The brief lesbian romance in Wāḥat al-ghurūb, by contrast, shows how two female bodies can encounter each other within a literary representation of colonial contact yet outside the heterosexually gendered dramatization of this process that these earlier works of fiction reiterate. The canonical paradigm is invoked in Ṭāhir's novel only to yield to a West–East encounter at the heart of the narrative that transpires via lateral exchanges of erotic pleasure between bodies whose civilizational ties are absolutely irrelevant to how each body affects and is affected by the other, and whose identical sex makes these bodies moreover resistant to being reduced to symbols of the respective agency or passivity of the two cultures with which they are superficially affiliated.
Reina Lewis has proposed that the "differential, gendered access to the positionalities of imperial discourse" that was open to European women during the colonial era—women who were themselves othered within the hegemonic cultural and discursive frameworks of their Western societies—equipped them to approach "the Orient and the Orientalized 'other' [in ways] that registered difference less pejoratively and less absolutely" relative to how the Orient and its people were typically viewed by male colonialists. Following from Lewis's observations, Catherine's "gendered" relationship to the Oriental other that Malīkah embodies can be seen as demonstrating a means of accessing the Orient's difference otherwise than through the favored epistemological apparatuses of imperial discourse, and instead through the perceptions and affects of the body. In this regard, Catherine's encounter with Malīkah could result not only in "a decolonization of self," per Pratt's reading of the transformative potential of Janine's orgasmic moment at the fort in "La femme adultère," but in a decolonization of the other as well. Just as the phenomenological immediacy of the colonial space of the desert rendered it elusive to being known in advance of Catherine's physical experience of it, the immediacy of how Catherine's body responds to Malīkah's touch affirms Malīkah herself as an inhabitant of this space whose physiological materiality exceeds Orientalist imaginings of the other.
The final third of the novel that follows the scene of the two women's tryst, however, does not bear out the transgressive possibilities that this episode registers. Not only do Catherine and Malīkah never meet again, but Malīkah commits suicide for reasons that are never made fully clear, and Catherine resolves to "forget all of this and put it behind me," in order to "recommence my work and my research … [and] recover the true Catherine [Kāthrīn al-ḥaqīqiyyah]." If Catherine's liaison with Malīkah further perpetuates a shift in her character that was initiated during her journey across the desert, then this moment also marks the limit of how much she can change. Marcia Lynx Qualey, reviewing Wāḥat al-ghurūb's English translation, observes a "frustrating" lack of believable character development in how the latter part of the book unfolds, illustrated first by Malīkah's enigmatic suicide and subsequently by an underrealized plotline involving Catherine's sister Fiona, who joins Catherine and Maḥmūd in Siwa, becomes briefly romantically entangled with Maḥmūd, and then dies herself from a mysterious illness. These moments of narrative dissonance are described by Qualey as instances of characters being "moved across the page for the greater explication of theme"; Rachel Aspden observes along similar lines that the novel's characters "behave more like ciphers than real people."
Catherine's awakening to an embodied and erotic mode of experiencing colonial space, which leads to no permanent evolution for her character, instead produces a crisis within the formal apparatuses of the novel as a work of postcolonial literature. In Anne-Marie McManus's reading of Wāḥat al-ghurūb, it is a text that restages the epistemological stakes of empire from a postcolonial vantage point, only to reify ultimately a Eurocentric belief in the superiority of reason. This quality of the novel is exemplified for McManus by its portrayal of Malīkah as a "subaltern woman," who, oppressed by the primitive superstitions of her tribe yet "external to the march of rational history" whose telos is in the establishment of the postcolonial state, must be sacrificed narratively so that "law and reason" can prevail in the present-day Egyptian national imaginary that Ṭāhir's work of historical fiction prognosticates. The female characters in Wāḥat al-ghurūb by this account are no more permitted to act upon the affective inclinations of their bodies than the other fictional women who populate a lineage of colonial and postcolonial literary texts. Rather than being used to personify the cultural stakes of the West–East encounter, they are tied here, in McManus's reading, to the drama of national self-determination that the novel enacts. In this respect, Ṭāhir's novel is consistent with a tradition of Egyptian literary treatments of nationalistic themes since the nineteenth century that employ female characters to symbolize or allegorize various obstacles facing the emergent nation-state.
And yet—and if "in overt tension" with the novel's mimetic aims, as McManus suggests—the bodies of these same female characters in Wāḥat al-ghurūb dispute colonial imaginings of how a European self encounters the otherness of the colony. The novel's descriptions of how Catherine experiences first the sensorium of the desert, and then the sensations triggered by Malīkah's touch, register Egypt's materiality via the affective responses that colonial space produces in her body. These responses linger as an aftereffect of Ṭāhir's act of literary writing, gesturing toward the possibility of a different arc that Catherine's character might have taken, perhaps even one consonant with the novel's decolonial commitments. Wāḥat al-ghurūb concludes with Maḥmūd's exhortations to his fellow Egyptians to fight for a future free of colonial rule as he lies dying beneath the literal rubble of the country's glorious past, having dynamited one of Siwa's ancient temples to perform symbolically the futility of seeking a source of self-realization in Egyptian history. If his hopes for a postcolonial nation die with him, however, then the decolonization of Egypt has already been set in motion within the diegetic reality of the novel by what Catherine has experienced in the desert and at the oasis—albeit ambivalently, for her decolonizing potential comes from her body, and it is thus unassimilable to the literary aesthetic function to which her character has been assigned.
