Violets in a Crucible: Translating the Orient, 2019
Awlad Haritna (1959) almost cost Naguib Mahfouz his life. The attempt on Mahfouz's life in 1994 w... more Awlad Haritna (1959) almost cost Naguib Mahfouz his life. The attempt on Mahfouz's life in 1994 was the result of a fatwa issued by Islamist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric and militant currently serving a life sentence in the United States. Abdel Rahman's fatwa followed that issued in 1989 by the then Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie after the release of The Satanic Verses (1988). Khomeini sanctioned the shedding of Rushdie's blood on the basis of blasphemy and called upon Muslims to kill him if they got the chance. One year later, Abdel Rahman linked Rushdie to Mahfouz, making the assumption that had the second been killed, the first would not have thrived: "Both Salman Rushdie and Naguib Mahfouz are apostates, but had we killed Mahfouz from the very beginning, Rushdie would have never emerged," he was quoted as saying. "If those people do not repent, they have to be killed." While The Satanic Verses did revive interest in Awlad Haritna, it was the Nobel Prize for Literature that Mahfouz was awarded in 1988 that brought the novel back to the limelight and renewed fatwas against its author. Although he was given police protection, an Islamist extremist succeeded in attacking Mahfouz outside his house and stabbing him in the neck. Mahfouz survived, yet his right arm was permanently affected and his ability to write dwindled remarkably.
HUMAN REVIEW. International Humanities Review / Revista Internacional de Humanidades
This paper explores the manifestations of the wound metaphor in two Mexican-American border novel... more This paper explores the manifestations of the wound metaphor in two Mexican-American border novels: The Guardians (2007) by Ana Castillo and The River Flows North by Graciela Limón (2009). This will be done by analyzing the metaphor as tackled by Anzaldúa and Fuentes then examining the detrimental impact of the border on characters that are affected by it in one way or another whether through attempting to cross to the United States, crossing back to Mexico, or living in border towns.
International Journal on Language, Literature and Culture in Education, 2016
When the Nahua woman known as La Malinche became the interpreter of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror ... more When the Nahua woman known as La Malinche became the interpreter of Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, she was not only carving her name as one of history’s most influential translators, but was also rendered one of the most enduring symbols of the cultural intricacies of translation. Malinche’s knowledge of both Spanish and Nahuatl and the way it made her instrumental in the conquerors’ success took her role from the level of linguistic mediator to that of an active agent in cultural transformation, or rather cultural erosion. Having used her linguistic abilities to help the invaders against her people, Malinche has since the conquest been labeled a traitor. Becoming Cortés’s mistress served to further confirm this idea. Yet, being arguably the bearer of the first “mestizo,” Malinche came to be perceived as the mother of the Mexican people and the progenitor of the new race. In both cases, La Malinche has till this moment been emblematic of the complexities of cultural represe...
While writing about immigrants and border crossings arguably dates back to the signing in 1884 of... more While writing about immigrants and border crossings arguably dates back to the signing in 1884 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which resulted in the annexation by the United States of almost half Mexican territories, Marta Caminero-Santangelo's Documenting the Undocumented: Latino/a Narratives and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (2016) focuses on the emergence of texts that came to be known as post-Gatekeeper narratives. These refer to texts written after the launch in 1994 of Operation Gatekeeper in California, which was followed by similar operations, including Operation Safeguard in 1995 in Arizona and Operation Río Grande in 1997 in Texas. Those operations marked the start of an era in which heavy policing of the US-Mexican border drove potential immigrants away from the relatively safe crossings, mostly located in urban areas, and forced them into taking dangerous routes through deserts and mountains, often with fatal consequences. In addition to doubling the number of immigrants who do not survive the journey, the experience to which those who make it to the other side or back to their homelands are exposed is more scarring, hence increasing the intensity of the resulting trauma. Documenting this trauma, which not only includes the actual crossing but also encompasses its impact on victims' families and border communities, is the focus of Caminero-Santangelo's study on narratives of the post-Gatekeeper era. Caminero-Santangelo brings together different types of narratives about undocumented immigrants that include fiction, literary journalism, and testimonials. Whereas the main focus of the book is actual border crossings from Mexico, Caminero-Santangelo also tackles the case of Caribbean immigrants, how different they are from their Mexican counterparts, and the impact of metaphorical borders on their experience.
The paper attempts at reaching a formula that can underline the main characteristics of the dicta... more The paper attempts at reaching a formula that can underline the main characteristics of the dictator(ship) novel and which can transcend spatial boundaries to encompass all the political and cultural specificities determined by the country and/or region in which the text is written as well as investigating the degree with which the texts can be looked at as analyses of the conditions that precede a revolution and constitute the reasons for its eruption even if the act of rebellion does not unfold throughout the events. The paper will lay special emphasis on the dictator(ship) novel in the Arab world to examine how far it had succeeded in offering a truthful and uncensored depiction of despotic regimes in the region in general and in influencing the dynamics of political activism and reshaping Arab reality in the past 50 years in particular. This will be done through tracing discourse development in the selected texts-in Spanish, English, and Arabic-and the way they can be linked to changes on the ground from sporadic, short-lived rebellions to regime-toppling revolutions, also known as the Arab Spring. It will also be important to determine how far the Arab literary scene has managed to produce a body of texts that can be grouped together under the banner of dictator(ship) novel and initiate an independent genre similar to its Latin American counterpart-both regions being the most fertile of soils for the thriving of such a canon by virtue of their exposure to several of the twentieth century's most ruthless regimes.
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Papers by Sonia Farid