The Image of Foreigner in Emirati’s Women Novel (with an Example of Rayḥānah, by Maysūn Şaqr al-Qāsimī)

Abstract

This kind of research, especially in the field of comparative studies, is crucial, because it provides a better understanding of people, culture, thought, and their way of thinking, seeing and dealing with the other. Therefore, choosing to study the image of the foreigner in Emirati women’s writing can help to examine the deep dimensions of relationship with the other who does not belong to family, class, and homeland, in this society. The study, hence, aims to shed a light on women awareness and their ways to articulate their own issues, and experiences after long history of isolation and suppression that women in this country and region in general had witnessed. Moreover, the study focuses on Maysūn al Qāsimī and her first narrative controversial work Rayḥānah, aspires to reveal how the strict upbringing and education had its impacts on women’s personality and thinking, and thus their ways of looking at the stranger in their home or homeland. The expected results of this study are to demonstrate women awareness and capability to disclose, to certain extents, the depth of female agony in very complicated network of political, social, economic and cultural factors that would shape the history of the whole region in postcolonial time. In addition, the study is expected to help to reach better understanding of the different roles that the foreigners have played in this society, from the female locals’ point of views, and therefore, their narration.