چکیده:
Postcolonial texts seek to rewrite the mythical narratives of vampires to problematize the power relations between the colonizer and the colonized. The vampire tradition is inscribed and recycled according to the collective Oriental heritage to articulate the untold stories of the muffled Eastern subject. Drawing on the mythical narratives of the ghoul (ogre) in classical Arabic culture and old Arabic folktales and of Lord Shiva in the Hindu myth, this paper compares the rewritings of the vampire topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in both Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989). The metamorphosis of Saraya into a laughing muse and Jasmine into a potent goddess can be taken to represent the liminal state of Dracula between life and death on the one hand and the convergence of cultures on the other hand. Where these two works differ principally is in the geographic location of this site of cultural interaction. Whereas Habiby (1922 – 1996), the Palestinian writer, traces the predicament of Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian diaspora, Mukherjee (1940-), the Indian American writer, writes of the potential synthesis of Indian and American culture in the context of globalization.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Drawing on the mythical narratives of the ghoul (ogre) in classical Arabic culture and old Arabic folktales and of Lord Shiva in the Hindu myth, this paper compares the rewritings of the vampire topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in both Emile Habiby's Saraya, The Ghoul's Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989).
Drawing on the mythical narratives of the ghoul (ogre) in classical Arabic culture and old Arabic folktales and of Lord Shiva in the Hindu myth, this paper compares the rewritings of the vampire topoi of otherness, unspeakableness, foreignness, and border existences in Emile Habiby‘s Saraya, The Ghoul’s Daughter (1991) and Bharati Mukherjee‘s Jasmine (1989).
Like the Palestinian Emile Habiby, Bharati Mukherjee uses the Gothic to explore hidden histories of repression and abuse and hidden passions of Asian young women.
Like Habiby‘s Saraya, Mukherjee‘s Jasmine has a cyclical narrative structure: Jasmine‘s metamorphosis is marked from beginning to end by the synthesis of Jasmine‘s life and journey through India and America on the one hand and the Gothic, the vampiric, and the postcolonial on the other hand.
Both Habiby and Mukherjee use the Gothic figure of the vampire to explore and rewrite the hidden histories and transcripts of the repression and abuse of Palestinians and Indians in colonial and post- colonial contexts.
Habiby and Mukherjee both recycle and update the images of the ghoul and the vampire in order to suggest that they, like Saraya and Jasmine, represent the dilemma of a postcolonial self trapped by the past but struggling to create new liminality and hybridity in the present.