History, Vision and Narrative in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

Year 2019, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 135 - 154, 24.10.2019

Ayşe Çırçır

Abstract

InThe Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif describes the liberation of the post-colonial subject as a palimpsest of competing claims, histories and painful dismemberments that cannot be separated from painful memories. She weaves post-colonial perspectives on history, memory and hybridity and writes a revisionist and contrapuntal history of Egypt. In this post-colonial novel, Soueif relates two cross-cultural love stories, which are set in different centuries, and structures them as doubles. The story of Anna Winterbourne and Sharif al-Baroudi passes in England and colonial Egypt after the Omdurman War (1898) and continues until 1913. The story of Isabel Parkman and Omar Ghamrawi takes place in contemporary Egypt and USA in 1997. Amal, sister of Omar, integrates the stories and acts as the author-character. In this historically dense novel, the story moves between colonial past and post-colonial present to emphasise overlapping histories, national insecurities and new forms of colonialism. 

Keywords

Ahdaf Soueif, Contrapuntal History, Post-Colonialism, Omdurman War, Overlapping Histories, Memory

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