Soueif’s Melody: An Other Female Symphony of Eastern and Western Ruptures and Fusions

Abstract

East and West encounters have often echoed oriental fantasies of the exotic and the strange besides binary labels such us ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ widely discussed within postcolonial theory. Besides, the  representations  of  'Arab'  and  'Muslim'  women  in  the  West have  been  caricatured to  represent  an Other  as an   inferior  entity;  the  weak entity  dependent  on  their  male  counterparts and   unable  to  take  decisions. They  bear  labels  such  as   'exotic',   'sexual  objects',  and  'secluded  creatures  in  the  Harem'.  This image conforms to the stereotypical portrait residing in a Western orientalist imagination. This paper explores how Ahdaf Soueif’s short story Melody, chosen from her second collection The Sandpiper (1996), pictures the afore mentioned misrepresentations of Eastern women by their Western counter-parts. The Western female narrator in Melody describes her Eastern counter-part and her young daughter as sexual-objects ignorant and submissive slaves and victims of patriarchal authority. This setting seems to make such cultural encounters appear barren and exclusionary. However, these very encounters also liberated an intellectual space of convergences besides that of ruptures. The author grants a space for her Western character to empathise with her Eastern one being a mother herself and a victim of confinement and patriarchal authority.