My paper will show how Ṭā’ir al-Kharāb by ᶜabd al-RRab Sarūrī uses narrative to deconstruct and dismantle the political oppressive regimes in Yemen through a heart breaking love story between an immigrant Yamani professor, Nashwān, who works and resides in France and a Yamani student, Ilhām, whom he met in a conference in France. The love relationship is told in a way that unveils and chronicles the cruel life that they have experienced in Yemen which has forced both of them to leave. In telling Nashwān about her traumatizing being, Ilhām uncovers the fact that she was raped by her father, Sheikh al-qabīlah, who later forced her to marry someone she did not want to marry who was also abusive. This Sheikh, Ta’ir al-kharāb, and the abusive husband, I will argue, are different faces for the same person, the dictator. The novel focuses on the traumatic impact of the dictatorship on the female body, and by a means of allegory on the body of the nation, as exemplified by the character Ilhām. The juxtaposition of both the story of the raped female body and the rape of the nation by the dictator, who is referred to throughout the novel as Ṭā’ir al-Kharāb (the bird of destruction) as well as Sheikh al-qabīlah (the tribal sheikh), will be read as an anguished cry for normalcy sought by not only women in Yemen but all the nation. Exploring the female body in sexual encounters interspersed throughout the novel echo, for the sake of unveiling and violently exposing, the discourse of Arab dictatorships in relation to the body. In Tā’ir al-Kharāb there is an obvious gendered reproduction of the nation. My goal in this chapter is to analyze the ways in which the novel has chosen to represent the dictator’s power. I am aware that my reading may sound treacherous given the polemic exchange between Aijaz Ahmad and Fredric Jameson over the latter's formulation of what he terms “national allegory”. However, such an approach, I would argue, enables us to see how the agony of dictatorship reinforces the trauma of the besieged female body which consequently becomes the site of struggle for its freedom.