Rhetoric of Body and/in Exile in Haydar's Wallmah Il-A'shab al-Bahr and Maraya al-Nar: Against Transnational Narrative of Exile

Abstract

Al-Mashriq & al-Maghrib al-'arabi 2. Agency of Female Body 3. Homeland 4. Root: Longing for End 5. "Novelistic Time" iv. Conclusion: Foreword It is important to mention here that what has prompted me to focus on the experience of exile is the tragic issue of Syrian refugees, which has turned into a variety of narratives, both personal and collective experiences. While the word 'exile' sounds a fancy term befitting the upper-class and intellectuals who are assigned their own personal solitary space for reflections over 'critical' issues in life, the word 'refugee' tends to connote feelings of pity and empathy over the collective experience of a group leaving their homeland. 1 While the first term triggers political and intellectual contexts and a sense of individuality, the second invokes humanitarian contexts, primarily social, regarding a community or more. However, refuge and exile still share one important characteristic: leaving homeland under fear of greater danger, and thus the experience of the past becomes one and the same. With all its complex nature, the main issue that concerns me here in this paper is the representation of the experience of leaving one's own country by force (in its various connotations) stripped from its aesthetic components that tend, most of the time, to add, and thus, change or embellish even the experience in its abstract situation. In the issue of Syrian refugees, a great deal of attention is directed towards these components, what I call aesthetic components, that are usually either political (such as the issue of border crossings), social (such as the inability to integrate within societies) or linguistic (their attempts to learn new languages). Although primary causes in the refugees' suffering, these components create an aesthetic dimension that shifts the attention from the experience of being outside one's country to that of historical continuity, or progress, of human beings in exile. The important thing becomes the present and the future of refugees: a historical progress that often times blurs the past and pushes back the moment of leaving the country into a secondary status.