Created by diasporic women film directors who are located in Morocco, the US, France, England and Belgium, Moroccan women’s cinema is part of a wider cinematic production that is influenced, according to Hamid Naficy, “by its sensitivity to the production and consumption of films in conditions of transnationality, liminality /and/ multiculturality” (Wilson and Dissanayake 2000, 121). Naficy argues that transnational cinema enables films to be interpreted as authorial films as well “as sites for intertextual, cross-cultural, and translational struggles over meanings and identities” (121).This paper examines the way Mariam Touzani’s film Adam (2019) highlights the mobility of exilic characters into different spaces, where through experiential interactions with others and spatialized encounters, they create new identities for themselves. The paper draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which refers to counter spaces that operate on the margin of dominant culture. The film, which highlights the theme of the transgressive woman, presents women’s spaces as variations from the hetero-normative depictions of family, and offers alternate spaces through which they seek to transcend and compensate for their marginal identities. Foucault identifies two types of heterotopia: “crisis heterotopias” and “heterotopias of deviation.” Crisis heterotopias are society’s way of putting in marginal spaces women who violate its norms. They constitute separate spaces that have been designed to host those who are, in relation to society, in a state of crisis. In Adam, the protagonist is introduced as a homeless pregnant woman who appears out of nowhere as she seeks shelter to hide her pregnancy. Her pregnancy takes place outside the home and manifests a certain stage of her coming of age. Foucault cites pregnant and menstruating women as examples of crisis heterotopias. His trope enables us to analyze the heterotopic dimension of pregnancy which is used in the film to disrupt and challenge patriarchy. It also enables us to look at how singing, dancing and cooking sequences are used in the film as means to articulate alternative feminine identities. The film critiques hegemonic forces and shows how women can transform oppressive forces into heterotopic spaces that are liberating.

I analyze Iraqi author Hassan Blasim’s “Why don’t you Write a Novel, Instead of Talking about all these Characters” and “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”, two short stories primarily concerned with the experience of border crossing of Iraqi refugees and immigrants into Europe. In both stories, the Iraqi protagonists try to forget past trauma and lives to forge new identities and subjectivities rooted solely in the present. The experience of border crossing leaves its mark on the body, mind, identity and narrative of the border crosser. These borders they have crossed are actually contaminated and figurative. In their new lives, they are constantly reminded of their otherness (refugees and immigrants), mainly, being border crossers which comes to define their new subjectivity and identity. Thus, instead of crossing the border, they actually become the border. These characters are doomed psychologically, figuratively and sometimes physically, to dwell indefinitely at the border. They inhabit “diaspora spaces”, where fractured subjectivities intersect and co-exist. Inhabiting a constant state of liminality, imprints itself on the body and psyche of the refugee/immigrant and translates into madness which manifests itself in another liminal space where nightmarish dreams, fragmented narratives, fiction and reality intersect and co-exist. Like his characters, Blasim the Iraqi refugee and writer, inhabits the in-between literary space, confounding the real and the fantastical. He uses literary narration to translate the experience of trauma, border crossing and madness; a translation that can raise our common concern for human suffering. Using Said, Anderson and Foucault’s critical notions of geographies, communities and identities as imagined/structured entities, I argue that Blasim’s use of nightmarish dreams, fractured narratives and experimental techniques offer the case for the use of writing and narration as an imagined, liminal space, beyond a bordered vision of territoriality, life and truth. Through this literary space of liminality, Blasim invokes ethico-political paradoxes of diaspora spaces transforming absurd real life liminality into a meaningful literary dialogue.

The theme of exile is not a new area in Arabic literature. Separation from one’s home-country has been explored by various writers as early as the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Arabic Mahjar (diaspora/migratory) literature evolved at the turn of the twentieth-century when Levantine writers emigrated to North and South America escaping Ottoman rule, exile literature started mid-century as a result of English and French colonization. Edward Said states that “the post-colonial age have produced more refugees, migrants displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history. . . .” (Said 332). Bahā’ Ṭāher’s الحب في المنفي (Love in Exile) (1995) is an exemplary work of art illustrating Said’s notion of “exilic consciousness.” Ṭāher’s (1935-) semi-autobiographical novel was written during his self-exile in Switzerland when he was dismissed from his job in the Egyptian radio. The novel takes place in the post-Nasserite era; an epoch of psychological trauma after Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. As a result of this belligerent trauma, the home country for most Arabs seemed no longer the safe place it used earlier to be. This paper explores the different forms of exile in Bahā’ Ṭāher’s novel: the individual, the familial and the national. Love in Exile is not just about an exiled Egyptian protagonist; there are other characters in the novel who are also exiled in different ways from their European, African and Arab countries. They reconcile with their banishment in a café which becomes a liminal imaginative space where they can feel at home. They overcome their feelings of banishment through discussing and trying to find the roots of political issues that have torn them away from their home countries such as the Palestinian genocides of Sābrah and Shatīlah and the human rights problems in South America. In a global world, the theme of exile becomes contested; these transnational characters meet in a café discussing and researching contingent world issues that bring them closer to each other. In relation to Said’s idea that “The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring” (The Edward Said Reader 381), I illustrate how the novel assumes an interesting dichotomy expressed in its title: love and exile. It is through an “exilic[compassionate] consciousness” that one can find a home to trespass the borders of exile and to create new hyphenated transnational identities.

This paper examines a literary work by the Palestinian-Israeli authors; ʿatāllah Manṣūr, ʾayman Siksik, Saiyyd Qashūʿ and Salmān Maṣālḥa. Their work reflects a new, blooming transcultural identity for Palestinians living in Israel. The importance of such work is shown in two characteristics. First, the original work is produced in Hebrew rather than Arabic. This is an emerging writing style adopted by Palestinian- Israelis writers in the early 2000s, and it is central to my claim. Second, this contemporary writing style concerning identity is a significant departure from the nationalist style of prior Palestinian-Israeli authors, such as Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Sameyḥ-al Qāsim, ʾntūn Shammās, ʾimīl ḥabībī, Ghassān Kanaffānī, and others. Contradictory to ḥabībī, Darwīsh, Shammās, and al- Qāsim, who use their voices to solidify traditional national Palestinian identity, Manṣūr’s, Siksik’s, Qashūʿ’s and Maṣālḥa’s works tend to shift away from that nationalist literary dialogue. Their work illustrates a blend of social identities and introduces a new direction for Palestinian cultural identity in Israel. The obvious question here is why would these authors want to rejuvenate and deconstruct a very solid Palestinian national narrative? How do their writings alter our view of current Palestinian-Israeli literature? What does their writing tell us about their identity?