An-Najah National University Faculty of Graduate Studies A Translation Analysis of Sinan Antoon's Language in his Novel (The Corpse Washer, 2013): A Socio-Cultural and Ideological Construction By Ibrahim Awni Ibrahim Abu Rob Supervisor Dr. Odeh Odeh This Thesis is Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Master Degree of Applied Linguistics and Translation, Faculty of Graduate Studies, An-Najah National University, Nablus- Palestine. 2017 ii A Translation Analysis of Sinan Antoon's Language in his Novel (The Corpse Washer, 2013): A Socio-Cultural and Ideological Construction By Ibrahim Awni Ibrahim Abu Rob This thesis was defended successfully on 20/08/2017 and approved by: Defence Committee Signature 1- Dr. Odeh Odeh / Supervisor ..………………. 2- Dr. Mohammad Thawabteh / External Examiner ………………... 3- Dr. Abdel Karim Daraghmeh / Internal Examiner ……………….. iii Dedication For all those who encouraged me to fly toward my dreams iv Acknowledgments I would first like to thank my thesis advisor Dr. Odeh Odeh of the Master‟s program of Applied Linguistics and Translation in the Department of English Language and Literature at An-Najah National University. The door to Dr. Odeh‟s office was always open whenever I ran into a trouble spot or had a question about my research or writing. He consistently allowed this paper to be my own work, but steered me in the right direction whenever he thought I needed it. I would also like to thank my great friend, Hana Irshaid, candidate of the Master‟s program of Visual Studies at Free University of Berlin, who strongly supported me with her insightful remarks on this thesis. I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Rula Jurdi Abisaab of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and Dr. Rania Jawad of the Department of English Language and Literature at Birzeit University for their very valuable comments on this thesis. Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my parents and to my close friend, Elia, for providing me with unfailing support and continuous encouragement throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This accomplishment would not have been possible without them. Thank you. Author Ibrahim v االقرار أنا الموقع أدناه مقدم ىذه الرسالة التي تحمل عنوان: (3102، تحميل ترجمة لغة سنان أنطون في روايتو ) المغسمجي ثقافي وأيديولوجي-بناء سوسيو أقر بأن ما اشتممت عميو ىذه الرسالة إنما ىو نتاج جيدي الخاص، باستثناء ما تمت اإلشارة إليو ث عممي حيثما ورد، وأن ىذه الرسالة ككل أو جزء منيا لم يقدم من قبل لنيل أية درجة عممية أو بح أو بحثي لدى أية مؤسسة تعميمية أو بحثية أخرى. Declaration The work provided in this thesis, unless otherwise referenced, is the researcher's own work, and has not been submitted elsewhere for any other degree or qualification. Student’s Name: الطالب:اسم Signature: :التوقيع Date: :التاريخ vi Table of Contents Subject Page Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv Declaration v A Note on Transliteration viii Abstract ix Chapter One: Introduction 1 1.1 Introduction 1 1.2 Significance of the study 3 1.3 Purpose of the study 5 1.4 Statement of problem 5 1.5 Study questions 6 1.6 Theoretical framework 7 1.7 Research methodology 11 1.8 Literature review 11 Chapter Two: Sexually Explicit Language in Context 19 2.1 The nature of eroticism and erotic language 20 2.1.1 Defining eroticism 20 2.2 What makes erotic words erotic? 23 2.3 The nature of Arabic erotic language 27 2.4 Literary eroticism in The Corpse Washer (2013) 32 2.5 Conclusion 37 Chapter Three: The Manifestations of Sexuality in Translated Modern Arabic Literature: between Mimicking and Dismantling the Eurocentric Narrative 39 3.1 Arab sexuality in Western narrative: images of Arab/Muslim women and men 40 3.2 The search for a place: towards establishing a peripheral narrative on sexuality 50 3.3 Conclusion 78 Chapter Four: Politicized Approaches to Translation: Translation as a Form of Cultural Resistance 79 4.1 Ideological and Cultural Protest in Literary Translation 80 4.1.1 Countering stereotypes 83 4.1.2 Overthrowing exoticism 86 4.1.3 Forwarding a new preface 87 4.1.4 In-between language 88 4.1.5 Constructing a sexual narrative 90 4.2 Identity Formation through Erotic Language 95 4.3 Conclusion 101 vii Chapter Five: Conclusions and Recommendations 102 5.1 Conclusions 102 5.2 Recommendations 105 References 108 ب الممخص viii A Note on Transliteration The chart below explains how the researcher represents Arabic pronunciations with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Arabic letter Symbol َ a aː ا , ى aj ـَيـ aw ـَو u و , uː وو َ i iː ي b ب d د dˤ ض dʒ ج ð ذ ðˤ ظ h هـ ħ ح m م n ن q ق r ر s س sˤ ص ʃ ش t ت tˤ ط θ ث x خ ɣ غ z ز ʔ ء ʕ ع https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-close_near-front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_sibilant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative ix A Translation Analysis of Sinan Antoon's Language in his Novel (The Corpse Washer, 2013): A Socio-Cultural and Ideological Construction By Ibrahim Awni Ibrahim Abu Rob Supervisor Dr. Odeh Odeh Abstract The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the "War on Terror" after September 11 attacks have further reinforced the Orientalist myths and fantasies of and about the Orient that chiefly aimed to create a lascivious and violent East. As a response, a number of Arab intellectuals have utilized translation to intervene and write back into the metropolitan language, English, as they were aware of its role in establishing „a cultural turn‟. This thesis addresses the question of how The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan Antoon employs the translation of sexually explicit language to participate in constructing a resistant cultural identity. It also explores the kinds of intervention Antoon exerts in the hegemonic Anglo-American discourse of Arab sexuality through translating his own novel. This thesis is a qualitative study which utilizes the tools of descriptive and interpretive approaches. Therefore, the integrated translation theory of Lefevere‟s rewriting, Said‟s postcolonial theory of voyage-in and Bhabha‟s cultural theory of hybridity are deemed relevant approaches to the context of this work. x This thesis argues that Antoon departs from dichotomous approach to translation and develops innovative methods of implementing translation strategies, such as omission, theme fronting, and new formalisms to carve out a hybrid space where he inaugurates a decolonizing cultural identity that finds itself in central narratives on Arab sexuality. In addition, it argues that translating sexually explicit language in Antoon‟s novel has contributed to blurring the boundaries between East and West where the sexual becomes representative of enactive cultural resistance of the idea of death devoted by American occupation of Iraq and corrupted patriarchal values. 1 Chapter One Introduction 1.1 Introduction There is a large, and growing, body of revaluations of translations which are being made under the label of "cultural translation". In Bassnett‟s and Lefevere‟s opinion (1998: 123-124), translation is deemed as a cultural construct, a mediation vehicle, and an important language transfer. We live in a period of ideological and philosophical exploration of translation as a cultural task. In fact, translation offers discursive and micro/macro- investigations into multifarious cultures. Translating sexually explicit language, particularly in novels that seek decolonizing resistance of the hegemonic Anglophone discourse on sexuality and sexual desire, is a tremendously sensitive area in language and culture transfer. As Jose Santaemilia (2011: 266) maintains "it [erotic translation] constitutes a powerful index of the translator's linguistic- cultural competence, prejudices, taboos or ideological assumptions". Translation of literary eroticism is, therefore, a major sphere by which many people of diverse cultures can access texts of taboo desires and erotic practices. Erotic language manifests, undoubtedly, a privileged area to bring to light cultures, deemed as exotic-erotic by Orientalists. According to Friedrich Flotow (2000: 31), erotic language is a site "[where] issues of cultural sensitivity are encumbered by issues of gender stereotyping and 2 cliché". Admittedly, several socio-cultural and ideological contemporary studies inched us to, somehow, an understanding of the ways in which the Eurocentric literature and Western anthropologists alleged the contemporary sexual lives and practices of the peoples they colonized. In fact, Massad (2007: 2) suggests that "as Orientalism assumed a central place in the colonial campaign, its pretensions encompassed defining who the subject people to be colonized were, what their past was, and the content of their culture that colonial thought had disseminated". The Orientalist representational repertoire imputes the Orient, as Edward Said (1995: 188) argues, to "the freedom of licentious sex" and an exotic-erotic culture. In fact, the bipolar thinking of identity and difference, from the perspective of sexual practices and taboos in the Arab and Muslim worlds, necessitates a critical language of duality, that echoes both Western and Eastern dichotomies which have been thought of by colonization. In its dominant form, it assumes that West/East inequalities and divide were premised on a static dualism of dominance and resistance, center and periphery. However, intellectuals and scholars from around the Arab world have embarked on socio-culturally and ideologically dialectical excavations of their own in an attempt to unearth new trajectories for the translated modern Arabic literature, particularly postcolonial novels. Their conscious literary efforts meant not only to delve into the hegemonic discourse of the West that had predominantly constituted the canonical archive of the Arab 3 sexual past, but also "to mix with it and thus transform it" (ibid: 256). This is what Said (1993) calls "the voyage-in". In other words, the historical logic of binary opposition of dominance/resistance is overturned by a radical and dialectical "alternative decolonizing resistance" (ibid: 260), which might also "couple" -mix- with hegemonic discourse. It is in this contested space that the thesis and the antithesis merged together to reach a middle ground or other state of agreement (synthesis). In fact, this definition of decolonizing resistance implies a strategic "hybrid" space of trans-cultural form countering an imperialist discourse. Bhabha (1994: 7) describes "hybridity" as a liminal postcolonial space that represents the effects of mixture of historically contested cultures. Hybrid discourse creates a way out of binary thinking to refute the process of domination and to reevaluate the assumptions of colonial identity that is essentially constructed through a stratagem of mimicry of the other which later becomes a mask of authority. 