(Re)writing the History of the Female Subaltern: Radwa Ashour's Siraaj (2007)

This paper claims that the Egyptian academic, activist, translator, and writer Radwa Ashour, uses the novel as a medium to subvert colonialism in the way Edward Said proposed in Orientalism In Siraaj, Beautifully translated by Barbara Romaine, Ashour, on the one hand, reverses the colonial narrative and create vivid female indigenous characters. On the other, she alienates the female characters that are attached to colonialism or support it. Despite their inability to directly speak back to the oppressors, the female subalterns change the history of subalterneity by taking part in a revolution against a colonially supported Sultan that is oppressed at the end. With the Urabi revolution looming as background event, Ashour obviously pinpoints that the lack of political consciousness and vision, expressed in the island’s widespread illiteracy, doom the revolutionary acts of the subalterns. The study shows how Third World female writer Radwa Ashour subverts colonialism and the marginality of the “female subaltern” by escaping the trap of “representing” the subaltern; hence further marginalizing them, but slowly paving a rough uncertain way for them to be seen and heard in their variety and mystery. Moreover, by alienating the colonial or colonially supported female characters in the novel, she writes back to the empire. Pinpointing illiteracy as one cause of subalternity is another finding of the study.