Identity, Resistance and Representation:
A Postcolonial Critique of Fadia Faqir’s Pillars
of Salt
Nadeem Jahangir Bhat
Assistant
Professor
Department of
English
University of
Kashmir
Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, India
Abstract: Fadia Faqir’s novel Pillars of Salt (1999) examines the detrimental
impacts of patriarchal and colonial systems on the main characters of the novel
as well as Jordanian society as a whole during the 1920s and beyond. The novel
demonstrates how colonialism and patriarchy conspire against women and relegate
them to a peripheral position in society. The paper exploring issues such as
women’s identity, marginalization and the clash of cultures between colonizers
and colonized, issues intrinsically connected to Postcolonialism. The paper
endeavours to position the novel as a counter hegemonic narrative that debunks
myths about Arab women and allows them to represent themselves authentically.
It’s a writing back to both the West as well as the native patriarchy.
Keywords: Identity, Repression, Resistance, Self-Representation,
Hybridity, Postcolonialism
Introduction:
Fadia Faqir’s The
Pillars of Salt (1999) examines the detrimental impacts of patriarchal and
colonial systems on the main characters of the novel as well as Jordanian
society as a whole during the 1920s and beyond. The study is accomplished by
exploring issues such as women’s identity, marginalization and the clash of
cultures between colonizers and colonized, issues intrinsically connected to
Postcolonialism. The novel demonstrates how colonialism and patriarchy conspire
against women and relegate them to a peripheral position in society. The two
main female characters of the novel, Maha and Um Saad, share their tales of
oppression and the physical and sexual abuse they endure at the hands of the
male figures in their constrictive, patriarchal society. This oppression is
made worse by the English occupation of their country. The novel highlights the
fact that in patriarchal societies women are treated as ‘burdens’, as ‘slaves’
and ‘objects of sexual gratification’. They are, in fact doubly marginalized as
colonialism imposes further marginality over women and treats them as
‘backward’, passive and in ‘need of saving’ by the West. They are
misrepresented and not allowed to speak, disallowing agency and identity.
Political
independence and women’s freedom are closely related. Concerns of independence,
equality, human rights, freedom (both personal and civic), integrity,
power-sharing, liberation and pluralism are shared by both. While colonialism
has a negative impact on society as a whole, it affects women especially and
makes their suffering worse as it prevents them and many others in their
community from realizing their full potential as human beings.
Maha, the
protagonist in Pillars of Salt, is a Bedouin lady from the Jordan
Valley who lives in Jordan during the turbulent political era that followed the
British mandate over Jordan, which lasted from the 1920s to 1946. Maha is a
bold, fearless and extremely outspoken woman who strives for her people’s
national rights and to be placed on an equal footing with the powerful and
furiously tempered Bedouin men. Maha’s will to battle beside her husband Harb
is an even stronger example of her fiery, independent and free-spirited nature.
The political unrest that occurred during the British mandate is something
Faqir includes in the story, which gives Maha, the main character of the book,
her dynamic power as she battles on multiple fronts. Al Fadel puts it like
this:
Faqir portrays Maha as a woman whose
fight is three-fold. First, she must battle the political injustices of the
aggressors, the foreign men who have taken her beloved husband Harb. Secondly,
she finds herself fighting her brother Daffash, who is bent on controlling her
views and her ideas and on taking her land. Thirdly, she has to fight a
patriarchal community which suppresses her and usurps her legal rights. (Al
Fadel 91)
In actuality,
Fadia Faqir is recreating a significant period of Jordanian history from the
viewpoint of her female protagonists and a somewhat postcolonial standpoint.
The 1920s colonial Transjordan and the postcolonial Jordan that emerged from
independence in the mid-1940s are the settings of Pillars of Salt.
After Sharif Hussein launched the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in
1916 with British assistance and the backing of the Allies of World War I,
Jordan became a colony during the conflict.