1.2 Significance of the study The Corpse Washer (2013) is the second novel by the acclaimed writer and translator, the Baghdad-born, US-based Sinan Antoon. Antoon (2013) himself has translated it into English from the original Arabic. He has recently won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation of the aforementioned novel. On winning the prize, he stated I think of the sentence when I translate, concentrating on the mechanics while letting the poetic manifest itself through the body of words. It‟s 4 challenging but it‟s beautiful because it shows you the horizons of the target language which you are translating into (as cited in Farid, 2015, para. 11). Antoon's novel situates itself at two decisive moments in the modern Iraqi history, the Gulf War in 1990 and the American invasion in 2003; it depicts the life of the protagonist, Jawad, within that socio-political context. Antoon uses vividly sexual language and imagery to render some of the lovemaking scenes in the novel as well as the other mundane sexual subplots. Moreover, Antoon's novel shows that religiosity is not necessarily sexually suppressive, which is a unique attribute to the local Islamic cultures he is portraying. He also applies some culturally-specific metaphors of the sexual as a way to contextualize them into the socio- political milieu in Iraq. More importantly, Antoon has resolutely demonstrated that " there is a cultural amnesia in the Arab and Muslim world in terms of its attitude towards sexuality" (as cited in Omar, 2010, para. 16 ). He thinks that the translated modern Arabic literature into the Anglo-American culture still carries sexual images and signs that evoke Orientalist depictions of the Arabs. In effect, he imputes this cultural amnesia to "the problem in translation as there is a tendency to exoticize the Arabs with special regard to this aspect" (ibid: para. 16). 5 1.3 Purpose of the study The sexually explicit language in a translated Arabic literary work, therefore, cannot be studied in isolation from the overall socio-cultural and ideological system that makes it possible, especially in the postcolonial era. This thesis brings about a hybrid, liminal reading of sex and sexuality in the translated modern Arabic literature, which is an enticing idea in the postcolonial period. This study is about a transcultural negotiation where the Arab writer and translator purposefully addresses the sexual representations and practices (their histories and narratives) to and through the other. In particular, it is concerned about analyzing how Sinan Antoon "voyages in" the Western narrative of the sexual to create a "Third Space" that serves as a terrain for formulating an in-between identity with particular attention to sexuality. 1.4 Statement of the Problem Most modern Arabic literature translated into English helps perpetuate fixed and stagnant sexual representations of the Arab cultural identity instead of creating a temporal, liminal identity that intervenes in grand Western narratives. This study looks into the issue of translating sexually explicit language in modern Arabic literature into English and examines how translators deal with the dichotomies Orientalists and imperialists established about sexuality in the Orient; The Corpse Washer is the case in point. Therefore, translating passages that reflect sexual experiences and practices, put into their complex socio-cultural contexts 6 and mixed into the modern European hegemonic discourse, implies a more complex conscious attempt and a strategic decolonizing resistance to seek and re-imagine what the Western audience think and engage with. 1.5 Study Questions To meet the above objective, the research is guided by the following questions: (1) Antoon argues that some Arab writers tend to fall into "the trap of exoticizing the sexual lives of Arabs" (as cited in Omar, 2010, para. 16), when there is a primary purpose of publishing erotic Arabic texts for the Western world to recast the sexual lives of Arabs. My first question, therefore, concerns in which ways Antoon, through his translation, intervenes in the Eurocentric discourse of the sexual stereotype of Arabs/Muslims and what kind of intervention he exerts. (2) Drawing on the fact that Antoon, the author and translator of The Corpse Washer, is entrenched in two distinct socio-cultural and ideological milieus, which are the Arab, with all the diverse heritage that casts the representations of sex and sexuality in the Arab World, and the Anglo- American, as it is obvious that he is part of the American academia. In the wake of these intertwining influences, my second guiding question is how the aforementioned socio-cultural and ideological constructs and literary heritages impact the language he employs in his translation to render sexually explicit scenes and thus to participate in formulating an in- between cultural identity. 7 1.6 Theoretical Framework By translating, one participates in the constitution of culture, and the very gesture of translating can create pockets of resistance in the cultural hegemony. Translation does not necessarily have to be market driven and geared to producing easily digested versions (Kadish, et al., 1994: 14). The Belgian scholar Lefevere (2004: vii), a prominent theoretician in the field of literary translation, proposes translating as a process of "rewriting"; and he indicates that rewriting is basically conditioned by three factors: ideology, poetics and patronage. In Lefevere's opinion, rewriting is basically comprised into two parts. One is "a manipulation and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of literature in a society"; the other is "a concept of what the role of literature is, or should be, in the social system as a whole" (ibid: 51). Following this, translation, which is a social phenomenon, is greatly valorized by the ideology and the poetics underlying the cultural and moral system in a society. But as Jixing (2013: 110) sees it, the ideology remains a clear winner over poetics and linguistics, resulting in a partial equivalence between the source text and the target text. That is to say, translation can lead to a greater ideological illumination and understanding of the multifarious cultures we translate from. Potentially, it can also equip us to find ways to manipulate the ideology and poetics of the dominant language/culture (English) we translate into. 8 The Indian postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha recasts a theoretical development of cultural hybridity and identity, and utilizes concepts, such as ambivalence, enunciation, mimicry and liminality to provide the terrain for managing strategies of selfhood and communal representations that evince new signs of cultural differences. Fundamentally, Bhabha does not perceive colonialism as a temporal construct sheltered in the past but an intruder into the present of cultures and narratives; as such, he envisages cultural hybridity as a paradigm of postcolonial contestation that seeks the social articulation of difference as both an alternative of cultural diversity and "a complex, on-going negotiation that attempts to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation" (ibid: 3). That is, hybridity is designed to bring two cultures together and open up an ambivalent Third Space that can "accept and regulate the differential structure of the moment of intervention" (ibid: 25). Bhabha refers to this as "enunciation [which] is the act of expression of a culture that takes place in the Third Space. It is through enunciation that cultural difference is discovered and recognized" (ibid: 33). As a result, this Third Space acts to "displace the narrative of the Western" as it "challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People" (ibid: 37). The key proposition of cultural hybridity, as Bhabha suggests, underlies, firstly, the idea of ambivalence, which is a duality that shows a 9 split in the identity and culture of the colonized other; and that, in turn, enables those who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the colonizer's cultural identity" to emerge (ibid: 96). Secondly, the colonized other can distort the colonial image's originality- by the virtue of "iteration" that constructs it- and its identification- by the virtue of "difference" that defines it. Like Bhabha's hybridity, mimicry is a metonym of presence. He claims that "the effect of mimicry is camouflage [...] it is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background" (ibid: 85). As the colonized subjects imitate and engage with the colonizer's culture, mimicry turns out to be a stratagem articulation of the difference since it elaborates to appropriate the Other as it envisions power. On the other hand, mimicry is a force to "inappropriate" the colonial subject's presence and so give it a partial recognition; it does so through the process of writing and iteration. Thus, "the observer becomes the observed and 'partial' representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence" (ibid: 89). By the same token, the seminal work of Edward Said regarding the Orientalists' representation of Arab sexuality stands out in this regard. Said envisages Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. Orientalism as a discourse which shows the persistence of the European romantics and colonialists to depict distorted and over-eroticized images and misconceptions of the nature of 10 women and Arab sexuality (ibid: 188). Said notes that the Orient was almost always perceived as a sexual promise (and a threat) and was "associated with the escapism of sexual fantasy" (ibid: 190). However, in his venture to expand the argument of Orientalism, Said published Culture and Imperialism (1993) to probe the impact of imperialism and colonialism on culture in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He does so through analyzing many outstanding British and French novels in an attempt to show how domination, resistance to it, and decolonization affected this genre. Respectively, Said notes that "the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them" (ibid: xiii). In this regard, Said's theory of cultural imperialism is based on a domination/resistance binary, yet he disapproves of Foucault's inclination that imposition and resistance are morally equal. Said thinks that "resistance cannot equally be an adversarial alternative to power and a dependant function of it" (ibid: 252); so resistance is morally unequal to domination and thus "never simply power in reverse" (ibid: 252). Subsequently, Said presupposes that Western domination had always faced decolonizing resistance by the natives; that is, as there was always a Western "voyage-out" to non-Western territories, the native decolonization movements initiate a "voyage-in": a "conscious effort to enter into the discourse of the West, to mix with it, [and so] transform it" (ibid: 256). 11 1.7 Research methodology This research is conducted to investigate the nature of translating sexually explicit language in Sinan Antoon's novel The Corpse Washer (2013). For this reason, descriptive and interpretive qualitative analysis will be applied to understand the crucial role of translated sexually explicit language in the postcolonial Arabic novel and how translation can be a form of resistance to the Eurocentric narrative, depending on the three basic notions of "hybridity", "voyage-in" and "rewriting". 