Fictional Bodies
For Wen-chin Ouyang, Wāḥat al-ghurūb exemplifies a broader tendency in postcolonial Arabic literature to yoke nationalist politics to literary form—in this case, by using the vehicle of historical fiction to "argue … with both the past and the West" while simultaneously testing the "authenticity and originality of the Arabic novel" against its Western precursors. This trend is one that, according to Ouyang, has to some extent restricted other modalities of writing from achieving prominence in the modern Arabic literary field, and it has particularly disadvantaged "women writers," who "understandably take exception to the kind of unabashed misogyny exhibited in the story of the [Arabic] novel's love affair with the nation-state." For these reasons, Ouyang argues, the "dominance of the nation-state as the structuring episteme and chronotope" of postcolonial Arabic fiction is "problematical" both "politically and aesthetically."
Bearing in mind Ouyang's critique, this article has argued that what is a problem for postcolonial Arabic literature in general provides in Wāḥat al-ghurūb, however, an opportunity for reading this novel against the grain of its apparent political and aesthetic commitments, including as they have been described by Ṭāhir himself. With respect to how Wāḥat al-ghurūb fits into a tradition of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Arabic fiction that addresses the dynamics of Western colonialism in the Arab Middle East, I would like to suggest in closing that recovering a role for Catherine's character other than that seemingly intended for her by the author enables us to identify Wāḥat al-ghurūb with a different transgressive potential and a different set of recalcitrant aesthetic possibilities than those typically accorded to the postcolonial Arabic novel. The novel's erotic phenomenology of Egyptian space as it is experienced by a female body poses a challenge both to the colonial literary discourse that the text is configured to "write back" against and to the literary dramatization of the emergence of a rational Egyptian nation-state that it offers instead. This, too, is an aesthetic effect produced by Ṭāhir's novel, and it affirms the irreducibility of this body and of female sexual experience to such instrumental representations.
Only by framing my reading of Ṭāhir's novel in the second half of this article vis-à-vis my earlier reading of Camus's story could these contradictory implications of Ṭāhir's gender-flipping postcolonial rewriting of the colonial literary script of Orient-as-woman be elucidated. As Camus's story reveals, an aesthetic strategy that yokes representations of female erotic affect to any kind of colonial politics, whether in support of the epistemologies of empire or against them, proves unsustainable. Elizabeth Grosz argues, drawing on the work of the French feminist thinker Luce Irigaray, that the inherent leakiness of the female body guarantees its "cultural unrepresentability … within prevailing philosophical models of ontology"—and, we might add, within prevailing literary models of the same. For Tarek El-Ariss, the leaking body is identified with a critique of power made possible by this body's affective autonomy from all epistemological structures, especially those that seek to relegate embodiment to a discursive or mimetic given. Subverting such structures through its refusal or incapacity to conform to them, the leaking body activates fiction as the site and medium of its interventions, "touching bodies and altering narrative course, subverting power relations and the codes regulating gender, the sacred and the profane, the private and the public, and the knowable and the unknowable."
Embracing the fictionality of the female protagonists in these two works of literature invites us to contemplate a range of possibilities for each character beyond the official closure of the narrative. What if Janine, instead of returning to Marcel at the hotel, were truly to become the "adulterous wife" promised by the story's title: were to seek out sexual satisfaction with the French legionnaire from the bus or the Algerian man in the town, with anyone but the plodding, unattractive husband with which Camus's own imagination has saddled her? What if Catherine, instead of reverting to being the stereotypically Orientalist European wife of the tormented Egyptian "mimic man" that Maḥmūd epitomizes in his struggle toward self-realization as an enlightened postcolonial subject, were to escape with Malīkah into the desert—thereby saving both the Siwan woman and herself not by acting rationally, but by giving in to the bilateral impulses of their desiring bodies?
Literary characters, freed from the tropic structures in which they are contained, drift in alternative narrative directions and enter into alternative aesthetic configurations. Yielding fully to the erotic inclinations of their bodies, these two European women would conjure colonial space aesthetically, within the diegetic reality of a literary text, as no longer colonial but as the extensive whole of "the world that takes shape around" them: as the totality of the phenomenal environment in which the experiences of embodied life unfold. Out of the literary conjunction of a female character with the land of the (post)colonial nation, what would emerge would be not a drama of self and other but a fiction of bodies that are "always becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what … [they] already" are, decomposed and recomposed perpetually by "the forces of encounter" that act on them.
To draw such conclusions about these two works of literature that inscribe the dynamics of the colonial encounter onto the female body is to propose ultimately neither a strictly decolonial nor feminist reading of them. Instead, what might be gained by the approach followed in this article, I suggest, is something closer to an ethical means of reexamining the mimetic conventions that colonialism spawned in multiple intersecting traditions of literary writing, in order to locate sites and modes of resistance in fiction that lie outside the binaries of colonizer/colonized and male/female that have historically provided the aesthetic coordinates for such writing. Literary representations of non-normative bodies bear a potential to "return the aesthetic domain to an active ethical core," insofar as such representations hold within them the threads of their own unraveling. The fictional body, irreducibly affected by its encounters with the world, refuses to be merely a trope, a symbol, or an occasion for colonial politics.