In Anxiety of Erasure, Hanadi al-Samman writes about the way in which women authors of the early and mid-twentieth century attempted to challenge the erasure of the female character in Arab fiction by calling attention to the myth of pre-Islamic female infanticide underlying these androcentric narratives. These writers used the Shahrazad figure to place the woman narrator at the center of the construction of myth. This, however, resulted in literary productions by women writers that either reinforced patriarchal fear of feminine sexuality or perpetuated the symbolic representation of womanhood as the mother and the nation, resulting in a womanhood lost in what Irigraray calls its “representative function.” Disillusioned with this counterproductive reinforcement of patriarchal notions of femininity and the perpetuation of the whore/mother dichotomy, more texts by Arab women, I argue, began to construct narratives that contested the spatial confinement within domestic national and familial spaces, and the Manichean rejection of corporeal “felt histories.” In Miral al-Tahawy’s narrative about the identity of the Bedouin woman, I see a productive turn to the self-reflexive deconstruction of temporal and spatial unity that is the justification for boundaries surrounding the nation, the domestic sphere, and embodied experience. The recursive narrative structure challenges the teleology of historical linearity and the near-merging of the worlds of animals, humans, and the desert landscape challenges anthropocentric understandings of humanness and broadens the definitions of ‘self.’ Al-Tahawy uncovers the influence of myth on modern society by examining social norms and standards in relation to Egyptian folklore and the traditional fairytale of Sitt al-Hosn (Rapunzel), but she does so critically, destabilizing the problematic discourses that they perpetuate and complicating the Shahrazad ideal. In my paper, I seek to examine the ways in which al-Tahawy merges ithe magical and real to uncover the contradictions inherent in patriarchal definitions of Arab womanhood. I argue that temporal asynchrony, manifested in the traverse of place and time, enables a constant reevaluation of gendered social systems both within and without the text and challenges the erasure inherent in the wa’d trauma.