ABSURDISM IN J.P. CLARK'S THE RAFT AND TEWFIK AL-HAKIM'S NOTATHINGOUT OF PLACE

This paper examines absurdism in J. P. Clark’s The Raft and Tewfik Al-Hakim’s Not a Thing Out of Place. Absurdism is usually framed as a European aesthetic, rooted in Beckett, Ionesco, and Camus. African and Arab engagements with the absurd remain scattered. It is often dismissed as derivative or secondary. This study challenges that view. It argues that Clark and Al-Hakim provincialise European absurdism. They transform it into a language of corruption, stasis, and fractured hope. The analysis is thematic and comparative. It traces fragmentation and circularity, the breakdown of communication, character stasis, futility, corruption, and the uneasy fusion of comedy with horror. Full textual excerpts are integrated into critical readings to show how absurdist techniques are recalibrated in African and Arab contexts. Clark’s raft becomes a tragic allegory of betrayed leadership. Al-Hakim’s village , animated by arbitrary bureaucracy and ritualised nonsense, stages absurdity as comic inversion. The findings demonstrate that both dramatists expand global absurdist poetics. They adapt rather than imitate. Clark embeds existential drift in the economics of corruption; Al-Hakim translates bureaucratic farce into a theatre of social paralysis. Together, they show that absurdism is not a European monopoly but a travelling idiom, elastic enough to articulate postcolonial disillusionment. This study contributes to re-mapping absurdism as a global, rather than Eurocentric, form.