I am assistant professor in the English Department of the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences, University of Tunis, Tunisia. I teach English and Postcolonial Literature. My publications include “Resistive Aesthetics: Jamaica Kincaid's Formal Strategies” (Connecticut Review, 25.2, 2003);
In The Story of Zahra, Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh presents betrayal as the very essence of narrative and narrativity. It becomes a postmodernist syndrome with various symptoms and multiple manifestations, predicated, as it is, on all manner of deception in the negotiation of female identification and self-defining modes. It starts from the enunciation of the title itself: the third person referent implies a certain detachment; a voice promising to unveil Zahra’s secrets and hence breach her interiority. This detached voice is the one behind the scenes, Zahra’s double and the marker of her schizoid self.