The Polyphonic, Dialogic Feminine, Narrative Voice in Anglophone Arab Women's Writings

Abstract

The present paper aims to distinguish the narrative voice in Anglophone Arab women narratives from other feminine voices by putting spotlight on the state of hybridity, hyphenation and oscillation between home and Diaspora and how Arab women writers living in the diaspora stand in a particular cultural, social, political and linguistic position that enables them to voice distinctively their female compatriots to the Western readership. A fundamental preoccupation, in this article, is to argue that the narrative voice in Anglophone Arab women’s writings is both dialogic and polyphonic following Bakhtin’s theory of Dialogism. The major finding of this paper is that the voice in these narratives is both multiple and complex since the hyphenated identity of Arab women writers living in the Diaspora is also complex and multilayered.