In
1920, Britain was granted the mandates over Transjordan, Palestine and Iraq by
the League of Nations. Under Emir Abdullah, the Emirate of Transjordan was
formally acknowledged as a state by Britain in 1923. The pact acknowledged Emir
Abdullah as head of state and said that Transjordan would be prepared for
independence under the general supervision of the British high commissioner in
Jerusalem, Palestine. A string of Anglo-Transjordanian accords between 1928 and
1946 gave Transjordan nearly complete independence. However, Transjordan gained
full independence with the end of the British mandate in 1946 when Emir
Abdullah negotiated a new Anglo-Transjordanian treaty (Massad1-10).
The
entwined patriarchal and postcolonial ideologies are examined in Pillars of
Salt, published in 1999. The protagonist, Maha, is a peasant lady whose
story starts with the death of her mother in 1921, the year that Britain
founded Mandated Transjordan. Several uprisings against the administration of
the British Mandate took place from time to time in the Jorden Valley between
1923 and 1946. During one of these uprisings, Maha’s husband Harb, meaning
“war”, was killed following a bloody battle with the British Royal Air Force
(RAF). As per Moore, “The historical chronology provided at the start of the
text lists a suppressed rebellion by the villagers of Wadi Musa in 1926,
rendered fictionally as the event that killed Maha’s lover Harb (whose name
means war), who fights the British forces in their early years on
Transjordanian soil” (Moore, Arab, Muslim 105).
The
novel starts in Fuhais Mental Hospital around 1946 or later, which is when
Jordan earned its independence. This is done retroactively. Maha tells her
historicalized tale in the Mental Hospital, along with the story of her
roommate Um Saad, an Amman-based Syrian refugee. Maha’s confinement in the
prison-like hospital serves as a metaphor for both the hegemonic colonists and
the unjust patriarchal society, which deprives women of their freedom and keeps
them under check. Maha herself claims that “A woman’s place was in a
well-closed room” (Faqir, Pillars 20). However, this institutionalized
suppression does not silence their voices or erase their agency, as they speak
for themselves even under severe confinement. The two women endure various
forms of agony and their dreams remain unfulfilled, ultimately ending up in a
mental health facility. Faqir demonstrates this “double jeopardy” by eloquently
describing the physical and verbal abuse women endure at the hands of
colonizers as well as the patriarchy in their lives. Postcolonial feminists
argue that even after the collapse of the colonial regime, which trivialized
men and women, women continue to be marginalized in postcolonial societies.
Since colonialism and patriarchy are closely related, the end of colonialism
does not mean the end of the suppression of women in the erstwhile colonies.
Even after independence from the colonial powers, the double marginalization of
women continues as women are marginalized first as colonized subjects just like
men and second by patriarchy simply by being women. Dr Edwards, the English
physician in charge of the mental health facility, is adamant about using
electrical shock to prevent these women from having the much-needed therapeutic
talks. The English psychiatrist Dr Edwards, who is meant to be assisting them,
is making things worse for them. He tries to silence Um Saad and her friend
Maha by forcing them not to speak: “Dr Edwards entered the room quietly, interrupting
Um Saad’s story. You never stop talking” (207). He even cuts Um Saad’s hair
against her will. Instead of taking care of the two women, he labels them
“mad,” trying to impose silence on them. Both instances demonstrate how the
coercive and suppressive behaviour of the colonizer exacerbates societal
violence. For Moore, “The inclusion of a British doctor who ‘rules us
like a king’ consolidates an alignment of two contiguous frames of dominance,
and containment: local patriarchy and neo- (colonialism)” (Moore, Arab,
Muslim 107). Even though threatened with electric shocks as treatment, the
women laugh back at the threatening doctor and continue to recite their
individual stories locked up in a small room. Moore calls these acts “fragile
modes of resistance that only transiently breach the reduced physical and
narrative space accorded to women in a society presented as enduringly
patriarchal” (107).
