Betrayal, as an umbrella term, is instantiated through individual actions but also generic, formal strategies. For a question might pose itself: Is Zahra’s account really an autobiography? If she dies at the end of the narrative by the sniper’s bullets, who, then, tells the story? Her Qarina, the psychic manifestation of her unconscious? 13 The implication might be, in that case, a betrayal of the reader’s trust and breach of an implicit covenant. Along these lines, Al-Cheikh resorts to transfiguration of the narrative pattern via memory, the delinearised reticulation of whose elements hybridises, contaminates, and violates the rules of the genre.
The “monstrous” body of the insane female protagonist translates into a “monstrous” text or genre, because she systematically rends the cohesive fabric of a chronological narrative and impedes its linear, teleological summation due to perpetual recourse to non sequitur and intervention of alien points of view: in the middle of the narrative, one chapter is told by her uncle and another by Majed, whose voices she seems to have internalised and regurgitated.
The tactic of deferral is to be understood as a betrayal of the conception of meaning as an irreducible entity and a “presence-to-itself.” The female textual body flaunts its endlessness: “. . . it is without limits, it starts on all sides, and when it ends, it starts all over again” (Curti xiii). Zahra retraces her steps, stalking the meanders of her subjective memory to offer a prismatic, multivalent treatment of both past and present. She betrays her own desire to achieve discursive centrality of the ex-centric self. But just as she endeavours to perform this centralism, she subverts it by the same token, whether consciously or not, through a gamut of manipulative ploys. This is compounded by the correlative excess that attends on the shuttle between the realms of body and text; a passage that is fraught with gaps so much so that lapses into betrayal are more than probable.
In the first chapter entitled “Zahra remembers,” the vagaries of memory betray the reality it strives to duplicate. It is the case, for instance, when Zahra speaks ambiguously about “a feeling”, both mysterious and ambivalent that overwhelms her whenever Fatmé abandons her daughter to sleep with her lover: “It was a feeling which shattered both reality and imagination. It was much as I felt when I rode the roller-coaster … racing between heaven and earth. It suspended me between sky and land like a bolt of lightning” (13). This limbo condition is associated with betrayal and loss as Zahra was left on the brink of opening a Pandora Box and staring at a forbidden knowledge that was to ravage her innocence. The afore-mentioned quote might be said to amount to a reflection on her autobiography and the generic compartment it should be assigned: it is neither a work that totally reflects reality - because subjective memory intervenes to shatter the illusion of realism - nor a work of poetic imagination as reality always intrudes. Memories are always ensconced in the margins between certitudes. Furthermore, the narrator continuously ruptures the illusion of a realist account and casts doubt on the veracity or exactitude of her recollections through all her queries that intersperse the narrative like so many reminders of the constructed nature of narrativity. She interpolates digressions in an abrupt way with no transition, only to resume a narrative that is stitched in a random pattern, thus emulating the actual act of memory. Zahra presents these motley recollections in a jumbled fashion, peeling layers off in a quasi fortuitous pattern where the mother is the only constituent susceptible of lending a semblance of cohesion. The collage, as a postmodernist technique, allows Zahra to juggle periods and phases in her life in a game of fragmentariness that gives away her sense of loss.
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