With her first novel, In the Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf Soueif garnered comparisons to Tolstoy, Flaubert, and George Eliot. In her latest novel, which was shortlisted for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, she combines the romantic skill of the nineteenth-century novelists with a very modern sense of culture and politics--both sexual and international.

t either end of the twentieth century, two women fall in love with men outside their familiar worlds. In 1901, Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed, leaves England for Egypt, an outpost of the Empire roiling with nationalist sentiment. Far from the comfort of the British colony, she finds herself enraptured by the real Egypt and in love with Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Nearly a hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, a divorced American journalist and descendant of Anna and Sharif has fallen in love with Omar al-Ghamrawi, a gifted and difficult Egyptian-American conductor with his own passionate politics. In an attempt to understand her conflicting emotions and to discover the truth behind her heritage, Isabel, too, travels to Egypt, and enlists Omar's sister's help in unravelling the story of Anna and Sharif's love.

Joining the romance and intricate storytelling of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Ahdaf Soueif has once again created a mesmerizing tale of genuine eloquence and lasting importance.

Colonialism

The Map of Love examines the British colonial administration of Egypt while it is going on in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and at the poisoned legacy it leaves behind when finally it departs. One sees how opportunistic Britain found the sorry state of Turkey and quasi-independent Egypt too good an opportunity to pass up and garrisoned troops there from the 1880's. They bleed the Egyptians dry trying next to subdue the Sudan, directly to the south. We hear about the Suez Canal and the draconian colonial measures being taken in India, but the link between two is not brought out. Britain must hold and control Egypt and the Canal in order to hold onto the Gem of its Empire. Anna's first father-in-law and his friends in Parliament want Britain.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 1999

"Ahdaf Soueif has written a masterpiece ... set in the past and present, it has the weight of a Victorian novel without trading in nostalgia. Filled with subtlety, grace and beauty, it will

make the reader cry. ” The Big Issue

"Half-romance and half a gently nationalist defence of Egypt - Soueif never raises her voice." The London Review of Books

In The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif weaves an account of the consequences of British imperialism and the fierce political battles of the Egyptian Nationalists through the gorgeously romantic love story of Anna Winterbourne and Sharif al-Baroudi. Told through the voice of Amal, Sharif’s grandniece, Anna and Sharif’s story is echoed by the love affair between Isabel, their American great-granddaughter, and 'Omar, Amal’s brother, set against the continuing political turmoil of the Middle East.

Longing to assuage her grief at the loss of her husband, Anna Winterbourne travels to Egypt. She corresponds with her friends, with her father-in-law, Sir Charles, a fierce critic of British imperialism, and keeps a journal. While travelling disguised as a man, she is abducted by Egyptian nationalists and taken to the home of the al-Baroudis. There she meets and becomes firm friends with Layla. Sharif, Layla’s brother, accompanies her to Sinai, ensuring her safe

conduct and the adventure she had sought. On their return, the couple undertake a marriage that will see Anna ostracised from British society and Sharif under suspicion from his nationalist colleagues.

A century later, Isabel Parkman finds Anna’s papers, some written in Arabic, in a family trunk when her mother is taken to hospital. When she meets the renowned conductor and political activist, 'Omar Ghamrawi, he suggests she take the papers to his sister, Amal, for translation. Already a little in love, Isabel travels to Egypt where she and Amal piece together Anna’s life from the contents of the trunk. The stories of Anna and Isabel, one a member of the British ruling classes, the other a citizen of the world’s most powerful country, are merged with scenes from Amal’s life and set against the backdrop of a political struggle in which only the names seem to change in the hundred years that separate Isabel from Anna.

Coincidence--personal, political and cultural--rules in this burnished, ultra-romantic Booker Prize finalist. In 1997, Isabel Parkman, a recently divorced American journalist, travels to Egypt to research about the impending millennium. But her interest in Egypt has more to do with her crush on Omar al-Ghamrawi, a passionate and difficult older Egyptian-American conductor and political writer, than with her work. Once in Egypt, Isabel neglects her project for a more personal investigation. Lugging with her a mysterious trunk of papers bequeathed to her by her mother, Isabel turns up at Omar's sister Amal's house in Cairo and explains that Omar had said she might be interested in translating the papers. As the two soon discover, Isabel is Amal's distant cousin, and the papers belonged to their mutual great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. As a young English widow, Anna traveled to turn-of-the-century Egypt, then an English colony, and fell in love with an Egyptian man. "I cannot help thinking that when she chose to step off the well-trodden paths of expatriate life, Anna must have secretly wanted something out of the ordinary to happen to her," muses Amal, who begins to realize that the same applies to her own life. Soueif (In the Eye of the Sun) writes simply and, on occasion, beautifully. Anna's journal entries are particularly evocative. Sticklers for narrative detail might chafe at the number of incredible coincidences, including a bizarre twist involving Isabel's mother and Omar, and forsaken plot devices (Isabel's millennium project is never mentioned after her arrival in Egypt). On balance, however, Soueif weaves the stories of three formidable women from vastly different times and countries into a single absorbing tale. 6-city author tour.

The Map of Love Summary | Plot Summary

The Map of Love tells the story of an artistic and articulate Englishwoman, Anna, who visits Egypt as a balm for the wounds of widowhood. Egypt is a land she has heard much about and whose sights she has admired in museum paintings. Anna is too adventurous to be content with the staid tourism of the late 19th Century, and dresses in men's clothing to see the Pyramids and Mt. Sinai. On the latter trip, allies of a political protester recently jailed kidnap her. The wife of the protester, Layla, and Layla's attorney brother, Sharif, to whose home Anna is taken, are indignant for her sake, befriend her, and Sharif vows to help Anna reach her original goal.

In the desert of Sinai, where Anna dresses as an Arab man, and particularly in the garden at St. Catherine's Monastery, where Anna is an Arab woman, she and Sharif develop deep feelings for each other. He is silent upon their return, and Anna resolves to return to England. Layla points out her brother's mistake and he proposes marriage. They set aside the many problems this will create for each - Anna will be shunned by fellow Britons in Egypt, and

Sharif will be suspected of British bias by his numerous political enemies -marry, and move into the old house with Sharif's mother Zeinab and hermitic father al-Baroudi, twenty years ago a rebel against the British.

Anna assimilates to Egyptian culture, learns Arabic, and is drawn into the nationalist movement as translator, intermediary with anti-colonialists in London, and finally spokesperson with foreign visitors. Sharif works hard to fight the British Occupation legally and legislatively. They have a daughter, Nur al-Hayyah - literally the light of their lives - and, ten years after their marriage, Sharif begins thinking about retiring to private life. He is thinking of this when unknown assailants open fire on his carriage. Sharif dies and Anna keeps her promise to take Nur to England. Contact is lost with her Egyptian in-laws.

This story emerges from research performed by Amal from a trunk load of journals and letters discovered in New York City by an American, Isabel Parkman. At a party she mentions the find to a prominent older musician, which is sent to his sister, Amal, in Cairo. Amal becomes engrossed in the characters, and Isabel falls in love with Amal's sister 'Omar. The anti-terrorist, anti-Islamist policies of Egypt's President Mubarak cause problems on the family lands, and revive Amal's late-1960s radicalism. 'Omar is deeply involved in Palestinian politics. Only after making love with Isabel does 'Omar realize he was her mother's lover in 1961 and thus could be her father. They have a son, Sharif.

Part of the treasures in the trunk is one panel of a tapestry depicting Isis, Osiris, and Horus, ancient Egyptian deities. Anna finishes weaving the panels just before Sharif is assassinated. One panel goes to Anna and Nur, and thus into Isabel's trunk. A second goes to Layla and reaches 'Omar through his and Amal's father, Ahmad. A third panel is never accounted for. Isabel discovers it in her camera bag when she returns to Cairo after a long visit to the U.S. She claims it was put there by a mysterious woman, Umm Aya, whom she claims to have met in al-Baroudi's old cell. Conservators of the museum that once was Anna and Sharif's old house deny anyone could have gotten inside the cell and any knowledge of an Umm Aya. Amal cannot accept Isabel's explanation, but finds no other.

Lady Anna Winterbourne, an English widow, arrives in British-occupied Cairo in 1900. Fascinated by Egyptian culture, Anna bridles at the prejudices and parochial attitudes of the colonial community and follows her sense of curiosity to places few Europeans venture. During one disastrous secret outing, she meets and falls in love with Sharif Basha-al-Baroudi, a fierce Arab nationalist. He in turn falls in love with her, and against their better judgment, they marry. In a world where politics and personal relationships are inextricably intertwined, the choices Anna and Sharif make have profound repercussions not only in their own lives but in the lives of their descendants.

Isabel Parkman, Anna's great-granddaughter, is a young American divorcée irresistibly drawn to Omar-al-Ghamrawi, a renowned Egyptian musician living in New York. Hoping to find keys to understanding him, Isabel travels to Omar's homeland, taking with her an old truck full of papers she inherited from Anna. In Cairo, Isabel and Omar's sister, Amal, unwrap Anna's treasures and discover an unsuspected blood link between their families: Amid Anna's diaries and letters and newspapers crackling with age is a notebook written in Amal's grandmother's hand recounting the story of her brother, Sharif, and the Englishwoman he loved. As Anna's experiences during the first decades of the century and Isabel's contemporary quest unfold in counterpoint, the politics that divide two cultures and the passions that bring lovers together resound across time and space.

Ahdaf Soueif evokes Egypt in meticulous detail, describing age-old and modern-day customs, the stark beauty of the desert and bustle of the cities, and the interactions among Egyptians and between Egyptians and Westerners. In a compelling, impressive combination of historical fidelity and fictional artistry, she takes a culture little understood by most Westerners and makes it real. (From the publisher.)

Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo. She is the author of the bestselling novel The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999, as well as Mezzaterra: Notes from the Common Ground and the novel In the Eye of the Sun. She also has translated from the Arabic the award-winning memoir I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti. She lives in London. (From the publisher.)

MoreAhdaf Soueif is an Egyptian short story writer, novelist and political and cultural commentator. Soueif was educated in Egypt and England. She studied for a Ph.D in linguistics at the University of Lancaster. Her novel The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and subsequently translated into 16 languages.

Soueif writes primarily in English, but her Arabic-speaking readers say they can hear the Arabic through the English. Along with in-depth and sensitive readings of Egyptian history and politics, Soueif also writes about Palestinians in her fiction and non-fiction. A shorter version of "Under the Gun: A Palestinian Journey" was originally published in The Guardian and then printed in full in Soueif's recent collection of essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004). Soueif has also translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah (with a foreword by Edward Said) from Arabic into English.

In 2007, Soueif was one of more than 100 artists and writers who signed an open letter initiated by Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism and the South West Asian, North African Bay Area Queers (SWANABAQ) and calling on the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival "to honor calls for an international boycott of Israeli political and cultural institutions, by discontinuing Israeli consulate sponsorship of the LGBT film festival and not cosponsoring events with the Israeli consulate."

Critics Say. . . A wonderfully accomplished and mature work . . . Although a key part of the novel's maturity is its ability to face up squarely to both politics and love, the narrative unfolds obliquely—so obliquely that it even starts in midsentence . . . [The] novel requires—and deserves—an active, attentive audience.Annette Kobak New York Times Book Review

A bold and vibrant novel....This is political fiction that is also unashamedly romantic....A trimphant achievement.Penelope Lively - Literary Review

A magnificent work, reminiscent of Marquez and Allende in its breadth and confidence.

Guardian (UK)

Epic....Soueif is at her most eloquent on the subject of her homeland, her prose rich with historical detail and debate. Ultimately, Egypt emerges as the true heroine of this novel.Independent

This exotic family saga/romance by the Egyptian-born Soueif is based on a conceit: the discovery of family letters and diaries by New York journalist Isabel, which leads to her discovery of the Egyptian branch of the family she never knew she had. Isabel's great-grandmother was a young English widow who traveled to Egypt to see where her young husband had fought in World War I. Abducted by Egyptian nationalists while in disguise as a male, she subsequently fell in love with an Egyptian man. Her story is slowly unraveled when Isabel returns the trunk containing her papers to the sister of an Egyptian doctor from New York, both of whom turn out to be her long-lost cousins. This colorful, involving story offers a good dose of history of the struggle for Egyptian independence from British rule. Recommended as something a little different where historical romances are popular. —Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA. Library Journal

Shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in England, The Map of Love was easily one of the Discover reading group's favorite books this season. A tale of passion and alienation, a romantic epic compared to both A.S. Byatt's Possession and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient in its timelessness, Soueif's second novel is a wonder to behold. It is the story of two Western women at opposite ends of the twentieth century who find themselves in love with men whose histories anchor them to another place and time: Egypt. In 1901, newly widowed Anna Winterbourne leaves Britain to explore Egypt and finds herself enraptured with the culture and the affections of a particular man-Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi. Nearly a century later, a descendant of Anna and Sharif, a divorced American journalist named Isabel Parkman, similarly finds herself involved with an Egyptian-American conductor-a difficult, yet passionate man, who is fiercely loyal to his politics. To better understand her own conflicted feelings and discover the truth behind her heritage, Isabel travels to Egypt, where she gradually excavates the long-buried story of Anna and Sharif's illicit affair. A compelling story of love, loyalty, and the cultural and political differences separating East from West, The Map of Love is an exceptional work of fiction from a talented writerBarnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers

Recipient of both critical and commercial acclaim for her previous novels, Ahdaf Soueif's new novel is a story of what it is to be divided, poised between two lives. She explores the changing relationship between Egypt and Britain in the twentieth century and tells the compelling story of a doomed cross-cultural love affair, recreating the Romantic Hero of Byronic legend in an utterly original contemporary style. It is the year 1900, and a trip to Egypt marks a new beginning for the recently widowed Lady Anna Winterbourne. There she meets and falls in love with Sharif Pasha al-Barudi, an Egyptian Nationalist, a man utterly committed to his country's cause. For Sharif, Anna at first represents the snobberies and vulgarities of colonialist Britain. For her, Sharif stands for the real, secret Egypt - an Egypt entirely hidden from her incurious compatriots. The couple fall in love, but fearfully. Can they

both adjust to the reality of love between such conflicting cultures? In 1997, Isabel Parkman, herself a recent divorcee and descendent of Anna and Sharif, meets and falls in love with Omar-al-Ghamrawi, a New York based Egyptian. In search of answers to questions she has scarcely framed, she travels to Egypt, carrying with her an old family trunk which she delivers to Omar's sister Amal, who lives in Cairo. As the tensions and dangers in contemporary Egypt build to a threatening climax, Amal unpacks the trunk and unravels from Anna's notebooks and diaries, the story of her love affair with Sharif and her love affair with Egypt a hundred years ago. Ahdaf Soueif subtly interweaves these two stories and unerringly locates the political and historical intensities that govern even the most personal relationships. This is a richly researched rendering of historical cross-currents, a story of Empire, of Egypt, and of love across the century.

In conjunction with the First Year Academic Workshop, Lauinger Library highlights items from its General and Special Collections that illustrate themes in The Map of Love by Ahdahf Soueif. The novel's characters are connected through their journeys: through their actual journeys to and from Egypt, and through their intellectual journeys leading them to family, friendship, and love. As with Anna Winterbourne's "Egypt collection" of journals, letters, and objects, much of this exhibition focuses on objects from travels: letters, maps, books, and art.

It was surely AS Byatt's Possession, published in 1990, which made the use of parallel narratives - divided in time but interleaved within a single novel - so favoured by novelists. Possession showed how the disinterring of the past might be part of the story of characters in the present: two young academic sleuths fall in love as they uncover the love affair of two Victorian writers.

Similarly, Ahdaf Soueif's story moves back and forth between 1997 and the first decade of the 20th century. In the novel's present, Isabel Parkman, an American, unravels the story of her great-grandmother, Anna Winterbourne. She also finds herself falling in love with Omar, the brother of Amal, the woman who helps her with translating the Arabic documents. Amal is our narrator, but for the events of almost a century earlier we are presented with Anna's journal and letters. So there are two narratives, a century apart.

The narratives are parallel because they run alongside each other, but also because they share a certain shape. Both feature idealistic but naive western women who fall for Egyptian men. Anna marries her paramour, Sharif, and thereby cuts herself off from her fellow colonials. Isabel finds Omar, living in an age of ready foreign travel and looser sexual mores, much harder to pin down. The parallels run further because Sharif and Omar are public figures, noted for - and threatened because of - their strong political commitments. These are both stories about Egypt, its history and its relationship with the west. The novel's melancholy comes from its illustration of the follies and misunderstandings of one age being repeated in another.

