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Code switching in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love Mohammed Albakry and Patsy Hunter Hancock Language and Literature 2008; 17; 221 DOI: 10.1177/0963947008092502 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lal.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/3/221

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CODE SWITCHING IN AHDAF SOUEIF’S THE MAP OF LOVE

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Code switching in Ahdaf Soueif ’s The Map of Love Mohammed Albakry and Patsy Hunter Hancock, Middle Tennessee State University, USA Abstract This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian–British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article’s methodology is informed by Kachru’s framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative’s effectiveness and readability. Keywords: Anglophone Arab literature; bilingual creativity; hybrid English; identity; postcolonial literature; readability; Soueif, Ahdaf

1 Introduction Code switching or language switching is a phenomenon that occurs both consciously and unconsciously in the speech of bilinguals (Auer, 1995, 1998; Myers-Scotton, 2002). The majority of the studies of code switching, therefore, tend to focus on naturally occurring code-switched utterances in interpersonal interaction or spoken media (Paugh, 2005; Shinhee, 2006). A few studies have analyzed the deliberate use of code-switching technique as an aspect of literary or bilingual creativity in world English literatures (see for example Bamiro, 1997; and Zabus, 1991 on West African writers in English; Dissanayake and Nichter, 1987 on Sri Lankan English fiction; D’Souza, 1991 on Indian English; Lee, 2004 on Chinese pidgin English in Maxine Hong Kingston’s novels; Tan, 1999 on Singaporean English; Watkhaolarm, 2005 on Thai novelists in English). So far, however, there is little research on Anglo-Arab literature (Nash, 1998) and particularly on the employment of code switching strategies in the writings of Anglo-Arab authors. Code switching or language switching in literature is a conscious effort to use two or more languages, for example Arabic and English, with the purpose of creating particular literary effects. These effects relate to conveying social and cultural elements to the reader as well as setting the mood of the narrative. Lipski (1985: 73) argues that unlike code switching in speech, literary code switching Language and Literature Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications Language and Literature 2008 17(3) (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore), Vol 17(3): 221–234 Downloaded from http://lal.sagepub.com at ALBERTA UNIVERSITY on August 21, 2008 DOI: 10.1177/0963947008092502 www.sagepublications.com © 2008 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

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MOHAMMED ALBAKRY AND PATSY HUNTER HANCOCK

may not be representative of the community that is targeted because of the processes of writing, editing, and rewriting, which is not possible in spontaneous speech. It is, however, worthwhile to examine code switching as a literary device, its motivation and strategies in fiction. The article examines and analyzes the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian–British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses to write in English, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to possibly represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of the Egyptian society. Before proceeding into the methodology and the analysis of results, however, it is necessary to give some background about the author and her selected novel.

2 Author’s background Ahdaf Soueif (1950–) was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. Between the ages of four and eight, she lived in England while her mother studied for her PhD at London University. Soueif returned to England in 1973 to study for a doctorate in linguistics at Lancaster University (Bloomsbury, 2006). Her fiction in general deals with characters poised between western and Egyptian cultures and perpetually engaged in negotiating relationships across cultural boundaries. Her novel The Map of Love was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize award in 1999. The Map of Love (1999) is a family saga that draws its readers into two periods in the turbulent history of modern Egypt. The narrative spans across 100 years of history, and it juxtaposes several generations of an Egyptian family against the backdrop of a colonial and postcolonial Egypt. The story travels back and forth between present-day Egypt/New York and Egypt in the early 1900s, thus creating parallels between past and present, and east and west. Isabel Parkman, a recently divorced American journalist who lives in New York City, finds a trunk full of documents in the form of journal entries and personal letters in her dying mother’s apartment. These documents, some of them in English, others in Arabic, belong to her English great-grandmother Anna Winterbourne. In order to decipher the Arabic documents, Isabel Parkman uses the help of an Egyptian woman, Amal. By seeking to discover more about Isabel’s family’s roots and the story of her English great-grandmother Anna Winterbourne, both Isabel and Amal, who function as the main narrators of the story, discover something about their own identities in the process. Because of the themes and the context of the novel, The Map of Love belongs to what could be described as postcolonial fiction. In its simplest form, the term ‘postcolonial’ as used here refers to literature written by colonized and formerly colonized peoples and all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day (Ashcroft et al., 2003: 2; Talib, 2002: 17). The subject of such literary works is often centered on examining cultural

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identity and the ways, both subtle and obvious, in which colonization has affected/ affects the colonized society even after independence. Soueif uses language and specifically code switching as a potential means to convey such themes in her novels. Like many other postcolonial writers who have suffered a forced or voluntary geographical displacement away from the motherland, Soueif lives in Britain, a country often considered the main center in the inner circle of the English-speaking world (see the concentric model in Kachru, 1997). With the displacement and relocation comes an imposed gap resulting from the linguistic displacement of the mother tongue. Even though Soueif has chosen English as the medium of her creative expression, English alone might feel inadequate or inappropriate to reflect her bicultural experience or describe the geographical conditions and cultural practices of her native homeland.

