Testimonies of Resistance and Assimilation: A Postcolonial Study in Mohja Kahf's E-mails from Scheherazad

Abstract

This study examines resistance and assimilation as postcolonial modes in Arab-American women's poetry after the 9/11, 2001. Here the intention is to clarify the modes of resistance and assimilation as two important aspects in Mohja Kahf's volume of poetry, E-Mails from Scheherazad (2003); and the forces that formulate and shape these modes, and the extent to which these modes reflect the complexities and difficulties that Arab-Americans face in their daily life in America. Kahf's poetry functions as a testimony that resists and challenges the stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as terrorist, ignorant, fundamentalist, naïve and others, and the woman as an oppressed, belly-dancer harem; so submissive, passive, and subordinate to the dominant role of man; by engaging Bhabha's concept of the Third Space