“Bodies in the Way”: Melancholia and Resistance in Fadia Faqir’s My Name Is Salma and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite its richness and diversity, Anglo-Arab fiction is often haunted by the themes of loss and displacements that are often associated with the experience of exile. This preoccupation with loss resonates with recent postcolonial re-appropriations of the Freudian theory of melancholia, that are aimed at uncovering the theory’s potential for explaining the phenomenon of unresolved integration at the heart of several diasporic narratives of migration. One such revisionary model, Sara Ahmed’s figure of the melancholic migrant, provides a useful interpretive framework with which to explain the elegiac mood that pervades a number of Anglo-Arab novels. This paper focuses on two key works from this tradition, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, to argue that these texts employ the archetypal figure of the melancholic migrant both as a psychic response to loss and a strategy of resistance and empowerment.