Buried in the desert and lost in the city: Gothic spaces in Egyptian feminist writing

ABSTRACT

This article considers the non-diasporic Egyptian feminist literary encounter with modernity through Gothic spaces. The dissociative relationship to fearsome spaces demonstrates that there is no symbolic place for women in Egypt’s (patriarchal) modernization. Egypt is often depicted as a woman, and Al-Samman’s work on the wa’d al banat motif – the daughter who is erased through burial – is used here to explore Egyptian feminist texts’ rejection of the conflation of space and subject in the patriarchal symbolic order. These spaces are read as Gothic through what Luce Irigaray calls “dereliction” and the Warwick Research Collective’s theorization of “combined and uneven development”. The article considers Gothic “bewildered” spaces in the palatial home and the city in Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Maryam’s Maze, a forest in Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam, and Bedouin estates and the desert in Miral Al-Tahawy’s novels The Tent and Gazelle Tracks.

KEYWORDS:

• Egyptian feminist writing
• Middle Eastern Gothic
• Egyptian Gothic
• feminist Gothic
• Gothic spaces
• wa’d al banat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Throughout the English translations of Al-Tahawy’s novels, there are references to a Bedouin “estate” where each novel takes place. These are usually permanent settlements controlled by patriarchs, who build European-style houses, or set up permanent tents. In The Tent, this space is privatized with a wall and gate. In my correspondence with Anthony Calderbank who translated The Tent and Gazelle Tracks to English, he said he translated “إقطاع and [ … ] ربع. both to refer to lands/place of abode. I used estate here because the Bedouins who settled in the Delta had come to own significant land holdings and were in some cases akin to landed gentry. The families in Mirals’s novels no longer live the nomadic Bedouin life style, though nostalgia for it and aspect of it remain” (Calderbank 2022).

2. Jahiliyyah translates to “the time of ignorance” before the spread of Islam. The folklore of this period includes supernatural beings, such as djinn or ghouls (spirits or demons), and qarin (spirit doubles).

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Roxanne Douglas

Roxanne Douglas is a teaching fellow in gender and sexuality at the Department of English at the University of Birmingham. She was awarded her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2020. Her research brings together feminist theory, world-literature theories, and Gothic studies, with a focus on Arab feminist writing in translation. She recently co-organized the “Women in World-Literature” international, hybrid, conference, and has published in Life Writing, Hypatia, and Feminist Theory.