Like The Map of Love, novels with parallel narratives separated in time often use a sense of place to bind their different stories together. Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, which alternated narratives from the early 18th century and the 20th century, connected its stories through the geography of London, and the sites of some of its churches. An early example was Alan Garner's brilliant Red Shift (1973) (neglected because it fell between children's and adult fiction), which has three different narratives, set in the present, during the civil war, and during the Roman occupation. These are subtly held together by their location: a particular hill in Cheshire.

Of course, there must be further connections. As in Possession, Soueif uses the conceit of discovered manuscripts. Isabel has been left by her mother a trunk full of documents, which include not only Anna's copious journal but also the record (in Arabic) written by Leyla, the sister of Sharif, the man she loves. Soueif uses typography - italics for Anna's writings, a variant font for Leyla's account - to lay these in front of us. But the connections are also, as in all good family sagas, matters of blood. Omar was the second cousin of Isabel's mother (though he is reluctant to let her know this). The characters in the present are bound to the characters in the past.

This becomes unsettling, for the reader and the main characters, when late in the novel we discover that Omar had an affair, many years earlier, with Jasmine, Isabel's mother. The characters themselves raise the dread possibility that he could be Isabel's biological father; the timing makes it entirely credible. Unlike the characters of earlier fiction, they have access to DNA technology, but simply decide that it is inconceivable. Amal tells the worried Omar that she is "sure" that he cannot be his lover's father. Later, when Isabel, heavily pregnant with Omar's child, discovers his love letters to her mother after her death, she emails Amal to declare: "He is not my father, though. I am totally definite about that."

Byatt showed that parallel narratives allow a novelist to fictionalise history while avoiding fake archaism, on the one hand, and heedless anachronism on the other. In its very form, the novel concedes that the past is seen through the events of later years. Amal tells us near the beginning of the novel that she is working to "piece a story together". Anna's story comes through her - indeed, on occasion the narrative stops to remind us that an episode from the early 20th century is actually being imagined by our contemporary narrator via her journal. Anna Winterbourne, says Amal, has become "as real to me as Dorothea Brooke".

The story of Anna and Sharif is more romance than slice of Victorian realism, however. In fact, it knowingly risks being associated with this "unrealistic" genre. Anna meets Sharif when she is abducted by mistake by some of his hot-headed political associates. In captivity, she immediately compares her ordeal to "the Oriental tales I had read". There are constant self-parodic references to eastern tales and romances. One of Sharif's Egyptian friends jokes about his appearance in her eyes. "Ah! The Hero of the Romance! The Corsair!" Amal reads Anna's journal and likes to picture her and Sharif, "dressed in the flowing white of the Bedouin", riding in the Sinai desert. The parallel narratives allow us to succumb to romance, and to laugh at it.

Critical Perspective

The story of Ahdaf Soueif’s success is a fascinating one, and looking at her work and career we learn not simply about her passionate areas of concern – Egypt, British literature, sexual politics and the representation of the Arab world by the West – but about how the Booker Prize can put an arresting voice in the spotlight. The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Prize and achieved thus high cultural and commercial visibility, meaning that the rest of Soeuif’s fiction, and her political writing, has found a wider audience than would otherwise have been the case.

 

Soueif’s position is both unusual and yet typical of much of modern humanity: born in Cairo, she completed her education in England and is married to an Englishman, writes in English

for English publishers and newspapers, and yet retains a home in Cairo and is naturally committed to Egypt. Her first husband was Egyptian and she has continued to write for Egyptian journals.  Soueif, then, can be truly seen as a ‘world’ writer: labels such as English, Arab or even Anglo-Egyptian seem too restrictive. For the writer, in fact, borders should be broken down, and culture is something interchangeable, as she explains in the Preface to her collection of writings, Mezzaterra (2004): as a young woman, the idea of identity was not something she considered; Arab culture was ‘Mezzaterran’ and a positive experience, because

 

'The rewards of inhabiting the Mezzaterra are enormous. At its best it endows each thing, at the same moment, with the shine of the new, the patina of the old; the language, the people, the landscape, the food of one culture constantly reflected off the other. This is not a process of comparison, not a ‘which is better than which’ project but rather at once a distillation and an enrichment of each thing, each idea … you are both on the inside and the outside of language, that within each culture your stance cannot help but be both critical and emphatic.'

 

This duality, hybridity and concern with representation is prominent in The Map of Love, which tells the complex story of the love between Lady Anna Winterbourne, an upper-class Englishwoman, and Sharif, an Egyptian nationalist. This story is paralleled by the modern love affair between Anna’s great-granddaughter Isabel and Omar; the latter characters learn of the events of the past when Anna’s notebooks and journals are discovered by Isabel. As well as giving a narrative tension and symmetry, Soueif is clearly making positive points about the ability of cross-cultural love to recur: she is something of a joyous postcolonialist. Informative about Egyptian history, the novel is unashamedly romantic as well as political, which has greatly helped its success.

 

But it should not be forgotten that Soueif has written other fiction, too. In the Eye of the Sun (1992) was praised by Edward Said on publication; a long and ambitious novel, it is in fact a more satisfactory work than The Map of Love. Although it shares the later book’s interest in love and family relationships, it makes intriguing parallels with the English canon (the lead character, Asya, is a modern version of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch) and has a greater seriousness and moral depth. It is not surprising that Said admired Soueif: both figures appear as postcolonialists who yet resist many of the term’s definitions, and Soueif supports Said’s belief in ‘the great liberationist cultural movements that stood against Western culture’ that wanted liberation ‘within the same universe of discourse inhabited by Western culture’.

 

The Map of Love is the perfect introduction to Soeuif, and has been a worthy favourite with reading groups; but we should go beyond that, through In The Eye of the Sun to her political writing, which is as good as, if not better than, her fiction. Soueif’s voice – clear, concise and emotive when required, unashamedly and rightly personal as well as political – is naturally suited to journalism. The seminal example of this is an important piece Soueif wrote for the London Review of Books, ‘Passing Through’, a commentary on William Golding’s An

Egyptian Journal (which is reprinted in Mezzaterra). Soueif tells us how she came to be convinced, by personal experience, that the great novelist’s representation of her country was racist and untrue; we learn that her own family is now ‘open to attack’ for having ‘opened doors and smoothed paths which have only led to our being made the subject of yet another wrong-headed and patronising account by a Western passer-through’.  This concern for truth, combined with an admitted love for her country of birth, has caused some to say Soueif romanticises Egypt; for the writer, a positive presentation is nonetheless vital when

 

'For a whole year my children were taught in religious studies that Egypt was evil. The popular media ties in the pagan splendour with cruelty and the sense of it being a place to be got out of. Now throw in a mad bearded fundamentalist and some oppressed women wearing the veil and having their clitorises chopped off and you have a fairly heavy image.'

 

The veil is, of course, a contentious issue; for Soueif, the wearing of it is empowering. In the ‘The Language of the Veil’ (in Mezzaterra) a woman in full niqab is not wearing something oppressive but a ‘garb which says loud and clear: ‘I am a political Islamist. I am in opposition to this government.’ It takes guts to do this in these days of arbitrary detentions and torture. Guts, or desperation’. Of course, the matter is a different one in a different country, and Soueif is well aware of this.

As she has grown older, and with the recent upheavals in the Middle East and 9/11, Soueif has moved from a celebration to a defence of Mezzaterra in the face of imperialistic capitalism and the increasing portrayals of the Arab world as weak and passive. Her anxiety reflects a more anxious world; we are lucky to have her voice in it, sometimes romantic, sometimes pleading, but always burningly committed to truth and justice.

This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian—British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article's methodology is informed by Kachru's framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative's effectiveness and readability. 

This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian—British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article's methodology is informed by Kachru's framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the

discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative's effectiveness and readability.

Crossing the borders of time, spaceand languageBy Daniel RolphMiddleEast Times: September 29, 2000After Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif's first, triumphant novel In the Eye of the Sunappeared in 1992, many must have considered it a tough act to follow. But herlatest novel, The Map of Love, now out in paperback, has quickly assuagedthose fears.Hailed as "a second Anglo-Arab masterpiece," the novel, written, like the author'sother work, in English, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. And whileSoueif's fame continues to grow, with interviews on issues of post-colonialism,translation, authenticity and Arab identity appearing in both the English andArabic press, The Map of Love itself is still making the headlines more than ayear after its publication.Like In the Eye of the Sun, Soueif locates The Map of Love in both Egypt andEngland. But while her first, semi-autobiographical novel was fiercelycontemporary, her latest - with equally undiminished power - is set at both endsof the 20th century. It is in fact, the story of two stories.In 1900, Lady Anna Winterbourne, recently widowed, travels to Egypt, where shefalls in love with and marries Sharif Al Baroudi, an Egyptian nationalist from anoble family campaigning for his country's independence from British colonialrule.In 1997, Isabel Parkman, an American divorcee and great granddaughter ofAnna and Sharif, meets and falls in love with Omar Al Ghamrawi, a New YorkbasedEgyptian who also has blood-links to the Anna and Sharif marriage. Shetravels to Egypt, taking with her a trunk containing the notebooks and journals inwhich Anna set down the story of her love affair with Sharif and with Egypt.Isabel gives the trunk to Amal, Omar's sister, who not only reveals the old storybut, in so doing, also contributes to the new story - the story of Isabel and Omar.The two tales unfold side by side, and as they develop we become aware thatthey are intricately - and mysteriously - intertwined. The novel is, on one level, a classic romance - the story of two great romancesseparated - and brought together - by a hundred years of history. Soueif creates,quite unashamedly, two undeniably dashing Egyptian heroes: "the character ofSharif Al Baroudi was based on the image of Ahmed Mazhar [a famous Egyptianactor of the 1950s and 60s], I was thinking of him all the time!" she remarked in arecent interview with Alaa Karkouti in Akhbar Al Adab. And Soueif's proseluxuriates in every stage of the two couples' relationships, their passion, theiruncertainty, their tenderness.At the same time, however, the book is also a hard-hitting and critical account ofa century of Egypt's troubled history and politics, taking in feminism, nationalism,colonialism and post-colonial discourse as well as the Arab-Israeli dispute andthe question of normalization.The research for the novel took two years, Soueif searching the SOAS Library for

the precise chronology of events at the beginning of the 20th century as bothBritish imperialism and Egyptian nationalism gathered strength.From the Denshwai massacre of 1906 and its aftermath to the Cairo bus bomband Luxor massacre of 1997 and the subsequent rounding up of villagers inUpper Egypt, Soueif gives us a fascinating and disturbing account and analysisof the forces that continue to shape Egypt.But this account is always personalized, Soueif making clear how enmeshed hercharacters' lives are in political events. The personal is an integral part of thepolitical or historical, and it is this expert shift of focus from the grand sweep ofhistory to the detailed and intimate, coupled with an unerring accuracy, that notonly characterizes Soueif's work but is in fact the hallmark of her brilliance.Thus, aside from the more overt political exposés, Soueif for example weaves asnapshot of a Cairo street, instantly recognizable for anyone in Cairo in 1997,into her narrative:On the bonnets of the cars parked on the street, young men sit in groups,chatting, watching, waiting for action. The latest Amr Dyab song, the tunevaguely Spanish, spirals up at us... Beloved, light of my eyes/who dwells in myimagination/I've loved you for many years -Elsewhere, Soueif's descriptive genius is apparent in a passage about a colorcard:...it lobs you gently into the heart of the rainbow, and turns you loose into blue;allows you to wander at will from one end of blue to the other: seas andskiesand cornflower eyes, the tiles of Isfahan and the robes of the Madonna and thecool glint of a sapphire in the handle of a Yemeni dagger. Lie on the line betweenblue and green - where is the line between blue and green?... Lie, lie in the areaof transformation - stretch your arms out to either side.These lines reveal, subtly, the essence of the book's message, and what appearsto be a preoccupation for Soueif: a fascination with the concept of the border line,or rather the lack of a border line - with transitions.Just as in her short story Sandpiper, where she used the line where sea meetsland as a metaphor for the transitions in a young woman's life, Soueif in The Mapof Love reveals the shifting sands in the history of Egypt and in people's personallives, but also the paradox of the perceived continuity that runs through thehuman experience. Where does one thing end and another begin? Are the twolove stories one?The Egypt of 1900 has shaped the Egypt of today: Dr. Ramzi, when questionedby Isabel about Egypt's future in the new millennium, answers "It will be thesame." And what role does Fate play in all of this? Anna's first entry in her journalreads: "My name is Anna Winterbourne. I do not hold (much) with those who talkof the Stars governing our Fate."This voice, cautiously allowing the possibility of the inexplicable into people'slives, could also be Soueif's. In the novel, it is in this mystical force of continuity,ironically comforting and unchanging in its fluidity, that Soueif ultimately findsbeauty and solace. Across time and space, the eternal light of love shines againfor Isabel and Omar, and no less brightly and with no fewer complications than itdid for Anna and Sharif.Linguistically too, Soueif in The Map of Love breaks down borders betweenlanguages, in order to accommodate the Arab experience as expressed throughArabic in her writing. Thus Arabic words are used regularly in dialogues. Forexample, Yakhti (my sister), a phrase often used among women, appears firstly,

Soueif says, because there are conversations between Egyptian characters inthe novel, and secondly because the emotional sense and effect would be lost intranslation.In fact, whole dialogues give the impression of being literally translated fromArabic, a quality which Jenine Abboushi Dallal referred to in a recent article aswriting "in translation." Soueif herself states that she hears the dialogue in herhead in Arabic when writing, and the overall effect is that any reader who knowsArabic will find themselves translating sentences likeYakhti, have some shame, you and her! Are your tongues loose or what?Have we said anything? We're women together. Or is the Sett a stranger?"back into Arabic as they read.Not only does this technique impart a unique depth of character, it also enablesthe reader who knows English and Arabic to receive the full cultural andemotional impact of both languages simultaneously, and is thus a highlysignificant and groundbreaking achievement.Towards the end of the novel, Amal, reading Anna's story, says "I know I amclose to the end and I have slowed down. I don't want it to end." It appears thatreaders of The Map of Love have been feeling the same way. Ahdaf Soueif, the

consummate cartographer of emotion, has won our hearts once again.

Romance as Political Aesthetic in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

By EMILY S. DAVIS

[1] Romance has, to put it mildly, a sketchy political history. On the one hand, its focus on interpersonal dramas within the feminized private sphere, from aristocratic liaisons in the chivalric epics of the Middle Ages to the novels of Jane Austen to the tawdry delights of Harlequin, Mills and Boon, and the romantic comedy film, seem ill fitted to grand statements about social and political concerns. In this sense, the romance's very identity depends on being defined against a masculinized realism and its weighty problems. At the same time, as scholars such as Anne McClintock and Laura Chrisman note, the romance's tradition of male questers seems to lend itself all too well to narratives of imperialism as grand adventure, as evidenced by classics such as Ryder Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle (1912). With their trademark depictions of exotic colonial subjects as alluringly available, primitively threatening, or often a combination of both, these colonial romances express the fears and fantasies of Western publics about their empires.

[2] If romance proved well suited to the xenophobic nationalism of the colonial project, it has been taken up equally enthusiastically as a vehicle for postcolonial nation-building. In Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Doris Sommer describes how the genre of the “national romance” that dominated postcolonial Latin American literary production in the late nineteenth century functioned to reconcile diverse

 

Copyright ©2007Ann Kibbey.

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national populations with each other and with the goals of new national governments and their accompanying civil societies (12). The motif of lovers struggling to come together across barriers, whether of race, class, or religion, provided a “narrative formula” for gestures of conciliation between groups that had been positioned antagonistically within colonial hierarchies (15). Because the romances that are the object of Sommer's study serve to unify the nation through a fantasy of reconciliation often at odds with the economic, gendered, and racial discrepancies of new Latin American states, she concludes that they are ultimately a “pacifying project” (12, 29). The bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family, married to the national ideal of the unified populace, produces a revisionist historical narrative that contains dissent in the service of national unity.

[3] But what happens when postcolonial writers take up the romance to the opposite effect? That is, rather than harnessing the affective force of the love story to justify the ends of empire like the colonial romance or to suture national inequalities like the national romance, what if one yoked the romance's emotional power to a critique of the exclusionary violence of both? Diasporic Egyptian writer and journalist Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love works against the political failings of both the colonial romance and the postcolonial national romance even as she appropriates some of the key tropes of both sub-genres. Like the colonial romance, Soueif's romance serves primarily to bring into contact colonial subjects and members of the populations they rule rather than disparate elements of the postcolonial nation. As with the national romance, the novel adopts the romance as a vehicle through which to represent problematic divisions within the nation-state. However, I argue that this particular redeployment of the romance functions to dramatize not the utopian desire for national unity represented in the Latin American novels, but the failure of nationalism as an ideological construct under the weight of postcolonial corruption and global capitalism. Instead of bridging gaps to bolster the precarious state, the romance here evokes transnational coalitions—significantly, of women—and unearths genealogies of their resistance in order to critique and transform the postcolonial state and to comment upon the international balance of power in the wake of British imperialism.

