Yousef Awad | University of Jordan (original) (raw)
Papers by Yousef Awad
University of Georgia, 2018
Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences
This paper aspires to delineate the poetics of the Anglophone Arab Campus novel. It shows how the... more This paper aspires to delineate the poetics of the Anglophone Arab Campus novel. It shows how the genre of the campus novel, which has always been perceived as exclusively American and European, has now reached the Arab region and it took a local shape. This research proves that the Arab world, via the works of Arab writers in the diaspora, is witnessing the birth of the genre of the campus novel. It highlights some of the basic features of the western campus novel and how the selected novels appropriate these features. This paper deals with Laila Lalami’s Secret Son (2009), Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015), and Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian (2019). These novels are selected because they highlight different campuses, and therefore, they represent different experiences of Arab academics and students. Some of the aspects that will be discussed throughout the research are the microcosmic relationship between the campus and real life, the state of xenophobia that Arab ac...
World Journal of English Language
This study explores the künstlerroman from an Arab diasporic viewpoint. It aims to illuminate the... more This study explores the künstlerroman from an Arab diasporic viewpoint. It aims to illuminate the first years of the formative process that the Arab diasporic artist undergoes in The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon and An Unsafe Haven (2016) by Nada Awar Jarrar as Arab diasporic künstlerromans. The article traces the childhood of Antoon’s Jawad and Jarrar’s Anas as young aspiring Arab artists against the backdrop of the novels’ socio-political contexts, which include religion, family, and the political conditions in the protagonists’ countries. Since Arab diasporic writers relocate the genre into an Arab transnational setting, this study draws attention to the violence and suffering in the lives of artists as children and the fact that they are brought up in an Arab household that does not feature in the traditional genre plot. It as well explores the environment the characters grow up in like social class and religious milieu and expounds on the way each character has seeds of...
World Journal of English Language
This paper investigates the literary representation of London as a site of cross-cultural romance... more This paper investigates the literary representation of London as a site of cross-cultural romance by analyzing the effects of romantic relations between Arab women and white men on their identities in the works of Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It (2011) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s Dreams of Water (2006). It aims at examining the city of London as a convenient testing ground for whether Arab women characters could mingle and cohabit with white men as a coping strategy in the Metropolis. As this paper shows, the Metropolis helps Arab women to navigate a sense of identity in these cross-cultural romances. It is within the multi-ethnic and multicultural spaces of Metropolitan London that new intimate possibilities between Arab women and white men begin to emerge, revising and interrogating long-established racial and cultural barriers and boundaries. In other words, this is an attempt to examine how these cross-cultural romances serve to tighten the rift between the two cultures and decode the city...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the journey motif plays a pivotal role in the wor... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the journey motif plays a pivotal role in the works of Arab women writers in diaspora. Through a close reading of Arab American novelist Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) and Arab British novelist Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), the paper highlights how the journeys taken by Khadra and Sammar, respectively, govern each of these two novels structurally and thematically. As they make journeys to their home towns in Syria and Sudan, respectively, they edge closer toward self-discovery. Therefore, the journeys the characters embark on are linked to their inner search for their own identities. Khadra and Sammar gain knowledge, better understand life, and consequently, better understand themselves. Overall, the paper shows how investigating the importance of journeys and travels in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and The Translator helps shed light on how Khadra and Sammar negotiate their cultural circumstances and ...
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2021
This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in th... more This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in the contemporary Anglophone Arab narrative of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019). The study follows a methodology which combines two critical approaches to magical realism: first, a textual approach, and then a contextual one. Accordingly, the study uses key magical realist elements in Bird Summons to delineate the poetics of magical realism within the narrative, before determining the context in which magical realism functions in the narrative. Simultaneously, the study benefits from Christopher Warnes’s two strands of magical realism, ‘faith-based magical realism’ and ‘irreverent magical realism’ in providing a coherent basis for the use of magical realism in the text. This study aims at examining the significance of the magical realist narrative in articulating Arab British identity in Bird Summons. The analysis will interpret the role of magical realism in conveying and undermining t...