1.8 Literature review In relation to the research questions being investigated, the literature review of the sexually explicit language in literary translation is designed to provide an overview of the sources the researcher has explored while researching this topic. Admittedly, not many postcolonial research studies have so far sought to analyze and provide critical evaluation of the discrepancies of other people's sexual practices between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL) in literary translation, but ongoing research looks promising. According to Wassouf, et al. (2004: 489), between 1885 and 1887 Sir Richard Burton received a tremendous and unexpected public success in Europe for his translation of The Book of Thousand and One Nights – known as The Arabian Nights- in which he expressed his myriad impressions on the erotic customs of Orientals. Wassouf, et al. (ibid) claim that Burton's oriental expedition and adventure into the Arab and African 12 erotic scenery overstated the sexually explicit and obscene language in public since it was eschewed and kept at a low-profile in the Victorian age. Despite this, his panoramic view of the Eastern erotic life had brought with it a wave of severe criticism, or as it was labeled by John Morley in 1885, "esoteric pornography" (Colligan, 2002: 11) that is to explain how the Arab taboo desires and sexual perversions are imported and stereotyped in the West. Yet, Burton aggressively defended his view of the erotic translation and denounced the label of „pornography‟, since it was a road-map to understand the vague East and its sexual and racial habits and a potential educational value for English scholars (ibid: 18). Even more importantly, and to the benefit of this research, Burton's obsessive focus on the Arabs' sex life in his translation of The Arabian Nights insinuated exotic-erotic practices into a deviant Orientalist perception of the Orientals' sex life. According to Colligan (ibid), "he [Burton] defamiliarized the Arab text. His translation violently disrupted the English cultural presentation of the Arabian Nights- to such an extent that it was branded pornographic" (ibid: 26). For instance, Burton infamously noted that Arab women are tempted by black men; he writes, "Debauched women prefer Negroes on account of the size of their parts" (ibid: vol.10, p.177). Therefore, Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights was a milestone and had a great position in the formation of the European Orientalism, which, more or less, motivated the English reader at that time to focus on the sordid sexuality of the Arabs. 13 To unravel the European narrations and fantasies about the East, Kabbani (1985) proposes that imperial expansionist projects in the East encompassed Western paintings and travel writings to enshrine their colonial legitimacy and hegemony over the ages. Kabbani suggests that the Orientalist travelogues, like Burton‟s, established sexual and racial stereotypes that "made the East different from the West, exiled it into an irretrievable state of „otherness‟" (ibid: 11) Kabbani‟s scholarly work is a significant historical and ideological analysis which serves scrutinize the ongoing tension between West and East. In the same context of reading the Orientalist depictions of the Orient, Borges (1936) ponders the subject of translation of The Arabian Nights, in which he focuses mainly on Sir Richard Burton‟s. Borges, the Argentine, was fascinated with The Nights since his childhood; this fascination can be felt through his novels and short stories, where he deployed a paradigm of endless textuality of The Nights' stories (Levine, 2004: 16). In studying Burton‟s translation, Borges believes that Burton‟s perspectives to 'orientalize' The Nights entails the unfulfilled sexual life that forced Burton to misread the Orient as exotic and violent. Moving from the discussion of 19th-century Orientalists‟ misrepresentations of the Orient, writings on the theme of Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature by Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor (1995) attempt to explore a terrain that has been treated as taboo in the Arab world. The book is an erudite analysis of modern 14 Arabic literary works ranging from poetry, novel and short story by significant Arab writers, such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Adonis and Najib Mahfouz. The contributors to the book put under close scrutiny many topics that are masterly handled and are of particular interest. For instance, De Moor‟s essay takes on a journey into notions of sexuality and eroticism and demonstrates the socio-cultural and political environments of their production and deployment in the 20th-century Egyptian short story. In effect, this book is of great insights and importance to the study of love and eroticism theme, particularly in a segregated and patriarchal society that deems this topic truly controversial. Within this respect, Massad (2007) is also one of the most prominent books written about representations of sexual desires in Arabic writings and the way they were perceived in the Western culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Massad asserts the significant role such representations played in altering the cultural difference between the West (the Other) and the East (the Self) and argues that, "the novel form is significant both in the type of labor it performs for social analysis and in its deployment of sexual allegories while representing social and sexual histories to address complex socioeconomic and political processes" (ibid: 269). The incredible scope of historical and literary sexual narratives that his book provides deepens our understanding of the sexual attitudes of Arabs and helps to unearth the racism of Orientalist discourses on sexuality. 15 On the other hand, translation enacts the domination of one culture over another, especially when it occurs between the languages of the colonizer and the colonized. Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) collect and edit nine extended articles on the role of translation as a major tool in reconstructing a nation's cultural identity. However, the first article, Postcolonial Writing and Literary Translation by Maria Tymoczko, and the second, Writing Translation: the Strange Case of the Indian English Novel by G.J.V Prasad, are of particular interest to this research paper. Tymoczko (1999) argues that post-colonial writings and writings coming from subaltern cultures are necessarily works of translation as they involve the process of 'carrying across' literary, mythical and historical elements from one culture to a more central, and thus more powerful, culture (ibid: 25). In this sense, she suggests that post-colonial literary texts do not merely transpose a text, they also transpose an entire culture. A literary translator, therefore, explicitly and implicitly utilizes his cultural and ideological background as metatexts for the act of translating a source text. In addition, she addresses one major challenge that faces post-colonial writers, which is translating elements in the source text that are unfamiliar to the target culture such as customs, food, or myths. In this case, writers have to choose among a variety of translation techniques: to omit entire lexical units, choose "equivalent" lexis, or use footnotes (ibid: 31-40). 16 The significance of Prasad's article (1999) lies in analyzing the phenomenon of Indian English writers and explaining how a writer, in general, can convey his/her culture's spirit in the language of his/her colonizer. It discusses the works of prominent Indian writers as well, such as Salman Rushdie and Raja Rao, who wrote in English to "a struggle for space, between colonial English and the native Indian languages" (ibid: 43). Rushdie and Rao, the study argues, do not simply write in English. They create a new English that is neither faithful to British English nor to Indian languages and culture, as well as create new forms of literature in it ( ibid: 44). Another influential work that studies the relationship between translation theories and postcolonial literature, specifically Arabic literary works, is Faiq's collection of essays (2004). The volume emphasizes the fact that translation is an intercultural communication that is capable of either constructing or deforming cultural identities. It also sheds light on the politics and poetics of translating from Arabic, a language marginalized in Western mainstream literary circles. Leeuwen (2004) and Carbonell‟s (2004) extended research reveals that the discourse on translating from Arabic into dominant Western languages "reflects a past and a lexicon dominated by "fixed" perceptions of Arab culture as dead and ceased to contribute to global culture" (ibid: vi). Leeuwen (ibid: 14) proposes that translation is "a highly politicized activity, which touches not only on historical, political and 17 cultural relations but also on sensitive issues of cultural identification and self-representation". He concludes from analyzing the literature of 'nahda' period and Naguib Mahfouz that dichotomic approach to understanding translated Arabic literature should be abandoned and cultural relations between Europe and the Arab world should be studied in the light of 'dialogism', a term developed by Bakhtin in 1994. Dialogism defined as "a dualistic speech act in specific contexts" (ibid: 17) gives life to a dynamic and complex cultural exchange, which in its turn reproduces images of the Other. Carbonell (2004) elaborates on extocising ideologies in translation and their implications in translating Arabic texts. He states that the process of extocising a literary text usually employs "foreignising devices [such as] literal selective translation of phraseology, footnotes, diacritics, etc." (ibid: 34). Nevertheless, he asserts that such ideological devices should be seen in an interdisciplinary manner, focusing on the correlation between semiotics, discourse analysis, and cultural criticism. He also discards the domestication/foreignization dichotomy as simplistic and reductionist in the sense that it does not allow conflicting representations and ideologies to coexist in a translated text. Consequently, a postcolonial translator, according to Carbonell, bases his/her choices on a comprehensible decolonizing agenda (ibid: 35). 18 To sum up, all the studies mentioned previously in the literature review section are just meant to highlight the subject matter of this research and provide an overview of the topic to the readership. 19 Chapter Two Sexually Explicit Language in Context The present chapter endeavors to discuss the nature of eroticism, in general, and of sexually explicit language in Sinan Antoon's novel The Corpse Washer (2013), in particular. The sexually explicit language in The Corpse Washer is likely to present new literary and socio-cultural trajectories in the post-colonial modern Arabic novel, revolving around subjects of love and sexuality. Also, it is an attempt by the colonized subject towards the emancipation from the oppressive power relation with the colonizer, since the erotic element has a vital role in identity formation. This chapter will show that the use of sexually explicit language, or the erotic element, in the novel is essentially a social act, which fulfills an important and necessary function. The chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of eroticism and its correlation with erotic language. The second section closes with a discussion of what makes erotic words acquire an erotic nature. The chapter then discusses the peculiarities of the Arabic erotic language and how it functions as a tool for challenging the socio-political order. After all, the last section is dedicated to an in-depth interpretation of the literary eroticism in The Corpse Washer, focusing on its connection with post- colonialism, literary renewal and identity formation in the post-colonial modern Arabic novel. 