Differing from her sister’s voice: (Re)configured womanhood in Assia Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade

Abstract

The frame story of the pan-oriental literary legacy, the Arabian Nights, involving the gripping and near-tragic nuptial exchanges between Sultan Shahriyar and Queen Scheherazade (Shahrazade), has provoked engaging literary and critical responses around the world – many of them feeding into enduring orientalist, postcolonial and feminist polemics. This article argues that Assia Djebar’s 1987 novel A Sister to Scheherazade proposes an idealized Arab-Islamic sisterhood that deviates from both patriarchy and polygamy, and dominant, reductive representations of woman as other. Ironically, such reductive perspectives have been encouraged by elements of the Algerian female world that are largely traditional. The article argues that the main function of the Scheherazade trope within the feminist/postcolonial framework of A Sister to Scheherazade is to contest the heroine’s implied reliance on male benevolence, while not absolutely writing off the male individual as necessarily woman’s enemy.