[4] What I hope to demonstrate is that The Map of Love's yoking of romance to politics allows for an exploration of transnational political coalitions for which neither masculinist nationalist rhetoric nor colonialist fantasy has provided the space. Representation in Soueif's novel is the terrain on which these transnational affiliations take place. Within the novel, characters marginalized within national political conflicts turn to representation as an alternative discourse of resistance, reaching back across several generations to construct intensely imagined transhistorical political and artistic alliances with other women. As the novel's contemporary women lose themselves in the stories of their foremothers, the novel dramatizes the affective intensity and private pleasures offered by the romance, only to demonstrate how that affect can provide the springboard for renewed social action. Thus, the text presents a certain doubling

maneuver in which the author's transformation of politically reactionary genre conventions is reinforced by her characters' conviction about the transformative political potential of art. Yet, the novel's sophisticated mediation of historical memory and the performative nature of its engagement with the romance genre have not always been acknowledged by critics, erasing much of the political force of Soueif's project. Thus, in the final section of this essay, I briefly examine how the novel itself stages the encounter with otherness. Recent work by scholars such as Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj has called attention to the necessity of analyzing how work by postcolonial women writers has been, to borrow Chandra Mohanty's phrase, “read, understood, and located institutionally” in Western markets (Mohanty, 34). By considering Soueif's staging of the romance genre alongside the novel's reception in the West, I flesh out why Soueif's depiction of a mediated and performative vision of coalition is as necessary as it is difficult to market.

Transnational Romance and the Political Possibilities of Representation

[5] In an interview at Brunel University in London in 2000, Ahdaf Soueif was asked to describe what led her to write her 1999 novel The Map of Love. Soueif replied,

After In the Eye of the Sun was published, I met up with a friend who had become a literary agent. . . . And she said, 'Why don't you write a best seller? Why don't you write a pot-boiler—big thing, sort of East-West, and romance, and so on? I can get you a huge advance for that. And bits of In the Eye of the Sun show you can do sexy scenes. . . .' And I went away and thought about it. And I said no. I mean, in the end, obviously I couldn't do it. But it got me thinking along romantic lines, and what I became interested in was the idea of the romantic hero . . . as in Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff, and all the characters that we find in Mills and Boon novels—tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic, a stranger, proud, aloof, yet you just know that if you can get close you'll find these depths of sensitivity and empathy and passion and tenderness, and so on. And this hero is very often kind of Eastern, but he isn't ever really Eastern. And I've read novels and stories where he's meant to be Egyptian and he really isn't at all. He's completely fake. Or . . . they have to make him Christian because they can't go into the whole Muslim bit, but he's called Ali or Mohammed because that's what Easterners are called—very odd, pastichey things like that. And I thought, what if I make a hero who's larger than life, who's somebody I would think, Wow!—and he's a real, genuine Egyptian, of that time, with the concerns of that period (Soueif, “Talking,” 102).

Soueif's response describes a striking artistic decision: to take apart the colonial romance genre and reconstruct it through a hybrid combination of the nineteenth-century British novel's modes of male characterization and the political and historical surround of a “genuine” Egyptian man at the turn of the twentieth century. She thus rejects her agent's fantasy, but decides to pursue the fantasy she would have liked to read but that remained

unrealized in Western romance fiction.

[6] To construct this new romance, Soueif explained that she wanted to take up another orientalist stalwart:

There's a genre that I really am very interested in, which is travel writing, done by women, English women, mostly Victorian, and of course they are varied, from people with very set, very colonial attitudes, to people who were very broad-minded and opened themselves up to the culture that they were coming to see, like Lucy Duff Gordon who ended up living there until she died. And you can see them changing as you go through the letters, you see a different character evolving, and I really like that whole genre. And so I thought, what if you found a way to make a lady traveler like that meet and fall in love with my hero (Soueif, “Talking,” 102-3).

For Soueif, British women's travel writing, like the tradition of the romantic hero that emerged in nineteenth-century British women's fiction, provides possibilities for cooptation and counter-discourse. By brushing two often orientalist representational modes against the grain, Soueif opens up the ambivalent colonial rhetoric of the fake Eastern man and what Margaret Strobel calls “the destructive female” (Strobel) for a more nuanced fictional exploration of race, gender, and nationalism during and after colonialism.

[7] The Map of Love is structured around two narratives: the first concerns Englishwoman Anna Winterbourne's romance with the Egyptian nationalist Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi in the early twentieth century; the second concerns American Isabel Parkman's romance with the Palestinian American composer Omar al-Ghamrawi in 1997. In both narratives, falling in love with a man active in nationalist politics (Egyptian and Palestinian, respectively) leads the women to some level of involvement with politics that differs from the party line of their own home countries. Both women end up in Egypt and befriend their lover's sister (Sharif's sister is Layla, and Omar's sister is Amal), a bond that, especially in the contemporary narrative, becomes the most significant relationship for each woman. The motif that weaves the two narratives together is a family trunk inherited by Isabel that reveals that she is Anna Winterbourne's great-granddaughter and is thus distantly related to Omar, whose grandmother, Layla, was Sharif's sister and Anna's closest friend. In other words, Isabel is Anna's great-granddaughter, and Amal is Layla's granddaughter, making the two contemporary women cousins. Omar encourages Isabel to take the trunk to his sister Amal in Cairo, where the two contemporary women begin to reconstruct the earlier story from Anna's and Layla's letters and diaries. As they unearth the historical narrative, it becomes clear that there are significant parallels—personal and political—between this earlier moment and their own.

[8] Formally, the novel is a postmodern hybrid, interweaving Anna's journal entries with letters, newspaper clippings and both third-person omniscient and first-person narrations of the thoughts and actions of the characters and

of national and international political events. The hybrid nature of the novel is not surprising given Soueif's own cosmopolitan roots. Born in Cairo to two prominent university professors, she spent several years of her childhood in London and returned as an adult to complete a Ph.D. in linguistics, an experience she chronicled fairly autobiographically in In the Eye of the Sun. While in England, Soueif married the British poet Ian Hamilton and had two children with him. The couple later separated, but Soueif has remained in London, writing creative fiction as well as several journalistic pieces, including a report on Palestinian responses to September 11 entitled “After September 11: Nile Blues,” for the Guardian. Soueif's fiction demonstrates her familiarity with the European novelistic tradition. For example, in her first book of short stories, Aisha, the protagonist cites heroines such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Dorothea Brooke as central figures in her childhood. Soueif's Western literary influences, as well as her decision to write in English rather than in Arabic, have placed her in a difficult but not uncommon position for diasporic writers. For example, Mona Fayad notes “the inevitable hybridity of cultural practices” for Arab writers who work in the European languages of their colonizers (“Reinscribing Identity”). In her discussion of the Algerian novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar's novel L'Amour, la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985], Fayad describes Djebar in similar terms to Soueif as an intermediary between Arabic speakers and French historical records, as well as between a masculinist national history and one that acknowledges the role of Algerian women in the independence movement. However, Soueif's status as the only major Egyptian-born novelist writing in English underscores her singular position as a translator between cultures and languages, a difficult position both politically and aesthetically. Soueif's status as an Egyptian writer is by no means a given in Egyptian literary circles. At an annual women's conference in Cairo (the 2002 topic was “Women and Creativity”) sponsored by the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture, Amina Elbendary describes how “a heated debate threatened to arise between [Sabry] Hafez [chair of the roundtable on Arab women's writing in the West] and several participants when the chair argued that Ahdaf Soueif's novels were not part of contemporary Arab literature but of English literature, since the Anglophone Egyptian novelist writes in English” (Elbendary, “Gathering One More Time”).

[9] Soueif's skillful interweaving of detailed historical research with fiction in The Map of Love has led critics like Amin Malak to describe the novel as “a tour de force of revisionist metahistory of Egypt in the twentieth century” (141). Important historical persons figure as characters in the novel, including the progressive imam Muhammad 'Abdu, who is Sharif's best friend, the popular poet Hafiz Ibrahim, and the famous women's rights advocate Qasim Amin, author of the controversial book The Liberation of Women, who argues his case in the novel at a gathering of prominent Egyptian intellectuals at Sharif's house. I should note here that Amin himself has come to represent a historical discourse on feminism that often celebrates male intellectuals at the expense of their female contemporaries. As Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke point out, Arab women like the

Syrian writer Hind Nawfal and the Lebanese writer Zainab Fawwaz “had been writing 'feminist' or gender liberationist poems, essays, tales, and stories before the distinguished male judge had put pen to paper to write his famous book” (Badran and Cooke, xvii, xxxvii). In the present day, as Malak has noted, Omar bears a striking resemblance to Edward Said. Like Said, he writes books on the Palestinian situation and instead of “Professor Terror,” Omar is labeled the “Kalashnikov Conductor” and the “Molotov Maestro” (Soueif, Map, 17). The titles of Omar's books, “The Politics of Culture 1992, A State of Terror 1994, Borders and Refuge 1996” (21), pay tribute to Said's political and scholarly concerns (Malak, 155). These are simply a few of many resemblances Omar bears to Said. Like Said, Omar also resigns from the Palestine National Council in protest over the Oslo provisions (Judt, “The Rootless Cosmopolitan”). In addition, though not a professional conductor like Omar, Said was an accomplished pianist and close friend of the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. The two organized a series of controversial collaborative concerts in Jerusalem and Birzeit involving Palestinian and Israeli musicians, which are echoed by Omar's concert in the West Bank in Soueif's novel (Tamari, “No Ordinary Concert”). The sheer density of the historical material in the novel demonstrates Soueif's awareness of the critical work on orientalism and her interest in revisiting the geopolitical and temporal particularities of the era of British colonialism in Egypt.

[10] But the doubled historical narrative is not simply a convenient device through which two unconventional families stand allegorically for a “larger” political scene. Unlike the allegorical structure that Fredric Jameson identifies in his account of “third world literature,” here the personal is not merely the political in the sense that sexual difference or other “personal” dramas provide the symbolic language for “larger” political questions. Such a framework cannot account for the complex ways in which heterosexual romance, family dynamics, and so-called personal issues are constituted by individuals interpellated by nationalist, religious, and other discourses and just as importantly how the personal is essential to the workings of constructs such as the nation-state. Ann Stoler echoes my own skepticism about models in which the personal functions merely as an allegorical stand-in for politics. In laying out the framework for her historical study of constructions of the intimate in colonial politics, Stoler argues:

I pursue these connections between the broad-scale dynamics of colonial rule and the intimate sites of their implementation not because the latter are good illustrations of this wider field or because they provide touching examples of, or convenient metaphors for, colonial power writ large. Rather, it is because domains of the intimate figured so prominently in the perceptions and politics of those who ruled. These are the locations that allow us to identify what Foucault might have called the microphysics of colonial rule. In them I locate the affective grid of colonial politics. (7)

Soueif's complex narrative structure explores the linkages between sexual

politics and national and international politics, both under the colonial conditions that are the subject of Stoler's study and after fifty years of postcolonial statehood, without subsuming the familial/domestic narrative into the national as allegory like earlier critical work such as Jameson's.

[11] But Soueif's is an imaginative exercise: she is in no way attempting to depict a typical set of intimate relationships, as Anna and Layla's friendship would have been unlikely. In contrast to British India, where white women were brought in large numbers to shore up racial hierarchies officials worried had been undermined by soldiers' relationships with local women, there were relatively few European women in Egypt in the early twentieth century (Stoler, 79-111). As a result, rather than functioning as literal bodies to be protected from the threat of the sexual advances of men of color as they had in India (Sharpe, 128), in Egypt white women served mainly as a symbol of the freedoms enjoyed by the West but denied to Muslim women by a supposedly monolithic and oppressive Muslim 'culture.' Of course, as is usually the case, this rhetoric was laden with hypocrisy. For example, Lord Cromer, the infamously unpopular British consul general in Egypt in the early twentieth century, eagerly deployed this rhetoric about Western women's freedoms even as he cut funding to already existing girls' schools in Egypt and was a member of the vehemently antifeminist Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage back home (L. Ahmed, 153). Rather than mapping the actual historical “affective grid” of colonial politics, then, Soueif's transnational romance instead offers a fantasy of an affective grid of anticolonial politics, transforming the historical record to meet the needs of her own artistic and political projects. In other words, the intimate relationships in Soueif's novel are an imaginative attempt to will into being the coalitions necessary for the current political impasse at a moment when their absence in the “real” world seems truly dire. This imagined progressive transnational community, while set up by conventions of romance, quickly disrupts both the obsessive heterosexuality and the nationalism associated with the genre.

[12] At first glance, The Map of Love's heterosexual romance does seem to have much in common with the national romance. Soueif's hero, Sharif, like the national romance's typical hero, is “unerringly noble, by birth and talent” (Sommer, 49). Moreover, Anna and Sharif exhibit a startling lack of personal conflict in their relationship, given their differences in culture and language. This “lack of personal antagonism or intimate arguments between lovers,” Sommer argues, is key to the national romance (49). Because the lovers function to model the ease of national coalition, all conflicts must stem from external sources. Thus, from the moment Anna arrives in Egypt, she easily rejects the colonialist stereotypes about Egyptians held by other members of the British community in Egypt. She shows no fear when she is kidnapped by Sharif's nephews or when she first meets Sharif. In fact, he later teases her for her failure to buy into orientalist fantasy: “Weren't you afraid of me? The wicked Pasha who would lock you up in his harem and do terrible things to you?” Anna merely responds, “What terrible things?” (Soueif, Map, 153). For his part, Sharif completely dissociates Anna from

the British colonial violence that he is actively involved in fighting and even comforts her after the gruesome Denshwai incident in 1906, when Egyptian resistance to British soldiers leads to the deaths of several villagers and widespread anti-British sentiment (Fisher, 342, 350-53; J. M. Ahmed, 62-63).

[13] While in the national romance, idealized love is threatened by the same forces that undermine national unity to strengthen the reader's desire for romantic and national unity, Soueif's evocation of the colonial romance tradition necessarily complicates the nationalist equation. Sharif's relationship with Anna cannot function simply as a tale about national unions, because Anna's position as imperial white woman makes her an icon of the very forces that undermine national unity. Moreover, the forces that threaten their romance involve public ambivalence about the potential neocolonialism of their union. Unlike the national romance's use of eros to bolster nationalism, here the romance's dual aims find themselves at odds because of the complex network of national and transnational concerns about their partnership.

[14] For Soueif's novel is not simply about national institutions, but about the corruption of a nationalism bolstered by imperial and neocolonial economic interests. Egyptian nationalism here is engaged with a variety of transnational forces, in particular the volatile political and economic nexus of Israel, Palestine, and the United States. For example, in the contemporary narrative, Tareq 'Atiyya, Amal's old friend and potential love interest, is considering bringing in Israeli agricultural firms to modernize farming methods on his lands in Minya near Amal's ancestral property, land on which the now “emancipated” fellaheen scrape by as small farmers (Soueif, Map, 202). Low-wage Egyptian agricultural workers are no match for Israeli agribusiness, which is part of a powerful regional economy backed by American military muscle. These contemporary neocolonial economic conditions exacerbate fissures in national politics regarding the right path for Egypt, just as the presence of the British disrupted precarious nationalist coalitions in the early twentieth century. In a letter to England in the earlier narrative, Anna explains that, in addition to heated disagreements between those advocating immediate withdrawal of the British and those proposing a gradual dismantling of British rule, there are a host of

other divisions: People who would have tolerated the establishment of secular education, or the gradual disappearance of the veil, now fight these developments because they feel a need to hold on to their traditional values in the face of the Occupation. While the people who continue to support these changes have constantly to fight the suspicion that they are somehow in league with the British. (384)

Part of the novel's point in juxtaposing early-twentieth-century British imperial rule with the corrupt Mubarak regime is to underscore the untenable position in which Egyptian activist intellectuals find themselves: caught between ineffective and increasingly reactionary nationalist

movements and the devastating interventions of wealthy Western powers.

[15] Echoing Anna's frustration, Omar in the present day speaks despairingly of the Palestinian situation, dismissing Arafat's methods as “containment” (356). He rejects Arafat's agenda, arguing that “he uses torture and bone-breaking just as much as the Israelis” (356). But Omar cannot see Hamas as a viable alternative, even though they have the most credibility among Palestinians. “They're intelligent,” he tells his sister. “They're committed. They certainly have a case. But one cannot approve of fundamentalists—of whatever persuasion” (357). Here, the need for national unity may be the same as in the national romance, but Omar's relationship with the American Isabel cannot unify national factions any more than Sharif's marriage to Anna. The fragmentation wrought by colonialism and neocolonial globalization is not mended in Soueif's novel by romance. Omar's rejection of Hamas and the implication that he is later assassinated for his views only underscores the gulf between alienated Leftist intellectuals and religious fundamentalists in the contemporary Middle East. Likewise, in the earlier narrative, Sharif and Anna are perpetual outsiders. Anna's marriage ensures that she will never be at home anywhere, and Sharif's murder testifies to his inability to maintain the nationalist coalition he painstakingly sought to build. It is never clear who has assassinated Sharif, because, as with Omar, there are so many groups who would be happy to see him eliminated.

