Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: creating new discourses from old
- 2 Women's voices and women's space in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia
- 3 Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
- 4 “At the Threshold of the Untranslatable”: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi
- 5 The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
- Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: creating new discourses from old
- 2 Women's voices and women's space in Assia Djebar's L'Amour, la fantasia
- 3 Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sandchild: voiceless narratives, placeless places
- 4 “At the Threshold of the Untranslatable”: Love in Two Languages of Abdelkebir Khatibi
- 5 The view from underneath: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
- Concluding: breaches and forgotten openings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The night asks who am I?
I am its secret – anxious, black, profound
I am its rebellious silence
I have veiled my nature, with silence,
wrapped my heart in doubt
and, solemn, remained here
gazing, while the ages ask me,
who am I
nazik al-mala'ikah, “Who Am I?”We need an angry generation,
A generation to plough the horizons,
To pluck up history from its roots,
To wrench up our thought from its foundations.
We need a generation of different mien
That forgives no error, is not forbearing,
That falters not, knows no hypocrisy.
We need a whole generation of leaders and of giants.
nizar qabbani, “What Value Has the People Whose Tongue is Tied?”These verses of an Iraqi woman and a Syrian man of the immediate post World-War-II generation of Arabian poets who challenged the strictures of Western and Islamic culture, speak of issues taken up by the con-temporary Muslim authors we have studied: giving voice to doubt in the face of hegemonic power and calling past tradition and literary and social thought itself into question. Djebar, Ben Jelloun, Khatibi, and Rushdie are inheritors of such early literary and social revolutionaries who struggled under authoritarian rule.
The struggles we have witnessed in the works of the writers studied in the previous chapters take a variety of forms, and, should we have looked at the writing of other postcolonial writers, we would have seen a still greater diversity of literary expression. No closure is possible for this study. The infinite variation of narratives of postcolonial writers from the so-called Third World, and the rich profusion of narrative positionings and repositionings they bring about in relation to conventional narrative, obviate any attempt to postulate any such imaginary construct as a (undifferentiated) “postcolonial” mode of writing.
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- Information
- Islam and Postcolonial Narrative , pp. 161 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998