A Postcolonial Feminist Study of Suzanne Staples’ Under the Persimmon Tree (2005) and Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing (2015)

Document Type : Original Article

Author

English Department, Higher Institute of Languages, Mansoura, Egypt.

Abstract

The paper presents a critical approach to the Western colonial discourse in representing non‐Western issues, especially the question of third-world Muslim women in Syria and Afghanistan in Suzanne Staples’ Under the Persimmon Tree (2005) and Samar Yazbek’s The Crossing (2015). Both texts show how women are silenced, marginalized, oppressed, and victimized through culture, history, and geography and how they manage to react and defend their identity to achieve survival and freedom through resistance. The study also highlights the close affinity between displacement and trauma, which affects third-world women’s behaviours and actions. The paper examines the consequences of postcolonial intersectionality of gender, class, and religion that faces third-world Muslim women. While Staples introduces those women's stereotyped and subordinated images from a Western perspective, Yazbek reforms the traditional images of the oppressed Syrian women. The paper investigates how each author reconstructs the experiences of the marginalized voices of women through different narrative techniques, such as reconnecting memories in Yazbek’s memoir and the transition from one narrator to another in Staples’ novel. Finally, the study asserts the importance of the West’s understanding of Third World culture, so as not to result in a misunderstanding or misappreciation of Islamic societies' religious or social backgrounds. Following a historical and analytical approach, the paper introduces a brief history of postcolonial feminism, followed by a discourse analysis of both texts in a socio-cultural and religious context.

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