Literary Analysis Of Alameddine's Koolaids
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Alameddine’s Koolaids illustrates that the geographical dislocation is not only the source of the protagonists’s, Mohammad and Samir, sense of unfriendliness in the adapted homeland, but the eccentricity, discrimination, and hybridity have much to do with the protagonists’s crises and struggles. Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain argues that the body in pain defines reality and ‘for the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that ‘having pain’ may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to ‘have certainty’” (4). Thus, the agony of physical pain on the self and others is an expression of severe psychological suffering and exercise of power. Wail Hassan in Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature argues that Alameddine’s: …fiction queers Orientalism by, first, laying bare the discriminatory and often violent processes by which all identities (sexual, social, national, cultural, religious and so forth) are formed; second, staging storytelling as an epistemology that reveals the ideological constructedness of all cultural knowledge; and third, demonstrating the limits as well as the potentials of cultural translation as both impossible and inevitable (200).
Thus, Alameddine’s novel Koolaids imagines narrative as epistemological and raises questions about the impossibility of cultural translation. He does so by mimicking the religious hypocrisies of