[16] The violence and frustration caused by the fragmentations of colonialism and government repression, as the novel tells us, seem to lead “either to fanatical actions or to despair” (472). Omar's sister Amal's decision to move to her ancestral home in upper Egypt is a product of this tension between political commitment and despair. As she thinks near the end of the novel, the political obstacles in Cairo seem overwhelming and insurmountable. At least in her village she can see the concrete impact of her attempt to improve others' lives by fighting for the release of fellaheen jailed by the government and keeping open a school that will educate their wives and children. All of the characters in the novel face the conflict between a potentially happy private life and a political situation in which change appears doubtful.

[17] Political forces like colonialism cannot truly be external to the private sphere, because, as Stoler reminds us, they are mutually constitutive. Nevertheless, the romantic relationships in the novel attempt to evade in the private sphere the irresolvable conflicts playing out in the public sphere. In the early-twentieth-century romance, Anna's rejection of colonial ideology and Sharif's ability to separate Anna the person from the actions of other British in Egypt carve out a space for them apart from social forces. This arrangement is inherently precarious, and both know it. Sharif's life mission is nationalist politics, and Anna becomes an active supporter of this cause, translating his articles for the British press and working for an Egyptian women's magazine and the newly founded art institute in Cairo. The tapestry she finishes weaving right before her husband's death is meant to

be her “contribution to the Egyptian renaissance” (403). Though they are romantically and politically committed to one another, they both pay a high price for Sharif's alliance with his well-meaning English wife.

[18] In fact, Anna's entry into the relationship seems possible only because she is completely alone. Her parents have died, she has no other family, and she has traveled to Egypt in the first place to come to terms with her husband's death after his participation in the British military campaign in Sudan. Anna's orphan status does not escape Sharif's mother, who warns him that

you will be everything to her. If you make her unhappy, who will she go to? No mother, no sister, no friend. Nobody. It means if she angers you, you forgive her. If she crosses you, you make it up with her. And whatever the English do, you will never burden her with the guilt of her country. She will be not only your wife and the mother of your children—insha' Allah—but she will be your guest and a stranger under your protection and if you are unjust to her God will never forgive you. (281)

In a moment of feminist solidarity later echoed by her daughter, Layla, Sharif's mother notes the difficulty of Anna's situation. Keenly aware of Anna's isolation, Sharif makes Anna promise that she and their daughter will leave the country and return home should he die before her (459), arguing that he does not want his daughter, Nur, to have to struggle like they have. For Anna, Sharif's assassination, partly attributable to their marriage, is a blunt reminder that she essentially remains an outsider in Egypt. She leaves Egypt as promised, losing her only remaining family in the process. As the disastrous ending of Anna and Sharif's marriage makes clear, the romance here cannot unite the nation and refuses to justify colonialism; instead, it serves to highlight the unattainable ideal of a transnational partnership of open-minded intellectuals committed to a new political dispensation.

Friendship, Art, and the Turn to Activism

[19] While this partnership proves unsustainable via heterosexual romance, it does in fact take shape through the intense relationships between the different women. The men, while noble, are frequently absent and ultimately doomed to death, leaving the women to make sense of the past and construct genealogies of resistance to serve them in the present. The earliest of these friendships, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century friendship between Anna and Layla, is perhaps the least developed in the book. The two women meet when Anna is kidnapped by Layla's relatives, who want to use the ransom of a British man to gain Layla's husband's release from jail. When they discover that they have in fact kidnapped a woman in men's clothing, the men are at a loss and deliver Anna to Layla's brother's house. Under these unlikely circumstances, while they all wait for Sharif to return and decide how to resolve this potentially explosive problem, Layla and Anna become instant friends, speaking in French, their only shared

language. Layla immediately recognizes herself in Anna's attempt to know Egypt, having herself been a frustrated stranger in France:

It was a pity Anna was going away tomorrow; she could imagine so many things they could do together, so many things she could show her, this woman who had come across Europe and the Mediterranean Sea to find Egypt, and who had confided yesterday that she felt it had eluded her, that she had touched nothing at all. Layla understood what she meant, for what would she have known of France had she not been befriended by Juliette Clemenceau? (149-50)

Layla's reference to her French native informant hints at a cross-cultural genealogy of women extending their friendship to strangers that is carried forward into the contemporary narrative.

[20] If Layla and Anna's friendship is for the most part relegated to the backdrop of the tragic romance between Sharif and Anna, Amal and Isabel, Layla and Anna's present-day descendents, completely displace the romance narrative between Isabel and Omar. As readers, we know that Isabel is in love with Amal's brother, but he is barely present in the book and presumed dead by its end. Instead, it is Amal and Isabel's relationship that unfolds, and there is no sense that Isabel, an orphan like Anna, will return to the U.S. after Omar's death. While the colonial romance narrative of Sharif and Anna's era seems inextricable from the framework of the heterosexual romance, the unconventional family composed of Amal, Isabel, and Isabel and Omar's newborn son, Sharif, becomes at the end of the novel a model for personal and political survival out of the failure of romance. Isabel has lost Omar to political violence. Amal has returned to Egypt after “twenty-odd years” (38) living in Britain with her (British?) husband and children. She misses her sons terribly and thrills at baby Sharif's arrival in her family.

[21] Amal's new family echoes and resignifies the tapestry that Anna wove a hundred years before to represent her own transnational union. After her marriage, Anna had produced a three-paneled tapestry of the Goddess Isis, her husband/brother Osiris, and their baby son Horus, with the Qur'anic verse “He brings forth the living from the dead” stretching across all three panels. Uniting Pharonic iconography with Islamic text in a composition inflected by her own tradition of Christian hagiography, Anna's artwork commented on the complexity of the modern Egypt her husband's nationalist movement was willing into being. After Sharif's death, a family servant had divided up the tapestry, giving the panel with Osiris to Anna and the one with Isis to Amal's father. The panel of the baby Horus was lost, but magically reappears in Isabel's bag at the end of the novel after her son's birth. The tapestry's trinity of the nuclear family gets mapped onto the contemporary trinity of Amal, Isabel, and baby Sharif. Similarly, when Amal and Isabel travel back to Cairo from Tawasi, they stop along the roadside to let the car cool down. To shade the baby from the sun, they use the family's old flag of national unity, a symbol of Muslim-Christian coalition against the British that had been wielded in women's street protests

in the early twentieth century. Amal describes the scene: “I rooted in the car and found the flag and we pushed three sticks into the earth and spread the flag over them, and the baby lay on the rug with his mother on one side of him and me on the other and above his head the green and white flag of national unity” (481). Here, as in Anna's tapestry, a national symbol is reconfigured by an atypical transnational family.

[22] But why does this friendship and its resulting family so dominate the contemporary narrative in the novel, while the only developed romance in a self-proclaimed love story is confined to the past? I argue that it is because the novel is first and foremost a romance with the past. To make sense of the book's reconfiguration of the romance, then, we must consider the relationship between Amal and Anna as the most important one in the book. From the beginning, Amal's identification with Anna proves central to Amal's political rebirth by allowing her to meditate upon the political potential of art under repressive conditions and as a vehicle for understanding coalition in not only spatial but temporal terms. On the first page of the novel, Amal describes her intense response to Anna's story: “Across a hundred years the woman's voice speaks to her—so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer. . . . She reads and lets Anna's words flow into her, probing gently at dreams and hopes and sorrows she had sorted out, labeled and put away” (4). Telling Anna's story provides Amal with a political genealogy; she falls in love with national heroes such as her grandfather, Sharif, through Anna's descriptions and identifies with their struggle to stay committed to their political fight in hopeless times that mirror the present. Writing Anna's story absorbs Amal to the point that she loses sense of where and when she is:

Looking up from Anna's journal I am, for a moment, surprised to find myself in my own bedroom. . . . I had been so utterly in that scene. . . . My heart had beaten in time with Anna's, my lips had wanted her lover's kiss. I shake myself free and . . . bring myself back to the present. Who else has read this journal? And when they read it, did they too feel that it spoke to them? For the sense of Anna speaking to me—writing it down for me—is so powerful that I find myself speaking to her in my head. At night, in my dreams, I sit with her and we speak as friends and sisters. (306)

Although Soueif seems largely concerned in the novel to highlight the political potential of the romance, here she calls less attention to it than to the commonly understood delights of the genre. Framed by the bedroom setting, she provides us the vicarious thrill of the hero's kiss. Moreover, the description of Amal's absorption in Anna's journal mirrors precisely the experience of what reading a romance should be like: losing oneself in the past as evasion of the present. Yet, even by the end of this passage, we have shifted from Anna as a point of access to the male lover to Anna herself as the prize. Why is Amal so absorbed by the life of this early-twentieth-century white woman? And is the lure of Anna's story about a desire to engage with the lessons of the past for the present, or is the real desire to retreat from the present altogether, as her grandfather Sharif had ironically

decided to do the day he was murdered? Tellingly, after a painful political discussion with other Cairo intellectuals at the Atelier hotel, Amal longs to return to her Anna project: “That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you—unchanged. . . . And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part” (234). Overwhelmed by the current political moment, Amal turns to history. However, though she initially seems to lose herself in the past, her translation of Anna's past into her present does not lead her away from politics as much as provide her with a way back into it.

[23] As a sort of modern-day Scheherazade figure, Amal stakes her politics on the artist's ability to translate experience between cultures and across times (Darraj, 102, 106; Hassan). Her primary identification with Anna makes sense in this context, because Anna is the other true artist figure in the book, a woman who came to Egypt because she was inspired by a painting. Like Isabel, who asks Amal, “If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?” (468), Amal reaches back to Anna as a model for how to translate between East and West in a moment of profound political crisis in the Middle East. Anna's changing understanding of art shadows Amal's own artistic crisis. Whereas Anna begins her artistic work as a painter, she switches to weaving at the same time that she begins to work more consistently as her husband's translator for the British press, a shift that signals a change in her thinking about both politics and art. In a letter to a friend, Anna describes her newfound preference for weaving over painting and writing:

I have quite taken to it. I find that when I work at it I am still a part of everything that surrounds me. It is not like reading or writing, when you are necessarily cut off from everything so that you may not hear when you are spoken to—indeed you may look up and be surprised to find yourself where you are, so transported were you by what is on the page. When I work at the loom I am still part of things and it seems as if the sounds and the smells and the people coming and going all somehow get into the weave. I can see you thinking 'Ah! Anna is getting metaphysical', but I am really most practical. . . . And then there is the pleasure of using the object you make—oh, I forget myself and preach. . . . But truly, I believe that my sitting at the loom in his courtyard has brought some pleasure to old Baroudi Bey. (385)

Although Anna's writing is decidedly public in that it will reach major newspapers in Britain and Europe, it disengages her from her own immediate family and Egyptian cultural context in a way that weaving does not. Anna's turn to weaving functions as a shorthand for an idea of art as both aesthetically beautiful and socially engaged—as she points out, her tapestry not only allows her to maintain a sense of her surroundings, it can even be used. Significantly, it also produces the first signs of life in her father-in-law, who has been completely withdrawn since his participation in Urabi's failed revolt against the British-controlled army decades before. While he was not exiled like Urabi (Fisher, 341), Anna's father-in-law has

in essence exiled himself from his nation and family since his political ordeal. That Anna's weaving integrates this once-political figure back into the social world underscores the potential of art (especially historically feminized art forms) for sustaining those involved in exhausting political struggles.

[24] Amal, who works as a translator of novels, has been a writer in just the sense that Anna describes, absorbed in her solitary task to the point that she loses her connection to the outside world. Amal contrasts this privacy of writing with the public nature of her brother's music conducting, which involves putting on concerts in Palestine and the ruins of a bombed out building in Sarajevo. Amal argues that “for her it has been different. She has not had a public life. She has concentrated on the boys, and she has translated novels—or done her best to translate them. It is so difficult to truly translate from one language into another, from one culture into another; almost impossible really” (515). Yet she refuses to abandon this difficult task, in spite of her fatigue and despair. Revitalized by translating Anna's struggle, Amal tells us that she has “made up her mind. When Anna's story is finished she will close down her flat and move to Tawasi. Not for ever, but for a while. If she has any responsibility now, it is to her land and to the people on it” (297). Appalled at the jailing of innocent villagers by the police in Tawasi on charges of terrorism, a reenactment of the humiliating and unjust actions of the British at Denshwai, but this time by her own corrupt government, Amal demands “Whose country is it?” She throws in her lot with the fellaheen, vowing to protect the people in her village from further brutality and to write about their lives. Aware that she cannot single-handedly stop the corruption and despair that leads young men to violence, she decides that “she can learn the land and tell its stories” (298). Inspired by characters from her past, Amal's relationship to writing transforms over the course of the novel from private occupation to political mission.

[25] Renewing her commitment to translate not just novels but the stories of the fellaheen entails rejecting the political despair she had experienced in earlier conversations with the disenfranchised Egyptian intelligentsia. Asked about the role of the intellectual in voicing the people's concerns, a friend had responded, “We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit at the Atelier or the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people. The people don't know we exist” (224). This rehearsal of the fraught relationship between the native intellectual and the subaltern prompts Amal to reconceive her artistic identity to speak to new audiences. Mona Fayad claims that the retrieval of communal history through women's oral narratives functions as an essential component of re-reading history in Arab women's writing (Fayad, “Reinscribing Identity”), and Amal's decision at the end of the novel to move to the countryside and transcribe the villager's oral narratives follows the pattern Fayad describes. While I suspect that Spivak might have her suspicions about the ease of Amal's new cross-class identification with the fellaheen, her recent argument that the intellectual must “learn to listen” to

the subaltern resonates with Amal's new role as chronicler of her villagers' stories (Spivak, “Keynote Address”). Thus, though I do not want to excuse the book's aristocratic leanings, which pose a serious limitation for the book's political vision (and merit a longer discussion than I can give here), I do think the novel's understanding of coalition in more flexible and unstable geographical, temporal, and aesthetic terms is worth investigating.

[26] Through her dedication to oral narratives as well as her relationship with Isabel, Amal in effect renews her dedication to the plea her grandfather, Sharif, had articulated in his final essay: “Our only hope now—and it is a small one—lies in a unity of conscience between the people of the world for whom this phrase itself would carry any meaning. It is difficult to see the means by which such a unity can be effected. But it is in its support that these words are written” (481). Amal works to build this difficult unity of conscience through her art and her new family. Since she has decided that art is her new means of enacting social change, it is not surprising that her support network for her new political commitment is in effect a colony of artists. Amal works as a translator and storyteller, and Isabel is an aspiring filmmaker as well as a savvy web designer, setting up a home page for Omar so that people all over the world can access not only his music but his writing and links to other political news sites (481).

[27] Amal's imaginative reconstruction of a genealogy of the political possibilities of art allows us to read Amal's primary identification with Anna as another woman living in between, produced by multiple, and at times antagonistic, aesthetic and political traditions, including colonialism, nationalism, and romance. Just as Amal reads Anna through the lens of European characters such as Anna Karenina and Dorothea Brooke, Anna's Western training in painting and epistolary writing leads her to the Egyptian artistic renaissance and the anticolonial movement. In this sense we can see The Map of Love as a hybrid subject's meditation on the subtlety and complexity of identity, drawing cultural genealogies across borders and genres even as she attempts to find her place in local politics as a transnational subject. The romance provides her with an opportunity to resurrect a new Egyptian hero out of orientalist schlock, and her romance with the past through Anna points her toward a renewed sense of a transnational political community even as it problematizes the idea that anyone can ever truly know anyone else.

[28] The complex interplay among national, international, and sexual politics in the novel raises the question: What political possibilities does reworking the colonial romance genre open up, and what possibilities does it foreclose? Soueif's self-conscious deconstruction of the genre's codes, in particular her transformation of the destructive woman, produces a nuanced transnational engagement with the relationship between art and political activism. That it ends with women artists is perhaps itself an argument about the failures of nationalism for those not defined as its ideal citizens. As the novel seems to conclude, what would be the use of dedicating all of one's energy to electoral politics when the very framework of nationalism

writes women out of the political picture? These women find a different space for themselves to engage with politics by turning to representations grounded in particular political coalitions. Amal represents her turn toward storytelling as emphatically not a turn away from political engagement, moving to her chosen site of political struggle to begin her artistic work and to nurture her new family. Amal's genealogical project signals her need to imagine models for continued political struggle, because, as she demonstrates, we need representations to inspire us, even if the ideals they represent are unattainable. Souief's interest in the possibilities of representation, in particular her transformation of politically maligned genres such as the romance, points toward the potential for destabilizing the gender, class, and race formations associated with particular narratives of both art and politics without offering any easy formulation of representation as politics (Loomba, 243-44). Her experiment with the romance raises the question of whether its utopianism and nostalgia, so closely associated with reactionary politics, might in fact be put toward more subversive ends.