20 2.1 The nature of eroticism and erotic language 2.1.1 Defining eroticism Eroticism, as a theme, appears in old civilizations in human history as it was depicted even before the invention of the modern alphabet, from the Mesopotamian cuneiform sources to hieroglyphs and iconography of Egyptians, where sexual images were common in temples, tombs, and religious texts. Eroticism was part and parcel of culture and art. Dating back to the second-century-love story of Eros and Psyche in the novel The Golden Ass (Butler, 1910), early definitions managed to correlate the etymological source of eroticism with Greek mythology; as the word "erotic" drives its origin from the Greek word "Eros", the god of love, desire and pleasure; it was adapted into English language from the French word "Erotique" (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016) in the middle of the 17th century. The Merriam Webster Dictionary (2016) has a close definition of the first referential meaning, "a state or quality of sexual arousal and feelings". Before coining the word „eroticism‟ in English, sexually stimulating themes, which took esthetic and literary forms, were discussed in the writings of well-known authors, such as Shakespeare. For instance, in Sonnet 138, Shakespeare describes the sexual nature of the affair with his dark lady through these lines, "Therefore I lie with her and she with me/And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be" (as cited in Shakespeare- online.com). The pun on the word "lie" indicates either the meaning "to 21 have sex with" or "to deceive", which means that the writer attempted to disguise the erotic place that the dark lady occupies in his poem. Such language would be described in Shakespeare‟s time as bawdy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, and with the rise of industrial society, Featherstone (1999: 4) states the literature on "passionate love" (confessions, novels, pornography) "became socially important by helping to provide 'codes' between men and women". This new ideology of love extended its scope in order to "undermine the restrictive practices of class, religion and ethnicity" (ibid: 5). A striking example of the increasing linking between love and sexuality in the 19th century is the following passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890: 56) by Oscar Wilde: "Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes. "Harry! Sibyl Vane is sacred!""It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian". Here, what is worthy to observe is the fact that the ideal of love and the most poetic of emotions cannot be sustained without physical love and passion. In modern Western narratives, love and sexuality have become notably separated. Featherstone (1999: 6) remarks that "sex becomes a key component of intimacy, hence the romantic narrative of love has lost its cultural motivation". This form of eroticism can be found earlier in the 20th century in D.H Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928: 250) It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the 22 passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvelous death. Here, the erotic is manifested as solely sexual and sensual, with no romantic love expressed in the act. The main character, Connie, esthetically reflects on the purely sensual experience by the narrator's expressions, such as "sensual flame" and "marvelous death". However, according to Octavio Paz (1996), the Mexican poet and the Nobel Prize winner, it is quite unusual not to perceive love and eroticism and not associate them with the third term, sexuality. Paz maintains that "sexuality is clearly the primitive source with eroticism and love the derivative forms" (ibid: 87). Sexuality is part of human identity; human beings have been able to associate this act of the sexual with various sets of practices, rituals, presentations and representations. Eroticism, for Paz, represents a universal phenomenon and tends to appear in all mankind societies, while love is perceived as culturally and historically specific to a particular society (ibid: 93). Put differently, in modern Arabic criticism, the word "eroticism" is transliterated (erotiki / ايروتيكي or erosi / ايروسي : which denotes the god of love Eros) into Arabic. The semantic boundaries of this transliterated word are, however, fuzzy and fluid; this can be reasoned by the fact that "eroticism" is, as noted before, Greek in origin. Arab literary critics, such as Boutros Hallaq, are reluctant to refer to a solid semantic boundary for 23 this word. Some Arab critics, such as Adonis and Darwish, prefer to define eroticism in terms of its physical arousal and its artistic style as the Western ideology restrains, while others, like Amal Donqol, tend to associate this word with physical arousal only (Abu Zeid, 2008: para. 2-6). Yet, through componential analysis, we can determine the principal features of eroticism; eroticism is basically a notion that should have at least one defining factor, which is physical arousal coupled with artistic pleasure. We can conclude that, be it as a signifier for a particular love mode, eroticism is a bit difficult to pin down to one definition. The intersection between love, eroticism and sexuality might not find a place to merge together, either in people's imagination or in their artwork. In some cultures, not close to the Western ones, eroticism might be conflated with love and sexuality, or even be replaced by sexuality. It is not assumed that erotic is not the same as sexual activity, but it is supposed that not every sexual activity is erotic. Irrespective of context, the „erotic‟ is bound to two conditions: sexual stimulation and aesthetic value. 2.2 What makes erotic words erotic? It is now accepted that the idea of eroticism, as presently understood, is based on Eros, the blind Greek god of love, and it has been elaborated and given a theoretical basis throughout the Western ages. Laurie Stras and Bonnnie J.Blackbum (2016) maintain that the idea of eroticism, or the erotic language, is, in essence, about both physical arousal and its aesthetic value to its audience of various orientations. Stras 24 and Blackbum argue that the notion of eroticism, alongside texts, equipped with explicit sexual content, "relies on a mutual understanding of cultural codes and a set of esthetic principles between writer and audience" (ibid: 1). Thus, reading an erotic content is reliant on, and subjective to, the esthetics and codes of the culture in which the explicit sexual content is deployed in. In other words, understanding an erotic element in a particular culture "demands a mutual understanding of what constitutes the erotic" (ibid: 1). Stras and Blackbum (ibid) attempt, at first, to discuss the sexual content through categorizing it into four categories: pornographic, erotic, bawdy, and obscene. In doing so, their aim is clearly to differentiate among the four categories by looking at their defining peculiarities. As a matter of fact, these categories might be related, but they all show a discrepancy in their engagement of the sexual content. First, pornography may be taken to mean "material that engages with its consumers on the level of physical arousal through explicit sexual content" ( ibid: 2). Eroticism, on the other hand, is "also arousing, but ideally it engages with its consumers' aesthetic sense, their intellect, and perhaps also with their sentiments" (ibid: 2). The distinction, therefore, that to be drawn between pornography and eroticism is the nature of context, in which the sexual content tips over from pornographic into eroticism. For instance, the use of sexual content within the context of marriage, humorous anecdotes or even in medical texts is contextualized within the 25 concept of eroticism, because it "may emphasize the intellectual or the intimate, but ultimately it elevates physical arousal into a value-laden, positive cultural space, hovering above its artistic style" (ibid: 3). In short, eroticism is bound to sexual content in terms of physical arousal, its artistic style and aesthetic principles. However, bawdy language is based on a political protest; it comprises a class conflict between elite and popular cultures. Sexual humor, within the conflict of class, is an instance of bawdy language and behavior, aiming to humiliate its targets yet having a sense of a joke. Thus, bawdiness "rejects both intellectualism and manners, violating codes of conduct associated with the upper strata of society" (ibid: 3). In contrast, obscenity, or obscene language, is "anti-erotic" (ibid: 4). Its main objective is neither to arouse nor to promote the physical arousal to an artistic value for its targets (ibid: 4). What is remarkable about erotic language is the fact that eroticism is highly dependent on author's intention and audience's perception of the sexual content, whatever and however it is represented. Therefore, writers could manipulate innovative attitudes to present sexual content in a way that transcends language and even era. Barthes (1975: 12) asks an inviting question: "Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?" Barthes claims that to present an erotic artwork, it is not necessarily to expose the body in an explicit and obscene way, but it is that purposeful approach where the writer intends to show us just a small 26 portion of an entire erotic scene; so the readers can swim and surf in their imagination to capture that intact erotic scene; "it grants them a glimpse of the scandalous to see the perfection" (ibid: 14). In fact, erotic language is not fossilized in one period of a time or even a space. It can undergo changes and can be understood across cultures and social strata. For instance, the word "banana" can be charged with a spark of eroticism when it transcends language barrier through mechanisms of allusion and metaphor, and also as it is perceived within contexts of time and space. For example, Ceccato (1995: 27) states that the erotic element was always present in the popular theatrical comic plays," to such an extent that it aroused in the first European travelers who saw them erogenous and vulgar". Ceccato provides this excerpt, which is a dialog between ʕajuaːz and a beautiful lady in the Syrian comedy ʕurs karakuːz [Karakuːz's Wedding]. In order to get the man's help against her mother, who refuses to get her married, the girl makes the man contemplate her physical features My height, isn't it a little displeasing? No! My physique .... It's like a bamboo cane! And my forehead? It's like the half moon in the month of Sha„bān! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%98 27 And my eyes? Like the eyes of a gazelle! And my breast? Oh my God! It's a square as big as a battlefield! And my belly? Ah, it drives one mad! It makes one rise like the baker's yeast! Don't I therefore deserve a piece of man who goes in and out of my house? (ibid: 29) Most frequently, as in the above excerpt, which fulfils an erotic element, eroticism can function through allusion and metaphor, exceeding the referential meaning of words and playing on their semiotics and their relatedness to cultural codes. Erotic words, therefore, are meant to be erotic when they are contextualized within a socio-cultural construct and are intentionally fabricated by the writer. 