Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale
Journal issue | 50 | 2014
Research Article | Salwā al-Naʻīmī’s Šibh al-ǧazīra al-ʻarabiyya
Salwā al-Naʻīmī’s Šibh al-ǧazīra al-ʻarabiyya
For a New Arab Identity
Abstract
In her latest novel, Šibh al-ǧazīra al-ʻarabiyya (2012), Salwā al-Naʻīmī narrates the experience of exile of a Syrian woman who lives in France. Through the protagonist’s first-person account, the author questions the meaning of nation, membership to a collective and identity for an Arab woman settled in France. The main character embodies the exiled subject – or the ‘nomadic subject’ (Braidotti, 2002) – who severs her ties with family, nation, Ba‘ṭ’s party and religion. This painful process of liberation leads her to a global re-signification of the notion of Arab identity. The protagonist succeeds in releasing the meaning of Arab identity from the idea of normative membership to a collective. al-Naʻīmī choice to narrate the experience of exile in Arabic helps to restore a link between the individual and the community, here identified with the community of speakers.
Published Dec. 1, 2014 | Language: it
Copyright © 2014 Martina Censi. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