3 Framework and methodology To understand the complexities and peculiarities of the creative use of English in non-native contexts, it is important to examine the impact of native sensibility (Dissanayake and Nichter, 1987: 121–2). To achieve this goal, we need to identify the distinctive discourse patterns and cultural assumptions used in non-native English literatures in terms of vocabulary, idioms and syntax. These contact literatures, as Kachru calls them, exploit two or more linguistic and cultural-resources and ‘reveal a blend of two or more linguistic textures and literary traditions’ (1987: 127). Kachru (1987) puts forth the idea that code switching or language switching results in creativity that is not only the combination of two languages, but also the creation of societal, cultural, aesthetic and literary norms with a distinct context of situation. He points out that the authenticity of a narrative could be achieved by linguistic realization of five types: ‘the use of native similes and metaphors’, ‘the transfer of rhetorical devices for “personalizing” speech interaction’, ‘the translation of proverbs, idioms, and other devices’, ‘the use of culturally dependent speech styles’, and ‘the use of syntactic devices’ (1987: 133). After close reading of the novel and using Kachru (1987) as an interpretive framework, the authors created a database for all the Arabic terms of each chapter in the novel as well as the loan translations and direct expressions transferred from Arabic. The data were then manually counted and coded. We found it necessary, however, to modify and refine Kachru’s framework to suit the novel’s specific cultural and linguistic context of situation. Our coding categorizes the occurrence of literary code-switching instances in the novel into the following cultural and linguistic types: ‘traditional honorific titles and terms of respect’, ‘references to customs and tradition’, ‘historical references’, ‘greetings and conversational formulas’, ‘inter-language dialectal variation’ and ‘translational transfer’.



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4 Results and discussion Some bilingual writers, such as Hispanic writers in the USA, can safely assume that most readers have some knowledge of another commonly spoken language (e.g. Alvarez, 1992). Soueif with her use of Egyptian dialect, however, cannot make this assumption and she provides her English readers at the end of the book with a glossary of many of the Arabic utterances used in her novel. Figure 1 provides an overview of the occurrences of Arabic code switching in the different sections and chapters of Soueif’s novel. As illustrated in Figure 1, the book is divided into three major sections, 29 chapters and a closing chapter. The number of Arabic utterances introduced into the English narrative seems to fluctuate with peaks and valleys as the novel progresses. This phenomenon, however, is conditioned by narrative necessities because the more noticeable increases in code switching occur mainly in certain chapters to mark significant events. Prior to Chapter 8, Soueif introduces very little Arabic into the narrative with the focus being on setting up the novel’s two stories that weave across generations in a whole century. The first section ‘A Beginning’, however, slowly introduces the reader to several Arabic names and words. For example, the first encounter, ‘The child sleeps: Nur al-Hayah: light of my life’ (Soueif, 1999: 4), is with an Arabic proper name (reduplicated in English glossing) that belongs to Anna Winterbourne’s son. In one of the early entries in Anna’s journal, we read: Lord Cromer himself speaks no Arabic at all-except for ‘imshi’, which is the first word everybody learns here and means ‘go away’, and of course ‘baksheesh’. (Soueif, 1999: 71) Words such as baksheesh (tips given for rendering a service) haramlek (the area in a house reserved for women), ruq’a (the informal Arabic script used for personal letters and notes) and ya (vocative instrument that is obligatory if located in the middle of an Arabic utterance) are examples of Arabic lexical items that Soueif uses to ease the reader into the technique of lexical borrowing and appropriating Arabic terms Chapter 8, after the English widow Anna Winterbourne arrives in the Egyptian port of Alexandria in 1900, is the first chapter where some Arabic phrases are inserted into the English narrative. Documenting her cultural encounters with the east in a series of letters to her former father-in-law detailed in Chapter 9, Anna describes her impressions of Cairo using several Arabic words and phrases: Dear Sir Charles, It feels very strange these days not to be in England … We sat under a tree which they say sheltered Our Lady in her flight to Egypt with the infant Jesus, and I am myself touched by the simple faith with which our guide spoke of Settena Maryam and her son Yasu al-Masih … (Soueif, 1999: 86–88, emphasis added)



