Abstract
<p>This article investigates Raja Alem’s <em>Fatma: A Novel of Arabia</em> (2002) as a narrative that appropriates magical realist techniques in the service of the feminist project of critiquing patriarchal notions and practices in contemporary Saudi society. Although Alem is credited by Arab and international critics as a major Saudi writer of the fantastical, it is <em>Fatma </em>that largely establishes her specific reputation as a magical realist. This article provides a close reading and critical analysis substantiating Alem’s extensive use of magical realist techniques. The fabulous and the real converge to create a mysterious universe wherein various times and spaces are merged together to question contemporary society’s assumptions around gender, gender ideology, and feminist issues—a central theme in contemporary Saudi fiction—thereby giving voice to the marginalized female character depicted in <em>Fatma.</em></p>
Highlights
When Raja Alem appeared on the Saudi literary scene, few would have predicted that she would establish herself in less than two decades as a major contemporary Saudi woman writer
Aiming to find an appropriate mode of writing to describe the reality of Saudi women, Alem adapts certain identifiable narrative techniques and strategies associated with magical realism, that is, originally, with Latin American writers in a magical realist mode such as Gabriel García Márquez & Isabel Allende, that are well suited to her objective—to challenge the existing reality of marginalized women in her country
Like magical realist writers, such as García Márquez, who accrding to Simpkins, found conventional realist fictional “hardly satisfactory, much less an accurate presentation” (Simpkins, 1988, p. 143) of a reality they knew existed but was submerged by various cultural assumptions, patriarchal or otherwise, Alem takes magical realism to provide an appropriate means to perceiving truth that is somehow obscured by reality
Summary
When Raja Alem appeared on the Saudi literary scene, few would have predicted that she would establish herself in less than two decades as a major contemporary Saudi woman writer. Like Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982) and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate (Como aguapara chocolate, 1989), Fatma can be thought of as an overtly feminist critique that employs magical realism as a mode of subversion, based on the mutual coexistence of magical and real elements in the fictional work, to challenge Alem’s patriarchal society and give voice to women who seek to break loose from social strictures and overcome gender discrimination in their education, economic relations, marriage and personal relationships. The novel can be read on the realistic level, narrating the story of an abused woman divoreced from her husband after twenty years of loveless marriage It constantly slips into another magically perceived mode of reality, an oeuvre colored by elements of the fabulous, the fantastic, and the mythic, emphasizing the binary opposition between fact and fiction, the material and the spiritual, and male and female
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