2.3 The nature of Arabic erotic language In her introduction to a collection of essays, Kilpatrick (1995: 12) maintains that Arabic literature has undergone gradual, constant developments in the subjects of love and sex in several ways. In fact, Arabic literature, including its fundamental genres: poetry [qasˤiːda] and prose [maqaːma], has encountered changes in "sensibility and literary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel 28 expressions in the last hundred years […]" (ibid: 9). Moreover, according to Kilpatrick, the treatment of love and sexuality in modern Arabic literature reveals these three recurrent themes: The search for love is intimately connected with the individual's desire for freedom and fulfillment, while the frank affirmation of sexuality, of whatever kind, represents a challenge to a rigid and hypocritical social order. In both cases the act itself cannot be separated from its expressions, and innovative attitudes to love and sexuality are bound up with literary renewal (ibid: 15). Therefore, Arabic literary texts, which have dealt with topics of love and sexuality during the past century, have essentially revolved around a particular social act, alluding to the entire population. This social act was represented in various ways for multitude objectives and motives. For instance, in the Umayyad literature, poets, who wrote about their love affairs, took a significant part in social criticism of social norms that separated these poets from their lovers due to family opposition (ibid: 10). Moreover, Kilpatrick (ibid: 11) argues, in the Abbasid period, poets composed erotic poetry "in the pleasure-loving circles of the Hijazi aristocracy before moving to the Abbasid court in Baghdad". This was also the case in prose literature in that period; texts celebrated many various stories about highly adorable slave girls and their fans that mirror a society where the themes of love and sexuality had grown to be "a refined art practiced by both men and women" (ibid: 11). After all, erotic language in 29 Arabic literature, as Kilpatrick draws attention to, has complex connections with societal and cultural notions. But most frequently, one of the intrinsic peculiarities of eroticism in Arabic literature is that it was deemed acceptable and even desirable for the elite and popular targets, as long as it was perceived within contextualized venues, such as ceremonies of marriage and divorce or mental and physical health of the individual. In short, erotic language was perceivable if it was framed within justifiable contours. What is interesting is to observe how Arab writers approach erotic themes in their literary narratives, especially in a paradoxical society. Thus, as de Moor (1995: 66) claims, Arab writers, to some extent, "wrote or spoke openly about erotic themes and preferred the poetic allusion or the romantic story" in terms of spiritual or justified relationships. An example of this sort of approach can be found in the work of Sheikh Nafzawi‟s The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight 1 , which was merely a sex manual. The book presents attitudes on what traits both men and women should boast to be eye-catching and gives advice on sexual techniques and sexual health. The kiss on the mouth, on the two cheeks, upon the neck, as well as the sucking up of flesh lips, are gifts of God, destined to provoke erection at the favorable moment. God also is who has embellished the chest of the woman with breasts, has furnished her with a double chin, and has given brilliant colors to her cheeks (Sheikh Nafzawi. Trans. Colville, 1999). 1 . In the introduction of Colville's English translation, Al-Nafzawi likely wrote The Perfumed Garden during the twelfth century. It was first translated into French in 1886 by Sir Richard Francis Burton. In 1999, it was first introduced into English. 30 This passage reveals an erotic awareness of the sexual in the Arab world, which has been perceived within the socio-cultural venues rather than mere imagination and fantasies. At that time, eroticism is conditionally connected to religion if one wants to talk about. It is that, as we have noted, Arabs and Muslims had written a lot on this topic and manifested a lot on eroticism yet within contextualized channels. However, with the onset of the twentieth century, the representations of love and sexuality took a different perspective, as Starkey (1995: 61) maintains, due to the powerful movements for political and social reform, including the emancipation of women and the triumph of Romanticism in literature. This kind of literary renewal came from the close contact of Arab writers with Europe and its literary and philosophical schools. Changes also took place in the mid-twentieth century, which were inclined to " the French realists and naturalists, as they produced some idealized pictures of sexuality and love" (ibid: 60). An example of this new trend is the manifestations of sexuality and eroticism in Tawfiq al-Hakim's novel ʕusˤfuːr min al-ʃarq (1985) [Bird from the East]. The novel displays the dichotomy between East and West through its protagonist, Muhsin, who left his rigid society but kept his vengeance of West. Al-Hakim makes a comparison between Egyptian and European women. The Egyptian woman does not look much at the person with whom she is speaking: she does not glance idly or randomly as daring, frivolous, European women do. Instead, she keeps track of her glances and holds them between her languid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharyngealization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_sibilant 31 lashes… then raises her head and releases a single, devastating look (Al- Hakim, trans. Youssef, 1985: 30). In fact, it is tacit that there has been a gradual shift in both poetic and prose language used in Arabic literature, equipped with eroticism, due to the plights of colonialism and its impact on the societal norms of Arab society. In the last decades of the twentieth century, love and sexuality have been associated with violence and repulsive imagery. Cooke (1995: 186) states that the recurrent theme in modern Iraqi literature, for example, was particularly when discussing "the theme of cleansing a family's honor through killing the woman member who transgresses the code of relations between the sexes". This also may extend to include domestic daily life events and ceremonies. Daoud (2016: para.16) says, "like a war on women, [Arab women are in ] a property relationship". The concealment and the paradoxical relationship with women in Arab society play certainty a major role in altering the semantic nature of Arabic erotic language. In a similar perspective, the Syrian thinker, Georges Tarabishi, in ʃarq wa ɣarb, rudʒuːla wa ʔunuːθa [East and west, Virility and Femininity] (1977: 13), argues that in patriarchal and colonized societies, like the Arab society, the relationship between man and woman underlies both power and oppression. In a way of explaining this, manhood is a representation of war and strength, while concepts of peace and weakness are traits of women. This prototype of relationship can be manifested in childhood toys; boys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_sibilant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel 32 are usually interested in plastic guns whereas girls desire to play with baby dolls (ibid: 15). Tarabishi, then, correlates this paradoxical dichotomy between man and woman to the principles of colonialism, as it stands on the ideas of hegemony and superiority. As a result, most of the words referring to a sexual intercourse in Arabic or to an erotic scene are ultimately charged with this paradox of power and oppression (ibid: 17). For instance, Tarabishi mentions the following Arabic words that are used to refer to a violent sexual intercourse: ɣaʃaːhaː [he is over her but fiercely], watˤiʔahaː [he treads on her], daʕakahaː [he tastes her pain], daʕasahaː [he stumbled upon her voraciously] (ibid: 20). Even the word "conquer" has a semiotic meaning in Arabic erotic language; it is closely connected to notions of power and hegemony. 2.4 Literary eroticism in The Corpse Washer An in-depth reading in The Corpse Washer reveals how the author, who shows a mastery of the style of language he employs, handles sexually explicit scenes, or the erotic element, to illustrate the socio-cultural dimensions. The Corpse Washer deals with eroticism on two levels. First, on the aesthetic level of erotic language, it presents an erotic narrative variant to the exotic Eurocentric vision of the magic sexual East. Second, it conflates the context of the sexual with its societal and cultural norms of the Iraqi society, implicating the whole Arab society. The Corpse Washer, which is narrated in the first person, is a tragic novel, discussing the recurrent themes of death, family loss and sectarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_sibilant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_palato-alveolar_sibilant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel 33 violence. However, the language Antoon shadows, simple, straightforward and explicitly poetic, is an embodiment of the Iraqi life and culture before and after the American occupation in 2003. Being a self-translation novel, Antoon gives himself a special privilege as a translator to inhabit the body of the novel and to be the author. As a result, marginal discrepancies in terms of style of writing, aesthetics and language in both the source text (Arabic, Ar) and the target text (English, Eng) are subtle, but as Antoon (2013: vii) remarks in the preface of the novel, "[t]he characters spoke English. Their lives (and deaths) did not change at all, but they said a few words here and there differently and left a few others unsaid". In fact, the nuances were utilized to establish a socio-political and cultural stance. Antoon attempts intentionally to delete some phrases from his translation to reflect such ideological viewpoints. In some erotic contexts, Antoon decides to leave out the word "mutaxalif (Ar. p.214)" [backward] in Jawad and Ghayda‟s love-making scene, "It was reasonable for her to preserve her capital in a society like ours (Eng. p.151)"; as well as the sentence "kaːnat xaːifa an takuːna fariːsa ʔshal li-ridʒaːl (Ar. p.72)" [she was afraid that she might be an easier prey for men] in the English translation is omitted, because the two expressions are historically connected to dehumanizing the colonized, and therefore, justifying their physical violation, and even killing. The word "easier prey" would suggest to the Anglo-American reader that Arab men are barbaric and savage, and so they must be freed from this animalistic state through the intervention of the civilized man, the Western. