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Abstract

This article examines the challenging of Orientalist and Western discourses and of patriarchal authority over Eastern women in Wafa Faith Hallam’s memoir The Road from Morocco. The conventional representation of these women is revisited as Saadia in the memoir debunks the passivity and docility with which they are associated by exercising her agency and trespassing the sacred cultural and physical frontiers. Regardless of being introduced to confinement in the private space of a harem since her infancy, Saadia manages to liberate herself first through leaving the allegedly sacred frontiers of the house and trespassing in public space which is discursively assumed to belong to men, and second through dismantling the patriarchal authority of her husband by applying for a divorce and starting a business in spite of his refusal. This article argues that the representation of Saadia invalidates the discursive portrayals of Moroccan women as being passive and confined in the domestic private space of harem and deconstructs patriarchal authority.

Author Biography

Rachid Lamghari is a Ph.D. researcher in Cultural Studies at FLDM, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Morocco. He reads and writes on a wide range of topics, but his primary interests are diaspora and migration studies, gender and women’s studies, cinema, transnationalism, identity and space, and postcolonialism. He has participated in many conferences and webinars and has recently published two articles, one in Feminist Media Studies and the other in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Email id: rachidlamgh@gmail.com and rachid.lamghari@usmba.ac.ma.

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