Resisting the Allure: The West as Fiction in the Arab Immigrant Novel

This article investigates the resemblance between the Arab immigrant experience in the Arab immigrant novel, on the one hand, and the experience of fiction reading, on the other one. The article analyzes Tayeb Salih’s Season of migration to the north (1966), Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the snooker club (1964), Walid Al Hajjar’s trilogy The search for the self (published privately in 1973, 1979, and 1984), Leila Aboulela’s The translator (1999), and Alaa Al Aswany’s Chicago: A novel (2007) to demonstrate the presence of a pattern depicting the experience of Arab immigrants as akin to fiction reading. Drawing from genre, postcolonial, and diasporic studies, this project argues that the West, for the Arab immigrant characters, shares many of the features of fiction: its emotional distance, authority, the privacy of its experience, the space it allows for role playing, and its allowance or requirement of a temporary reinvention of the self. Such characteristics, the project shows, illuminate our understanding of significant issues such as the integration of Arab immigrants into Western countries and their sense of home and belonging. While these characteristics comprise the lure of the fictional West, they also account for its oppression and exclusion. The Arab immigrant characters who find the prolonged fictional experience of the West painful respond to the agony of this experience through violence—to depart from the Western experience altogether or to settle for it despite its unpleasantness—or through the establishment of a native, home religion in the receiving Western countries.