Both
Maha and Um Saad are rendered subaltern and disallowed agency. In answer to the
question can the subaltern speak, both Maha and Um Saad speak a lot, but no one
pays attention to them. Whatever they say is seen as insignificant and
meaningless. The subaltern is mute not because they do not speak, but because
they are not heard. Therefore, the female character’s plight in the book is not
the result of their inability to express, themselves but rather of society’s
unwillingness to pay attention to them. They are seen as mad women, rendered
marginal and unfit for society and confined to a prison cell. For Moore, “The
prison/asylum functions as metonymy of an unjust society that writes women’s
bodies into reductive social scripts and places them under permanent
surveillance, but cannot entirely contain their oppositional voices or
perspectives” (106).
Um Saad’s
predicament as an immigrant who left Syria due to French colonization is
somewhat related to her marginalization and her challenging existence with her
abusive husband in Jordan. She discusses her early years in Damascus before
having to leave for Jordan as a result of her father’s involvement in the
independence struggle against the French mandate in Syria. Um Saad’s family was
forced to flee Syria and relocate to Transjordan due to unabated violence,
thinking that by relocating to Transjordan, their misery would end. Um Saad
reveals how her dislike of the French as well as her father when she says: “My
father would stop fighting the French, and he might then leave me and my mother
alone. I did not like my father, but I really hated the French who made him
restless and dirty” (Faqir, Pillars 37).
This is
suggestive of the intricate relationship between military conflict and social
and domestic abuse. Her father marries her off forcefully to, “a much older
man, Abu Saad, a fat and ugly butcher in the offal market. A disgusting
profession. Nobody would let him marry their daughter” (123). She is yet
to reach puberty when Abu Saad forces himself upon her. “He looked at me
assessingly, patted my hairless stomach with his cold fingers, forced my legs open,
then penetrated my discarded body” (109-110). Abu Saad makes Umm Saad work like
a slave all through the day and during the night as an object to gratify his
sexual hunger. Faqir makes Umm Saad decry, “We are just vaginas. That is how
men see us. That is what men are about” (Faqir, Pillars 169). He
treats her badly and uses her as a vessel to empty his frustrations. Umm Saad
tells Maha in the hospital room: “I remember Abu Saad the butcher, the stink of
blood, and the early days of my marriage when he used to beat me before
sleeping with me” (179). Suyoufie and Hammad decry this “primal violation” in
the form of “the brutal penetration of her body by her husband prior to her
puberty” as rape committed in the name of the institution of marriage (Suyoufie
and Hammad 296).
Faqir
herself argues that in one or another way, this kind of violence is experienced
by many women in Jordan, and “the use of violence to maintain privilege” has
resulted in “femicide, with the institutionalisation of patriarchy over the centuries.”
Faqir further argues that “‘Men’s sexual violence is part of the backdrop of
all women’s lives (….) ‘Violence against women can take the shape of rape both
within and outside marriage, beating, childhood sexual assault and incest,
harassment in the work-place and even the killing of women (Faqir,
“Intrafamily” 65-66).
The
British colonizers in Jordan make the situation worse for these women. Maha’s
story transports us to the early 1920s, when the British mandate over Jordan
first began and she fell in love with Harb. We are informed that Harb has
joined the uprising against the English occupiers. He and his men have launched
an uprising against the British mandate and their ‘oppressive taxes on the poor
populace’. He informs Maha that the English and Turks both levy high taxes on
the underprivileged and charge them in arrears:
“The Turks and the English. They both
want more money”.
“Taxes?”
“Yes, in arrears. One foreign rule was
replaced by another. First the Turks and now the English”.
“We are free bedouins. We never
accepted foreign masters”, I said” (Faqir, Pillars 83).
The remark makes clear that Harb
considers the British presence in Jordan as an ‘occupation’, and that he
intends to fight it. To free the people from all forms of oppression and
subjection, he consequently joins the national resistance movement against the
British mandate. When Harb notices English soldiers across the Jordan River, he
becomes even more enraged. “He looked at the west bank and shook his head like
an angry horse: “No, I am not like your brother Daffash” (53).