Staging Encounters: Soueif and Her Critics

[29] One of the most fascinating aspects of Soueif's novel is that she in effect stages how Western readers should read it. The novel itself dramatizes several acts of reading in which the reader acknowledges the limitations of her ability to truly grasp what she is reading. For instance, this is Amal's approach to Anna's letters and journals, which are themselves attempts to read Anna's new surroundings. By presenting Anna's growing horror at her own implication in the British imperial project, as well as the ongoing thematic of how women's history gets passed down through ephemeral and frequently neglected art forms such as journals, letters, and tapestries, Soueif not only challenges the erasure of women from the historical and artistic record but also presents an alternative ethics for approaching narratives about others. In other words, Soueif presents her own overt challenge to a model of contact as “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington) through a feminized narrative mode that highlights precisely the masculinist underpinnings of that antagonistic political model. The romance provides a useful vehicle for staging this drama about reading and knowing, because it is all about the consuming desire for access to another. However, the characters themselves seem completely aware that they are not following the script and, as I discuss above, even comment at times on what would have happened at a particular moment if this had been a “real” romance.

[30] This performative element of the novel has not always registered with critics. Part of what first interested me in Soueif's novel was the discussion around why it would not (or should not) win the Booker Prize in 1999. Interestingly, it was voted the “best read” by the Booker Prize committee, while the prize went to Coetzee's Disgrace instead (McEwan, “The Map of Love”). Responses to the novel varied widely, but one common thread ran through nearly all of the critical responses: a profound unease with the novel's combination of romance and politics. For critics, the genres of the

romance and the political novel functioned as two mutually exclusive and irreconcilable traditions, and their reviews thus tended either to valorize the novel's political content and criticize its formulaic romance or to celebrate the romance as an escape from the realities of the book's political commentary and an indulgence in the guilty pleasures of mass-market fiction. For example, Library Journal's Ann H. Fisher concludes that the novel is “recommended as something a little different where historical romances are popular” (98-100), while Gabriele Annan writes in the London Review of Books that Soueif's “combination of seriousness and romance doesn't quite work at the highest level of fiction” (28). Soueif's book was in effect doubly damned. Because it adopted conventions of the romance, critics argued that it was not artistically strong enough to merit the Booker Prize. On the other hand, its stringent critique of Israel's regional role in Middle Eastern politics caused some critics to argue that the book was too radical politically and could not win the award because it would offend Jewish readers. Thus, Asim Hamdan argues in Arab View that “the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif was the most deserving among the final list of the writers [nominated for the Booker Prize]” but concludes that the main reason she was ultimately denied the prize was her vocal pro-Palestinian stance (“Zionist Denies”).

[31] Soueif's use of romance proved particularly difficult for critics to stomach, and I think there are some important reasons for this. First, Western readerships have been trained to expect the “political novel” from postcolonial writers, in part because they are encouraged to read novels about the rest of the world as transparent historical documents rather than aesthetic experiments of any kind. Simon Gikandi, writing about Western readers of African literature, reiterates the danger of this assumption that literature is “a mere reproduction of reality, and language a tabula rasa that expresses a one-to-one correspondence between words and things” (Gikandi, 149). Soueif's partial satisfaction of this expectation made for an ambivalent reception: the novel includes the kinds of historical and political discussions considered appropriate for postcolonial fiction, but the romance's theatricality and overt artifice call into question the transparent factuality of the rest of the novel. Another key element here is of course the historically gendered divide between mass-market women's (genre) fiction (often romance fiction in some form) and 'literature' that has operated both in the academic canon and in the literary marketplace. Publishers are very savvy about packaging texts to appeal to the demographics they think are most likely to buy them. Soueif's novel was marketed, particularly in the U.S., as the perfect women's reading group book, and the Anchor web site provided a list of discussion questions to facilitate its use in such groups.

[32] The combination of the political expectations for postcolonial writers and the historically gendered value system used to distinguish literature from women's fiction in the West helps explain the sharply divergent evaluations of Soueif's literary merits. But what do we gain from paying such close attention to the story of this particular novel? What concerns me about Soueif's case is not simply that a book that was considered good by

some critics, but bad by others, might fail to enter the literary canon. Instead, I am hoping that my discussion of Soueif's redeployment of romance demonstrates the ways in which loaded conventions about literary genre and taste in the West, as well as the global market forces that cater to them, might prevent scholars from engaging with complex and experimental Anglophone texts by women that fail to meet their expectations. If the problem is not as much about Soueif's text as the tools with which scholars are able to approach it, then literary studies needs to develop new methodologies for exploring the interplay among global literary traditions, readerships, and markets.

WORKS CITED

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Contributor’s Note:

EMILY S. DAVIS is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship in English at the University of Nevada, Reno, before beginning a position as assistant professor of World Literatures at the University of Delaware. Her article “The Intimacies of Globalization: Bodies and Borders On-Screen” appeared in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies in 2006. Her research interests include Anglophone postcolonial literatures; globalization, immigration, and diaspora; feminist theory; transnational reception and circulation; genre fiction; and film.Ahdaf Soueif: Developing a Euro-Arab Literature

Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian writer who made it big in Great Britain. As a nominee for the Booker Prize she is among the growing number of authors who are developing a so-called "Euro-Arab Literature", writes Yafa Shanneik.

| Bild: Adhaf Soueif | The Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif is one of a number of Arab authors who emigrated to Western Europe in the second half of the 20th century and who, from their adopted homes, attempt to describe their encounters with cultural otherness.

They base their narratives in their foreign homes as well as in their countries of origin and, through the themes, content and literary style of their work, they present their characters' unique experiences in both locations and in the "space in between".

Literature as a beacon for social integration

This immigrant literature trend can for instance be observed in Germany. Here, Arab authors write stories which illustrate the conflict between their own cultural identity and that of the new country and which deal with the inner struggle between the old and the new cultural identities using new literary forms that stem from Arab tradition.

In the context of today's globalized literature, these authors are making an important contribution to the process of observing and comparing cultural differences: They see it as an opportunity to develop an intercultural "Euro-Arab literature" which can help make a dialogue between the cultures easier and assist in the integration of immigrants into the societies that receive them.

Intellectual Muslim background

Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo in 1950, the daughter of an intellectual Muslim family. She studied English Literature at Egyptian and British universities and served for two years as an instructor at a Saudi Arabian university. Since 1981, she has been dividing her time between London and Cairo.

Soueif's literary career began in 1983, when she published her collection of short stories, Aischa. This was followed by the novel In the Eye of the Sun (1992), the short story collection Sandpiper (1996) and her second novel The Map of Love.

She translated some of her literary works into Arabic and in 1996, she was awarded the Cairo Book Fair Award for the Best Short Stories of the Year for her collection Zimat al-Hayat wa Qisas Ukhra, Sandpiper, or literally, The Beauty of Life and Other Stories.

Egyptian Booker Prize nominee

In 1999, her novel The Map of Love was nominated for the acclaimed Booker Prize. Numerous magazines and newspapers – including The Times Literary Supplement, Cosmopolitan, the London Review of Books and al-Ahram Weekly – regularly review her work and publish her critical treatises.

Soueif's literary works focus on the portrayal of Arab-Muslim society and its striving for modernization in a globalized world. She formulates this objective in the context of a specific understanding of culture, cultural identity and intercultural relationships.

Culture as a dynamic concept

For her, culture is a dynamic concept which embraces all of a society's activities in their historical context and thus lends its identity a form which is distinct, yet still able to communicate and learn.

Soueif incorporates this understanding into her work by portraying her characters' experiences both in the various stages of Egyptian society's historical development as well as during their stays in Great Britain.

In her novel, The Map of Love, Soueif describes the political, socioeconomic and cultural conditions that dominated Egyptian society at the beginning of the 20th century and follows their development through the changing viewpoints, experiences and feelings of the character Anna, an Englishwoman living in Egypt.

Through this learning process, we observe the way that Anna on the one hand and her Egyptian neighbors on the other maintain their respective cultural identities and, at the same time, enter into a conflict-ridden, yet fruitful dialogue.

Writing about modern Egyptian women

In the novel, The Eye of the Sun, Ahdaf Soueif presents a different view of the common Western cliché of the oppressed Arab woman, deprived of her rights and her voice. She follows the development of the main character, Asya al-Ulama's cultural identity as she becomes an emancipated Egyptian woman who nevertheless insists on maintaining that cultural identity.

In doing so, Soueif uses time and space, fiction and reality in the context of history and politics to paint this picture in different epochs and in different places. She is helped here by well-founded information and research which challenge the oversimplified, stereotyped portrayal of Egyptian women in English literature.

In an interview with the author of this article, Ahdaf Soueif points to the positive reception of this process among her readers: "I think it has already changed misconceptions among my readers judging by the letters I get. I do like to play with these preconceptions and twirl them round a bit; like standing the Western concept of the 'harem' on its head as I do in The Map of Love by representing the domestic life of a harem."

The aesthetics of writing

The special quality of Soueif's writing style lies in its artistic construction, which is based on a fusion of Arab and English settings, characters and manners of speaking, lending a unique aesthetic character to her works.

Cultural characteristics of Egyptian people – such as Arab names, expressions, metaphors, greetings and forms of address – flow seamlessly into her English-language dialogues.

"English is an extremely hospitable language"

Literary critic Polly Pattolo wrote that Soueif's literary style consisted of thinking out her dialogues in Arabic and writing them in English. In her interview with me, Soueif pointed to the literary advantages that this style provides for the English-speaking reader: "I think this is

the base, really, of the sometimes 'different' English I write. That I need to fashion an English that will express an Arab reality.

I have found English an extremely hospitable and wonderful language. The interesting thing also is that often my bilingual (Arabic/English) readers tell me that when they read my characters' dialogues in English they can hear it in their heads – in Arabic."

In Soueif's work, the intercultural quality literature appears in the unprejudiced intercultural relationships, such as that between the Englishwoman Anna and the Egyptian Sharif (The Map of Love) or between the Egyptian Asya and the Englishman Gerald (In the Eye of the Sun). The development of the characters of both Anna and Asya and the transformation of their traditional cultural values (British and Egyptian, respectively) demonstrate a tendency in the direction of modern, universal values.

In Germany, too, both German and Arab writers have intensified their efforts to support an intercultural dialogue in recent years. Examples of this trend can be seen in the works of the Arab immigrants Jusuf Naoum, Suleman Taufiq and Rafik Schami.

With the intensive support of German, British and Arab authors, these literary products could be developed into a Euro-Arabic literature. This literary genre could provide a forum for encouraging dialogue between the cultures and accelerating integration into the societies of immigration.

Yafa Shanneik, © Qantara.de 2004

Yafa Shanneik is working on her doctoral thesis on the topic "Transculturalism, transformation processes and gender research. The image of the Arab-Muslim woman in German and English-language 'transcultural literature'."

Translation from German: Mark Rossman

Ahdaf Soueif's new novel is a story of what it is to be divided, poised between two lives. She explores the changing relationship between Egypt and Britain in the twentieth century and tells the compelling story of a doomed cross-cultural love affair, recreating the Romantic Hero of Byronic legend in an utterly original contemporary style.

It is the year 1900, and a trip to Egypt marks a new beginning for the recently widowed Lady Anna Winterbourne. There she meets and falls in love with Sharif Pasha al-Barudi, an Egyptian Nationalist, a man utterly committed to his country's cause. For Sharif, Anna at first represents the snobberies and vulgarities of colonialist Britain. For her, Sharif stands for the real, secret Egypt—an Egypt entirely hidden from her incurious compatriots. The couple fall in love, but fearfully. Can they both adjust to the reality of love between such conflicting cultures?

Romance as political aesthetic in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

Genders, June, 2007 by Emily S. Davis

[1] Romance has, to put it mildly, a sketchy political history. On the one hand, its focus on interpersonal dramas within the feminized private sphere, from aristocratic liaisons in the chivalric epics of the Middle Ages to the novels of Jane Austen to the tawdry delights of Harlequin, Mills and Boon, and the romantic comedy film, seem ill fitted to grand statements about social and political concerns. In this sense, the romance's very identity depends on being defined against a masculinized realism and its weighty problems. At the same time, as scholars such as Anne McClintock and Laura Chrisman note, the romance's tradition of male questers seems to lend itself all too well to narratives of imperialism as grand adventure, as evidenced by classics such as Ryder Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes: A Romance of the Jungle (1912). With their trademark depictions of exotic colonial subjects as alluringly available, primitively threatening, or often a combination of both, these colonial romances express the fears and fantasies of Western publics about their empires.

[2] If romance proved well suited to the xenophobic nationalism of the colonial project, it has been taken up equally enthusiastically as a vehicle for postcolonial nation-building. In Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, Doris Sommer describes how the genre of the "national romance" that dominated postcolonial Latin American literary production in the late nineteenth century functioned to reconcile diverse national populations with each other and with the goals of new national governments and their accompanying civil societies (12). The motif of lovers struggling to come together across barriers, whether of race, class, or religion, provided a "narrative formula" for gestures of conciliation between groups that had been positioned antagonistically within colonial hierarchies (15). Because the romances that are the object of Sommer's study serve to unify the nation through a fantasy of reconciliation often at odds with the economic, gendered, and racial discrepancies of new Latin American states, she concludes that they are ultimately a "pacifying project" (12, 29). The bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family, married to the national ideal of the unified populace, produces a revisionist historical narrative that contains dissent in the service of national unity.

[3] But what happens when postcolonial writers take up the romance to the opposite effect? That is, rather than harnessing the affective force of the love story to justify the ends of empire like the colonial romance or to suture national inequalities like the national romance, what if one yoked the romance's emotional power to a critique of the exclusionary violence of both? Diasporic Egyptian writer and journalist Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love works against the political failings of both the colonial romance and the postcolonial national romance even as she appropriates some of the key tropes of both sub-genres. Like the colonial romance, Soueif's romance serves primarily to bring into contact colonial subjects and members of the populations they rule rather than disparate elements of the postcolonial nation. As with the national romance, the novel adopts the romance as a vehicle through which to represent problematic divisions within the nation-state. However, I argue that this particular redeployment of the romance functions to dramatize not the utopian desire for national unity represented in the Latin American novels, but the failure of nationalism as an ideological construct under the weight of postcolonial corruption and global capitalism. Instead of bridging gaps to bolster the precarious state, the romance here evokes transnational coalitions--significantly, of women&--and unearths genealogies of their resistance in order to

critique and transform the postcolonial state and to comment upon the international balance of power in the wake of British imperialism.

[4] What I hope to demonstrate is that The Map of Love's yoking of romance to politics allows for an exploration of transnational political coalitions for which neither masculinist nationalist rhetoric nor colonialist fantasy has provided the space. Representation in Soueif's novel is the terrain on which these transnational affiliations take place. Within the novel, characters marginalized within national political conflicts turn to representation as an alternative discourse of resistance, reaching back across several generations to construct intensely imagined transhistorical political and artistic alliances with other women. As the novel's contemporary women lose themselves in the stories of their foremothers, the novel dramatizes the affective intensity and private pleasures offered by the romance, only to demonstrate how that affect can provide the springboard for renewed social action. Thus, the text presents a certain doubling maneuver in which the author's transformation of politically reactionary genre conventions is reinforced by her characters' conviction about the transformative political potential of art. Yet, the novel's sophisticated mediation of historical memory and the performative nature of its engagement with the romance genre have not always been acknowledged by critics, erasing much of the political force of Soueif's project. Thus, in the final section of this essay, I briefly examine how the novel itself stages the encounter with otherness. Recent work by scholars such as Amal Amireh and Lisa Suhair Majaj has called attention to the necessity of analyzing how work by postcolonial women writers has been, to borrow Chandra Mohanty's phrase, "read, understood, and located institutionally" in Western markets (Mohanty, 34). By considering Soueif's staging of the romance genre alongside the novel's reception in the West, I flesh out why Soueif's depiction of a mediated and performative vision of coalition is as necessary as it is difficult to market.

