Narrative Clusters:

A Reading of ElMusadafa's The Hyena's Journey

By

Dr Nagy Rashwan

Associate Professor of English Literature,

Faculty of Arts, Damanhour University. Egypt.

Introduction: Language as the Site of Cultural Politics

Musadafa's creative journey started nearly three decades ago with the publication of her collected short stories "Soft Attack- هجوم وديع" in 1997. Her first novel, "A Girl Trying Her Fate- فتاة تجرب حتفها" was published with great success two years later in The UAE. Seven more novels were published consecutively from 3003 to 2021: "the Devils' Play-2003- لهوة الأبالسه", "Miss Egypt-2008- مس إيجيبت", "The Hyena's Journey-2013- رحلة الضباع", "Hot Whiteness-2015- بياض ساخن", "The Curse of Meit Rahena-2017- لعنة ميت رهينة", "The Day of Response Control—2019- يوم الثبات الانفعالي ", and "The Forbidden Garden-2021- الحديقة المحرمة" (Ismaeel 2). This long history of narrative writing manifests itself quite clearly in the particular personality of her works' mode or general language and their intricate narrative lines and structure. Both aspects reflect a finely tuned narrative experience manifested as stories enriched by cultural and political stances. Musadafa has held various important posts and executive positions in the Egyptian ministry of culture across her career, keeping a very active role in the general women's rights movement across Egypt over the past two decades.

This political atmosphere informs much of this work's narrative structure. It manifests itself in two distinct ways; the insistence on historical positioning, and the recalling of historical linguistic forms. Attentively, this novel describes the historical background of each series of events as, and when, they happen. Other than the obvious socio-historical political commentary on the present, the reason for this is to underline the philosophical reasoning behind its choices of form. In other words, history is utilized to add further political depths of rootedness and irony to the already critiqued present by underlining its backward relevance. The second is contextually linguistic, where narrators attempt the actual archaic language of the period in which they live. Naturally, this adds another dimension to the credibility of characters and events. More significantly, it offers a way to redefine events and characters by learning their conceptual make-up. Language here is a vehicle for the narrative structure and a means to enlist insights into concepts and ideals of different characters in their different events. This is what Mikhail Bakhtin terms "heteroglossia" and defines as various intermingling discourses and styles in the voice of the speaker or narrator; a linguistic fingerprint, being both general and specific simultaneously. Bakhtin points out:

Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as we, centripetal forces, are brought to bear. The processes of centralizations and decentralization, unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is, in fact, an active participant in such speech diversity. Moreover, this active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative-centralizing system of unitary language. Every utterance participates in the "unitary language" (in its centripetal forces and...