Maha
doesn’t mind her husband fighting the English and even supports him. As Harb
gallops away for the last time, Maha prays for protection over Harb: “Go. May
the eye of Allah guard you” (84). But Harb is soon killed in an air strike by
English planes- “a huge bird of prey dropped a metal egg. The jinn eagles were
laying eggs” (115). Sami al Adjnabi, the spiteful Storyteller describes the
tragic killing of Harb and his fellow men in a grotesque manner: “The bombing
split open the bodies of men, exposing their entrails (…) Black smoke filled
the area, the stink of burnt flesh and blood filled the air. The raid on the
well left no survivors no chicks, no insects on the face of earth” (115).
Harb’s terrifying death at the hands of the British colonizers serves as
unequivocal proof of the tragic effect that political-military violence has had
on Bedouin society’s daily existence.
Maha,
who has experienced a significant loss, presents Harb’s death as a noble deed.
Maha’s intense sadness over the killing of her beloved husband is compounded by
her strong reaction to seeing her husband’s mangled and burnt corpse and her
straightforward but dignified burial of her husband’s remains. Even the
vengeful Storyteller’s description of the combat scene bestows an honourable
status upon the man who lost his life alongside fellow combatants in their
battle against the occupier: “She kissed his lips then shrouded his body with
soil until he was completely buried. The faint light of the dying sun made the
corpses look bigger, darker, and more haunting. She dug more soil and scattered
it on the bodies of the horsemen” (116). Maha, throughout the novel, is
presented as a strong, defiant and resourceful woman. She is described as a
“tigress” (11), and an “Arab mare” (83) in more than one place. Maha’s warrior
persona recurs frequently in the narrative. When Harb is wounded during a fight
with the British, she vows “she will drink the blood of the man who wounded him
(83). After Harb’s death, she keeps his dagger under her pillow (124)
indicating that her fight is far from being over. Maha’s resistance to her
brother’s persecution and the subversive laws of her society also highlight her
status as a fighter in her own right. Therefore, not just Harb, Maha too fights
and in the words of Bouteraa “They are both warriors in their own right: Maha
is struggling for independence and freedom in her society and Harb is fighting
to keep his country’s independence” (Bouteraa 2004).
Postcolonial
discourse provides a suitable framework to analyse the relationship between
national mythologies and the landscape, particularly the way colonial history
narratives are revisited, reviewed, revisioned and undermined. Dale and Gilbert
argue that “One of the principal means of resisting imperial narratives and
rewriting the self (…) is through the refiguring of place, and analyses of the
relations between place, language and subjectivity have been central in
criticism of post-colonial literatures” (qtd. in McWilliams 3).
In
postcolonial literature, land becomes a crucial national emblem in the struggle
against a colonial power and frequently serves as the focal point around which
the action is focused. In Pillars of Salt, the land is seen as a
symbol of nationalism and identity. It’s used as a means of resistance against
the colonizer. Franz Fanon also argues that “For a colonized people the most
essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the
land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (Fanon 44). Faqir
emphasizes the role of land and landscape and draws upon the power of natural
symbols and national emblems to ignite feelings of resistance against all forms
of occupation and colonization. As such, there is a strong relationship between
national identity and the land, and their subsequent relationship to political
independence. Being interrelated, the land and people become indispensable
tools in the struggle against colonialism.
In
the novel, Maha is strongly connected to the land. Maha and Harb, both are
attached to their land. It’s this attachment to their lands that leads them to
resist the British occupation of their land and resources. Harb defends the
land against the British occupation militarily and Maha takes care of the land
by ploughing it, tending to and cultivating it. We see Maha removing weeds and
stones from the land, ploughing and watering it. Maha develops a physical and
emotional bond with the soil. When the English drive their car through her
vegetable field, she resists by erecting a stone boundary around the field.
