چکیده:
Drawing from the mainly Bakhtinian theories of the grotesque and its further readings by Kristeva, Foucault, and Bhabha, the present paper tends to examine the representation of “feminine grotesque” in one of the less discussed novels of Post-millennial Muslim diaspora, Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies (2015). Written in response to the Islamophobic aftermath of the 9/11 and London bombings, Aboulela’s postmillennial fiction is often read as an instance of Islamic Postcolonialism, in the shade of which the story’s manifestly corpographic quality is mainly neglected by the critics. An offspring of miscegenation between a Muslim African and a white non-Muslim Russian, Aboulela’s female protagonist Natasha Hussein reconfigures diasporic hybridity as seminally “monstrous,” and accordingly proposes a synthesis between the feminine abject and Muslim monstrosity. The Bakhtinian grotesque is exemplarily revitalized in Natasha’s abject body at different strata, which turns her body mass from a definite individual figure to a becoming political body in a network of sociocultural and religious forces. In her struggle to adjust with space through the Sufi practice of zikr, she is both metamorphosed and proposed to the West as an alternative model of embodied Muslim subjectivity which is more willing to tolerate and to negotiate.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Notwithstanding religious preferences of the writers (believers or other- wise), the corporeal combat of the Muslim migrant woman on daily basis with a host(ile) culture – where ‘veiling’ is taken beyond a free personal choice and socio-political significations are constantly inscribed upon their othered bodies – has become an iterative obsession in post-millennial narratives with reac- tionary strategies towards redefining Muslim identity and reconnecting to the hybrid world around them.
The primordially grotesque conditions forming the human body as a dou- bled, hybridized space that is constantly becoming transformed and re- fragmented are then traced in Aboulela’s female character, Natasha.
The story then breaks in halves, two parallel universes, one set in the post-millennial Islamophobic England where Muslims are monitored everywhere for any trace of tendency towards “Islamic terror- ism,” and yet where Natasha finds Oz’s mother as an apt Muslim guru in life (as a Sufi Muslim, her peaceful approach to life and religion is presented as a possi- ble alternative) – and the other travels back in time and history to the period of Imam Shamil’s jihad against the tsar – which also functions to present a factual record of what Jihad really meant to Muslims, reclaiming its past grandeur and status.
With the hierarchical order sub- verted in the practice of carnivalesque, grotesque realism becomes a matter of “degradation” and lowering of all spiritual ideals and abstraction to the materi- al world: To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organ; it therefore relates to acts of defection and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth.