Egyptian author Radwa Ashour and Jordanian novelist Samiha Khrais both employ polyphonic narratives to explore sensitive topics regarding the history of slavery in the Arab world. Ashour’s novel Siraaj (2007) and Khrais’s novel Fustuq `abīd (2017) both forefront female voices and experience as they deal with the Arab and European practice of slavery and British colonial intervention in the Middle East and North Africa. Both novels begin in the late 19th century and deal with indigenous rebellions. Siraaj explores a slave revolt against the British supported Sultan of the imaginary Arab Sultanate of Ghurrat Bahr al-`Arab off the coast of Yemen. Fustuq `abīd explores the Mahdist Rebellion against the British in the Sudan and the Portuguese slave trade. At the same time, Ashour and Khrais have different aims in deploying this technique. Ashour generates a plurality of independent voices to explore slavery as a metaphor for tyrannical rule. She draws parallels between the emotional impact of repressive rule on both the nominally free-born Arab subjects and the African slave population of Ghurrat Bahr al-`Arab. Khrais on the other hand uses the polyphonic narrative to explore the experience of gender, race and color as they inform identity. She also uses the diversity of consciousnesses to explore the impact on individuals of physical abuse, rape and other humiliations of enslavement, and to probe into the psyches of those who perpetrate this violence. Finally, the paper explores the way in which both novels reference and incorporate traditional Arab and African storytelling conventions to get at questions of desire and memory in contexts where slavery and political oppression inhibit individual growth, disrupt families and disconnect individuals across space and time.