No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
She is no Desdemona: a Syrian woman in Samar Attar’s Shakespearean subversions
Abstract
This paper analyzes the significance of appropriating three plays by William Shakespeare—Macbeth (1606), Romeo and Juliet (1597), and Othello (1604)—in Samar Attar’s Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl. The Syrian novelist, Attar, finds in Shakespeare powerful sites for the expression of exile, rejection of sentimental love, and resistance of patriarchy in Arab societies. Attar’s reading of Shakespeare is both constructive and deconstructive. Her novel shows simultaneously identification with and challenges to the British Bard. The main female protagonist, Lina, renounces Shakespeare’s dramatization of the concept of love in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, which requires the female submission to the authority of the male lover. In Macbeth, Attar identifies with its concepts of exile and homeland when one’s country becomes polluted by political conspiracies and chaos. Lina, in Attar’s novel, is a new Arab Desdemona/Juliet, who is subversive and revolutionary to the atrocities of gender marginalization.
This article analyses the Shakespearean appropriation in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014) to show how Faqir’s novel establishes a new Arab Jordanian feminist trope of the willow tree, metaphorically embodied in the female character of Najwa, who does not surrender to the atrocities of the masculine discourse. Faqir’s novel, appropriating a direct text from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, does not praise the Bard but dismantles the Shakespearean dramatization of the submissive woman. In this article, I claim that Faqir’s Willow Trees warns against mimicking the Bard’s feminine models and offers a liberating space or a local ‘alternative wisdom and beauty’, in Ania Loomba’s expression, and a ‘challenge’, in Graham Holderness’s terminology, to Shakespeare. In Faqir’s novel, Shakespeare has been ‘Arabized’, in Ferial Ghazoul’s words, to revise and redefine new roles of the Arab Jordanian woman.
Properly analyzing Shakespeare appropriations means asking exactly how international adapters have received their source texts. These complex reception histories matter whether one is analyzing an Arabic adaptation of an English play (mediated through Russian or French) or an English-to-English-through-English adaptation such as Harlem Duet, Black Canadian playwright Djanet Sears's 1997 prequel to Othello. This article uses examples from two periods of the Egyptian Hamlet tradition (the earliest extant Arabic Hamlet, from 1901, and the period of Nasserist and post-Nasser political theatre, 1964–71) to show why artists' global kaleidoscope of sources and models is both so important and so easy to overlook. The case of Harlem Duet demonstrates how this approach, developed in Arabic literary studies, can be fruitful for studying the circulation and transformation of world literary classics even within English-language literature.
Few scholars have addressed Arabic adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew, though it remains among the most popular Shakespearean comedies in the Arab world. The first Arabic performance of Shrew in Egypt in 1930 marked a significant landmark in the history of Arab Shakespeares, as the translator rendered the play in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, rather than in the formal, classical Arabic accessible to the educated elite. As such, the play offered the uneducated Egyptian public - and women in particular - unprecedented access to this work of Shakespeare. Instrumental to the adaptation's success was Fātima Rushdī owner and lead actress of the company that performed this first Arabic Shrew. In this and other roles as one of Egypt's first renowned Shakespearean actresses, Rushdī not only effectively recast Shakespeare in an Egyptian mould, but also cast Egyptians in a Shakespearean mould, with effects that still echo today.
Awad, Yousef, ‘In I, The Divine (2001) and An Unnecessary Woman (2013), Arab American novelist Rabih Alameddine borrows lines, characters, themes, motifs and tropes from Macbeth and King Lear to portray the horrendous experiences his protagonists undergo during and after Lebanon’s fifteen year civil war. In An Unnecessary Woman, traumatic memories of the war leave Aaliya Saleh reclusive and isolated, sharing a building with three other women whom she dubs ‘the three witches’; in I, The Divine, Sarah Nour El-Din, the youngest of three daughters of a Lebanese-American couple, feels alienated and displaced and eventually chooses self-imposed exile. Alameddine frames Aaliya’s and Sarah’s stories within narratives of chaos, anarchy and sweeping violence reminiscent of Macbeth and Lear. Reading Alameddine’s novels as appropriations of Shakespeare’s tragedies valorizes the novelist’s contrapuntal vision and demonstrates how Arab writers in diaspora, writing in English for an international readership, strategically draw on Western canonical texts to represent the experiences of Arab characters.
Considers the Arabic novel within the triangle of the nation-state, modernity and tradition. Wen-Chin Ouyang explores the development of the Arabic novel, especially the ways in it engages with aesthetics, ethics and politics in a cross-cultural context and from a transnational perspective. Taking love and desire as the central tropes , the story of the Arabic novel is presented as a series of failed, illegitimate love affairs, all tainted by its suspicion of the legitimacy of the nation, modernity and tradition and, above all, by its misgiving about its own propriety. • Authors studied include Naguib Mahfouz; Ghassan Kanafani; Ibrahim Nasrallah; Emil Habiby; Jamal al-Ghitani; Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Khalil Hawi and Salah 'Abd al-Sabur. • Works studied include Arabian Nights and Maqamat. • Addresses issues such as nation & nationalism, Arabic poetics of love, modernity & modernisation; the politics of desire, the poetics of space, women & cartography of nation, identity and intertexutality.
