Prepared by: Mrs.

Nouioua Wafa
Module: Third World Literature
07/05/2018
Ahdaf Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England,
where she studied for a Ph.D. at the University of Lancaster.
She is the author of two collections of short stories, Aisha (1983) and
Sandpiper (1996), and two novels. The Eye of the Sun is about a young
Egyptian woman's life in Egypt and England, where she goes to study as a
postgraduate, set against key events in the history of modern Egypt. It was
published in 1992.
The Map of Love (1999), is the story of a love affair between an
Englishwoman and an Egyptian nationalist set in Cairo in 1900, as secrets
are uncovered by the woman's great-granddaughter, herself in love with an
Egyptian musician living in New York. The Map of Love was shortlisted
for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
In 2004, her book of essays, Mezzaterra, was published. Later on, her
most recent work is Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012), a personal
account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
 In The Map of Love, a contemporary Arab woman, Amal, tells the
story of her English-born great-aunt Anna Winterbourne, who fled
her life in Victorian England to travel to the East at the end of the
nineteenth century. Recently widowed, Anna has a desire to
explore Egypt to see whether her admiration for the Orientalist
paintings of John Frederick Lewis is justified and whether he
depicted Arab life in its authenticity. Ignoring traditional views the
West holds over the East, Anna follows the footsteps of real
Victorian female travelers, such as Lady Lucy Duff Gordon and
Lady Emily Blunt, who looked beyond Orientalist stereotypes.
Anna finds love and a new family in Egypt when she marries
Egyptian nationalist Sharif Basha.
 Over a century later, Amal magically
reconstructs Anna’s story by exploring the
content of a trunk which was brought to
her by an American woman, Isabel. The
trunk contains letters, diaries and
newspaper clippings. Isabel’s love story
echoes Anna’s, since both of them fall in
love with an Egyptian man, passionate
about the political affairs of his country. In
Isabel’s case, she falls for Amal’s brother
Omar.
Many literary analyses of novels
produced in the era following
colonial occupation focus on how
two or more cultures fuse and how
the characters in these stories
attempt to negotiate the differences
that come along with such a merger.
 Homi K. Bhabha describes this
process, known as hybridity, as the
creation of culture and identity from
the blending of cultural elements of
the colonizer and the colonized,
thereby defying the origins of any
authentic identity.
 According to Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin,
hybridity is “one of the most widely
employed and most disputed terms in post-
colonial theory, [which] commonly refers to
the creation of new transcultural forms
within the contact zone produced by
colonization” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin
1998: 118)
In 2004, she published a book entitled Mezzaterra:
Fragments from the Common Ground, which
contains a collection of non-fictional essays on
significant matters that are linked with the
“Mezzaterra” in a globalized world.

 The “Mezzaterra” refers to the construction of a

meeting point for diverse cultures and traditions, a
common ground. This mutual ground is not
competitive, rather it offers an enrichment working
at both sides of the construction.
 The “Mezzaterra” constitutes a space
where the best elements of different
cultures are combined and where
admiration for the thought, literature and
music of the West is accompanied by
confidence in the possibilities of an
Egyptian culture, free from colonial
occupation.
 [Themezzaterra] is a territory imagined,created
even, by Arab thinkers and reformers starting in
the middle of the nineteenth century when
Muhamed Ali Pasha of Egypt first sent students
to the West and they came back inspired by the
best of what they saw on offer. (Soueif, qtd. In
Mahjoub 2009: 57).
 Ahdaf Soueif’s attempt at incorporating hybridity
by inserting intertextual references to Eastern
and Western literature into her novels is also
present, though less transparent, in The Map of
Love.
 Each chapter opens with an epigraph which
reThe Map of Love fers to either a Western or
Eastern text. Ahdaf Soueif inserts these
references in an alternating pattern so that the
Anglophone voices of Coleridge and Yeats are
heard, as well as those of Arabic figures such as
Arwa Salih and Ama Ata Aidoo
 Soueif explains her decision to insert these
intertextual references in her novels by linking
them with her own private admiration for these
stories, since these were the books that she read
when she was growing up. She admits that those
novels recited the stories “ [I] go back to again
and again-the books that do for me what I want a
novel to do, which is to open up a new world and
seduce me into it, to make me feel that I am
living there and getting to know these people”
(Soueif 1999: 88).
 During her youth, Ahdaf Soueif came across ‘great
romances’ which are considered ‘classics’ by
contemporary readers and are still read in great
numbers today. She admits to being absorbed by novels
such as Jane Eyre(1847), Wuthering Heights(1847),
Middlemarch (1871) and many others. However, as an
adult, Ahdaf Soueif came to rethink the portrayal of the
male heroes in Western literature, realizing that, on
the one hand, these men oftentimes bore strong
resemblances to Eastern men, while on the other hand,
many Western books which did write about the East
never really captured the notion of a true Egyptian
man. This observation made by Ahdaf Soueif can be
linked with Edward Said’s theory on Orientalism in
which he claims that Western literature did not depict
the East in its authenticity, rather it focused on the
exotic elements
 Ahdaf Soueif wanted to merge these opposite depictions of classic
European and Eastern heroes in one character. She explains:

