Communities of Fear: The Politics of ‘Strangering’ and the Ethics of Resistance in Naima El Bezaz’s Vinexvrouwen

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Moroccan-Dutch author Naima El Bezaz’s novel Vinexvrouwen (Suburban Women), which explores the interplay between the representation of migrants’ cultural difference, the politics of ‘strangering’ and the ethics of resistance. By means of gendered practice of storytelling, the autobiographical novel unfolds the native Dutch people’s fear of a loss at the hands of globalizing forces: mass migration, cultural relativism and the hybridization of their national identity. This rhetoric of fear is channelled into deep resentment against migrants represented as ‘fetishised’ strangers, excluded them from the ‘imagined community' of belonging. In my close-reading, I focus on how El Bezaz’s novel engages a dialectical process of estrangement and embodiment, of exclusion and inclusion, of solidarity and resistance in its representation of migrants’ cultural difference. Examining the bond between storytelling and the extra-literary reality/new realism, I delve into the way the text narrates the process of ‘strangering' migrants as communities of fear and instead expresses resistance and solidarity in face of exclusionary mechanism.