The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American ... more The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of themore nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among ArabBritish women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue andcross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their ArabAmerican counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resiststereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popularculture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arabimmigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looksat how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir?s My Name is Salma and Arab Americannovelist Diana Abu-Jaber?s Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light ofthe precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and inthe United States. Chapter Two e...
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
This paper investigates Jordanian playwright Nader Omran’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It... more This paper investigates Jordanian playwright Nader Omran’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It examines Omran’s dramatization of the struggle of Arab youths in a region ruled by corrupt leaders. In particular, the paper focuses on how Omran transforms Shakespeare’s Ophelia into an assertive and dynamic character to reflect the contemporaneous circumstances and conditions of the Arab World in A Theatre Company Found a Theatre and Theatred Hamlet (1984). In Omran’s adaptation, Ophelia’s suicide is an act of self-immolation which anticipates Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi’s act of burning himself in December 2010 since both acts awaken dormant hopes for change and trigger a process of transformation as an inevitable result of years of political oppression and marginalization. In this respect, Omran’s play anticipates and predicts recent Arab uprisings that were initiated and led by Arab youths in protest against years of social injustice and exclusion from the...
Critical Survey
The purpose of this article is to examine how Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa approp... more The purpose of this article is to examine how Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa appropriates in her novel The Blue between Sky and Water (2015) some of the themes, tropes and motifs that Shakespeare employs in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1596) in order to depict how wars and conflicts turn Palestinian people’s love stories/marriages into tragedies. In particular, love at first sight, the (negative) impact of families on love stories, exile/banishment, use of herbs/traditional medicine, humour and parties that practically turn ominous and fateful are among the themes, tropes and motifs that both Shakespeare and Abulhawa employ to represent love stories/marriages that are embroiled in ongoing violent events. Overall, in its depiction of ‘love and violence’, Abulhawa’s novel appropriates Shakespeare’s greatest love tragedy and shows the conditions under which Palestinians live in Gaza.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022
The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in ... more The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in Syrian American author Jennifer Zeynab Joukhader’s novel A Map of Salt and Stars (2018). It highlights the role of certain “Things” in Nour’s family’s healing process from the traumatic experiences of the Syrian war. The article also sheds light on the war’s reshaping of the objects and the individuals’ relationship with them. The objects that this article investigates are as varied as mundane utensils (a shattered plate), cherished souvenirs (Zahra’s bracelet), and even magical objects (Nour’s stone). Particularly, the article examines the establishment of the close association between the characters and these objects and the impact of this association on the family’s journey towards safety and recovery. For this reason, the present study is situated within the theoretical frameworks of the “Thing” theory and psychological trauma. This article argues that the close association that the ...
World Journal of English Language, 2021
The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspect... more The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspective to broadly examine how life under a Capitalist system along with its foreign investments and trading services can easily destroy the political, social as well as the cultural surroundings of a certain nation. Throughout his play, Adwan brilliantly adapts Shakespeare and offers a Marxist point of view to comment on how the West continues to dominate the East with its economic power. Importantly, in employing Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet as a tragic hero, Adwan uses him as a dramatic archetype to comment on one of the Shakespearean’s famous political quotes “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Seen from this perspective, the paper will read Adwan’s play from a Marxist viewpoint to demonstrate how he has in fact used Hamlet’s lack of intellectualism to criticize the Syrian policy of “The Six Day War” defeat to Israel.
World Journal of English Language
The purpose of this study is to examine the representation of the car as a social space in Laila ... more The purpose of this study is to examine the representation of the car as a social space in Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land (2007) and explore its interrelationship with issues of literary chronotope, counter discourse, and identity formation. The analysis of this study is interdisciplinary in nature; it tackles the car across social, psychological, and literary domains. Though the article takes Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope as a point of departure; it puts forth Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of social space to explicate how Halaby’s characters utilize their cars to incessantly produce social relationships with people from underclasses. In view of these two theories, it is found that Halaby transposes the semiotic function of the car, propelling it from the realm of conformity and nationalism to the realm of resistance and socialism. Halaby’s characters are depicted struggling to unshackle themselves from the stereotyping images imposed on them. By presentin...
