Sexuality in Emerging Translated Modern Arabic Literature

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.46.1.0056
• Published date: 19 January 2024
• Pages: 56-76
• Date: 19 January 2024
• Author: Ibrahim Abu Elrob

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

SEXUALITY IN EMERGING TRANSLATED

MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE

Between Mimicking and

Dismantling the Eurocentric

Narrative in The Corpse Washer

Ibrahim Abu Elrob

Submission date: April 30, 2023; Acceptance date: September 12, 2023;

Publication date: January 19, 2024

Copyright

© 2024, Ibrahim Abu Elrob. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of

the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/

licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract: This article addresses the question of how The Corpse Washer (2013) by Sinan

Antoon employs the translation of sexually explicit language to present a “resistant and

hybrid cultural identity.” Adopting a postcolonial framework, the article explores the

kinds of literary, linguistic, and translation-related interventions Antoon exerts to provide

a hybrid-discourse to the hegemonic Anglo-American discourse of Arab sexuality, particu-

larly through the creative and conscious self-translation of his novel.

Keywords: Sexually Explicit Language, Translation, Hybridity, Modern Arabic Literature,

The Corpse Washer, Sinan Antoon, iabuelrob@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Overview

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the “War on Terror” narrative after the

September 11 attacks have reinforced the Orientalist myths and fantasies that

chiefly represent the East as lascivious and violent. As a response, a number of

Arab intellectuals have utilized translation to intervene and write back in English

Ibrahim Abu Elrob is a PhD student in linguistics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, NYC

DOI:10.13169/arabstudquar.46.1.0056

SEXUALITY IN EMERGING TRANSLATED MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE 57

ASQ 46.1 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

as they have been cognizant of its role in establishing “a cultural turn.” This article

brings about a hybrid reading of sexuality and identity construction in the trans-

lated modern Arabic literature, witnessing postcolonial themes of Orientalism,

imperialism, eroticism, and politics of representation. It showcases a transcultural

negotiation whereby the Arab writer and translator purposefully mediates the sex-

ual representations and practices (their histories and narratives) to and through

the Other. The current study is primarily concerned with analyzing how Sinan

Antoon’s self-translated novel The Corpse Washer (2013) ”voyages in” (Said,

1993) the Western narrative of the sexual to create a “Third Space” (Bhabha,

1994) that serves as a terrain for formulating an in-between self-identification

with particular attention to sexuality.

The article addresses three issues about Antoon’s work. First, Antoon, the

acclaimed Iraqi writer and translator of the novel, Baghdad-born and US-based, is

well aware of the colonial ambition that dominated the Orient for centuries and which

“its pretensions encompassed defining who the subject people to be colonized were,

what their past was, and the content of their culture that colonial thought had dissemi-

nated” (Massad, 2007: 2). These colonial objectives were embodied in the travelogue

writings, paintings, and distorted translations rendered by infamous Orientalists such

as Richard Burton. For instance, the latter infamously reported inaccurate anthropo-

logical information and grotesque portraits of the sexual lives of Arabs, Africans, and

East Asians. The following is one of numerous false and outrageous depictions of

Arab women; “[d]ebauched [Arab] women prefer Negroes on account of the size of

their parts”, Burton writes (1886a: vol.10, p.177). These anthropological representa-

tions aimed to exoticize the colonized populations and later to legitimize the colonial

force over their lives. Furthermore, Antoon talks about “[…] a cultural amnesia in the

Arab and Muslim world in terms of its attitude towards sexuality” (as cited in Omar,

2010, para. 16). He imputes this cultural amnesia to “the problem in translation as

there is a tendency to exoticize the [sexual lives of] Arabs” (ibid), particularly in the

translated modern Arabic literature, which still carries sexual images and symbols

that perpetuate Orientalist depictions of the Arabs.

Secondly, The Corpse Washer, Antoon’s second novel and the topic of this

article, stands out as a deliberate product of the sociocultural “rewriting”(Lefevere,

2004) of the original Arabic text. Upon translating this novel into English, Antoon

applies several translation techniques that are indicative of his ideological stand-

points and of his experience as an exiled Iraqi who suffered from occupation and

forced migration outside his homeland. On winning the Saif Ghobash Banipal

Prize for Arabic Literary Translation of the aforementioned novel, he stated:

I think of the sentence when I translate, concentrating on the mechanics while

letting the poetic manifest itself through the body of words. It’s challenging but