The Language of the Self and the Fragments of Identity Using Fadila AlFarouq's "Ta'a Al-Khajal" (The Letter of Shame) as a Model

Abstract

For the novelist Fadila Al-Farouq, language has become a fertile ground for the
multiplicity of languages, discourses, and the multiplicity of selves and voices
that express them. Language has not only embodied the reality it represents, but
it has also collected the shattered fragments of identity and the features of broken
selves on the facets of reality, society and outdated customs. Al-Farouq's
novelistic language seeks a particular reality and a different entity, which allows
it to convey the topography of painful reality through an honest, descriptive
language that does not let the pain of oppression and deprivation fall from the
wounds of the image, but rather conveys it according to a special poetics, turning
its ugliness into a beauty that comes from this linguistic technique used in the
contemporary novel. How did the novelist's language of the self manifest itself in
the expression of broken selves? And how did the novelist represent female
identity in "Ta'a Al-Khajal"?