Whitewashing Arabic for global consumption: translating race inThe Story of Zahra

Abstract

This article argues that in reading comparatively the Arabic and English versions of Hanan al-Shaykh's 1980 H  ikāyat Zahra, a pattern of omitting race and racial language emerges in the English version, published in 1986. I use a close reading of the translation's selective appropriation of the original's racial and political language to argue for a more intersectional approach to Arabic women's writing, even as I acknowledge the structural and institutional contexts and constraints under which they operate and circulate in the global market of "world literature." First published in 1980, Hanan al-Shaykh's H  ikāyat Zahra is a novel that has transcended its Arabic origins and established itself as a world literary text, 1 in the Damroschian sense of a work that has had an "effective life within a literary system beyond that of its original culture." 2 The novel tells the story of a troubled young Lebanese woman named Zahra in the early years of Lebanon's civil war. It has been critically acclaimed and hailed as an indictment of Lebanese (and Arab) patriarchal culture, as well as a text that lays bare the horrors of violence, war, and trauma. 3 The novel is divided into two distinct parts; its Arabic version names them "part one" and "part 2," with numbered, untitled chapters in the first part, and one continuous chapter in the second. 4 The first part of the novel is taken up by Zahra's life in an unnamed country in sub-Saharan Africa in which she seeks refuge from her life in Lebanon by traveling to visit her uncle, who is in political exile. While there, she meets and marries a young man from southern Lebanon. This part of the novel has three distinct first-person voices: Zahra's, her uncle Hashem's, and her husband Majed's. The second part of the novel recounts Zahra's return to Beirut upon the breakup of her marriage, and her affair with and ultimate death at the hands of a neighborhood sniper who murders her after she has revealed her pregnancy to him. Al-Shaykh's novel has been a commercial and critical success since its publication. In Arabic, it has gone into several print runs; the most recent edition in 2009 is its fifth. Like much of Hanan al-Shaykh's other writing, Zahra is a text that has also circulated easily in the global literary sphere. 5 The novel has been translated into many languages,