Narrativising Betrayal in Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra, by Semia Harbawi

Her recourse to indeterminacy, which consists in bringing together opposites, is a major component of her postmodernist framework.14 She often speaks in terms of “seeing, yet not seeing” or “being and non-being” (22). At one point, she avers that “I existed in a state where everything existed yet did not exist” (38). She reduces reality to disjointed sensations, tantamount to a state bordering on schizophrenia. This state degenerates seguing her second abortion when she is interned in a mental asylum after her nervous breakdown. Betrayal becomes the phenomenon and conjointly the epiphenomenon. It is a paradox mirrored by the betrayal of both language and memory by means of omnipresent contradictions: bringing together dualities betrays the alleged stability and fixedness of meaning within a logocentric framework. Zahra consistently associates one entity and its opposite, all the while precluding any possibility of hierarchisation. She is herself the obvious example as she is the betrayer and the betrayed as the same time. After hiding the pieces of a torn page from her diary lest her prurient uncle find them, she “was filled with a sense of happiness and congratulated myself on my cleverness and the sort of deception to which I always resorted when outwitting my father” (27). She indulges in self-contradiction and moral ambiguity: at one moment, she feels repulsed by Malek’s lies and deceit but only two lines later, she admits: “I plotted how I might trick [Majed] and so get round his discovering that I was a woman who had twice been aborted” (39).

Betrayal is, paradoxically enough, the only constant in Zahra’s ever-whirling diaporama. It forms a chain that is solid, never-ending, ‘betraying’ its own sordid and taunting constancy. Betrayal is ever displaced, re-situated, re-formed, re-construed, protean in form but ubiquitous, studding Zahra’s route and embossing her script. It becomes an organisational structural principle and the thread running through the whole narrative, giving away its constructed frangibility and paradoxes while purveying, at the same time, a holistic unity. Betrayal also becomes a subversive means for countermanding the prescriptive limitations of patriarchal domination since Zahra rends the veil enswathing the female facet of experience, thus betraying the strict injunction of the “non-dire” that obtains in most Arab cultures.

Notes

1. This situation is to be subsumed within Jennifer Freyd’s “betrayal trauma theory” where the trauma a child experiences after an act of physical/ emotional violation perpetrated by a trusted parent, is yoked with an acute sentiment of betrayal, which would later translate itself in terms of various dissociative disorders. See Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and “Blind to Betrayal: New Perspectives on Memory for Trauma,” The Harvard Mental Health Letter 15 (1999): 4-6.

2. Fatmé’s name acquires an ironical connotation as it is evocative of the Arab superstitious belief that a splayed hand called “Fatma’s hand” is meant to ward off the evil eye and proffer protection on its bearer.

3. Other significant metaphors that pertain to this context are those of “the steamed-up mirrors” and “the rain-splattered glass” (9). Both reflecting surfaces refer to issues of narcissism and frustrated projection onto the mother as the internalised object of desire.

4. On one occasion, Zahra implicitly links her besetting nausea with her mother’s hand on her lover’s thigh, which tends to confirm the significance of the hand as a major vector of betrayal in the narrative. It is noteworthy that blackness is yet another index of betrayal, which complements the function of the hand. This notion is corroborated by the incestuous uncle’s hand that fondles Zahra’s body in a dark movie theatre (23) or her reminiscence about her cousin Kasem’s hand, which “in a darkness so intense as to be completely saturated with darkness . . . furtively moved in [her] panties” (22). Both episodes seem to duplicate the initial scene where Fatmé’s hand gaggles Zahra while they hide behind a door in a dark room at the beginning of the novel.

5. The omnipresent notion of sin might account for her fetishisation of the bathroom, as the sanctuary of cleanliness and purification, which becomes a “bolt-hole” whenever she wants to escape the exactions of her tormentors, first her father, her uncle and then her husband: “It allows me to disappear in time and space; it cuts me off from all human relations. It shuts off my memory . . .” (97).

6. This condition is caricatured, for instance, when Fatmé jeers at the shape of Zahra’s legs: “‘Don’t you see how bow-legged you are?’ And then she added, looking at my feet: ‘One points to the left, the other to the right’” (my italics 4).

7. Representation can be equated with betrayal since the former has always been used, all through “the history of logos,” as a patriarchal repressive ploy in a bid to silence and subjugate women. See Shoshana Felman, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, eds., Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore, 2nd edition (London: MacMillan Press LTD, 1997) p.120.

8. After she conceals between her thighs those pages she tore from her diary to prevent her uncle from reading them, she proclaims: “Those papers are secure between my thighs, obstinate man! They are safe! Even if you were to summon the best witch-doctor in Africa, he never would trace them, unless those papers themselves called out and betrayed me” (my italics 28).

9. His name is an aptronym since it means “owner” in Arabic.