Transnational Romance and the Political Possibilities of Representation

[5] In an interview at Brunel University in London in 2000, Ahdaf Soueif was asked to describe what led her to write her 1999 novel The Map of Love. Soueif replied,

After In the Eye of the Sun was published, I met up with a friend who had become a literary agent.... And she said, 'Why don't you write a best seller? Why don't you write a pot-boiler--big thing, sort of East-West, and romance, and so on? I can get you a huge advance for that. And bits of In the Eye of the Sun show you can do sexy scenes....' And I went away and thought about it. And I said no. I mean, in the end, obviously I couldn't do it. But it got me thinking along romantic lines, and what I became interested in was the idea of the romantic hero ... as in Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff, and all the characters that we find in Mills and Boon novels--tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic, a stranger, proud, aloof, yet you just know that if you can get close you'll find these depths of sensitivity and empathy and passion and tenderness, and so on. And this hero is very often kind of Eastern, but he isn't ever really Eastern. And I've read novels and stories where he's meant to be Egyptian and he really isn't at all. He's completely fake. Or ... they have to make him Christian because they can't go into the whole Muslim bit, but he's called Ali or Mohammed because that's what Easterners are called--very odd, pastichey things like that. And I thought, what if I make a hero who's larger than life, who's somebody I would think, Wow!--and he's a real, genuine Egyptian, of that time, with the concerns of that period (Soueif, "Talking," 102).

Soueif's response describes a striking artistic decision: to take apart the colonial romance genre and reconstruct it through a hybrid combination of the nineteenth-century British novel's modes of male characterization and the political and historical surround of a "genuine" Egyptian man at the turn of the twentieth century. She thus rejects her agent's fantasy, but decides to pursue the fantasy she would have liked to read but that remained unrealized in Western romance fiction.

[6] To construct this new romance, Soueif explained that she wanted to take up another orientalist stalwart:

There's a genre that I really am very interested in, which is travel writing, done by women, English women, mostly Victorian, and of course they are varied, from people with very set, very colonial attitudes, to people who were very broad-minded and opened themselves up to the culture that they were coming to see, like Lucy Duff Gordon who ended up living there until she died. And you can see them changing as you go through the letters, you see a different character evolving, and I really like that whole genre. And so I thought, what if you found a way to make a lady traveler like that meet and fall in love with my hero (Soueif, "Talking," 102-3).

For Soueif, British women's travel writing, like the tradition of the romantic hero that emerged in nineteenth-century British women's fiction, provides possibilities for cooptation and counter-discourse. By brushing two often orientalist representational modes against the grain, Soueif opens up the ambivalent colonial rhetoric of the fake Eastern man and what Margaret Strobel calls "the destructive female" (Strobel) for a more nuanced fictional exploration of race, gender, and nationalism during and after colonialism.

[7] The Map of Love is structured around two narratives: the first concerns Englishwoman Anna Winterbourne's romance with the Egyptian nationalist Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi in the early twentieth century; the second concerns American Isabel Parkman's romance with the Palestinian American composer Omar al-Ghamrawi in 1997. In both narratives, falling in love with a man active in nationalist politics (Egyptian and Palestinian, respectively) leads the women to some level of involvement with politics that differs from the party line of their own home countries. Both women end up in Egypt and befriend their lover's sister (Sharif's sister is Layla, and Omar's sister is Amal), a bond that, especially in the contemporary narrative, becomes the most significant relationship for each woman. The motif that weaves the two narratives together is a family trunk inherited by Isabel that reveals that she is Anna Winterbourne's great-granddaughter and is thus distantly related to Omar, whose grandmother, Layla, was Sharif's sister and Anna's closest friend. In other words, Isabel is Anna's great-granddaughter, and Amal is Layla's granddaughter, making the two contemporary women cousins. Omar encourages Isabel to take the trunk to his sister Amal in Cairo, where the two contemporary women begin to reconstruct the earlier story from Anna's and Layla's letters and diaries. As they unearth the historical narrative, it becomes clear that there are significant parallels--personal and political--between this earlier moment and their own.

[8] Formally, the novel is a postmodern hybrid, interweaving Anna's journal entries with letters, newspaper clippings and both third-person omniscient and first-person narrations of the thoughts and actions of the characters and of national and international political events. The hybrid nature of the novel is not surprising given Soueif's own cosmopolitan roots. Born

in Cairo to two prominent university professors, she spent several years of her childhood in London and returned as an adult to complete a Ph.D. in linguistics, an experience she chronicled fairly autobiographically in In the Eye of the Sun. While in England, Soueif married the British poet Ian Hamilton and had two children with him. The couple later separated, but Soueif has remained in London, writing creative fiction as well as several journalistic pieces, including a report on Palestinian responses to September 11 entitled "After September 11: Nile Blues," for the Guardian. Soueif's fiction demonstrates her familiarity with the European novelistic tradition. For example, in her first book of short stories, Aisha, the protagonist cites heroines such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Dorothea Brooke as central figures in her childhood. Soueif's Western literary influences, as well as her decision to write in English rather than in Arabic, have placed her in a difficult but not uncommon position for diasporic writers. For example, Mona Fayad notes "the inevitable hybridity of cultural practices" for Arab writers who work in the European languages of their colonizers ("Reinscribing Identity"). In her discussion of the Algerian novelist and filmmaker Assia Djebar's novel L'Amour, la fantasia [Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1985], Fayad describes Djebar in similar terms to Soueif as an intermediary between Arabic speakers and French historical records, as well as between a masculinist national history and one that acknowledges the role of Algerian women in the independence movement. However, Soueif's status as the only major Egyptian-born novelist writing in English underscores her singular position as a translator between cultures and languages, a difficult position both politically and aesthetically. Soueif's status as an Egyptian writer is by no means a given in Egyptian literary circles. At an annual women's conference in Cairo (the 2002 topic was "Women and Creativity") sponsored by the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture, Amina Elbendary describes how "a heated debate threatened to arise between [Sabry] Hafez [chair of the roundtable on Arab women's writing in the West] and several participants when the chair argued that Ahdaf Soueif's novels were not part of contemporary Arab literature but of English literature, since the Anglophone Egyptian novelist writes in English" (Elbendary, "Gathering One More Time").

[9] Soueif's skillful interweaving of detailed historical research with fiction in The Map of Love has led critics like Amin Malak to describe the novel as "a tour de force of revisionist metahistory of Egypt in the twentieth century" (141). Important historical persons figure as characters in the novel, including the progressive imam Muhammad 'Abdu, who is Sharif's best friend, the popular poet Hafiz Ibrahim, and the famous women's rights advocate Qasim Amin, author of the controversial book The Liberation of Women, who argues his case in the novel at a gathering of prominent Egyptian intellectuals at Sharif's house. I should note here that Amin himself has come to represent a historical discourse on feminism that often celebrates male intellectuals at the expense of their female contemporaries. As Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke point out, Arab women like the Syrian writer Hind Nawfal and the Lebanese writer Zainab Fawwaz "had been writing 'feminist' or gender liberationist poems, essays, tales, and stories before the distinguished male judge had put pen to paper to write his famous book" (Badran and Cooke, xvii, xxxvii). In the present day, as Malak has noted, Omar bears a striking resemblance to Edward Said. Like Said, he writes books on the Palestinian situation and instead of "Professor Terror," Omar is labeled the "Kalashnikov Conductor" and the "Molotov Maestro" (Soueif, Map, 17). The titles of Omar's books, "The Politics of Culture 1992, A State of Terror 1994, Borders and Refuge 1996" (21), pay tribute to Said's political and scholarly concerns (Malak, 155). These are simply a few of many resemblances Omar bears to Said. Like Said, Omar also resigns from the Palestine National Council in protest over the Oslo provisions (Judt, "The Rootless Cosmopolitan"). In addition, though not a professional conductor like Omar, Said was an accomplished pianist and close friend of the

Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim. The two organized a series of controversial collaborative concerts in Jerusalem and Birzeit involving Palestinian and Israeli musicians, which are echoed by Omar's concert in the West Bank in Soueif's novel (Tamari, "No Ordinary Concert"). The sheer density of the historical material in the novel demonstrates Soueif's awareness of the critical work on orientalism and her interest in revisiting the geopolitical and temporal particularities of the era of British colonialism in Egypt.

[10] But the doubled historical narrative is not simply a convenient device through which two unconventional families stand allegorically for a "larger" political scene. Unlike the allegorical structure that Fredric Jameson identifies in his account of "third world literature," here the personal is not merely the political in the sense that sexual difference or other "personal" dramas provide the symbolic language for "larger" political questions. Such a framework cannot account for the complex ways in which heterosexual romance, family dynamics, and so-called personal issues are constituted by individuals interpellated by nationalist, religious, and other discourses and just as importantly how the personal is essential to the workings of constructs such as the nation-state. Ann Stoler echoes my own skepticism about models in which the personal functions merely as an allegorical stand-in for politics. In laying out the framework for her historical study of constructions of the intimate in colonial politics, Stoler argues:

I pursue these connections between the broad-scale dynamics of colonial rule and the intimate sites of their implementation not because the latter are good illustrations of this wider field or because they provide touching examples of, or convenient metaphors for, colonial power writ large. Rather, it is because domains of the intimate figured so prominently in the perceptions and politics of those who ruled. These are the locations that allow us to identify what Foucault might have called the microphysics of colonial rule. In them I locate the affective grid of colonial politics. (7)

Soueif's complex narrative structure explores the linkages between sexual politics and national and international politics, both under the colonial conditions that are the subject of Stoler's study and after fifty years of postcolonial statehood, without subsuming the familial/domestic narrative into the national as allegory like earlier critical work such as Jameson's.

[11] But Soueif's is an imaginative exercise: she is in no way attempting to depict a typical set of intimate relationships, as Anna and Layla's friendship would have been unlikely. In contrast to British India, where white women were brought in large numbers to shore up racial hierarchies officials worried had been undermined by soldiers' relationships with local women, there were relatively few European women in Egypt in the early twentieth century (Stoler, 79-111). As a result, rather than functioning as literal bodies to be protected from the threat of the sexual advances of men of color as they had in India (Sharpe, 128), in Egypt white women served mainly as a symbol of the freedoms enjoyed by the West but denied to Muslim women by a supposedly monolithic and oppressive Muslim 'culture.' Of course, as is usually the case, this rhetoric was laden with hypocrisy. For example, Lord Cromer, the infamously unpopular British consul general in Egypt in the early twentieth century, eagerly deployed this rhetoric about Western women's freedoms even as he cut funding to already existing girls' schools in Egypt and was a member of the vehemently antifeminist Men's League for Opposing Women's Suffrage back home (L. Ahmed, 153). Rather than mapping the actual historical "affective grid" of colonial politics, then, Soueif's transnational romance

instead offers a fantasy of an affective grid of anticolonial politics, transforming the historical record to meet the needs of her own artistic and political projects. In other words, the intimate relationships in Soueif's novel are an imaginative attempt to will into being the coalitions necessary for the current political impasse at a moment when their absence in the "real" world seems truly dire. This imagined progressive transnational community, while set up by conventions of romance, quickly disrupts both the obsessive heterosexuality and the nationalism associated with the genre.

[12] At first glance, The Map of Love's heterosexual romance does seem to have much in common with the national romance. Soueif's hero, Sharif, like the national romance's typical hero, is "unerringly noble, by birth and talent" (Sommer, 49). Moreover, Anna and Sharif exhibit a startling lack of personal conflict in their relationship, given their differences in culture and language. This "lack of personal antagonism or intimate arguments between lovers," Sommer argues, is key to the national romance (49). Because the lovers function to model the ease of national coalition, all conflicts must stem from external sources. Thus, from the moment Anna arrives in Egypt, she easily rejects the colonialist stereotypes about Egyptians held by other members of the British community in Egypt. She shows no fear when she is kidnapped by Sharif's nephews or when she first meets Sharif. In fact, he later teases her for her failure to buy into orientalist fantasy: "Weren't you afraid of me? The wicked Pasha who would lock you up in his harem and do terrible things to you?" Anna merely responds, "What terrible things?" (Soueif, Map, 153). For his part, Sharif completely dissociates Anna from the British colonial violence that he is actively involved in fighting and even comforts her after the gruesome Denshwai incident in 1906, when Egyptian resistance to British soldiers leads to the deaths of several villagers and widespread anti-British sentiment (Fisher, 342, 350-53; J. M. Ahmed, 62-63).

[13] While in the national romance, idealized love is threatened by the same forces that undermine national unity to strengthen the reader's desire for romantic and national unity, Soueif's evocation of the colonial romance tradition necessarily complicates the nationalist equation. Sharif's relationship with Anna cannot function simply as a tale about national unions, because Anna's position as imperial white woman makes her an icon of the very forces that undermine national unity. Moreover, the forces that threaten their romance involve public ambivalence about the potential neocolonialism of their union. Unlike the national romance's use of eros to bolster nationalism, here the romance's dual aims find themselves at odds because of the complex network of national and transnational concerns about their partnership.

[14] For Soueif's novel is not simply about national institutions, but about the corruption of a nationalism bolstered by imperial and neocolonial economic interests. Egyptian nationalism here is engaged with a variety of transnational forces, in particular the volatile political and economic nexus of Israel, Palestine, and the United States. For example, in the contemporary narrative, Tareq 'Atiyya, Amal's old friend and potential love interest, is considering bringing in Israeli agricultural firms to modernize farming methods on his lands in Minya near Amal's ancestral property, land on which the now "emancipated" fellaheen scrape by as small farmers (Soueif, Map, 202). Low-wage Egyptian agricultural workers are no match for Israeli agribusiness, which is part of a powerful regional economy backed by American military muscle. These contemporary neocolonial economic conditions exacerbate fissures in national politics regarding the right path for Egypt, just as the presence of the British disrupted precarious nationalist coalitions in the early twentieth century. In a letter to England in the earlier narrative, Anna explains that, in addition to heated disagreements between those

advocating immediate withdrawal of the British and those proposing a gradual dismantling of British rule, there are a host of

other divisions: People who would have tolerated the establishment of secular education, or the gradual disappearance of the veil, now fight these developments because they feel a need to hold on to their traditional values in the face of the Occupation. While the people who continue to support these changes have constantly to fight the suspicion that they are somehow in league with the British. (384)

Part of the novel's point in juxtaposing early-twentieth-century British imperial rule with the corrupt Mubarak regime is to underscore the untenable position in which Egyptian activist intellectuals find themselves: caught between ineffective and increasingly reactionary nationalist movements and the devastating interventions of wealthy Western powers.

[15] Echoing Anna's frustration, Omar in the present day speaks despairingly of the Palestinian situation, dismissing Arafat's methods as "containment" (356). He rejects Arafat's agenda, arguing that "he uses torture and bone-breaking just as much as the Israelis" (356). But Omar cannot see Hamas as a viable alternative, even though they have the most credibility among Palestinians. "They're intelligent," he tells his sister. "They're committed. They certainly have a case. But one cannot approve of fundamentalists--of whatever persuasion" (357). Here, the need for national unity may be the same as in the national romance, but Omar's relationship with the American Isabel cannot unify national factions any more than Sharif's marriage to Anna. The fragmentation wrought by colonialism and neocolonial globalization is not mended in Soueif's novel by romance. Omar's rejection of Hamas and the implication that he is later assassinated for his views only underscores the gulf between alienated Leftist intellectuals and religious fundamentalists in the contemporary Middle East. Likewise, in the earlier narrative, Sharif and Anna are perpetual outsiders. Anna's marriage ensures that she will never be at home anywhere, and Sharif's murder testifies to his inability to maintain the nationalist coalition he painstakingly sought to build. It is never clear who has assassinated Sharif, because, as with Omar, there are so many groups who would be happy to see him eliminated.

[16] The violence and frustration caused by the fragmentations of colonialism and government repression, as the novel tells us, seem to lead "either to fanatical actions or to despair" (472). Omar's sister Amal's decision to move to her ancestral home in upper Egypt is a product of this tension between political commitment and despair. As she thinks near the end of the novel, the political obstacles in Cairo seem overwhelming and insurmountable. At least in her village she can see the concrete impact of her attempt to improve others' lives by fighting for the release of fellaheen jailed by the government and keeping open a school that will educate their wives and children. All of the characters in the novel face the conflict between a potentially happy private life and a political situation in which change appears doubtful.

[17] Political forces like colonialism cannot truly be external to the private sphere, because, as Stoler reminds us, they are mutually constitutive. Nevertheless, the romantic relationships in the novel attempt to evade in the private sphere the irresolvable conflicts playing out in the public sphere. In the early-twentieth-century romance, Anna's rejection of colonial ideology and Sharif's ability to separate Anna the person from the actions of other British in Egypt carve out a space for them apart from social forces. This arrangement is inherently precarious,

and both know it. Sharif's life mission is nationalist politics, and Anna becomes an active supporter of this cause, translating his articles for the British press and working for an Egyptian women's magazine and the newly founded art institute in Cairo. The tapestry she finishes weaving right before her husband's death is meant to be her "contribution to the Egyptian renaissance" (403). Though they are romantically and politically committed to one another, they both pay a high price for Sharif's alliance with his well-meaning English wife.

