(Neo)Orientalism and Violence in the Postcolonial Arab Novel: A Neo-Patriarchal Reading of Leila Aboulela’s Fiction

Abstract

This paper intends to examine the ways in which the colonial encounter with the British occasioned the racialization, sexualisation of Arab female bodies, the institutionalization of male domination which has led to the decline of the woman’s status and the brutal repression of the basic rights of the Arab woman. The continuation of this dreadful situation today despite the end of colonisation attests to the entanglement between the colonial and the postcolonial in the dynamics of gender in contemporary Arab societies. The systematic violence and oppression of the Arab woman in the Arab societies has its roots in the European imperial project. This has led to the binarization of gender identities around male hegemony as the transfer of power to national elites merely ensured the continuation of colonial structures that dehumanises the Arab woman. Postcolonial Arab societies still remain deeply marked by representation of race, religion, body and gender even after colonialism. The Arab woman in   the Sudanese Arab writer-Aboulela, in her novels Minaret and The Translator is not a description of reality but an ascription of a label that is supposed to be dominated. Within this spirit, patriarchy has mutated itself into neo-patriarchy as a modern form of domination that Arab women suffer from. Since, the family is the smallest unit of a state, neo-patriarchy gives power and control to elderly women over younger females by subjugating them culturally and socially. The violence inflicted on these women is both physical and psychological that puts the existence of the Arab woman at peril.