Attempting to Break Binary Oppositions of East and West: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s “I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops”

Abstract Hanan Al-Shaykh’s, “I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops”, calls for cross-cultural dialogue between different cultures. The text explores the cultural tensions that shape an individual’s identity within the postcolonial context. This article examines an encounter in the text between the Moroccan protagonist and her English boyfriend, his sister and his friends in London. Engaging in dialogue between multiple postcolonial theories such as Frantz Fanon’s concept of “absolute depersonalization”, Edward Said’s Orientalism and “contrapuntal consciousness” – Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of transculturation and Homi Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity”, this research studies how the processes of transculturation and hybridity can act to transcend cultural clashes and East–West divisions. The author resorts to using colonial tropes or Orientalist stereotypes to eventually subvert these problems but, at times, this causes ambiguity and contradictions in her text. The female protagonist follows a non-linear trajectory, experiencing various stages before she reaches a hybrid state; these stages involve a fascination with London, cultural clashes, self-assertion and integration, incorporating cultural crossing and hybridity. The female protagonist slips back and forth from one stage to another with all her experiences contributing towards the attainment of cultural dialogue.