However, the female protagonist evinces a substantial measure of resilience through the control she comes to exert over self-representation7: Zahra embraces a trickster aesthetics by means of manipulating the battery of clichés about what a chaste young girl should be like. She assumes different personae to deceive her despotic father who would, as she avows on several occasions, kill her if she ever came to swerve from the strict moral code a Muslim girl has to abide by. In the following litany, she ponders, with a detached cynicism, the instability and multivalence of her image:
It was all part of a conglomeration of fear, of fear, above all, that my image of myself might be overturned . . . the image of which I had run off hundreds of copies for distribution to all who had known me since childhood. Here is Zahra, the mature girl who says little; . . . Zahra the stay-at-home, who blushes for any or for no reason; Zahra the hard-working student . . . Zahra in whose mouth butter would not melt, who had never smiled at any man, not even at her brother’s friends. This is Zahra – a woman who sprawls naked day after day on a bed in a stinking garage, unable to protest at anything. Who lies on the old doctor’s table . . . (40)
In this meditation about the various stereotypes attending on women’s representation, Zahra parodies (with parody as yet another form of betrayal) the imposed patriarchal conception of women. She assumes “this role deliberately. Which already means turning subordination into affirmation, and therefore subverting it” (Irigaray qtd. in Curti 3). Along the same lines, she criticises Arab men’s expectations about the prototypical, ideal woman when she turns down the first man who proposes to her: “He wants to marry me because I am docile, because he has never seen my teeth, because I do not rival his own self importance, because I am a mystery to him” (my italics 29-30). When she ambiguously refers to herself as a “mystery”, she defies any facile summation of her identity along a male-defined axis of normative hierarchisation, by placing her identity beyond the pale of patriarchal categorisation. In keeping with this, she would later establish an implicit parallel between her self and Africa, where she chooses to repair after her second abortion and the nervous breakdown that ensues. This analogy gyrates round the notion of Africa as an allegory for those dark female secrets beyond men’s ken and, by the same stroke, represents an embedded allusion to Freud’s reference to female psyche as an allegedly dark continent.8
The foundational moment of betrayal, which is the mother’s act of treachery, paves the way for the accrual and superimposition of similar successive layers, which build on one another in a spiral of psychic disintegration. Betrayal becomes the ultimate signifier, since all its mediators, whether external (such as institutions and traditions, mother, father, lover, uncle, brother) or internal (body and language) refer to yet another instance in a circular, endless movement of self-referentiality. It is interesting to note that, within this pattern, men are constantly and consistently posing as out-and-out traitors associated with brutality and violation, whether literal or figurative. Zahra’s first lover, Malek, betrays her trust: he inveigles her into having sex with him in an Arab society that forbids sexual intercourse outside wedlock and fetishises a young girl’s virginity the loss of which, to the future husband, would seal the latter’s legitimate ownership of the female body. The sexual act turns, then, into yet another “mechanism for establishing a hierarchy and enforcing power, domination and therefore dehumanization” (Mernissi 38). Malek promises to marry Zahra despite being married himself. He deflowers her and subsequently makes her undergo two hymenorrhaphies only to deflower her again “without it being any pleasure to him since he knew the restoration was counterfeit” (34). He commodifies her body and eventually ‘owns’ it, true to the connotations embedded in his name.9 Zahra’s second lover, the sniper, uses her body as a sexual outlet and also promises to marry her but kills her in the end because she comes to pose a threat.
Another prominent example of male treachery would be that of her uncle Hashem presented, at first, as a mythic nationalist figure.10 He is a renowned member of the PPS, a pro-Syrian political faction, whose emblem is the Red Storm, a swastika within a circle. The obvious Nazi association is reminiscent of Zahra’s reference to her father’s “Hitler-like moustache” (24). This would amount to an attempt to point out the affinities, even collusion, between two totalitarian, monologic apparatuses predicated on women’s oppression: patriarchy, as symbolised by the father, and nationalism, whose major representative is Hashem.11 But Zahra soon debunks this legendary male nationalist hero and exposes the illusory naiveté of his fantasies: “I saw how different he was from his pictures and my own faded memory. How much shorter and plumper he was … Here, in Africa, he carried in his mind a symbolic image of his homeland, believing this to be the actual homeland, the every-day homeland” (19-20). The incestuous relationship he imposes on Zahra represents the betrayal of her affections and the violation of a taboo. What is more, incest becomes a metaphor for the male nationalist’s conception of women as embodiment of a national ideal through the conflation of a woman’s body and that of the motherland, which is always perceived as female.
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