Tra critica sociale ed erotismo, un esempio della nuova narrativa siriana: Ḥurrās al-hawāʼ di Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan
(Between social criticism and eroticism, an example of the new Syrian narrative: Ḥurrās al-hawāʼ by Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan)
in La rivista di Arablit, a. I, n. 2, dicembre 2011, pp. 21-38.
The aim of this article is to show the important role that representations of the female body play in contemporary Syrian novels written by women. To illustrate this, reference is made to Ḥurrās al-hawāʼ (The Air Guardians), published in 2009 by the young authoress Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan. This novel is a particularly interesting sample of a new trend within Syrian fiction. In fact, although the work seems to be mainly as a means of criticism against Syria’s autocratic regime, the erotic element which it contains also proves to be essential. The final result of the analysis of this text is that the body is actually the core factor in the plot and therefore it somehow affects all of the characters. One may conclude that the authoress basically uses social and political criticism as a means to represent multiple phenomena concerning the body: sex, pregnancy, illness, death, physiological functions and torture.
