Role of gender in the novel Ma La Tazrouh al-Riyah by Mohammad Aali Ar’aar from a postcolonial point of view

Postcolonial studies seek to explain how economic and political domination are employed to attribute otherness to African and Middle Eastern subjects and deny their sense of autonomous identity in order to consolidate Western and Imperialist cultural and ethical supremacy. Gender, as one of the major tenets of this theoretical framework, is of special interest in the East-West relationship in Arabic novels where the interactions between Eastern men and Western women are apparently determined by domination. Mohammad Al-‘AaliAr’aar, an Algerian writer, explores the role of gender in the relationships among his protagonist, his wife and a French woman in his postcolonial novel, Ma La Tazrouh al-Riyah. This paper aims to investigate the role of gender in creation of rapport between the Eastern man and the Eastern woman. It also examines the autonomy and active role of the Eastern man against the Western woman. It is contended that femininity and weakness are essentially conceptualized to be associated with women and the Orient. In a patriarchal society and culture, the Eastern woman is passive while the Eastern man presumes an active role. However, in his relationship with the Western woman, the Oriental man becomes passive and presumes a feminine role. Mohammad Al-‘AaliAr’aar attempts to, indeed, demystify this erroneous concept by showing that femininity is essential to neither women nor the Orient; rather, such an essentialist conceptualization is merely imposed on them by the West to further its ideological intentions.