Soueif’s Melody: An Other Female Symphony Of Eastern And Western Ruptures And Fusions

Résumé: East and West encounters have often echoed oriental fantasies of the exotic and the strange besides binary labels such us ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ widely discussed within postcolonial theory. Besides, the representations of 'Arab' and 'Muslim' women in the West have been caricatured to represent an Other as an inferior entity; the weak entity dependent on their male counterparts and unable to take decisions. They bear labels such as 'exotic', 'sexual objects', and 'secluded creatures in the Harem'. This image conforms to the stereotypical portrait residing in a Western orientalist imagination. This paper explores how Ahdaf Soueif’s short story Melody, chosen from her second collection The Sandpiper (1996), pictures the afore mentioned misrepresentations of Eastern women by their Western counter-parts. The Western female narrator in Melody describes her Eastern counter-part and her young daughter as sexual-objects ignorant and submissive slaves and victims of patriarchal authority. This setting seems to make such cultural encounters appear barren and exclusionary. However, these very encounters also liberated an intellectual space of convergences besides that of ruptures. The author grants a space for her Western character to empathise with her Eastern one being a mother herself and a victim of confinement and patriarchal authority.

Publié dans la revue: النص