These days there is a growing sense among Shakespeareans that our field has arrived at a crossroads. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the dominant preoccupation of academic Shakespeareans was to establish and preserve an “authentic” Shakespeare text. The reigning assumption has been that the source of Shakespeare’s greatness is to be identified with the verbal particularities of his scripts, which we as scholars are obliged to cherish, explicate and place in historical context. The appeal to Shakespeare’s original language, an appeal conducted from a variety of perspectives, has provided Shakespearean scholarship of the last century its distinctive cultural authority. It is no accident that professional Shakespearean scholarship—a peculiarly twentieth-century invention, we should acknowledge—can be traced to the professionalization of Shakespearean editing in the late nineteenth century and the concomitant demotion of biographical criticism’s prestige.1 The critical descent of Shakespeare the man enabled the ascent of Shakespeare the text.
On 28 September 1961 a group of Syrian army officers rebelled and announced Syria's secession from the United Arab Republic. A new government was hastily formed from conservative (reactionary) Syrian politicians. Jamāl cAbdannāşir initially contemplated intervening, but changed his mind when all resistance to the coup rapidly faded. It was a time for his many enemies both in the Middle East and elsewhere to triumph. Western governments were delighted, but equally the leaders of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia did nothing to conceal their pleasure. However, pan-Arab emotion was a powerful factor in a further coup in Iraq on 8 February 1963. Syria's fragile government could not long resist the joint pressure from Cairo and Baghdad. Exactly one month after the Iraqi revolt, a military coup in Damascus swept aside all the men who had been in power since the break-up of the UAR.
From the apparently simple adaptation of a text into film, theatre or a new literary work, to the more complex appropriation of style or meaning, it is arguable that all texts are somehow connected to a network of existing texts and art forms. In this new edition Adaptation and Appropriation explores: multiple definitions and practices of adaptation and appropriation. the cultural and aesthetic politics behind the impulse to adapt the global and local dimensions of adaptation the impact of new digital technologies on ideas of making, originality and customization diverse ways in which contemporary literature, theatre, television and film adapt, revise and reimagine other works of art the impact on adaptation and appropriation of theoretical movements, including structuralism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, feminism and gender studies the appropriation across time and across cultures of specific canonical texts, by Shakespeare, Dickens, and others, but also of literary archetypes such as myth or fairy tale. Ranging across genres and harnessing concepts from fields as diverse as musicology and the natural sciences, this volume brings clarity to the complex debates around adaptation and appropriation, offering a much-needed resource for those studying literature, film, media or culture.
For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike. On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, Litvin follows the distinct phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. Her fine-grained theatre history uses personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. Litvin identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet, shows the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ghost of Hamlet's father.
In summer 2012, to coincide with the Olympic Games, the United Kingdom celebrated a summer of Shakespeare. Troupes from around the world were invited to produce their own versions of plays from the playwright's corpus. 2012 was also a very eventful year, politically, in the Arab world, as people reacted to what had been dubbed the “Arab Spring”. This article looks at three plays produced by Arabic companies for the World Shakespeare Festival: the Palestinian Ashtar Theatre's Richard II, the Iraqi Theatre Company's Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, and the Tunisian Artistes Producteurs Associés’ Macbeth: Leila and Ben – A Bloody History. Using these performances, this article examines how different Arabic theatre troupes negotiate expectations of different audiences as well as their own artistic aims using the “playable surface” of Shakespeare's plays.
Building on what has already been documented in related scholarship concerning this topic, this article will look into facets of postcolonial theory vis-à-vis appropriations and adaptations of the plays of Shakespeare in Arabic. In doing so, the article will compare known
postcolonial 'Shakespeares', and Arabic appropriations of his plays. It will comment on the postcolonial aspects of these plays and show whether Arab dramatists have been 'writing back', so to speak, in response to the colonial experience. The article addresses the following questions: first,
do Arab playwrights deal with postcolonial issues in their appropriations of Shakespeare? Second, to what extent have Arab playwrights used Shakespeare to 'strike' at colonialism? Third, are Arab playwrights aware of postcolonial theory and discourse? And fourth, what is the nature of the
Arabic contribution to postcolonial discourse? Although the treatment of Shakespeare in Arabic literature, especially drama and poetry, has been considered elsewhere, this particular approach to the Bard is relatively new. The article contends that there are postcolonial appropriations of
Shakespeare in Arabic, which need to be properly investigated and commented upon with reference to postcolonial literary theory.
