- 期刊
Re-envisioning National Communities and the Short Story Genre in Nawal El Saadawi, Salwa Bakr and Ibtihal Salem
重寫國家空間 —— 當代埃及女性作家的短篇小說
摘要
本文檢視三位當代具有代表性的埃及女作家，分別是Nawal El Saadawi (1931-)的 〈In Camera〉(〈攝影鏡頭〉，1979)，Salwa Bakr (1949-)的〈Zeinat at the President's Funeral〉(〈總統葬禮上的賽娜〉，1986)，以及Ibtihal Salem (1949-)的〈The Boot〉(〈靴子〉，1999)。這三位作家，分別代表了埃及婦女解放運動中的不同政治立場，其對女性化特質的書寫，重新書寫了埃及現代國家的空間。哈費茲(SabryHafez)提出，短篇小說適於捕捉邊緣主體的孤獨、痛苦和主體分裂。本文藉由侯米巴巴的第三空間理論，探討短篇小說的片刻性和立即性等特質，如何成為邊緣位置的第三世界女性個人自我表達的工具。從短篇小說在阿拉伯的歷史發展來看，在文體上不若小說直接承載殖民歷史的收編和對抗，因為小說是引介自西方的新文體，而短篇小說為傳統散文書寫同源。短篇小說的特殊時間性造就了文化流動性，並成為邊緣主體表達社會改革的工具，繼而鬆動了小說均質的性/別化空間。本文引用侯米巴巴的混雜論述，認為第三世界女性運動沒有本源，亦沒有模仿，而是特定的在地性所形成的不穩定意義系統。後殖民國家空間、第三世界婦女日常生活無法完全被翻譯，顯示所謂的回教女性文化傳統，總是混雜的翻譯空間，碎片、遊走、重複而又多重。
並列摘要
This paper looks at the particular genre of the short story in playing a significant role for Egyptian women to articulate their relationships within and without the male-dominant new nation after national independence in 1952. The paper focuses on three representative Egyptian women writers' short stories, including Nawal El Saadawi's (1931-) ＂In Camera,＂ (1979) Salwa Bakr's (1949-) ＂Zeinat at the President's Funeral,＂ (1986) and Ibtihal Salem's (1949-) ＂The Boot,＂ (1999) to examine how they re-write femininities in relation to the modern national space dominated by the male elite who they have worked together and fought hard in the independence struggle since the turn of the twentieth-century. The juxtaposition of the three writers demonstrates the diverse political positionings from which Egyptian women rights activists have participated in the anti-colonial struggle. Sabry Hafez points out that the short story is particularly apt to capture the isolation, pain and fragmentation of the individuals' experiences in modern Arabic literature. Utilizing Homi Bhabha's theory of the in-between spaces, this paper considers the silences and the untranslatability with which Egyptian women's rights activists re-envision their nation. Bhabha suggests that the present temporality of the nation is both pedagogical and performative. He also holds that the storytelling of the people and national communities is subjected to unpredictable pulsations of the present temporality that constitute the people's identities in the modern nation. This paper aims at unraveling the decentered, incoherent and multiple identities with which Egyptian women writers re-envision the Islamic notion of femininities in relation to the nation through their daily life accounts embodied in the compressed moment of the short story.