The International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies, 2019
Humanities and social sciences, 2020
Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent sociopolitical issues of contem... more Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent sociopolitical issues of contemporary Arab cultures in their literary works. Because the family is the core unit of Arab societies and cultures, this study explores fictional representations of one of the main relations within the Arab family. Specifically, this study examines how Arab women writers in diaspora depict parents-children relations in their novels. The study is based on thematic and analytic readings of six novels and two collections of short stories written by diasporic Arab women writers who live in the West and who write in English. Despite the common features that diasporic Arab novels share, the study aims at identifying the differences in representing parents-children relations in the selected novels. Particularly, the study shows that Naomi Shihab Nye, Diana Abu-Jaber, Leila Aboulela and Mohja Kahf represent parents-children relations within the Arab family favorably, while Ahdaf Soueif and Fadia F...
Studies in Literature and Language, 2015
The purpose of this paper is to explore how home-as a concept and a physical space-is depicted in... more The purpose of this paper is to explore how home-as a concept and a physical space-is depicted in Arab American Susan Muaddi Darraj's novel The Inheritance of Exile (2007). I argue that the novel, set in the American city of Philadelphia, depicts the concept home as a site of contesting and conflicting ideas as issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class and generational differences among other dynamics intersect with attempts by different characters to define and redefine home. At the same time, the physical space of home becomes a site where these ideas are expressed and heatedly debated. As the characters unfold their stories, home becomes a character in the space of their narratives. By depicting various episodes from the lives of immigrant Palestinian women and their American (ized) daughters, the concept of home emerges as complex, multilayered and elusive. As characters trade homes, move into new neighborhoods and think they have left behind a legacy of exile, displacement, marginalization and exclusion still tint their daily experiences. For instance, Hanan, the daughter of a second generation Arab American man and an immigrant Palestinian woman, discovers the futility of her incessant attempts to assert her Americanness by staking a claim on the city in which she was born and raised up. Although she marries an American man of Irish descent and lives with him in a town house which she prefers to her parents' row house, people around her, including her in-laws, insist on calling her "ethnic". In short, Hanan realizes that exile is an inevitable and inescapable fate as Edward Said reminds us in his essay "Reflections on Exile". True to the title of the novel, the narratives the characters recount affirm that home is an oxymoron that encapsulates experiences and memories of rootedness, dispersal, fulfillment and anguish.
Ars Aeterna, 2021
This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather co... more This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather conditions in Arab American Laila Lalami’s novel The Other Americans (2019) play in narrating the protagonist’s story. It highlights how the weather conditions echo Nora’s deep emotions and reflect her inner thoughts and feelings in the light of her relationships with other characters. The study focuses on Nora’s journey of becomingness and reveals that through depicting the changes in the weather, the story of Nora’s self-actualization and settlement can be narrated. It considers presenting how reading the weather conditions informs the reader about Nora’s self-perception, love affairs, career development and aspirations. It also explores how Lalami employs weather description to show the ways in which Nora ends up achieving self-reconciliation. As the events unfold, Nora is transformed from a person who comments on the clouds and winds and describes the fogs and rains to a fully-fledged ...
University of Georgia, 2018
Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences
This paper aspires to delineate the poetics of the Anglophone Arab Campus novel. It shows how the... more This paper aspires to delineate the poetics of the Anglophone Arab Campus novel. It shows how the genre of the campus novel, which has always been perceived as exclusively American and European, has now reached the Arab region and it took a local shape. This research proves that the Arab world, via the works of Arab writers in the diaspora, is witnessing the birth of the genre of the campus novel. It highlights some of the basic features of the western campus novel and how the selected novels appropriate these features. This paper deals with Laila Lalami’s Secret Son (2009), Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015), and Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian (2019). These novels are selected because they highlight different campuses, and therefore, they represent different experiences of Arab academics and students. Some of the aspects that will be discussed throughout the research are the microcosmic relationship between the campus and real life, the state of xenophobia that Arab ac...
