ABSTRACT

It is a striking coincidence that both a South African and an Australian woman writer should write, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, about the issue of national belonging by setting their novels outside their own countries, in the Middle East. So differently placed in terms of generational and national identities – Gordimer an internationally regarded writer born in South Africa in 1923, and Sallis an emerging young Australian writer – both writers have ended up at a similar point in these novels, exploring issues of global and national belonging. In both Nadine Gordimer’s and Eva Sallis’ novels, the protagonist, a young woman from a privileged Western background, travels to an Arabic village and ‘finds’ herself in that remote place by means of a relationship with a Muslim man. Both deal with Orientalist stereotypes as well as with images of global culture and cultural imperialism, though Gordimer’s text is more ironic about its protagonist’s cultural and material South African heritage and the choices and advantages that it confers, while Sallis’ protagonist, Lian, is haunted throughout by her mother’s untold story as a Vietnamese refugee who survived as a ‘boat person’ and has not unlocked her painful past. This inability of Phi-Van, Lian’s mother, to come to terms with her past has resulted in her violence towards Lian which in turn has caused Lian to dissociate from her own body. It is only when she becomes pregnant by Ibrahim, her Yemeni lover, that Lian is able to think about her own mother and motherhood itself as something other than the cruel possessiveness she has learnt it to be through her destructive relationship with Phi-Van. Both these Australian and South African women’s physical journeys are also inner ones of self-discovery: Julie, Gordimer’s protagonist, finds a peace in the desert itself, and a relief from her guilt at her material privilege (though there are underlying ironies in this process), while Lian paradoxically learns about belonging and home by experiencing both the positive and the negative effects of entering a different culture. For both authors, the cultural, religious and linguistic effects of Arabic culture impact on their women characters, changing their perspectives and their sense of belonging in the world. For both women, this is a painful process at times but both end up finding an equilibrium, Lian by returning to Australia

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Coincidentally, both women have relationships with men named Ibrahim and both have to adapt to the roles for women that accompany Muslim cultural life.