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palato-alveolar_affricate 34 In other instances, the deletion of phrases in the target text serves an aesthetic purpose. As discussed before, Western erotic aesthetics are different from the Arabic, as the Western tend to elaborate more on eroticism by providing extra bodily details. Antoon takes into consideration this difference and carefully leaves out elements that do not add to the erotic and aesthetic values of the Anglo-American reader, such as omitting the metaphor "fawqa nahdiːni kumaθraiːn (Ar. p.7)" [ on her pear-shaped breasts] because the sentence that precedes in the Arabic version and is kept in the English one, which is "her nipples are erect" (Eng. p.1), delivers the notions of sexual arousal and bodily aesthetics to the Western audience. The Iraqi author/translator also attempts to distill from the traditional narratives rooted in Western ideology and culture: Arab/Muslim women do neither love nor have sex outside wedlock, since sex is regulated within channels and one of these channels is marriage; or 'the forbidden apple' which recaptures itself in the playful scenes from oriental films about the Sultan and his Harem. Moreover, he underlies a significant battlefield for the conflict against the dominant patriarchal and colonized society. This battlefield is manifested in the premarital sexual relationships, Jawad‟s relationships with Reem and Ghayda, that the writer normalizes and writes about with a mundane tone. Moving beyond dismantling Orientalists' stereotypes about eroticism in the Arab world, Antoon chooses to provide Western classical analogous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel 35 sexual depictions in his writing about his character's sexual relationships at the onset of the novel; he is merging, not stressing, the dichotomy of West and East conflict. Indeed, The Corpse Washer is a hybrid third place: "She is lying naked on her back on a marble bench in an open place with no walls or ceilings. There is no one around and nothing in sight except the sand (Eng. p.1)." The metaphors in the opening of the novel provoke two images in the reader‟s mind; the first is the resemblance drawn between Reem, Jawad‟s beloved, and the desirable, and extraordinarily sublime Greek and Roman goddesses‟ sculptures; the second is the departure from the conventional perception of Orientalists about images of prison, such as walls, which depict imprisoned women in the closed system of Arab society. Antoon projects the rumored social construct of the sexual act, within a closed society, on the language he uses in some erotic scenes. The author, when handling the notions of eroticism and sexuality, endeavors to express his ideological stand, which is to rebel against the societal norms; he is ultimately against the existing dominant cultural discourse that constitutes a fierce and sensitive zone of the sexual. A prominent example of this resistant attitude is the internal conflict Jawad faces when his desire grows for Ghayda, where, at the end, the inflaming desires triumph over the social rules as in this monologue, "my desire for Ghayda increased every day. I felt that she was drawn to me, too, but I never mustered enough courage to make a move. I didn’t want to complicate my life and stir up family problems (Eng. p.150)". This conflict, however, extends to later 36 scenes, for instance, when describing the secret world of pleasure that he and Ghayda construct as the following, "It was a world bordered by danger and the fear of scandal (Eng. p.151)." and ""Do whatever you want with my body, but not from the front.(Eng. p.151)"" So he inflicts this attitude on the usage of terms like "the Taboo zone" in "I played in the Taboo zone with my finger (Eng. p.152)", indirectly referring to her genitalia. The Corpse Washer also challenges the conventional portrayal of women in the erotic, both societal and literary. Antoon builds women characters that have strong personalities, able to express themselves, and active in the sexual act. This self-assertive feminine voice is especially demonstrated in the sexual and erotic act as the two lovers, Reem and Ghayda, are not passive women lying on a couch ready to take their fortune of their admirer. Even he represents them as the ones who start the spark of love and who are bright, flirtatious and capable of mystifying the naive male before them. For instance, the protagonist, Jawad, reflects on the fierce self-assertiveness of Reem during and after the sexual act saying, "I loved her self-confidence and the way she stood there and put her hand on her hip saying: "so you want to sculpt me now?" (Eng. p.53)." The reclaiming of the female body in the novel alters the dominant erotic elements and values prevalent in the Arab world, which are mainly masculine, and establishes a third place where neither female nor the male eroticism rules, but a complex merging of both. Under the same notion, the author highlights the fact that widowed women, women who lose their virginity in socially acceptable ways and are not attached to men, are 37 perceived as easy targets for sexual intercourse and erotic experiences. However, the novel attempts to change this common view through giving a heterogeneous module, Reem, who is described by the following words, "She was cautious with me at the outset of our friendship. More than once she made me feel that I had to slow down (Eng. p.48)." 2.5 Conclusion Overall, sexually explicit language as portrayed in The Corpse Washer seems to assert the fact that it is not considered within the context of pornography, but it is justified within the principles of literary eroticism and its artistic style. On the one hand, the style of the language employed in the target text (English) is direct, simple and strongly poetic; in doing so, Antoon (both author and translator of the novel) is able to voyage in the Western mindset to negotiate the Arab sexual act. On the other hand, Antoon embodies the sexually explicit language as a literary renewal (a tool of resistance) in the post-colonial modern Arabic novel as an attempt to intervene in the dominant socio-cultural literary discourse of the sexual in a closed colonized system. Moreover, The Corpse Washer‟s sexually explicit language represents a hybrid liminal space, not a continual division between East and West. The erotic language that is utilized to render the love-making scenes in the novel moves beyond serving as a mere decorative literary device. It is employed to draw on the contrast between life and death, the main themes of the novel, as well as to emphasize the ideological stand the novel takes 38 against the absurd and surreal amount of death caused by the American occupation and sectarian conflicts within the Iraqi society. Sexually explicit language, which is associated with images that allude to recreation, acts as a tool of resisting the attempts of dehumanizing and shredding of free individuals in order to imprison them within the acceptable roles dictated by the patriarchal and colonial systems. 39 Chapter Three The Manifestations of Sexuality in Translated Modern Arabic Literature: between Mimicking and Dismantling the Eurocentric Narrative The second chapter aimed to elaborate on the notion of eroticism, viewing its development in different cultural and literary scopes, drawing special emphasis on the translated language in Sinan Antoon‟s The Corpse Washer. In this chapter, the discussion of eroticism and sexuality shifts to the more profound terrain of translation as intervening in hegemonic narratives. In doing so, it examines the utilization of sexually explicit language to portray Arab men and women as well as sexual practices in Western narrative, focusing on Galland and Burton‟s translations of Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights) before taking a closer look at Camus‟ The Stranger (L’Etranger, 1942). This paves the way for further analysis to illustrate what role translated sexually explicit language in The Corpse Washer plays in searching for a liminal place, where Antoon 'voyages in' the Eurocentric discourse to say the unsaid. It also explores the rhetoric of the sexual in the novel to develop a deeper understanding of how translated fiction can form ideologies. 40 3.1 Arab sexuality in Western narrative: images of Arab/Muslim women and men This is how I bluff: Narcissus is not beautiful as he thought. Had he been a bit more clever, he would have broken his mirror and saw how much he was the others. (Darwish, trans. Diab, 2015). For centuries, the West set itself at an epistemological distance from the Orient as unattainable. Despite this fact, translated literature from Arabic into European languages, especially by Orientalists, such as Thousand and One Nights, still influences modern Western literature and arts, high culture and popular culture alike, and till nowadays constitutes an integral part of the European narrative about the East. Such literature derives its power from the notion of travelogue, travel writings, for it possesses an influential power for the dominant culture. Kabbani (1985: 1) states that French and English emissaries were sent out to the distant lands of the Orient to bring back information about Orientals‟ lives and ethnologies; Western travelers sought out knowledge that could help them in forging a communal image of the Oriental society. In fact, Kabbani (ibid) argues that this politically epistemological enrichment of the Orient 41 has potentially been a fresco for colonial discourse. The Orientalists‟ desire to collect information about the Orient populace was a systematic attempt to convey "images of the 'alien other' by imposing its own self- perpetuating categories and deviations from the norm" (ibid: 9). In this sense, they purposefully aimed to immerse their narrative with racial stereotypes, sexually exotic fantasies, and notions of barbarism and savagery that were intrinsic to their colonial hegemony over the Orient. Kabbani (ibid: 6) notes In the European narration of the Orient, there was a deliberate stress on those qualities [violence, savagery, and preoccupation with sex] that made the East different from the West, exiled it into an irretrievable state of ' otherness'. Among the many themes that emerge from the European narration of the Other, two appear most strikingly. The first is the insistent claim that the East was a place of lascivious sensuality, and the second that it was a realm characterized by inherent violence. Due to this systematic colonial characterization of the Orient, Orientalists justified their political domination and confirmation of the mythic self-image. The Other (Orientals) compared to the European Self was its inferior, enemy and opposite, so the Other was associated with qualities of animality, of which sexually exotic practice was one. For instance, the European narration sees the Oriental woman in a paradoxical gaze; she is both a victim of a sexual animal man and a playful witch. Said (1995: 32) argues that "in attempting to document the Orient, the Occident 42 came to document itself". This colonial discourse ultimately conditioned a polemic relation with the Orient, creating exhausting binaries as West/East and Christianity/Islam. The 19th century Western traveler was a 'mere' means for colonialism and a symbol of early confrontation between West and East. The Thousand and One Nights is an anonymous product of medieval Arabic literature, in which Scheherazade, the storyteller of the Arabian Nights, tells King Shahrayar a tale each night to save her life before the dawn of the next morning comes. Three centuries ago, the Arabian Nights appeared extensively in the Western culture and literature through travelers' translations; and, as Wright (1906: 12) notes, so many French and English poets and writers, such as Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Voltaire, have adopted the characters and stories of the Arabian Nights, such as "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "Aladdin", and "Sinbad", as allusions and illuminations for their writings. Wright (ibid) also maintains these stories have been circulated and fabricated, in a way or another in Hollywood films, Disney