“THE BOOK OF SONG”: EXPLORING THE TEXTUAL HETEROTOPIA IN SOFIA SAMATAR’S THE WINGED HISTORIES
“THE BOOK OF SONG”: EXPLORING THE TEXTUAL HETEROTOPIA IN SOFIA SAMATAR’S THE WINGED HISTORIES

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines Sofia Samatar’s The Winged Histories as a site of textual heterotopia, where narrative space is produced through language rather than geography. Drawing on Le Guin’s conception of language as world-making matter, Foucault’s heterotopic enclosures, Massey’s account of space as ongoing trajectory, and Cixous’s theory of embodied voice, the paper argues that Samatar constructs plural narrative interiors that coexist without collapse. Particular attention is given to Seren’s section, where an oral, gendered practice of storytelling generates a moving interior that resists fixed inscription. However, the novel transcribes this breath-based space into writing, revealing a paradox: the archive that preserves women’s oral worlds is also the structure that risks enclosing them. In tracing this tension, the paper positions Samatar’s novel as a heterotopic archive that keeps language alive within the very mechanism that could still it.

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