The Other as ‘others’: A Portrait of Dialogic Relations in Ahdaf Soueif’s Aisha

Abstract

Throughout Aisha, her first collection of short stories, Ahdaf Soueif draws a multilayered picture of the Other as others, presenting a series of encounters of her protagonist with this very Other as a set of opposed elements. The latter crystallize into the adult vs. child, male vs. female, and foreigner vs. locale. The text including only four narratives to be investigated among the eight stories constituting the whole work, also displays a possibility of perceiving a non-human Other, namely time, memory, space and characters. Aisha figures as conforming to the portrait of the stereotyped Arab Muslim woman as a sexsubject, submissive, and maudlin character, confining her vision of the Other to the boundaries of her cocooned self epitomizing a self-centered vision of the world. This very reduced vision results in the possibility of viewing the Other as a hindrance to her attaining a clarified and centrifugal representation of the latter, herself and the outside world. The very encounters are also considered as the character's opportunity for a less stigmatized perception of the elements set forth. The main queries to be probed are: 1] what are the different perceptions of the Other by the author? How does the protagonist's encounter with the Other[s] impede her ability to understand the Other, herself and the world around? Or how does this very encounter allow her an enlightened vision of the set forth elements to forge a new start? The current investigation include there chapters. The first chapter aims at illumination the question of the Other from a postcolonial and feminist perspectives and the possibility of viewing it as a dialogic entity. The second chapter probes the Other as a child/adult female representation in The Returning and Knowing. The Third chapter pictures the Other as 'The Foreigner' in an exotic land in 1964 and The Nativity. The possibility of imagining a dialogic relation between different perceptions of the Other opens new perspectives for adopting magnified representations of the later, oneself and the world, dilating one's imagination.