When Maha is forced to give up her land and sign the papers in favour of
Daffash, she refuses to do so. When forced to run away from her village to the
mountaintop after her brother Daffash, who has been working with the English,
cheats her out of her land, she decides to come back and fight for her rightful
inheritance and to take back her son. She is brutally assaulted by Daffash and
his English friends, while the local Imam declares her a pervert and mad. She
is bundled into a car and confined to the mental asylum. Daffash’s forceful
takeover of the land from Maha is symbolic of the English occupation of Jordan
against which Harb is fighting. It’s this collusion between patriarchy and
colonialism that renders women doubly marginalized of which Maha and her friend
Umm Saad are examples.
National
identity, a recurring theme in postcolonial literature, is explored throughout
the novel. As we understand that colonial domination is achieved not merely by
military domination, but also by imposing ideological frameworks upon the
subjects. Ania Loomba (2005) points out that, “the ruling classes achieve
domination not by force or coercion alone, but also by creating subjects who
‘willingly’ submit to being ruled” (Loomba 29).
National
identity is debated in light of the differences between Harb and Daffash’s
perspectives towards the land and the colonizer. In Pillars of Salt,
Daffash invites the English for a feast, eats and dances with them and takes
their active support in subduing Maha. Daffash, described as a “coward, a
womanizer and city worshiper” (Faqir, Pillars 21), works with the
English and is willing to submit to the colonizer. Daffash’s goal is to marry
Rose Bell, an English woman who “gave the Bedouin horseman a shoulder as cold
as her homeland,” and to “move towards the white man and his bundles of money”
(60). Daffash is richly rewarded by his English masters since he is willing to
give his land to them and owes them his allegiance. Contrary to him, Harb
opposes the colonizer and is battling the English forces in his nation. While
Daffash is a Bedouin but wants to live like the British, Harb values his
Bedouin identity and is against the British control of Jordan. Even Maha tries
to preserve her traditional ways of life and refuses English medicines and
sprays for her fields. She despises the English, much like Harb. She even
confronts them and spits them in the face, since they killed her husband.
Challenging and subverting the power relation between the oppressed, female,
colonized subject and the oppressive male colonizer, she refuses to oblige
Daffash and his English masters, raising questions over their authority: “I
will get married to nobody; I will not sign any deeds, and will never cook for
the English” (217). She even hopes that her son will one day exact revenge on
them and his uncle Daffash.
Cultural
identity is another aspect of postcolonialism examined in the novel as we see
there is a great deal of cultural hostility between the native Jordanians and
the English colonists. Maha discusses the detrimental impact of the English
mandate on Jordan and voices her concern when she says “The English tried to
change our lives and our land, but failed. Occupation was like a thin cloud,
which was blown away by the wind” (195). Um Saad also talks about the British
exit from Jordan leaving behind remnants of their culture. “At last, the
English left our country after building clubs which no one could enter and
strange-shaped toilets which no Muslim could use” (177). The novel on the whole
depicts a lot of mistrust and hostility between the locals and the British
colonizers whose departure from Jordan is celebrated by Maha and other women of
the hamlet.
A
typical condition of colonization is ‘hybridity’ and ‘mimicry’, as argued by
Homi Bhabha. Here, colonized people under the influence of the colonizer and
their cultural interference, end up imitating their colonizers, adopting their
language, political structures, educational programs and other lifestyles. On
the other hand, the colonizer can also imitate the colonized. This hybridity
and mimicry results in what Bhabha calls “cultural hybridity”, or what
postcolonial studies commonly refer to as “cultural multiplicity”. This is
corroborated by the fact that Daffash mimics the British and the British intern
upholding the indigenous system of patriarchy and gender inequality, as
evidenced by the way the British doctor treats Maha and Um Saad inside the
mental asylum.
