[Download] "Going the Extra Mile: Redefining Identity, Home, And Family in Hanan Al-Shaykh's Only in London." by Studies in the Humanities # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Going the Extra Mile: Redefining Identity, Home, And Family in Hanan Al-Shaykh's Only in London.
- Author : Studies in the Humanities
- Release Date : January 01, 2003
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 376 KB
Description
Hanadi al-Samman argues that Arab women writers have gained much from exile as a major decentralizing life experience, many of whom succeeded in transforming a potentially negative condition into a positive one. Joseph Zeidan places Hanan al-Shaykh in a group of Arab expatriate women--including Salma al-Haffar al-Kuzbari, Samirah al-Mani', and Hamidah Na'na'--who not only live and write in Western countries, thus enjoying more freedom and a wider reading public, (13) but also address in their fiction the cultural conflict between Eastern and Western values (236). Al-Shaykh positions herself within a much larger network of expatriate women writers, including "Pakistanis [and] Japanese ... [who] feel [they] don't entirely belong to England" and have, therefore, "made a country of [their] own" (qtd. in Ghazaleh) in the form of shared intellectual interests and artistic sensibilities. In 1976, a few months following the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in April 1975, al-Shaykh left with her husband and two children for Saudi Arabia, where they stayed until 1982. Since then they have been living in England. Although her novels The Story of Zahra (1980) and Beirut Blues (1992) deal with the issue of nationalism, al-Shaykh describes herself as "unnationalistic," preferring peace and her own peace of mind to any piece of land: