Islam and Postcolonial Narrative (review)

Abstract

In a survey of postcolonial literature one rarely comes across a writer of English expression grouped together with francophone authors. In Islam and Postcolonial Narrative, John Erickson has included Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses with three francophone novels by Maghrebian writers: L'amour la fantasia by Assia Djebar, L'enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Amour bilingue by Abdelkabir Khatibi. What links these four writers, as Erickson is quick to point out, is not merely their Muslim background in countries that were once colonized by Western powers, but also the "mixture of genres" (29) that has come to characterize their writings. Drawing on Islamic and Western literary traditions, and using the languages of the people who colonized them, they have succeeded in honing a mode of expression that they have made their own. It is "an alternative discourse expressive of postcolonial sensibilities and perceptions" that dispenses with the "linear, closed worlds of Eurocentric and Islamic magesterial narratives and discourses" (95). These writers, Erickson makes it clear, are not influenced by the written word alone. Much of their writing, he says, draws "on a multitude of non-written sources" (166). The.reader often encounters in their texts extracts of poems and narratives, based both on religious and secular sources, a living testimony of the cultures they belong to and those they have adopted.