Pillars
of Salt employs an
intriguing narrative strategy. Faqir makes use of ‘multiple perspectives’ while
narrating the events of the story. Faqir is essentially “writing back” to the
medieval Orientalist travel narratives that exoticized the non-West and
presented them as enigmatic, exotic and other. The Western colonial rule itself
was justified in the name of correcting and civilizing the non-West and saving
their women from brutal patriarchal suppression and backwardness. The women’s
bodies have been used as a trope to control and govern the non-West. As such
they have been described in a way which is far from being realistic. The novel
is narrated primarily by Sami al Adjnabi, called the Storyteller. Being an
outsider and unfamiliar with Arab ways and customs, Sami Al-Adjnabi, which
means “the stranger,” consistently exhibits mistrust and unreliability. A
foreigner and a representative of the orientalist travel narrators, the
Storyteller presents Maha in unfavourably, depicting her as a “she-demon” (27),
a “ghoul” (30), “a vampire,” “a hyena” (86), a fork-tongued “serpent” (141), a
“bitter colocynth” with “twisted feet” (168), “the black widow” (169), “the
black spider, the destroyer of high houses” (170). Facts about Maha are
fabricated and she is depicted as a witch and a flesh eater. The narrative
begins with the Storyteller’s account of Maha as “a shrew who used to shrew who
used to chew the shredded flesh of mortals from sun birth to sun death. She was
a sharp sword stuck in the sides of the Arabs’ enemies” (2).
When
Maha and her husband go out on their wedding night, the Storyteller’s
voyeuristic and orientalizing gaze demonizes the couple’s act of lovemaking,
reducing it to some kind of bewitching activity:
Hand in hand they immersed their
bodies into the river. All the jinn and demons were flying freely in that
devil-accursed land. She started pushing him down, or baptize him like the
infidel Christians do, but he kept floating. A fierce struggle took place
between them. Hands and legs were entangled several times. He was resisting her
spells by pushing his head out of the water. She, trying to capture his soul by
immersing him in that sea of demons. A piercing shriek penetrated my bones when
finally she managed to possess his body. (61)
In
line with the Orientalist tradition of dehumanizing Muslim women, the
Storyteller gives a fanciful account of Maha’s encounter with Pasha, where she
is depicted as a ruthless witch:
When the moon gathered its light and
retreated, when darkness descended, Maha’s ankles started itching, her blood
bubbling, and her heart beating. “Not tonight”, she begged her masters the
magicians. The itching continued, then her ankles started twisting and twisting
until her left foot was facing east and her right facing west. Her fingernails grew
harder and her mouth extended. (168).
To
further mythicize and downgrade her, Maha is shown transforming into a hyena
and a cannibal who eats human flesh. “The hyena launched an attack on him armed
with her tongue and teeth (…) She chewed and blew at him, chewed and blew until
he became foam in her hands, a sponge, easily wrung dry” (169). The Storyteller
goes on to zombify Maha and presents her as a vampire. She is depicted as a
spider that weaves a web, catches her prey and drinks its blood. Daffash found
them “lying in bed and sucking each other’s blood from opened veins” (170).
The prison provides an opportunity for
Um Saad to narrate her own story of victimization to Maha and therefore to the
readers. Maha’s counter-narrative is “a retelling of Arab women’s stories from
a feminist perspective” and “debunks the mythicization and orientalization not
just of herself, but all Arab women” (Nadeem 112).
Maha’s
counter-narrative debunks the male-orientalist-western perspective about Arab
women rendering the traveller Storyteller unreliable, “undermined and
‘rewritten’, as it were, by Maha’s voice and version of events” (Abdo 244). She
presents Arab women in a new light and identity different from the one imposed
upon them in the Western orientalist narratives.
Maha is a resourceful woman who
ploughs the land and cultivates it. This makes her father entrust the land to
her: “The land must go to its ploughman. No, ploughwoman. The land is yours
Maha. This is my will” (Faqir, Pillars 180). This doesn’t go well with
Daffash and with the help of his English friends, he forces Maha to transfer
the land to him. However, Maha fights back and refuses to comply: “First, I
don’t talk to rapists. A hushed silence landed over the valley. Second, I don’t
talk to disobedient sons. Third, I don’t talk to servants of the English”.
