Open AccessFantasy, Mysticism, and Eroticism in Raja Alem’s Fatma
Author(s) -
Ghadir K. Zannoun
Publication year - 2015
Language(s) - English
DOI - 10.36583/kohl/1-2-9
Subject(s) - mysticism , feeling , fantasy , reading (process) , mythology , raja , honor , aesthetics , eroticism , literature , psychology , psychoanalysis , gender studies , art , sociology , philosophy , social psychology , human sexuality , computer science , linguistics , paleontology , biology , operating system
This paper is a close reading of Raja Alem’s 2005 novel, Fatma: A Novel of Arabia. I argue that Alem depicts the erotic in ways similar to Audre Lorde’s definition – as a doorway to self-fulfillment and in honor of the “fullness” of the erotic’s depth of feelings. The Saudi Arabian writer employs the fantastic, which has been used by writers to express feminist politics, to give textual embodiment to the relationship between the erotic, self-actualization, and women’s empowerment, central to which is self-knowledge and self-discovery. Alem suggests that a deeper knowledge of the self can open women to unlimited possibilities of being and perception, including a closer relationship to the natural and the supernatural worlds. Alem thus presents a female mythology that creates an alternate reality and undermines the binaries of patriarchal thinking, such as the corporeal/transcendent, the human/nonhuman, man/woman, and nature/culture.