World Journal of English Language
This study explores the künstlerroman from an Arab diasporic viewpoint. It aims to illuminate the... more This study explores the künstlerroman from an Arab diasporic viewpoint. It aims to illuminate the first years of the formative process that the Arab diasporic artist undergoes in The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon and An Unsafe Haven (2016) by Nada Awar Jarrar as Arab diasporic künstlerromans. The article traces the childhood of Antoon’s Jawad and Jarrar’s Anas as young aspiring Arab artists against the backdrop of the novels’ socio-political contexts, which include religion, family, and the political conditions in the protagonists’ countries. Since Arab diasporic writers relocate the genre into an Arab transnational setting, this study draws attention to the violence and suffering in the lives of artists as children and the fact that they are brought up in an Arab household that does not feature in the traditional genre plot. It as well explores the environment the characters grow up in like social class and religious milieu and expounds on the way each character has seeds of...
World Journal of English Language
This paper investigates the literary representation of London as a site of cross-cultural romance... more This paper investigates the literary representation of London as a site of cross-cultural romance by analyzing the effects of romantic relations between Arab women and white men on their identities in the works of Selma Dabbagh’s Out of It (2011) and Nada Awar Jarrar’s Dreams of Water (2006). It aims at examining the city of London as a convenient testing ground for whether Arab women characters could mingle and cohabit with white men as a coping strategy in the Metropolis. As this paper shows, the Metropolis helps Arab women to navigate a sense of identity in these cross-cultural romances. It is within the multi-ethnic and multicultural spaces of Metropolitan London that new intimate possibilities between Arab women and white men begin to emerge, revising and interrogating long-established racial and cultural barriers and boundaries. In other words, this is an attempt to examine how these cross-cultural romances serve to tighten the rift between the two cultures and decode the city...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the journey motif plays a pivotal role in the wor... more The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the journey motif plays a pivotal role in the works of Arab women writers in diaspora. Through a close reading of Arab American novelist Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) and Arab British novelist Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999), the paper highlights how the journeys taken by Khadra and Sammar, respectively, govern each of these two novels structurally and thematically. As they make journeys to their home towns in Syria and Sudan, respectively, they edge closer toward self-discovery. Therefore, the journeys the characters embark on are linked to their inner search for their own identities. Khadra and Sammar gain knowledge, better understand life, and consequently, better understand themselves. Overall, the paper shows how investigating the importance of journeys and travels in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf and The Translator helps shed light on how Khadra and Sammar negotiate their cultural circumstances and ...
Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2021
This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in th... more This article adopts a literary analytical approach to illuminate the use of magical realism in the contemporary Anglophone Arab narrative of Leila Aboulela’s Bird Summons (2019). The study follows a methodology which combines two critical approaches to magical realism: first, a textual approach, and then a contextual one. Accordingly, the study uses key magical realist elements in Bird Summons to delineate the poetics of magical realism within the narrative, before determining the context in which magical realism functions in the narrative. Simultaneously, the study benefits from Christopher Warnes’s two strands of magical realism, ‘faith-based magical realism’ and ‘irreverent magical realism’ in providing a coherent basis for the use of magical realism in the text. This study aims at examining the significance of the magical realist narrative in articulating Arab British identity in Bird Summons. The analysis will interpret the role of magical realism in conveying and undermining t...