(217)
In
a typical postcolonial fashion, Faqir undermines the power dynamic between the
hegemonic male Orientalist and the unprivileged feminine Orient. Breaking
stereotypes, Maha not only exerts agency and speaks for herself, but also
provides a counter-narrative against the myths and distortions about Arab
women. Fadia Faqir in her interview with Lindsay Moore affirms that “The
women’s stories are at the heart of Pillars: the lower voice, the
simpler voice, is supposed to challenge his bombastic voice that perpetuates
myths, illusions and lies” (Fadia, “You Arrive” 7).
In
this sense, the story told by the Storyteller takes on the role of a sort of
subtext underlying the main story. Faqir goes on to say that the Storyteller is
supposed to embody the Orientalist narrative, which is, in her opinion, an
inaccurate portrayal of the East. For her, the narrator “paints a picture of
the Arabs that is not true”. She adds: “I see the storyteller as an Orientalist
in cahoots with both the colonial forces and the indigenous patriarchy- the
three work hand-in-hand” (7).
Faqir
also talks about the use of multiple narratives in her novel: “I think the
truth needs to be told from different perspectives. You arrive at a
truth, not the truth. If you create a multi-layered narrative and have
different perspectives or points of view, then you more fairly represent the
issue you are dealing with” (3).
To
further accommodate the Arabic language and culture and emphasize the novel’s
postcolonial narrative structure, the novel employs language that includes
code-switching, lexical borrowing, historical and geographical referencing,
casual conversations, culture-specific metaphors, and grammatical deviation.
About the text’s linguistic strategies, Abdo makes a pertinent remark:
Although
Faqir’s novel both implicitly and explicitly attacks Islam, the text’s
linguistic strategy of (dis)placement fights against a westernized cooptation
of her struggle as a Muslim and Arab woman by conducting its own attack on the
English reader and on orientalist and Western appropriations of the image and
role of the Arab and Muslim woman. Faqir will have her critique of her own
culture, but on her own terms, and not without simultaneously critiquing the
West’s representation of her. (Abdo 242-243)
Faqir
uses vocabulary and narrative approaches in a way that is novel for the genre.
She employs both conventional modern storytelling and the oral tradition
frequently connected to the Arabian Nights. In an interview with
Moore, she points out that with Pillars of Salt, she wanted to “create
something similar to what Indian authors have achieved- a hybrid English.
Therefore, I used the oral tradition and the Qur’an and the Arabian Nights
in the Storyteller’s section” (Fadia, “You Arrive” 7).
Conclusion
In
a patriarchal society like Jordan where women are believed to obey male
superiority and authority, Maha refuses to be suppressed. Although fragile and
limited, she even presents a challenge to the English colonizers. She is
humiliated, brutalized and incarcerated at the end of the novel, but her spirit
remains indefatigable. This highlights the ways, as Tawfiq Yousuf says, in
“which the forces of patriarchy and colonialism are conjoined to restrict the
freedom and space of the individual and the community at large both on the
social, the cultural and the political levels” (Yousuf 389). The novelist
provides ‘multiple perspectives’ to offer ‘multiple critique’ that deconstructs
both native patriarchy as well as Western colonialism simultaneously. Miriam
Cooke prefers to call it a kind of “strategic self-positioning,” which allows
the author to criticize the native androcentric attitudes and practices, along
with a critique of global power structures. Cooke puts it like this:
Multiple critique is not a fixed
authorizing mechanism but a fluid discursive strategy taken up from multiple
speaking positions. It allows for conversations with many interlocutors on many
different topics. Unlike identity politics, which depends on an essentialized
identity, multiple critique allows for identitarian contradictions that respond
to others’ silencing moves. The individual’s goal is to remain in the community
out of which she is speaking, even when she criticizes its problems. (Cooke113)
Through
her postcolonial feminist rewriting, Faqir looks at the East and the West with
an interrogating stance, questions both patriarchy and Western imperialism and
makes her protagonists resist and confront both. These are revisionist
accounts, writing back to both the power structures that are at the heart of
postcolonialism.
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