[18] In fact, Anna's entry into the relationship seems possible only because she is completely alone. Her parents have died, she has no other family, and she has traveled to Egypt in the first place to come to terms with her husband's death after his participation in the British military campaign in Sudan. Anna's orphan status does not escape Sharif's mother, who warns him that

you will be everything to her. If you make her unhappy, who will she go to? No mother, no sister, no friend. Nobody. It means if she angers you, you forgive her. If she crosses you, you make it up with her. And whatever the English do, you will never burden her with the guilt of her country. She will be not only your wife and the mother of your children--insha' Allah--but she will be your guest and a stranger under your protection and if you are unjust to her God will never forgive you. (281)

In a moment of feminist solidarity later echoed by her daughter, Layla, Sharif's mother notes the difficulty of Anna's situation. Keenly aware of Anna's isolation, Sharif makes Anna promise that she and their daughter will leave the country and return home should he die before her (459), arguing that he does not want his daughter, Nur, to have to struggle like they have. For Anna, Sharif's assassination, partly attributable to their marriage, is a blunt reminder that she essentially remains an outsider in Egypt. She leaves Egypt as promised, losing her only remaining family in the process. As the disastrous ending of Anna and Sharif's marriage makes clear, the romance here cannot unite the nation and refuses to justify colonialism; instead, it serves to highlight the unattainable ideal of a transnational partnership of open-minded intellectuals committed to a new political dispensation.

Friendship, Art, and the Turn to Activism

[19] While this partnership proves unsustainable via heterosexual romance, it does in fact take shape through the intense relationships between the different women. The men, while noble, are frequently absent and ultimately doomed to death, leaving the women to make sense of the past and construct genealogies of resistance to serve them in the present. The earliest of these friendships, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century friendship between Anna and Layla, is perhaps the least developed in the book. The two women meet when Anna is kidnapped by Layla's relatives, who want to use the ransom of a British man to gain Layla's husband's release from jail. When they discover that they have in fact kidnapped a woman in men's clothing, the men are at a loss and deliver Anna to Layla's brother's house. Under these unlikely circumstances, while they all wait for Sharif to return and decide how to resolve this potentially explosive problem, Layla and Anna become instant friends, speaking in French, their only shared language. Layla immediately recognizes herself in Anna's attempt to know Egypt, having herself been a frustrated stranger in France:

It was a pity Anna was going away tomorrow; she could imagine so many things they could do together, so many things she could show her, this woman who had come across Europe and the Mediterranean

Sea to find Egypt, and who had confided yesterday that she felt it had eluded her, that she had touched nothing at all. Layla understood what she meant, for what would she have known of France had she not been befriended by Juliette Clemenceau? (149-50)

Layla's reference to her French native informant hints at a cross-cultural genealogy of women extending their friendship to strangers that is carried forward into the contemporary narrative.

[20] If Layla and Anna's friendship is for the most part relegated to the backdrop of the tragic romance between Sharif and Anna, Amal and Isabel, Layla and Anna's present-day descendents, completely displace the romance narrative between Isabel and Omar. As readers, we know that Isabel is in love with Amal's brother, but he is barely present in the book and presumed dead by its end. Instead, it is Amal and Isabel's relationship that unfolds, and there is no sense that Isabel, an orphan like Anna, will return to the U.S. after Omar's death. While the colonial romance narrative of Sharif and Anna's era seems inextricable from the framework of the heterosexual romance, the unconventional family composed of Amal, Isabel, and Isabel and Omar's newborn son, Sharif, becomes at the end of the novel a model for personal and political survival out of the failure of romance. Isabel has lost Omar to political violence. Amal has returned to Egypt after "twenty-odd years" (38) living in Britain with her (British?) husband and children. She misses her sons terribly and thrills at baby Sharif's arrival in her family.

[21] Amal's new family echoes and resignifies the tapestry that Anna wove a hundred years before to represent her own transnational union. After her marriage, Anna had produced a three-paneled tapestry of the Goddess Isis, her husband/brother Osiris, and their baby son Horus, with the Qur'anic verse "He brings forth the living from the dead" stretching across all three panels. Uniting Pharonic iconography with Islamic text in a composition inflected by her own tradition of Christian hagiography, Anna's artwork commented on the complexity of the modern Egypt her husband's nationalist movement was willing into being. After Sharif's death, a family servant had divided up the tapestry, giving the panel with Osiris to Anna and the one with Isis to Amal's father. The panel of the baby Horus was lost, but magically reappears in Isabel's bag at the end of the novel after her son's birth. The tapestry's trinity of the nuclear family gets mapped onto the contemporary trinity of Amal, Isabel, and baby Sharif. Similarly, when Amal and Isabel travel back to Cairo from Tawasi, they stop along the roadside to let the car cool down. To shade the baby from the sun, they use the family's old flag of national unity, a symbol of Muslim-Christian coalition against the British that had been wielded in women's street protests in the early twentieth century. Amal describes the scene: "I rooted in the car and found the flag and we pushed three sticks into the earth and spread the flag over them, and the baby lay on the rug with his mother on one side of him and me on the other and above his head the green and white flag of national unity" (481). Here, as in Anna's tapestry, a national symbol is reconfigured by an atypical transnational family.

[22] But why does this friendship and its resulting family so dominate the contemporary narrative in the novel, while the only developed romance in a self-proclaimed love story is confined to the past? I argue that it is because the novel is first and foremost a romance with the past. To make sense of the book's reconfiguration of the romance, then, we must consider the relationship between Amal and Anna as the most important one in the book. From the beginning, Amal's identification with Anna proves central to Amal's political rebirth by allowing her to meditate upon the political potential of art under repressive conditions and as a vehicle for understanding coalition in not only spatial but temporal terms. On the first page of the novel, Amal describes her intense response to Anna's story: "Across a hundred years

the woman's voice speaks to her--so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer.... She reads and lets Anna's words flow into her, probing gently at dreams and hopes and sorrows she had sorted out, labeled and put away" (4). Telling Anna's story provides Amal with a political genealogy; she falls in love with national heroes such as her grandfather, Sharif, through Anna's descriptions and identifies with their struggle to stay committed to their political fight in hopeless times that mirror the present. Writing Anna's story absorbs Amal to the point that she loses sense of where and when she is:

Looking up from Anna's journal I am, for a moment, surprised to find myself in my own bedroom.... I had been so utterly in that scene.... My heart had beaten in time with Anna's, my lips had wanted her lover's kiss. I shake myself free and ... bring myself back to the present. Who else has read this journal? And when they read it, did they too feel that it spoke to them? For the sense of Anna speaking to me--writing it down for me--is so powerful that I find myself speaking to her in my head. At night, in my dreams, I sit with her and we speak as friends and sisters. (306)

Although Soueif seems largely concerned in the novel to highlight the political potential of the romance, here she calls less attention to it than to the commonly understood delights of the genre. Framed by the bedroom setting, she provides us the vicarious thrill of the hero's kiss. Moreover, the description of Amal's absorption in Anna's journal mirrors precisely the experience of what reading a romance should be like: losing oneself in the past as evasion of the present. Yet, even by the end of this passage, we have shifted from Anna as a point of access to the male lover to Anna herself as the prize. Why is Amal so absorbed by the life of this early-twentieth-century white woman? And is the lure of Anna's story about a desire to engage with the lessons of the past for the present, or is the real desire to retreat from the present altogether, as her grandfather Sharif had ironically decided to do the day he was murdered? Tellingly, after a painful political discussion with other Cairo intellectuals at the Atelier hotel, Amal longs to return to her Anna project: "That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-glass, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you--unchanged.... And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part" (234). Overwhelmed by the current political moment, Amal turns to history. However, though she initially seems to lose herself in the past, her translation of Anna's past into her present does not lead her away from politics as much as provide her with a way back into it.

[23] As a sort of modern-day Scheherazade figure, Amal stakes her politics on the artist's ability to translate experience between cultures and across times (Darraj, 102, 106; Hassan). Her primary identification with Anna makes sense in this context, because Anna is the other true artist figure in the book, a woman who came to Egypt because she was inspired by a painting. Like Isabel, who asks Amal, "If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?" (468), Amal reaches back to Anna as a model for how to translate between East and West in a moment of profound political crisis in the Middle East. Anna's changing understanding of art shadows Amal's own artistic crisis. Whereas Anna begins her artistic work as a painter, she switches to weaving at the same time that she begins to work more consistently as her husband's translator for the British press, a shift that signals a change in her thinking about both politics and art. In a letter to a friend, Anna describes her newfound preference for weaving over painting and writing:

I have quite taken to it. I find that when I work at it I am still a part of everything that surrounds me. It is not like reading or

writing, when you are necessarily cut off from everything so that you may not hear when you are spoken to--indeed you may look up and be surprised to find yourself where you are, so transported were you by what is on the page. When I work at the loom I am still part of things and it seems as if the sounds and the smells and the people coming and going all somehow get into the weave. I can see you thinking 'Ah! Anna is getting metaphysical', but I am really most practical.... And then there is the pleasure of using the object you make--oh, I forget myself and preach.... But truly, I believe that my sitting at the loom in his courtyard has brought some pleasure to old Baroudi Bey. (385)

Although Anna's writing is decidedly public in that it will reach major newspapers in Britain and Europe, it disengages her from her own immediate family and Egyptian cultural context in a way that weaving does not. Anna's turn to weaving functions as a shorthand for an idea of art as both aesthetically beautiful and socially engaged--as she points out, her tapestry not only allows her to maintain a sense of her surroundings, it can even be used. Significantly, it also produces the first signs of life in her father-in-law, who has been completely withdrawn since his participation in Urabi's failed revolt against the British-controlled army decades before. While he was not exiled like Urabi (Fisher, 341), Anna's father-in-law has in essence exiled himself from his nation and family since his political ordeal. That Anna's weaving integrates this once-political figure back into the social world underscores the potential of art (especially historically feminized art forms) for sustaining those involved in exhausting political struggles.

[24] Amal, who works as a translator of novels, has been a writer in just the sense that Anna describes, absorbed in her solitary task to the point that she loses her connection to the outside world. Amal contrasts this privacy of writing with the public nature of her brother's music conducting, which involves putting on concerts in Palestine and the ruins of a bombed out building in Sarajevo. Amal argues that "for her it has been different. She has not had a public life. She has concentrated on the boys, and she has translated novels--or done her best to translate them. It is so difficult to truly translate from one language into another, from one culture into another; almost impossible really" (515). Yet she refuses to abandon this difficult task, in spite of her fatigue and despair. Revitalized by translating Anna's struggle, Amal tells us that she has "made up her mind. When Anna's story is finished she will close down her flat and move to Tawasi. Not for ever, but for a while. If she has any responsibility now, it is to her land and to the people on it" (297). Appalled at the jailing of innocent villagers by the police in Tawasi on charges of terrorism, a reenactment of the humiliating and unjust actions of the British at Denshwai, but this time by her own corrupt government, Amal demands "Whose country is it?" She throws in her lot with the fellaheen, vowing to protect the people in her village from further brutality and to write about their lives. Aware that she cannot single-handedly stop the corruption and despair that leads young men to violence, she decides that "she can learn the land and tell its stories" (298). Inspired by characters from her past, Amal's relationship to writing transforms over the course of the novel from private occupation to political mission.

25] Renewing her commitment to translate not just novels but the stories of the fellaheen entails rejecting the political despair she had experienced in earlier conversations with the disenfranchised Egyptian intelligentsia. Asked about the role of the intellectual in voicing the people's concerns, a friend had responded, "We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit at the Atelier or the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people. The people don't know we exist" (224). This

rehearsal of the fraught relationship between the native intellectual and the subaltern prompts Amal to reconceive her artistic identity to speak to new audiences. Mona Fayad claims that the retrieval of communal history through women's oral narratives functions as an essential component of re-reading history in Arab women's writing (Fayad, "Reinscribing Identity"), and Amal's decision at the end of the novel to move to the countryside and transcribe the villager's oral narratives follows the pattern Fayad describes. While I suspect that Spivak might have her suspicions about the ease of Amal's new cross-class identification with the fellaheen, her recent argument that the intellectual must "learn to listen" to the subaltern resonates with Amal's new role as chronicler of her villagers' stories (Spivak, "Keynote Address"). Thus, though I do not want to excuse the book's aristocratic leanings, which pose a serious limitation for the book's political vision (and merit a longer discussion than I can give here), I do think the novel's understanding of coalition in more flexible and unstable geographical, temporal, and aesthetic terms is worth investigating.

[26] Through her dedication to oral narratives as well as her relationship with Isabel, Amal in effect renews her dedication to the plea her grandfather, Sharif, had articulated in his final essay: "Our only hope now--and it is a small one--lies in a unity of conscience between the people of the world for whom this phrase itself would carry any meaning. It is difficult to see the means by which such a unity can be effected. But it is in its support that these words are written" (481). Amal works to build this difficult unity of conscience through her art and her new family. Since she has decided that art is her new means of enacting social change, it is not surprising that her support network for her new political commitment is in effect a colony of artists. Amal works as a translator and storyteller, and Isabel is an aspiring filmmaker as well as a savvy web designer, setting up a home page for Omar so that people all over the world can access not only his music but his writing and links to other political news sites (481).

[27] Amal's imaginative reconstruction of a genealogy of the political possibilities of art allows us to read Amal's primary identification with Anna as another woman living in between, produced by multiple, and at times antagonistic, aesthetic and political traditions, including colonialism, nationalism, and romance. Just as Amal reads Anna through the lens of European characters such as Anna Karenina and Dorothea Brooke, Anna's Western training in painting and epistolary writing leads her to the Egyptian artistic renaissance and the anticolonial movement. In this sense we can see The Map of Love as a hybrid subject's meditation on the subtlety and complexity of identity, drawing cultural genealogies across borders and genres even as she attempts to find her place in local politics as a transnational subject. The romance provides her with an opportunity to resurrect a new Egyptian hero out of orientalist schlock, and her romance with the past through Anna points her toward a renewed sense of a transnational political community even as it problematizes the idea that anyone can ever truly know anyone else.

[28] The complex interplay among national, international, and sexual politics in the novel raises the question: What political possibilities does reworking the colonial romance genre open up, and what possibilities does it foreclose? Soueif's self-conscious deconstruction of the genre's codes, in particular her transformation of the destructive woman, produces a nuanced transnational engagement with the relationship between art and political activism. That it ends with women artists is perhaps itself an argument about the failures of nationalism for those not defined as its ideal citizens. As the novel seems to conclude, what would be the use of dedicating all of one's energy to electoral politics when the very framework of nationalism writes women out of the political picture? These women find a different space for themselves

to engage with politics by turning to representations grounded in particular political coalitions. Amal represents her turn toward storytelling as emphatically not a turn away from political engagement, moving to her chosen site of political struggle to begin her artistic work and to nurture her new family. Amal's genealogical project signals her need to imagine models for continued political struggle, because, as she demonstrates, we need representations to inspire us, even if the ideals they represent are unattainable. Souief's interest in the possibilities of representation, in particular her transformation of politically maligned genres such as the romance, points toward the potential for destabilizing the gender, class, and race formations associated with particular narratives of both art and politics without offering any easy formulation of representation as politics (Loomba, 243-44). Her experiment with the romance raises the question of whether its utopianism and nostalgia, so closely associated with reactionary politics, might in fact be put toward more subversive ends.

Staging Encounters: Soueif and Her Critics

[29] One of the most fascinating aspects of Soueif's novel is that she in effect stages how Western readers should read it. The novel itself dramatizes several acts of reading in which the reader acknowledges the limitations of her ability to truly grasp what she is reading. For instance, this is Amal's approach to Anna's letters and journals, which are themselves attempts to read Anna's new surroundings. By presenting Anna's growing horror at her own implication in the British imperial project, as well as the ongoing thematic of how women's history gets passed down through ephemeral and frequently neglected art forms such as journals, letters, and tapestries, Soueif not only challenges the erasure of women from the historical and artistic record but also presents an alternative ethics for approaching narratives about others. In other words, Soueif presents her own overt challenge to a model of contact as "the clash of civilizations" (Huntington) through a feminized narrative mode that highlights precisely the masculinist underpinnings of that antagonistic political model. The romance provides a useful vehicle for staging this drama about reading and knowing, because it is all about the consuming desire for access to another. However, the characters themselves seem completely aware that they are not following the script and, as I discuss above, even comment at times on what would have happened at a particular moment if this had been a "real" romance.

