Resisting the Allure: The West as Fiction in the Arab Immigrant Novel

Rimun Murad

doi:10.29333/ejecs/2042

Authors

Rimun Murad Temple University Department of English https://orcid.org/0009-0002-0291-4570

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/2042

Keywords:

Arab diasporic literature, Arab immigrant literature, Alaa Al Aswany, Waguih Ghali, Leila Aboulela, diasporic literature, Walid Al Hajjar, Tayeb Salih

Abstract

This article investigates the resemblance between the Arab immigrant experience in the Arab immigrant novel, on the one hand, and the experience of fiction reading, on the other one. The article analyzes Tayeb Salih’s Season of migration to the north (1966), Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the snooker club (1964), Walid Al Hajjar’s trilogy The search for the self (published privately in 1973, 1979, and 1984), Leila Aboulela’s The translator (1999), and Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago: A novel (2007) to demonstrate the presence of a pattern depicting the experience of Arab immigrants as akin to fiction reading. Drawing from genre, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, this project argues that the West, for the Arab immigrant characters, shares many of the features of fiction: its emotional distance, authority, the privacy of its experience, the space it allows for role playing, and its allowance or requirement of a temporary reinvention of the self. Such characteristics, the project shows, illuminate our understanding of significant issues such as the integration of Arab immigrants into Western countries and their sense of home and belonging. While these characteristics comprise the lure of the fictional West, they also account for its oppression and exclusion. The Arab immigrant characters who find the prolonged fictional experience of the West painful respond to the agony of this experience through violence—to depart from the Western experience altogether or to settle for it despite its unpleasantness—or through the establishment of a native, home religion in the receiving Western countries.

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Author Biography

Rimun Murad, Temple University Department of English

Rimun Murad is Associate Professor of Instruction at Temple University’s First-Year Writing Program, Department of English. He completed his doctoral work at Louisiana State University’s Department of English, where he researched Arab immigrant and diasporic literature. He is currently researching the Arabic, Syrian (civil) war novel.

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