Aisha
Through out the last chapter in the novel, Aisha talks about her life and herself as if she was talking about another person. It seems as if she is talking about someone else, but she is actually talking about herself in her "other voice". The meaning of this represents that she is talking about herself as another person to give us the idea that she was at the time someone who is very different from the Aisha that now talks about her past. The old Aisha she talks about in "Nativity" is a married woman who lives an unhappy marriage, "I had watched them carefully over the years. Sometimes they argued. But less and less as time went by. Aisha learnt to be careful. To avoid certain subjects. To avoid enthusiasms, excesses, tears. To avoid - me. It was not that she was afraid of him. I believe she was afraid for him; afraid of me. And she wanted to go on loving him." (Soueif, 139), " There is a knot but it will not be broken. How can it be broken? Does not love him as a woman should love her man. When even as he enters her, she is closed to him. When even as he probes her, she retreats him." (Soueif, 140). She is a woman who has a nurse who takes care of her, controls her, and keeps her company twenty- four hours a day, "Aisha list
s to be as if she would have 'wanted' to be raped in search for liberating herself from the past, killing her old self and making the big leap to her new enthusiastic, modern, and free self. "He thrust and she fought but she never screamed, even though he had taken his hand from her mouth long ago" (Soueif, 183), it had to be something as strong as this that would make her break who she was to build someone new. The idea that in this last chapter Aisha talks about her past in the "other voice" has a relationship to identity and dislocation. The fact that Aisha does not talk about herself as herself gives a sense of alienation from herself. Throughout this last chapter Aisha is in a constant search for a new identity, she is taking in new ideas and she starts thinking in another dimension. She enters a world that she has never been in before, "Well, well, Aisha. Attending a zar. Squatting in the dust. Making friends with a butcher- a master butcher. Oh dear, oh dear. What will your husband say? What will everybody say? She smiles: her aunt was emphatic." (Soueif, 152). Her new self is in her soul yelling to come out and it is this chapter that Aisha starts making a migration in search of bringing out this new self, finding a new identity, that is why she did not tell her husband where she was going, "You're not going to tell him?" (Soueif, 159). She is trying to find a space for her o! Overall, this last chapter is a chapter of rebellion, and it is through this rebellion that the old Aisha is thoroughly explained and that the transition to the new Aisha is obtained. It is due to her rebellion and anxiety for change and experience that this last chapter relates to identity and dislocation. It is in this section of the novel that we can relate the meaning of word Aisha, which means survival and alive, to Aisha herself and to the course of her life in accordance to identity and dislocation. ened to her
Some common words found in the essay are:
Feast Aisha, Nativity Festival, , Aisha Attending, Gezira Club, Life Soueif, aisha talks, chapter aisha, identity dislocation, aisha talks past, search identity, oh dear, talking person, talks past, soueif 140, nativity festival,
Approximate Word count = 1293
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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