Narrative Metaphors: Questions of Text, Writing, and the culturally-different Other in Malek Haddad’s The Flowers Sidewalk no longer answers.

Abstract

Based on a cultural approach, this paper draws on the colonial discourse that involves the insatiable Western greed for domination and imperial expansion that began during the Renaissance and culminated beyond Europe. Within this historical context marked by enslavement and exclusion, we shall discuss issues faced by intellectuals in relation to the center that exercises its domination over the world and the culturally different other. Malek Haddad’s The Flowers Sidewalk no longer answers interrogates the history of colonialism and its impact on colonized peoples. A narrative in the colonizer’s language not out of fascination with its rhetoric but as a historical reality which marginalized Arabic and imposed the colonizer’s language. The novel uses narration to envision new worlds for the human’s crossing exiles, thus imbuing the narrative writing with a metaphorical energy to express the unsaid. Thus, our research raises this question: What does Haddad's novelistic writing represent?