Bridging Two Worlds: Transculturality in Shaping Women’s Hybrid Identity in Ahdaf Soueif’s 'The Map of Love'
Bridging Two Worlds: Transculturality in Shaping Women’s Hybrid Identity in Ahdaf Soueif’s 'The Map of Love'

Summary/Abstract: Arab British literature is a literature of exiles and ethnics, travellers and homemakers. The Arab British texts that have emerged over the last century testify to the experience of Arab immigrants and their descendants as they negotiate displacement, engage with intersections of geographies, nationalities, languages, cultures, politics and identities and claim or assert the creation of a ground space as Arab, British and Arab-British too. Confronted with diaspora, immigrant Arab intellectuals have expressed being torn between their commitment to universal-human values, their commitment to their new land, and their attachment to their homeland. In fact, their experience as emigrants profound changes in their conceptual social orientation as they move from the state of being a “majority” at home to that of being a “minority” or “diaspora” in another country, giving rise to feelings of dislocation, alienation and in-betweens which they have to cope with. It is in this sense that the present paper will examine how the Arab British novelist Ahdaf Soueif celebrates hybridity as fusion of different cultural background that allows the self to coexist with the other in her novel The Map of Love. My focus while exploring the text will be on the way the writer instigates dialogue with her Arab, British and American characters resulting in a full recognition of the one’s culture and that of the other, which gave birth to a self identity that flows from the fusion of values and ways of life and styles from both cultures through an act of transculturality.

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