Joyce Zonana | City University of New York Borough of Manhattan Community Collegr (original) (raw)

Papers by Joyce Zonana

Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 23, 2020

Middle East Critique, Jul 3, 2021

Abstract: A Land Like You, Tobie Nathan’s scrupulously researched yet wildly imaginative historic... more Abstract: A Land Like You, Tobie Nathan’s scrupulously researched yet wildly imaginative historical novel of early twentieth-century Cairo offers an extended exploration of what it means to be both Jewish and Egyptian, even as it chronicles the rise of the competing nationalisms that led to the dispersal of Egypt’s Jews. Unlike most Egyptian Jewish novelists and memoirists, Nathan claims Cairo’s Haret al-Yahud, where the city’s poorest, indigenous Jews lived from time immemorial, as his ‘source,’ and indeed the source for all of Egypt’s Jews—the ‘spring one drinks at every day.’ This source arises from the Egyptian land and the ancient spirits that govern it, to which the exiled writer remains inextricably bound, symbolized in the novel through the irresistible love that links the Jewish narrator to his Muslim ‘milk-sister.’ For Nathan’s French-to-English translator, herself an Egyptian Jew, the novel offers a return to her own Arab-Jewish source, which, like Nathan, she seeks to cultivate so that it may nurture others.

The Hudson Review, 1998

Page 1. JOYCE ZONANA Nell and I In West Philadelphia's Clark Park, a shabby collection o... more Page 1. JOYCE ZONANA Nell and I In West Philadelphia's Clark Park, a shabby collection of trees and benches in a once-grand neighborhood?and across the ... For years afterward, I was haunted by this memory of passion-Page 3. JOYCE ZONANA 575 ate, deep reading. ...

University Microfilms International eBooks, 1985

Purdue University Press eBooks, Dec 15, 2015

Tulsa studies in women's literature, 1989

The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics Joyce Zonana Uni... more The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics Joyce Zonana University of Oklahoma At the conclusion of her "unscrupulously epic" feminist poem Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning offers a striking image of a woman artist who is ...

Signs, Apr 1, 1993

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

Cahiers du CEDREF, 2010

... et perspectives postcoloniales. Le sultan et l&#x27;esclave. Orientalisme féministe e... more ... et perspectives postcoloniales. Le sultan et l&#x27;esclave. Orientalisme féministe et structure de Jane Eyre. Joyce Zonana. ... ce document. Pour citer cet article. Référence électronique.Joyce Zonana, « Le sultan et l&#x27;esclave. Orientalisme ...

Tulsa studies in women's literature, 1996

Tulsa studies in women's literature, 2008

Translation Review, Oct 6, 2021

Toward the end of Windward Heights, Maryse Condé’s richly textured 1995 Caribbean retelling of Wu... more Toward the end of Windward Heights, Maryse Condé’s richly textured 1995 Caribbean retelling of Wuthering Heights, a dejected Razyé, her Heathcliff character, gazes over the “listless immensity” of the sea and wonders if he should “swim out with a calm stroke” and then, “with eyes closed and fists clenched, rolled up in a ball like a foetus in its element ... lower himself further and further to the very bottom of the body of the ocean.” Razyé chooses not to return to the womb of the sea (la mer in French, impossible for the ear to distinguish from la mère, the mother), though the sea’s alluring embrace encircles Windward Heights as it does The Belle Créole, Condé’s 2001 novel recently published in an engaging English translation by Nicole Simek. Like the earlier novel, The Belle Créole takes place on Guadeloupe, Condé’s “small, fitful, and remote” island homeland, where the sun goes down in “a daily orgy of blood.” But unlike Windward Heights, The Belle Créole is set in a familiar and disturbing turn-of-the-twenty-firstcentury present. The Belle Créole’s central character, Dieudonné Sabrina, is as drawn to the sea as to a lover, “always quick to wrap herself around his body and greet him with the moist kiss of her mouth.” He swims in it alone for an hour every morning; his happiest memories are of childhood jaunts on La Belle Créole, the sailboat owned by the Cohen family for whom his mother worked; and in the end, the sea remains his “only friend,” the only “one who had always stayed faithful ... offering him the caress of her belly, opening for him the sticky depths of her pubis, crowned with kelp.” It is no accident that Dieudonné’s dark-skinned Black mother, abandoned by her well-to-do lighter-skinned lover (ironically named “Vertueux”) when she becomes pregnant, is named “Marine.” Dieudonné, a sensitive and sickly only child, clings to her with unabashedly Oedipal desire. Ten years old when Marine is paralyzed by a fall, Dieudonné spends the next five years “spoon-feeding her meals to her, bathing her, rubbing her down, dressing her, getting her to do her business without disgust.” Marine’s death, a relief to her family, leaves the boy “all alone in this world.” Rejected by his grandmother and godmother, he moves into the Cohens’ abandoned yacht, spending hours

Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Oct 1, 2003

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1993

Ohio State University Press, Jan 29, 2021

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1995

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2003

It is a bright Saturday afternoon, crisp fall weather outside, and I am in my small New Orleans k... more It is a bright Saturday afternoon, crisp fall weather outside, and I am in my small New Orleans kitchen, preparing stuffed grape leaves for the annual English Department party. My task began late last night, when I rinsed a cup of chickpeas and placed them in a bowl, covering them with fresh spring water. This morning, I peeled the chickpeas one by one, rubbing each swollen kernel between my palms until the dull skin slipped off to reveal the bright yellow core, plumply wrinkled, like an ancient stone goddess. Now, while the beans simmer, I mince four yellow onions, a head of garlic, two bunches of parsley, six tomatoes. My worn wooden cutting board is soaked in red juice, stained a deep green. In a large glass bowl, I combine the onions, garlic, tomatoes, and parsley with raw white rice, freshly-squeezed lemon juice, olive oil, allspice, and the warm, just-cooked chickpeas. The filling for my grape leaves is ready at last; time now to "stuff." With deliberation, I spread a vine leaf-veined side upon a plate, snip off its stem with my thumbnail, and place a spoonful of the filling at its base. With both hands, I fold in the leaf 's sides; then, keeping the folds in place with my right hand, I roll with my left, working to create a tight, narrow cylinder. I have two pounds of grape leaves to prepare in this mannerperhaps a hundred, two hundred leaves, I always lose track. As I complete each little packet, pressing firmly to seal it, I place it in the cast iron pot where it will simmer for an hour, fitted snugly in even rows beneath a plate weighted with stones. "Never again," I say to myself, "never again." The skin on my fingers is puckered and raw; my back hurts, my eyes burn, and the music I put on earlier has begun to cloy. I am tired, bored