I became interested in the idea of the romantic hero ... as in Mr.
Rochester and Heathcliff, and all the characters that we find in
Mills and Boon novels--tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic, a stranger,
proud, aloof, yet you just know that if you can get close you'll find
these depths of sensitivity and empathy and passion and
tenderness, and so on. And this hero is very often kind of Eastern,
but he isn't ever really Eastern. And I've read novels and stories
where he's meant to be Egyptian and he really isn't at all. He's
completely fake. Or they have to make him Christian because they
can't go into the whole Muslim bit, but he's called Ali or Mohammed
because that's what Easterners are called--very odd, pastichey
things like that. And I thought, what if I make a hero who's larger
than life, who's somebody I would think, Wow! and he's a real,
genuine Egyptian, of that time, with the concerns of that period.
(Soueif qtd. in Davis 2007: 5)
 Ahdaf Soueif cleverly explores her belief in the “Mezzaterra”
through the insertion of hybrid metaphors in The Map of Love.
In the novel, Anna Winterbourne tries to express her hybrid
identity characterized by English and Arabic elements, by
combining different cultures in one, hybrid tapestry. As an
English widowed lady, who has traveled to Egypt and has
married a Muslim man committed to the political situation of
his country, she finds a way to fuse the different cultures in
one singe element. During her last months in Egypt, she makes
a tapestry which displays images of Egyptian pharaohs, but it
also contains the inscription of an Islamic verse. More
importantly, the images depict the Goddess Isis with the God
Osiris and between them the Infant Horus (ML 403), which
illustrates “Anna’s transculturation in the Egyptian world, her
way of rewriting the classical myth with her own love story”
(Luo 2003: 93). This flag displays the Crescent and the Cross,
illustrating the union of Egyptian Muslims and Christians in
their struggle with British occupation. Other hybrid metaphors
are “the mosque nestling inside a monastery; and the three
calendars followed simultaneously in Egypt: Gregorian, Islamic
and Coptic” (Malak 2000: 157).
 Bycharacterizing the Egyptian Sharif, who
is strongly passionate about the
Nationalist cause of his mother country,
after classic and romantic heroes as
described in English novels is another
significant example that illustrates
Soueif’s interest in merging Egyptian and
English cultural elements in her novels.
She reacts to false portrayals of Eastern
men in Western literature by creating an
Egyptian hero who shares characteristics
with classic, European, literary figures.
 Ahdaf Soueif’s attempt at blending different
cultures illustrates her belief that, in some
ways, cultures have always been and will
always be connected, since “The Map of Love
delves into history to find connections that
have always bound all cultures, no matter
how different, and suggests that a more
 intricate phenomenon is in fact taking place,
as in those border zones where a complex
syncretic cultural system comes to replace
two or more cultures” (Luo 2003: 80).