World film company, for example. However, the travelers' translations of the Arabian Nights served colonialism as a pretext for hegemony and economic exploitation of the Orient; in fact, their translations intentionally manipulated the Arabian Nights into a sexual setting, conveyed distorted images and fragmented stories of the sexual that seemed naive and exotic. The Orient in their translations was perceived as a place for exotic tale. 43 The Nightingale sings o‟er her head: Voice of the Night! had I the power That leafy labyrinth to thread, And creep, like thee, with soundless tread, I then might view her bosom white Heaving lovely to my sight, And these two swans together heave On the gently-swelling wave. ( as cited in poemhunter.com: para. 3) This is a verse from Coleridge‟s poem “The Nightingale” in 1795, in which he alludes to the East as a metaphor of sexual fantasies and a setting for sensual atmosphere. The sordid translations of the Arabian Nights, therefore, function as a means for a long history of sociological and imperial discourse on the Orient. One of the most prolific narratives that should be discussed when it comes to writing about the East is Antoine Galland's translation of Thousand and One Nights (1717) into French as it owed to him the popularization of the manuscript in European milieus. Irwin (2014: 25) suggests that Galland's main aim was to introduce the French elitist class to "the customs and manners of Arabs" as part of contributing to the French 44 library "extensive" knowledge about the Orient. The translation was highly welcomed and successful due to its resemblance to "the vogue of fairy tales", which were popular in France at that time. However, Galland‟s translation of the Arabian Nights was not accurate, he "censored and omitted the exotic sexual" (ibid: 25) because content related to sex was considered as "vulgar" and "inappropriate" by the salons of 18th century France. Irwin (ibid: 16) states that " the Arabian Nights are not naive and vulgar, they are artfully constructed, highly sophisticated fictions; they are works of literature in fullest sense". In fact, the Arabian Nights unfolds a highly rich culture and a social and literary history of that era of Arabic literature. As will be further elaborated in this section, Galland's narrative was nothing but the European man perpetuating his fascination with his self-image and the irreconcilable differences between him and "the lower other", which he derives his power from, through his narratives of the Orient. Richard F. Burton, nicknamed "Ruffian Dick" (Wright, 1906: 1), however, had an exceptional experience from Galland in translating the Nights; his fascination with the Arabian Nights was ultimately reasoned to his attempt to question the sexual acts and rituals of others. Burton and other English men cofounded what they called "Oriental Translation Fund", which aimed "to publish erotic and semi-erotic Indian and Arab texts" (ibid: 30). In doing so, in his 1885-86 translation of the Arabian Nights, Burton added a long-detailed "Terminal Essay", in which he thrashed out sexual acts under the title "Pornography". Following the defense for 45 including sexual explicit material in the translation for his readers, Burton states that There is another element in The Arabian Nights and that is one of absolute obscenity utterly repugnant to English readers, even the least prudish. It is chiefly connected with what our neighbors call „Le vice contre nature‟[ The vice against nature]- as if anything can be contrary to nature which includes all things. Upon this subject I must offer details, as it does not enter into my plan to ignore any theme which is interesting to the Orientalist ( as cited in Massad, 2007:10). What is striking about Burton‟s translation, as Irwin (2014) argues, is his exaggeration of the obscenity of the original text. He added many of many biased footnotes, along with appendices and indexes, that mainly discussed strange observations of the sexual practices of Orientals and that were characterized by racism and sexual fantasy. His remark on Oriental women's desire for black men is one of the racial commentaries he added to his footnotes Debauched women prefer Negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the Negro race and of African animals; [. . .] whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by and by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a Negro partially whitewashed ( as cited in Wright, 1906: 129). 46 Above all, Hopwood (1999: 16) states that Burton claims that the Arab men are lazy, lascivious, preoccupied with sex that is their only daily activity, and are labeled "unbridled sexual animal". In effect, his translation fiercely distorted the Arabic text adopted by the English culture and its presentation of the Arabian Nights. In addition, Burton does not only rationalize his translation through stating the sexual disparities between West and East; more importantly, he regards his translation as colonial discourse to sustain the Western political hegemony over the Orient. Hence, Burton holds a major responsibility for theorizing the sensual and gullible Oriental myth. In his essay The Translators of the One Thousand and One Nights Borges (1936), whose most stories and poems include allusions and points of reference to the Arabian Nights, endeavors to examine the various translations of the Arabian Nights and study the polemic relationship between fiction and ideology. More specifically, Borges (ibid: 5) shows an analogous link between Latin American and the Arab worlds, as the first was also conceived as „exotic‟ in the gaze of the West, and he argues that through translation some reader can inflect his/her interpretation on another‟s. He also criticizes Burton‟s translation as it was accompanied with huge footnotes relating to Burton‟s longing for an active sexual life. The depiction of the 'Orient other' as exotic and savage persisted in modern narratives like The Stranger (L’Etranger) by the French author Camus in 1942. The novel is considered as 'a specialized entry' into the 47 imperial struggle over the Orient. The story that takes place in colonized Algeria ostensibly centers around the protagonist Meursault, a French of strangeness and absurd struggle against the values of the society he lives in. Besides justifying the killing of "an Arab", who Camus prefers to deprive of a name, Meursault, as part of his senseless acts, commits a crime "because of the sun" (Camus, 1989: 53). In the novel, Camus goes further with neglecting the identity of the colonized and treating their men and women as mere properties of his own when he illustrates Raymond's mistress, an Algerian, as a passive, and low-life cheater who only deserves to be physically and sexually violated: Then, when she came back, he‟d go to bed with her and, just when she was "properly primed up," he‟d spit in her face and throw her out of the room. I agreed it wasn‟t a bad plan; it would punish her, all right (ibid: 22). The mistress is also depersonalized by being referred to as "she", and "my girl" by Raymond, as well as reduced into a means of enjoyment and a prostitute through using a very sexual and slangy language when talking about her. Through the eyes of the main character, Meursault, Camus attempts to mask his colonialist reality and his violent hatred towards the Other, the indigenous Algerian, under the notions of absurdism and existentialism. If we examine these efforts under Said‟s argument that, "contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it" (Said, 1993: 66), we conclude that Camus forcibly blurred 48 and excluded any element in the text that alludes to France's history of colonialism and its physical, mental, and sexual oppression of Algerian men and women, at a time when Algeria was struggling to obtain independence and freedom. As noted before, the anthropological and Orientalist observations of the sexual desires and practices of Arabs were, and still are, assimilated into the political and economic agenda of Western powers as hegemony, even though these observations do exhibit ongoing and different articulations. The emergence of human sexual rights in the late 1960s and the War on Terror in 2001, as Massad (2007) argues, have led to major conceptual shifts in the sexual representational repertoire of Arabs: from emphasizing the Orientalist fascination with the exotic and sensual to portraying Arabs as sexually repressed and sex-starved individuals. So, the discourse of the international human rights organizations, outside the United States and the European countries, has increasingly cast the plight of 'sexual freedoms', dependant on existing anthropological details of the sexual act. Massad (ibid) maintains that such organizations have delved into propping the human sexual rights in the Arab world as an alibi for political hegemony, which necessitated forming Non-Western sexual subjects"; [...] two prime victims of human rights violations in Arab countries emerged and/or were created: women and 'homosexuals'" (ibid: 37). In this way, what is noticed in the discourse of human sexual rights activism on Arab sexuality, as the concern of this research, is its 49 prolific preoccupation with the terror of 'honor' crimes and domestic violence committed against Arab women in the Arab world. Within the political implications of War on Terror launched by the White House in response to the 9/11 attacks against the so-called Islamist fundamentalist organizations, the Orientalist and anthropological sources have served as an influence for the Anglo-American military forces to violate the Other. The New Yorker reporter, Seymour Hersh, revealed in 2004 that the combination of disdainful violence and sexual abuse committed against Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison was based on the US war planners' reading of the notion (as cited in Smith, 2004: para.1) that "Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation" (as cited in Patai, 2010: 165) in Orientalist Patai‟s infamous book The Arab Mind. Patai (ibid: 89) discusses two opposing notions of Western and Arab societies as the notion of 'guilt' is consciously present in the Western consensus while, in Arab societies, 'shame' is more overdosed than guilt. In effect, Patai (ibid: 90) thinks of two emerging themes, "one, that Arabs only understand force and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation". For instance, masturbation among the Arabs according to Patai (ibid: 90) is "far more shameful than visiting prostitutes". Thus it would seem that the Western narrative over the three centuries has included anthropological data on the sexual desires and lives of Arabs to seek out imperial domination as well as it has maintained the civilized/uncivilized dichotomy. 50 After discussing what was included in constructing the Eurocentric and Orientalist narratives about Arab men and women with particular regard to the sexual act, the question that poses itself as Spivak (1990: 35) puts it is, "what is left in the Western narrative? When a narrative is constructed, something is left out". We might also add to this question another one, which is how was the empty space in the narrative filled and by whom? Such answers can be found in 'subaltern' responses to Orientalism and Imperialism. 