10. She mentions the rat, the arch-icon of betrayal in traditional symbology, when she compares her uncle to this scavenger (27).
11. For an in-depth analysis of the complicitous manoeuvring of both discourses and their symbolic investment in terms of women’s representation, see Elleke Boehmer’s essay “Stories of Women and Mothers: Gender and Nationalism in the Early Fiction of Flora Nwapa,” in Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: The Women’s Press LTD, 1991) pp.3-24.
12. In Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler avers that “[w]hat we consider ‘madness’, whether it appears in women or in men, is either the acting out of the devalued female role or the total or partial rejection of one’s sex-role stereotype,” quoted in Shoshana Felman, “Women and Madness: the Critical Phallacy” p.118.
13. She defines the Qarina, which incarnates and condenses her dissociative disorders, as a “kinship spirit . . . a jinn who invades a person’s body and lies low there until , no sooner is one on the verge of sleep, than it appears, especially during the day, and starts a struggle and sets off nightmares” (98).
14. The emblem of indeterminacy in the novel is the bat, a liminal creature most seen at twilight. It indicates the devastation of binary opposites since it conjointly flaunts characteristics of both the bird and the mouse, thus bringing together sky and earth. Moreover, the bat, as the symbol of the chtonic world, is associated with the night, a moment of fluid fragmentariness, opacity, and silence, whose amorphous darkness dilutes and evaporates all dualities and differences and reminds one of the supposedly unfathomable secrets of the female psyche.