[30] This performative element of the novel has not always registered with critics. Part of what first interested me in Soueif's novel was the discussion around why it would not (or should not) win the Booker Prize in 1999. Interestingly, it was voted the "best read" by the Booker Prize committee, while the prize went to Coetzee's Disgrace instead (McEwan, "The Map of Love"). Responses to the novel varied widely, but one common thread ran through nearly all of the critical responses: a profound unease with the novel's combination of romance and politics. For critics, the genres of the romance and the political novel functioned as two mutually exclusive and irreconcilable traditions, and their reviews thus tended either to valorize the novel's political content and criticize its formulaic romance or to celebrate the romance as an escape from the realities of the book's political commentary and an indulgence in the guilty pleasures of mass-market fiction. For example, Library Journal's Ann H. Fisher concludes that the novel is "recommended as something a little different where historical romances are popular" (98-100), while Gabriele Annan writes in the London Review of Books that Soueif's "combination of seriousness and romance doesn't quite work at the highest level of fiction" (28). Soueif's book was in effect doubly damned. Because it adopted conventions of the romance, critics argued that it was not artistically strong enough to merit the Booker Prize. On the other hand, its stringent critique of Israel's regional role in Middle Eastern politics caused some critics to argue that the book was too radical politically and

could not win the award because it would offend Jewish readers. Thus, Asim Hamdan argues in Arab View that "the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif was the most deserving among the final list of the writers [nominated for the Booker Prize]" but concludes that the main reason she was ultimately denied the prize was her vocal pro-Palestinian stance ("Zionist Denies").

[31] Soueif's use of romance proved particularly difficult for critics to stomach, and I think there are some important reasons for this. First, Western readerships have been trained to expect the "political novel" from postcolonial writers, in part because they are encouraged to read novels about the rest of the world as transparent historical documents rather than aesthetic experiments of any kind. Simon Gikandi, writing about Western readers of African literature, reiterates the danger of this assumption that literature is "a mere reproduction of reality, and language a tabula rasa that expresses a one-to-one correspondence between words and things" (Gikandi, 149). Soueif's partial satisfaction of this expectation made for an ambivalent reception: the novel includes the kinds of historical and political discussions considered appropriate for postcolonial fiction, but the romance's theatricality and overt artifice call into question the transparent factuality of the rest of the novel. Another key element here is of course the historically gendered divide between mass-market women's (genre) fiction (often romance fiction in some form) and 'literature' that has operated both in the academic canon and in the literary marketplace. Publishers are very savvy about packaging texts to appeal to the demographics they think are most likely to buy them. Soueif's novel was marketed, particularly in the U.S., as the perfect women's reading group book, and the Anchor web site provided a list of discussion questions to facilitate its use in such groups.

32] The combination of the political expectations for postcolonial writers and the historically gendered value system used to distinguish literature from women's fiction in the West helps explain the sharply divergent evaluations of Soueif's literary merits. But what do we gain from paying such close attention to the story of this particular novel? What concerns me about Soueif's case is not simply that a book that was considered good by some critics, but bad by others, might fail to enter the literary canon. Instead, I am hoping that my discussion of Soueif's redeployment of romance demonstrates the ways in which loaded conventions about literary genre and taste in the West, as well as the global market forces that cater to them, might prevent scholars from engaging with complex and experimental Anglophone texts by women that fail to meet their expectations. If the problem is not as much about Soueif's text as the tools with which scholars are able to approach it, then literary studies needs to develop new methodologies for exploring the interplay among global literary traditions, readerships, and markets.

WORKS CITED

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Annan, Gabriele. "The Map of Love." London Review of Books 21.14 (15 July 1999): 28.

Badran, Margot and Miriam Cooke, eds. Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing. 2d Ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje. Oxford and New York: Clarendon, 2000.

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Fisher, Ann H. "Soueif, Ahdaf. The Map of Love." Library Journal. 15 Nov. 2000: 98-100.

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--. Aisha. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.

--. In the Eye of the Sun. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.

--. The Map of Love. New York: Anchor Books, 1999.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Keynote Address." The SubalternPopular Conference. Santa Barbara, CA. 8 Mar. 2004.

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Strobel, Margaret. "Gender and Race in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire." Becoming Visible: Women in European History. Ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 375-96.

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Contributor's Note:

EMILY S. DAVIS is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship in English at the University of Nevada, Reno, before beginning a position as assistant professor of World Literatures at the University of Delaware. Her article "The Intimacies of Globalization: Bodies and Borders On-Screen" appeared in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies in 2006. Her research interests include Anglophone postcolonial literatures; globalization, immigration, and diaspora; feminist theory; transnational reception and circulation; genre fiction; and film.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Genders COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

Article ExcerptWriting in The Guardian in September 1999, Andrew Marr was shocked that "the superstars of contemporary English literature aren't English, and haven't been for years." He refers to the finalists for that year's Booker Prize, which included--among South Asian, Irish, and Scottish writers--the Egyptian-English author of The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif. Marr goes on to say that "the English, who virtually created the novel, are now being ventriloquised by others." The literary crisis he outlines is one that has been sounded before, especially as England sees writers from parts of the globe it formerly colonized (Egypt, India, Ireland, and elsewhere) now seemingly monopolize the cultural scene with their own particular, postcolonial brand of English.

These writers move between two worlds, infusing their Anglophone novels with the essence of their native languages and cultures. Ahdaf Soueif is a case in point: the Egyptian national spent many years of her childhood in England, and then returned for her PhD in linguistics. Her marriage to an Egyptian ended, and she later married English poet Ian Hamilton (from whom she eventually separated). She has been described as a "hybrid" writer, a tense and sometimes intellectually painful role to play; however, it is a suitable adjective: she blends Arabic rhythms and idioms into English; she writes regularly for England's The Guardianas well as for Egypt's prestigious newspaper, Al-Ahram; her two sons from Hamilton have combination Arab-English names, Omar Robbie and Ismail Ricki; she travels frequently between England and various parts of the Middle East. She writes in English because she feels more comfortable in it, but occasionally she gives readings in Arabic as if to satisfy those who think she has "forgotten" her roots (Wassef, "Unblushing Bourgeoisie"). Her lush style is described as exotic and foreign by her Western readers, while her sexual imagery and themes arouse the ire of some Egyptian readers who do not want to claim her as "one of their own."

Her literary corpus, usually described as consisting of "two short books" (the short story collections, Aisha and Sandpiper) and "two long books" (two novels, In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love), generally explores the misconceptions that exist in the spaces between East and West. Soueif is also a prolific essay writer and socio-political commentator, and has written discursive articles on themes ranging from the meaning of the veil in Islam to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her non-fiction shows her to be an astute and sensitive observer and chronicler of current world events and cultural, social, and political issues. Like her fiction, her non-fiction demonstrates that she both perceives herself and is perceived as an Englishwoman as much as an Egyptian one--the bane of the hybrid writer. For example, during a November 2001 trip to Egypt to document what ordinary Arabs thought of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Soueif seems to be among "her people" until she is asked by one Egyptian, "What does your chap think he's up to?" The comment is a reference to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, but the anecdote illustrates that, while Soueif is often regarded as a foreigner by the English, she is not received completely as an Egyptian in the land of her birth.

Is Soueif then an English writer or an Egyptian one? Is there room to be both in the current literary landscape? Despite being a culturally sandwiched artist, caught in the middle of an East-West face-off, she seems to have created a hybrid identity that, in turn, complements both her English and Egyptian roots. True to the meaning coined by Homi Bhabha, Ahdaf

Soueif's "hybrid" work is intensely post-colonial in nature. Bhabha describes hybridity as

The name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminating identities that secure the "pure" and original identity of authority).... It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of the power. (112)

Soueif subverts the colonizer/colonized hierarchy by presenting England a picture of its colonial past and postcolonial present, complete with all accompanying tensions, thus turning her Egyptian postcolonial gaze on England's eye of power. Her work gives the colonized a voice not only to be heard, but to influence the English/Arab literary landscape as she describes Arab women exposed to British culture and influence (and vice versa), who seek to find their own voices and take control of the narrative of their lives.

Marr's commentary on the Booker finalists raises an interesting question: Whose narrative is it anyway? The English invented the novel, but is it still English when it is written (and rewritten) so well by foreign Anglophone writers? Indeed, the notion of "narrative" is one of the overarching plot lines that encompasses the various themes of gender issues, orientalist cliches, postcolonial politics, and centuries-old tensions between East and West in Soueif's work. Her female characters have a tendency to attempt to express, control, or reclaim their narratives. "Narrative," insofar as I will use the term in this essay, means the articulation of one's hybridity achieved by overcoming the obstacles above. It is informed by both the famous and maligned legend of Scheherazade and by Fadwa Malti-Douglas' observation that

Woman's voice is more than a physiological faculty. It is the narrative instrument that permits her to be a literary medium, to vie with the male in the process of textual creation. To control the narrative process, however, is no small task. Shahrazad demonstrates to her literary cousins and descendants that an intimate relationship must be created between writing and the body. (5-6)

Many of Soueif's characters are pulled between the polar forces of East and West, but only achieve balance when they carve out a place for themselves in the midst of that cultural intersection.

THE SHORT BOOKS: AISHA AND SANDPIPER

Although they mine the same thematic ore as her epic-length novels, Soueif's short story collections are slim volumes. Published in 1983, Aisha is a collection of linked stories, all documenting the eponymous main character, a young Muslim Egyptian woman at different points in her life. (Aisha was also the name of the Prophet Muhammad's youngest and favorite wife, legendary for her intelligence, beauty and bravery; the very name of the character indicates that the Western reader will not meet a stereotypically veiled and meek Muslim female, but a vibrant and energetic one.) Offering small episodes from Aisha's youth, Soueif explores issues of gender, sexuality, and East-West tensions and misunderstandings.

In the story entitled "1964," Aisha is a young schoolgirl whose father has brought his family to England on a grant. Aisha planned to stay at borne to study for her Egyptian school certificate exams, but her parents believe that her time will be spent more productively in an English school. Aisha looks forward to attending an English school: "I had always been happy

at my school in Cairo and bad no misgivings about this one. Besides, schools in books like The Girls' Annual all seemed jolly good fun" (29). Aisha, of course, perceives the school-life of English children through superficial media images--she has no doubts that she will be accepted within the circles of English schoolchildren because, after all, "I had the manners of a fledgling Westernised bourgeois intellectual" (27). She speaks the English language well and she and her upper-middle-class Cairo family are "Western" in their taste in clothes, politics, and lifestyle.

However, Aisha should expect to be treated differently, based on a previous, upsetting experience in which the local Vicar's children befriended her only in the hopes of converting her from Islam to Christianity. As the parishioners congregate in the church hall, Aisha observes, "Everybody was large and pale with straight light brown hair and tweeds. I felt excessively small and dark and was agonizingly conscious of my alien appearance, and particularly my alien hair, as I waited to be sought out and guided into the love of Jesus Christ" (27). The betrayal of the Vicar's children is her first introduction to English uneasiness about Indian and Arab immigration and an illustration of the "missionary orientalism" that was such a forceful aspect of imperialism. The notion that Muslims, or Mohammedans, needed reformation through the light of Christianity reinforced the popular Western notion, described by Edward Said in his seminal Orientalism, that the Arabs were backwards, pagan, and uncivilized. Soueif's choice to make Aisha's first "lesson" in English attitudes towards the East a confrontation with a persisting missionary orientalism recalls the tensions between colonizer and colonized.

School, she hopes, will be different and fun, even though it is an all-girls' school. Aisha wants to do nothing that will set her apart from the other English girls, even participating in school assemblies rather than excusing herself on grounds of being a "Mohammaden." Her first encounter with an English classmate, however, reveals just how difficult it will be to blend in. Susan, a slight girl with freckles and red hair, asks her about Egyptian life: "D'you go to school on a camel? ... D'you live in a tent? ... How many wives does your father have? ... Well, d'you have bags of money?" (30-31). Aisha finds all her attempts to answer questions seriously thwarted by Susan's constant interruptions, each question more ridiculous than the last. Aisha's attempt to articulate her narrative is thwarted by the pervasiveness of orientalist cliches. For example, Susan and the other girls are especially interested in knowing if Aisha has a boyfriend and lose interest in her when she cannot produce stories of holding hands and sitting on a boy's knee. Not sufficiently "oriental" for them, she cannot live up to the exotic, sexualized stereotype with which they are familiar: the oversexed odalisques and the other harem girls, waiting behind veils for their husband, locked up in a paradise-like prison under the guard of eunuchs.

To escape the cold circles of the English schoolgirl atmosphere, Aisha finds a secret place in the library, where she spends her free time reading Wuthering Heights and other classics. In effect, she explores other narratives, whether literary or musical. She saves enough money to afford a cup of milky tea (which she never drinks) and three songs on the corner cafe's gleaming juke box: "The Beatles, the Stones, the Animals, Peter and Gordon, Cilla Black, the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Dave Clark Five. I played them all. And for the duration of three songs I was happy and brilliantly alive" (35). She is ah Egyptian-looking girl with an English literary and musical soul, a Muslim girl who wants very badly to be a "rocker"--a thoroughly hybridized creature.

THE LONG BOOKS: IN THE EYE OF THE SUN AND THE MAP OF LOVE

The theme of reclaiming one's narrative pervades In the Eye of the Sun, Soueif's first novel, which details the "coming of age" of Asya Ulama, a young, upper-class Egyptian woman who studies for a doctorate in England, marries a Westernized Egyptian husband, and becomes embroiled in an affair with an uncouth and possessive American. Steeped in sexual politics (indeed, it was banned in Egypt for its "lewd" descriptions), Ahdaf Soueif's novel navigates East-West tensions by condemning the Western stereotype of Arab women with an Arab woman who must shed the burdensome skins of both England and Egypt and create her own identity. Asya inherits the strong voice of the Arab heroine and becomes a refreshingly non-orientalist "literary cousin" of Scheherazade, as described by Malti-Douglas.

Asya struggles between being the subject of her story (as told by someone else, primarily the patriarchal forces and the equally powerful Western forces in the novel) and telling her story herself, of being the narrator (which requires a triumph over the stereotype of the sexual, but silenced, Arab woman). By the end, Asya understands that the integrity of her narrative is threatened not only by orientalism, but also by gender inequities within both Western and Eastern cultures. With this realization, she seizes full control of her narrative, thus articulating her hybridized identity.

On the surface, Asya's existence seems terribly superficial and trite; she worries about painting her toenails and fixing her hair. However, there is much more to this protagonist--she plans to earn a Ph.D. in English literature and to become a university professor, like her parents, a career which is neither debated nor discussed, simply assumed and accepted by her family. The Ulamas, part of Cairo's urban elite, insist upon the higher education of their daughters as well as their sons. Asya fulfills their wishes; she graduates with a Bachelor's degree, gets accepted into a Ph.D. program in English Literature at an elite British university, and marries Saif Madi. She becomes the subject of their neatly-arranged narrative. Ironically, her mother often tells Asya, "'This is not a novel: this is your life,'" although Asya merely plays her role in an already-scripted tale (568).

Furthermore, she submits to Saif's narrative as well, especially to his habit of telling lies or fibs that retell the truth of the narrative in subtle ways. When they receive guests--his British friends--for dinner one night and are asked how they discovered the apartment, "Asya smiles and looks at Saif and carefully waits for his account" (180). Furthermore, in relating how he and Asya met, he remakes a simple meeting in front of the university library into ah encounter during a mass student demonstration against the Egyptian government--all in an attempt to impress his British friends with pseudo-exotic and Eastern-flavored stories. Saif is extremely Westernized himself, but he succumbs to orientalist embellishments to please his Western associates. Only Asya remains true to the narrative of their meeting, and thus true to her identity, though she outwardly accepts Saif's retelling of it (186-187). Her powers of narration are immature as yet. An argument they have in which he ridicules her high opinion of George Eliot only confirms her long-held, newly-articulated notion that Saif loves her only when "'I behave the way he wants me to behave'" (299), a realization that demarcates the old Asya from the new. Though she still loves Saif, she abandons her blind, surrendering and self-effacing devotion to the past. She has begun the process of salvaging and reclaiming her intellectual narrative (even if only for a brief moment) from Saif's grasp, though she will endure many more trials before she can confirm that hold completely.

That confirmation is not attained until the latter hall of the novel, when Asya begins an affair

with an American student, Gerald Stone. By the time that Asya meets Gerald, she has been married to Saif for five years and has been unable to consummate their marriage, a psychological block that causes her to reject him repeatedly (to his credit, he never forces her). She is fully convinced that Saif does not and never did love her, and even that he cares little about her as a human being. Communication between them is rare, as Asya lives in a cottage (bought by Saif) in England while she works on her dissertation and Saif works in Damascus. In frustration, Asya thinks that...