Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

It is important to stress that Arab woman writers have produced a new kaleidoscope of narrative fiction In English. They focus on a variety of representations with respect to identity, dislocation, cultural hybridity, and belonging. Moreover, they have tried to construct a stable subjectivity and a space of belonging. Spaces play a crucial role in an individual inward self-consciousness. The authors express the inner world of emotions, memories, thoughts, and subjectivity, then, the object is the transcendence of the inner space. These narratives are now dispersed and relocated by Arab women’s diasporic novelists such as Hala Alyan. This paper will examine Hala Alyan’s “Salt Houses” (2017) novel. This debut novel has amalgamated different narrative experimentations and techniques, and how polyphonic spaces have dislocated the conventional act of narration and relocated it in tandem with non-homogeneity of the Arab world itself. Indeed, Alyan’s text deconstructs signs of centrality, composes juxtaposed mosaics of multiple cultures and micro narratives to construct a general human knowledge and experience drowning in the sea of belonging and fixed identity. Moreover, it will trace the portrayal of characters in finding a stable space in the narrative discourse away from their home in the diaspora. Alyan has not been trussed to one narrative style, that she has pruned the concatenate narrative of its orthodox forms and infused it with tergiversation of Anglophone literature. Additionally, she has shadowed it with spaces of reality and their representations in the act of narration. The power of her novel arises from its experiment with narrative limits, that of the relationship between human perception and narrative. Consequently, Alyan’s novel tries to achieve self-determination, self-awareness, and self-realization within the dimensions of multiple voices and spaces.