Zahra’s malaise as a child translates itself through psychosomatic manifestations: enuresis and nausea that exemplify the way even her body, over which she forfeits all control, comes to betray her.4 She is made accessory to Fatmé’s affair and they form an unholy triad with the lover. Zahra’s innocence is betrayed since she is forced into a confrontation with adult reality: she has to grapple, willy-nilly, with such issues as sexuality and its inevitable correlative, sin.5 At this juncture, the symbolism of the bat and the fig tree, which interlards the narrative, intervenes to accentuate the preponderant role the concept of sin plays in the construal of the hidden mechanisms of betrayal and Zahra’s forthcoming insanity. The fig tree conjures up the image of the forbidden tree of knowledge and the notion of Original Sin in Arab tradition, while the bat is tightly linked with blood, a female-connotated fluid, which stands as a reminder of Eve’s curse (menstruation).
Zahra’s sense of betrayal can also be ascribable to her being stuck in an interstitial position between her parents who incarnate two diametrically opposite poles: on the one hand, the mother who stands for the Orient in her association with magic, emotions, sensuousness, cruelty, and dreams. On the other hand, the father who stands for the Western half in his connection with such notions as progress, reason, and authority. A tyrannical patriarchal figure par excellence, he is represented by a phallic symbol since Zahra refers to him as “the Lord of the Tram-car” (14). He is always depicted wearing a khaki suit, a typical Western attire, with his watch as an inseparable appendage that gestures towards the idea of time: a Western concept in the first place, whose major connotations are those of rigidity and a certain linearity of existence. He is said to see “life in terms of black or white” (24), thus exposing the sterile dichotomous binarism of his world vision, which explains Al-Shaykh’s strong reliance on indeterminacy all through the narrative as measures to counteract patriarchal logocentric ideology. His name Ibrahim (Abraham in Arabic) might be understood as an allusion to Zahra’s sacrifice on the altar of her mother’s betrayal, since he beats the daughter up to make her confess the truth about her mother’s affair.
This dichotomy between an Oriental mother and a Westernised father helps establish a “Manichean Allegory” of sorts that might contribute in explaining the lack of stable, coherent landmarks for Zahra’s identitarian (self-)formation and the aetiology of her schizoid self as an adult.6 What makes matters worse is that Fatmé offers no valid mothering model for her daughter to emulate: she is an arrant liar and a pitiable thief, to boot. Morever, Zahra resents the preferential treatment Fatmé reserves for her brother Ahmad on account of his gender, in an Arab society where sex role differentiation is a profoundly anchored notion: “Everyday, as we sat in the kitchen to eat, [my mother’s] love would be declared: having filled my plate with soup, she serves my brother Ahmad, taking all her time, searching carefully for the best pieces of meat. She dips the ladle into the pot and salvages meat fragments. There they go into Ahmad’s dish. There they sit in Ahmad’s belly” (11).
At this stage, the female body, most particularly the face as a key identitarian component, becomes the canvas on which Zahra etches the suffering entailed by her acute trauma. Her pimples, which might be interpreted as psychosomatic symptoms, are vectors of betrayal, for they concretise trauma and betray her ravaged interiority: “My fingers would search [a pimple] out, touch it, peel off the dry skin, then squeeze it out of existence. I would not stop until I found a drop of blood on my finger” (24). Self-mutilation, in this case disfigurement, turns into an act of self-mortification: the wounds sustained by the ego are translated into concrete facial stigmata as the index of identity implosion. Zahra’s body, once again, lets her down and evades her control: “It was as if my fingers had to go to work before I would say a word” (24).
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