3.2 The search for a place: towards peripheral narrative on sexuality [...] tell the people that they must be regenerated or born again, else they can never „see God‟. [...] To avoid the appearance of countenancing so absurd and pernicious a doctrine, you vary your language, and tell them that there must be a second birth – that they must be twice- born. (Alexander Duff, 2006: 48) Upon writing in the 'imperial' language, the peripheral scholarly intellectuals have cherished the merits of the Western metropolis, and thus, connected their work to the ideological resistance of the centre. After the 1 st Gulf War in 1991, Sinan Antoon migrated to the United States, where he studied for the M.A. and PhD. degrees, and produced many scholarly papers, novels, and translations in English. His work is off-centre for it has attempted to 'voyage in', a notion developed by Said (1993), through dealing with the metropolitan narrative, envisaging its techniques and critically re-examining it. The translation of The Corpse Washer into 51 English has endured for the empowerment of peripheral voices and asserted the discrepancies within the mainstream Western discourses, especially the human sexual rights and War on Terror discourses. As Bhabha (1994: 49) maintains "[t]he process of translation is the opening up of another contentious political and cultural site at the heart of colonial representation". Antoon‟s The Corpse Washer, on its merits, appeals apparently to his re-experience of the voyage motif of the imperial quest, which had driven him away from his Iraq, by the same imperial trope yet into "a creative culture revisited and reshaped" as Said (1993: 210) states. The first topic that Said proposes in decolonizing cultural resistance is the insistence" to see the community‟s history whole, coherently, integrally" (ibid: 215) by using restored ways of life and protagonists as well as formulating expressions of pride and defiance. The Corpse Washer approaches the realities of the 1 st Gulf War and the American occupation of Iraq as background and context of the novel, but the narrative does not centre and dwell on the unrelenting wars and the direct struggle between the occupied Iraqis and their occupiers. Instead, Antoon chooses to bring in these realities through the personal lives of Jawad, his lovers, his family, and his community members in a manner that gives new life to Arabic and Iraqi narrative styles, such as folklore songs, oral tradition in transmitting knowledge between two generations and mythology. 52 In the following folklore song, "So unfair of you/ To be gone for so long./What will I tell people?/ When they ask about you? (Eng. p.87)", Jawad‟s uncle, a communist who forcibly had to leave Iraq in order not to be assassinated by the Ba‟thist regime, grieves for his beloved Iraq. It is a nostalgic image of an ideal Iraq that has been destroyed after his return for a short visit and after he stumbles upon the massive destruction the consecutive struggles have imprinted on Iraq and Iraqi society, which leaves a deep scar in his heart and consciousness. Jawad‟s uncle, Sabri, represents a segment of Iraqis who have been marginalized in both Arabic and Western narratives and who have played a significant role in shaping the history of modern Iraq. Antoon, in the same manner, codifies the oral tradition of corpse washing (shrouding) rituals through Jawad‟s father, who desires him to inherit it, “He said that he’d mastered his profession through practice and without writing a single letter down, as had all those who had worked with him before. His notebooks were all in his head, written down by the years” (Eng. p.24). The father, then, goes further with explanatory details about the profession and mocks Jawad for writing every note about the washing. The structural function of oral tradition, as the novel suggests, ensures the interconnectedness of Iraqi society old tradition reservoir with its present articulation of history and sheds light on an aspect of Iraqi traditions that has been slightly talked about and how such traditions restore more significance in the context of occupation and the deaths it accumulates. 53 Moreover, the novel evokes old Sumerian creation epic of An-ki, the god of water and wisdom, and Nammu, the mother of gods, to connect the setting and the tragic events of the myth, which dates back to prehistory Mesopotamia, to the modern tragedy of Iraq and the sacrifices Iraqis have undergone during Saddam‟s regime reign and the US occupation. An-ki tells the great gods, “I will prepare a pure place and one of the gods shall be slaughtered there. Let the other gods be baptized with his blood [... and] eternally united in clay” (Eng. p.182). The pure place in the myth much resembles the washing bench at the mghaysil [shrouding house] and the sacrificed god that serves as a scapegoat to purify the rest of gods echoes the civilian Iraqis who have been brutally killed in the seemingly endless wars and occupation. Antoon‟s novel, also, overshadows prolific historical monuments that had imprinted dramatic effect on the history of Iraq through the life of the protagonist, Jawad, and other characters at a time Iraq was falling apart under colonialism; for instance, he summons the memory of Abd al-Karim Qasim‟s assassination, a nationalist Iraqi army brigadier who ruled Iraq in late 1950s, the history of Liberty Monument designed by Jawad Saleem as part of the rich modern Iraqi art movement in 1960s, and the national football league that was celebrated and passionately attended by Iraqis before the US invasion. Through these expressions of defiance and pride, Antoon attempts to maintain the integrity of Iraq history coherent and refutes the flat view of 54 history as claimed by Western powers. His choice to present this integrity of history in fragments reflects a wish to participate in the process of rewriting it, assembling smaller accounts of historical events into a single time segment. Also, sketching out long-forgotten moments in Iraqi history opens a dialog with a suppressed past and challenges the Western monumental discourse that initiated a process of forgetfulness. Similarly, Bhabha (1994: 12) calls upon carving a 'Third Place' where "[w]e find ourselves in the moment of transit where time and space cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion". As The Corpse Washer shows a conscious, yet subtle, endeavor to work out a constructive narrative of the overall fragmented Iraqi history, this would, in essence, reflect upon our ability to liberate the imagination of the past and present to reclaim a terrain, where it would be plausible to break down the barriers of cultures and build upon a liminal place. It is, as Said (1993: 216) argues, "an alternative way of conceiving human history". The Corpse Washer acts upon a negotiation process of the characters‟ identities, their past, and their current situations inside and outside, to reinterpret the voice of the silent Iraqi colonized. In fact, it is a conscious process to "enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories" (ibid: 216). 55 The Corpse Washer, both the novel itself and the translation work that Antoon renders, is revealed to be a hybrid and this hybridity ensures a third space that is a discourse "uttered between the lines and as such both against the rules and within them" as Bhabha (1994: 112) describes. It is a movement across the boundaries of two cultures, providing a solid ground to establish non-hierarchical relations and to encourage the disruption of the linear view of history and society, in which the subaltern agency can be enabled. Antoon overturns the long-established hegemonic Western discourse, making the marginal the central and, inversely, striving to embody both into a hybrid, complex unity where it would be not possible or sensible to trace down boundaries between marginal or central, masculine and feminine. Jawad, the wretched Iraqi individual, is the center of the story and the occupation is marginal, a setting background. At the same time, the occupation is central through the presence of accumulating and unnatural deaths in Jawad's life. This is how it is unmanageable for the reader to draw lines between the marginal and central. Death and the White man, the latter compressed into the death figure in Jawad‟s nightmares and hence occupation, on the one hand, and Jawad‟s life and attempts to escape the clutches of death, on the other hand, are one and cannot be separated. As for gender boundaries, even though Jawad, a male, is the one who narrates the stories of the females in the novel, the females are portrayed as fully present through the aesthetic detailing of their bodily features while 56 choosing to minimally portray the living males in the story as the case in which the reader is left with no physical image of Jawad. The females are also central in the sexual act as they are always the initiators and co-guides of the sexual asserting their sexual preferences, for instance when Ghayda‟ tells Jawad not to kiss her in between her thighs, " [...] but she pushed my head away gently and whispered, “not today.”" (Eng. p.151). Giving the voice to the female characters does not negate the fact that Jawad is also an active actor in the sexual as he contemplates and reflects on the sexual act, meaning that neither the male nor the female has agency over each other. They are both equal partners and creators of the sexual. The aesthetics of sexually explicit language do not lean towards the male gaze neither to the female one as in, "I climbed on top of her."(Eng. p.52) and "She kept rising in waves. (my emphasis)" (Eng. p.52). Hence, the text analysis of the novel, which is a first step in this research, shows that Antoon negotiates both the male and female aesthetics, aiming to incorporate both into one but complex interconnectedness. In the same manner, the sexual also temporarily neutralizes the class difference between Reem and Jawad, as they find a space where they can interact without being governed by the limitations of their classes, particularly when they are naked in the same bed and their bodies are united without giving any sign that someone is dominating the sexual act, as well as there is no violence or show of passivity of one of the sexual actors. 57 Antoon also negotiates cultural hegemony when his characters work out social and religious limitations on the sexual by creating a third space: the first space is Jawad, Reem and Ghayda‟ who have sexual desires that they need to articulate and act upon; whereas the second space is the society that suffocates such desires and only allows expressing them through its institutionalized language and structure, which is marriage, and the colonial power that militates against such natural desires by killing, depriving and separating actions as Reem with cancer and Ghayda‟ asking for asylum. Hence, Antoon works out these anomalies in the Third Space; Jawad, Reem, and Ghayda‟ do not resort to expressing the sexual through overtly challenging and abandoning these structures, but they negotiate and play in the boundaries. For instance, this negotiation process can be seen in the secret world of Jawad and Ghayda‟ and also when Reem and Jawad get engaged to facilitate their pre-marital sex. Similarly, when Jawad loses Reem due to colonialism he recreates her in his dreams and the recurrent nightmares; the dreams are our mental third place where we negotiate the things that are repressed in our subconscious and represent them to our conscious in symbols the consc