The poetics of love in Evelyne Accad's the excised

Abstract

In her essay entitled ‘Rebellion, Maturity, and the Social Context: Arab Women's Special Contribution to Literature’, Evelyne Accad observes that ‘most Arab women writers view the condition of women as one of oppression and deprivation’. She concludes, however, that ‘the recent fiction of Arab women with its greater openness and its integration of individual struggle into the larger social context, may well become a force for positive and creative social and political modification in the Arab world’.1 Like most of these Arab women writers, Accad believes in the power of positive and peaceful interventions to change human condition in society. One such intervention is writing. For she vehemently advocates that through the act of writing one may ‘recreate the hidden face of the world, the lost image of one's childhood’.2 In other words, writing can inaugurate new beginnings and new histories. Beginning with her first study, Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World (1978), Accad pays close attention to the changing roles of women as represented in fiction and as lived in reality. In 1990, she published her work on sexuality and war, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East, where she tries to understand why men and women both react differently to the reality of war. In this study, she posits the issue of how literature can still be a site from which one can address social and political realities. In a cultural and social context, where individual freedom is everywhere menaced, literature can still provide a source of inspiration for an adequate understanding of the entire picture of a period or of a society, including its most stifled dreams and fantasies. As an articulate feminist, Accad is also preoccupied with images of women's confinement and liberation, not only within social and cultural frames, but also within the frame of representation. Such preoccupation is manifest in her first novel, The Excised, which is presented, like most post‐colonial novels, as a journey where frontiers ‐ whether those set up by religion, culture, nationhood, politics, or those of gender, language, and literary genres — are constantly resisted, and ultimately displaced.