Jamal Mahjoub’s The Fugitives and Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City: A Panoramic View of the Occident

Abstract

Contemporary Anglophone diasporic Arab writers have initiated an “Occidentalist discourse” through which they depict a complete image of the Occident. Their narratives are not meant to distort or misrepresent the “other”, but to provide the reader with nuanced accounts about what an Arab immigrant/ refugee may experience in the “West”. These narratives are deemed consistent because contemporary Anglophone diasporic Arab writers have become part of their host countries’ sociocultural tapestry since they are, in most cases, part of European countries’ population. By applying Zahia Salhi’s definition of Occidentalism to Arab-British novelist Jamal Mahjoub’s The Fugitives (2021) and Arab-American novelist Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City (2021), this paper aims to illustrate how both writers paint a three-dimensional panoramic picture of the Occident by exploring triumphant as well as depressing journeys of Arab individuals in America. This study is also an attempt to demonstrate, by using these two novels as examples, that Occidentalism cannot be defined as “Orientalism in reverse” since Occidentalist literature, as Salhi proposes, represents Western life and culture with a great sense of impartiality.