South-South Triangulations: Fabric, Marriage, and Decolonization in Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Heeding Arabic literary scholar Waïl Hassan’s call for literary comparatist work that does not center the United States or Europe, in this article, I investigate two novels of the Global South set in the same political moment of decolonization. Examining the Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door (1960) and the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela’s novel Lyrics Alley (2010), I study the significance of women’s sartorial choices, what these sartorial choices symbolize within the central marriage plots, and what both reveal about the charged political fabric in the country in which each text is set—the early years of the 1950s in which Egypt gained independence from British colonial rule but before Sudan’s independence from Anglo-Egyptian co-rule. I contend that Al-Zayyat’s work invites a dynamism to women’s writing history and reveals an indigenous epistemology, while Aboulela’s novel centers the quotidian only to uphold colonial supremacy.