The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American ... more The purpose of this thesis is to compare the works of contemporary Arab British andArab American women novelists with a view toward delineating a poetics of themore nascent Arab British literature. I argue that there is a tendency among ArabBritish women novelists to foreground and advocate trans-cultural dialogue andcross-ethnic identification strategies in a more pronounced approach than their ArabAmerican counterparts who tend, in turn, to employ literary strategies to resiststereotypes and misconceptions about Arab communities in American popularculture. I argue that these differences result from two diverse racialized Arabimmigration and settlement patterns on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter One looksat how Arab British novelist Fadia Faqir?s My Name is Salma and Arab Americannovelist Diana Abu-Jaber?s Arabian Jazz define Arabness differently in the light ofthe precarious position Arabs occupy in ethnic and racial discourses in Britain and inthe United States. Chapter Two e...
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
This paper investigates Jordanian playwright Nader Omran’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It... more This paper investigates Jordanian playwright Nader Omran’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It examines Omran’s dramatization of the struggle of Arab youths in a region ruled by corrupt leaders. In particular, the paper focuses on how Omran transforms Shakespeare’s Ophelia into an assertive and dynamic character to reflect the contemporaneous circumstances and conditions of the Arab World in A Theatre Company Found a Theatre and Theatred Hamlet (1984). In Omran’s adaptation, Ophelia’s suicide is an act of self-immolation which anticipates Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohammed Bouazizi’s act of burning himself in December 2010 since both acts awaken dormant hopes for change and trigger a process of transformation as an inevitable result of years of political oppression and marginalization. In this respect, Omran’s play anticipates and predicts recent Arab uprisings that were initiated and led by Arab youths in protest against years of social injustice and exclusion from the...
Critical Survey
The purpose of this article is to examine how Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa approp... more The purpose of this article is to examine how Palestinian American novelist Susan Abulhawa appropriates in her novel The Blue between Sky and Water (2015) some of the themes, tropes and motifs that Shakespeare employs in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1596) in order to depict how wars and conflicts turn Palestinian people’s love stories/marriages into tragedies. In particular, love at first sight, the (negative) impact of families on love stories, exile/banishment, use of herbs/traditional medicine, humour and parties that practically turn ominous and fateful are among the themes, tropes and motifs that both Shakespeare and Abulhawa employ to represent love stories/marriages that are embroiled in ongoing violent events. Overall, in its depiction of ‘love and violence’, Abulhawa’s novel appropriates Shakespeare’s greatest love tragedy and shows the conditions under which Palestinians live in Gaza.
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2022
The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in ... more The present article explores the impact of “Things” on the healing journeys of the characters in Syrian American author Jennifer Zeynab Joukhader’s novel A Map of Salt and Stars (2018). It highlights the role of certain “Things” in Nour’s family’s healing process from the traumatic experiences of the Syrian war. The article also sheds light on the war’s reshaping of the objects and the individuals’ relationship with them. The objects that this article investigates are as varied as mundane utensils (a shattered plate), cherished souvenirs (Zahra’s bracelet), and even magical objects (Nour’s stone). Particularly, the article examines the establishment of the close association between the characters and these objects and the impact of this association on the family’s journey towards safety and recovery. For this reason, the present study is situated within the theoretical frameworks of the “Thing” theory and psychological trauma. This article argues that the close association that the ...
World Journal of English Language, 2021
The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspect... more The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspective to broadly examine how life under a Capitalist system along with its foreign investments and trading services can easily destroy the political, social as well as the cultural surroundings of a certain nation. Throughout his play, Adwan brilliantly adapts Shakespeare and offers a Marxist point of view to comment on how the West continues to dominate the East with its economic power. Importantly, in employing Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet as a tragic hero, Adwan uses him as a dramatic archetype to comment on one of the Shakespearean’s famous political quotes “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Seen from this perspective, the paper will read Adwan’s play from a Marxist viewpoint to demonstrate how he has in fact used Hamlet’s lack of intellectualism to criticize the Syrian policy of “The Six Day War” defeat to Israel.
