‘Gendering illiterature: the representation of the Egyptian women left behind in Ayman Zohry’s “The Mediterranean Sea”’

ABSTRACT

This paper shifts the focus from male paperless migrants to the women who stay in their country of origin. My analysis of the discrepancy between borderless economics and the bordered movement of people explores the representation of the women left behind in Ayman Zohry’s novella ‘The Mediterranean Sea’, which describes irregular migration from Egypt to Italy. This paper investigates the intersection between the forces of patriarchy and globalisation in the lives of the women who are left in the sending countries. The article starts by shedding light on the writer, who is an expert in immigration studies. The second section of this essay focuses on the wives’ struggle against the glocal masculine and geopolitical dictates. The third part of the paper analyses the juncture of gender and global capital in the lives of the mothers left behind. My investigation of the hardships endured by migrants’ wives and mothers demonstrates that immigration torments those women who stay in the homeland as much as it afflicts the spouses who travel to ‘Hopeland’ (Obi, Cyril. 2007. “From Homeland to Hopeland? Economic Globalization and Ogoni Migration in the 1990s.” In The Cultures of Economic Migration: International Perspectives, edited by Suman Gupta, and Tope Omonyi, 115. Burlington, VT: Ashgate). My main argument is that the Egyptian women left behind have to strive against both the contradictions induced by globalisation and the subordination generated by male domination.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered illiterature
• paperless migration
• Egypt
• globalisation
• women left behind

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The ideas of this project were disseminated in a variety of conferences and workshops. A paper was presented at the Africanist Graduate Research Conference at Michigan State University on 7–8 October 2011, under the title: ‘“Illegal” immigration in the new global economy: A case study of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami’. A second paper was presented on this theme at The Higher Degree Research Conference on Social Justice, which was held at the University of Sydney on 27 November 2013. Its title was: ‘Revisiting the concept of social justice through a reconsideration of the plight of female asylum seekers’. A third paper was presented on the women left behind in Lalami’s text at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia’s 2013 Symposium on ‘Doing Cultural Studies: Interrogating Practice’. It was presented at Swinburne University under the title: ‘Studying immigration policies and practices through the optic of transnational literature’. Another paper entitled ‘Gendered “illegal” migration from Morocco to Spain: Transnational literature’s representation of female clandestiniy in the age of globalisation’ was submitted to the International Conference on Migration, Diaspora and Development that was held on 20–21 February 2016 in India.