The Representation of Identity in Yassmine Zahran’s A Beggar at Damascus Gate

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to provide a critical analysis to the concept of identity as it is represented in Yasmine Zahran’s novella, A Beggar at Damascus Gate. The author addresses this contentious issue through the eyes of her protagonist Rayya, a Palestinian exile, whose relationship with Alex, an American ‘lover’, is shrouded in ambivalence. Through her characters, Zahran contests the orthodox view of identity as a unique essence and upholds the postmodernist claim that it is the embodiment of a new synthesis. Inspired by the postmodernist theory, this research calls into question totalities, universals and absolutes. It is a simple academic endeavor to disclose the binary extremes of colonialism, Zionism and Arabism and sap their reductive ethos. These machines of representation adopt a condescending discourse which is caught in the monad of the ego cogito; the aim behind this essay is to lay bare their semantic and conceptual slipperiness.

Keywords: Identity- Pan Arabism- essentialism- discourse- discursive practices- imagined communities.