World Journal of English Language
The purpose of this study is to examine the representation of the car as a social space in Laila ... more The purpose of this study is to examine the representation of the car as a social space in Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land (2007) and explore its interrelationship with issues of literary chronotope, counter discourse, and identity formation. The analysis of this study is interdisciplinary in nature; it tackles the car across social, psychological, and literary domains. Though the article takes Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope as a point of departure; it puts forth Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of social space to explicate how Halaby’s characters utilize their cars to incessantly produce social relationships with people from underclasses. In view of these two theories, it is found that Halaby transposes the semiotic function of the car, propelling it from the realm of conformity and nationalism to the realm of resistance and socialism. Halaby’s characters are depicted struggling to unshackle themselves from the stereotyping images imposed on them. By presentin...
The International Journal of Critical Cultural Studies, 2019
Humanities and social sciences, 2020
Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent sociopolitical issues of contem... more Diasporic Arab writers substantially differ in how they represent sociopolitical issues of contemporary Arab cultures in their literary works. Because the family is the core unit of Arab societies and cultures, this study explores fictional representations of one of the main relations within the Arab family. Specifically, this study examines how Arab women writers in diaspora depict parents-children relations in their novels. The study is based on thematic and analytic readings of six novels and two collections of short stories written by diasporic Arab women writers who live in the West and who write in English. Despite the common features that diasporic Arab novels share, the study aims at identifying the differences in representing parents-children relations in the selected novels. Particularly, the study shows that Naomi Shihab Nye, Diana Abu-Jaber, Leila Aboulela and Mohja Kahf represent parents-children relations within the Arab family favorably, while Ahdaf Soueif and Fadia F...
Studies in Literature and Language, 2015
The purpose of this paper is to explore how home-as a concept and a physical space-is depicted in... more The purpose of this paper is to explore how home-as a concept and a physical space-is depicted in Arab American Susan Muaddi Darraj's novel The Inheritance of Exile (2007). I argue that the novel, set in the American city of Philadelphia, depicts the concept home as a site of contesting and conflicting ideas as issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class and generational differences among other dynamics intersect with attempts by different characters to define and redefine home. At the same time, the physical space of home becomes a site where these ideas are expressed and heatedly debated. As the characters unfold their stories, home becomes a character in the space of their narratives. By depicting various episodes from the lives of immigrant Palestinian women and their American (ized) daughters, the concept of home emerges as complex, multilayered and elusive. As characters trade homes, move into new neighborhoods and think they have left behind a legacy of exile, displacement, marginalization and exclusion still tint their daily experiences. For instance, Hanan, the daughter of a second generation Arab American man and an immigrant Palestinian woman, discovers the futility of her incessant attempts to assert her Americanness by staking a claim on the city in which she was born and raised up. Although she marries an American man of Irish descent and lives with him in a town house which she prefers to her parents' row house, people around her, including her in-laws, insist on calling her "ethnic". In short, Hanan realizes that exile is an inevitable and inescapable fate as Edward Said reminds us in his essay "Reflections on Exile". True to the title of the novel, the narratives the characters recount affirm that home is an oxymoron that encapsulates experiences and memories of rootedness, dispersal, fulfillment and anguish.
Ars Aeterna, 2021
This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather co... more This study explores the self-nature relationship through tracing the key role that the weather conditions in Arab American Laila Lalami’s novel The Other Americans (2019) play in narrating the protagonist’s story. It highlights how the weather conditions echo Nora’s deep emotions and reflect her inner thoughts and feelings in the light of her relationships with other characters. The study focuses on Nora’s journey of becomingness and reveals that through depicting the changes in the weather, the story of Nora’s self-actualization and settlement can be narrated. It considers presenting how reading the weather conditions informs the reader about Nora’s self-perception, love affairs, career development and aspirations. It also explores how Lalami employs weather description to show the ways in which Nora ends up achieving self-reconciliation. As the events unfold, Nora is transformed from a person who comments on the clouds and winds and describes the fogs and rains to a fully-fledged ...