Although sixteenth-century daughters were evidently an economic burden on their fathers, Shakespeare consistently depicts fathers whose love for their daughters is so possessive that it endangers the family unit. To delineate the tensions of this bond at its liminal moment, Shakespeare evokes the altar tableau of the marriage service. This paradigmatic substructure illuminates the central conflict in the father-daughter relationship: the father who resists the ritual's demands to give his daughter to a rival male destroys both his paternal authority and his family's generative future; yet the daughter who escapes without undergoing ritual severance violates the family structure and thus becomes both guiltlessly agentive in ruining her original family and tragically incapable of creating a new one. The marriage ceremony is designed to resolve this paradox. In Shakespeare's dramas, submission to this rite ensures the only possibility of freedom for the individual and of continuity for the family.
A scorpion, its poisonous tail torn out, runs desperate circles around a
piece of burning coal. A small boy sits in front of a screen, watching
a film of a play translated from one language he does not understand
into another. Twenty-fi ve years later, these two events – an upper-
Egyptian game, a Russian film of an English play – coalesce into
a one-act play called Dance of the Scorpions, an Arabic-language
offshoot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This, at any rate, is the simple
etiology offered by the offshoot play’s creator, Egyptian playwright/
director Mahmoud Aboudoma.1 Let me summarise Aboudoma’s
offshoot play and two versions of his first Shakespeare encounter
before pointing to the larger questions these stories help to frame.
This article will then make a start at addressing those questions.
This paper intends to discuss the various treatments of Hamlet in Arabic culture. The study will reveal that Shakespeare's much discussed play has also become a subject of continual interest in Arabic writings. The play has been diversely interpreted and innovatively treated in Arabic belles‐lettres. The paper aims to highlight these areas in particular: (1) early reception; (2) translation and performance; (3) literary uses; and (4) critical response. It is to be understood that Shakespeare has been widely received into Arabic culture, but his play Hamlet remains his best known, leaving indelible impact on the Arabic creative mind. This has been manifested so much in the various translations of the play as well as in the different interpretations accorded to it both in literature and criticism and on the stage.
Sometime around 1890, Romeo and Juliet became the first
Shakespeare play translated into Arabic and staged at a public
theatre.1 The classic love story proved exceedingly popular among
theatregoers in Cairo, and it remained in the repertory of Iskandar
Farah’s theatrical company and its various successors for over twenty
years, even while it was simultaneously revived by other troupes.2
The success of this production has been duly noted. The popularity
of Shuhada’ al-Gharam [The Martyrs of Love], as it was known,
remains somewhat puzzling, however, since it was in many respects
completely foreign to its early Arab audiences who had very little
familiarity with Shakespeare, and especially the genre of tragedy. But
if it was unfamiliar to them, replete with the melodramatic songs of
the fl amboyant pop star Salama Hijazi, and punctuated with comic
sketches, recited poetry and cabaret-style music between acts, it
would strike Western viewers of Shakespeare as equally exotic.
This paper is an exploration of the 2004 Arabic adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which premiered in Casino du Liban in Beirut. The Last Day was created by Oussama al-Rahbani, who also composed the musical scores. The play shows how local Shakespeares resonate with the wider global field of study, which in turn echo East–West cultural interactions. The Last Day challenges our perception of the Other in Arabic drama as it questions intraculturalism within the conflict-ravaged Middle East. It prompts us to ask how we should address local Shakespeares in a global context, and how local knowledge illuminates our understanding of Shakespeare's reception. This paper emphasizes the fluidity of the field of Shakespearean studies and the instability of East–West cultural divides.
A Mother or a Grave? The Vision of Homeland in Modern Arabic Literature
- Samar Attar
“Syria.” In Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide 1873-1999
- Iman Al-Qadi
- Subhi Hadidi
Introduction: Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation
- Alexa Huang
- Elizabeth Rivlin
of Biographical Dictionary of Ibn Khallikan. Translated by Bn Mac Guckin De Slane. Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1843
- Khallikan
Shakespeare in the Arab World: Introduction.” MIT Global Shakespeares
- Margaret Litvin
Introduction: Shakespeare and the Post-Colonial Question
- Ania Loomba
- Martin Orkin
Cairo: Dār al-maʿārif
- Mutrān
Borrowed Imagination: The British Romantic Poets and Their Arabic-Islamic Sources
- Samar Attar
A Portrait of a Damascene Girl
- Samar Attarl
- Lina
Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves: Plays by Ann-Marie MacDonald and Paula Vogel.” In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women’s Re-Visions in Literature and Performance
- Marianne Novy
Beyond Equality, Freedom and Toleration: Echoes of Tufayl in Attar’s Works
- Magdalena Lopez-Perez