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Figure 1 Overview of Arabic code switching in Soueif’s The Map of Love


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This interspersing of Arabic is a linguistic technique that might signal the main western characters’ growing intimate relationship with the country. In fact, the two stories of Anna in colonial Egypt and Isabel (her modern-day parallel) in postcolonial Egypt unfold progressively with the increasing use of Arabic. Chapters 26 and 29 are the two high peaks of Arabic use in the novel. The largest introduction of Arabic (74 occurrences) into the English narrative is in Chapter 26, which documents the Egyptian move towards independence. The penultimate chapter, 29, marked by the murder of Anna’s husband Sharif alBaroudi, contains the second largest use of Arabic (70 occurrences). Historically, Egypt is politically under the control of Great Britain in 1906, but the country continues alignment with the Ottoman Empire until 1914. Echoes of independence from both the Ottoman and British Empires spiral in Chapter 26, and the parallel feelings of growing tension and unrest in modern Egypt are created by introducing a plethora of Arabic words and phrases that refer to the political parties and movements of the time: The Palace and the British parties are out of the question. He dislikes al-Watani’s cleaving to the Ottomans … The Hizb al-Ummah would have been the most natural place for him … (Soueif, 1999: 33, emphasis added) The reason for the frequent use of Arabic expressions may reside in Soueif’s concern with translation. Rather than translating to bring the text’s meaning closer to the reader, the author opts in many cases for maintaining the texture of the original Arabic and preserving its connotation. Many of the words and phrases used in the novel carry heavy sociocultural implications that would have been lost if represented by an English word or phrase. The Map of Love is, thus, interspersed with a vast number of diverse references: cultural, historical and linguistic. The following sections divided into more specific categories elaborate on this point. 4.1 Traditional honorific titles and terms of respect There are many examples in the text of the use of honorific Arabic titles as well as Turkish titles that have been appropriated into colloquial Arabic such as: Bey, Basha (mid-ranking and high-ranking Ottoman titles bestowed on wealthy men in colonial times); Umdah (village chief, usually the wealthiest man in the village); the formal Fadilatukum (an honorific title used to address high-status religious clerics). Other terms of respect are kin titles such as: am (paternal uncle); khal/khalu (maternal uncle); Abeih (a title used by siblings to address the oldest brother in the family). The use of these titles indicate the hierarchical nature of colonial Egyptian class society as well as the deference and respect conferred on relatives, the elderly and men of religion in the Egyptian culture. For example, Soueif inserts the Arabic title am 17 times into the narrative because of the wider scope of the Arabic lexical item, which is used in conversation to demonstrate respect not only for paternal uncles, but also for older men.



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The most frequently used titles, however, are those that denote political power. An example is the title Basha, which is concentrated in Chapter 29, where it occurs 25 times (overall 38 times in the narrative). On the eve of Sharif Basha’s assassination and during conversation between Sharif Basha and his friend Isma’il Basha Sabri, Soueif interjects the Arabized Ottoman title multiple times possibly to emphasize the power and wealth of these men. In the chapters preceding Chapter 29, 15 references are also made to the colonial rulers of Egypt by invoking the official title Khedive. Finally respect towards women when they are associated with wealth and power is also demonstrated in the narrative by interjecting the Arabic title Sett (lady) or setti (my lady) 44 times overall. This title is mostly used in modern and contemporary Egypt to address higher-status women (akin to the colonial concept of English Lady): And since Sett Eesa is here with us – tell her, ya Sett Amal, tell her to tell her government to lighten its hand on us a little. (Soueif, 1999: 176) 4.2 References to customs and tradition The book contains many Arabic references to local food, dress, forms of entertainment and religious traditions. Some of these references include: galabiyya (loose robes worn by peasants); Kufiyya (neck scarf worn by men); tarha (a head cover worn by traditional women); Kunafa (sweet pastry); sidaq (money given to a woman as a pledge of marriage); zagharid (women’s ululations as an expression of joy especially in wedding events); Mawwal (traditional form of musical entertainment consisting of narrative folk song); suhur (late meal eaten to prepare for the next day’s fast during the Islamic month of Ramadan). Keeping these cultural references reflects many of the customs and traditions of the country and also adds a foreignizing effect in an attempt to give the original flavor of a different/other culture. 4.3 Historical references Soueif seems to delve deep into the colonial/ historical archive to weave a family saga narrative and her novel, therefore, is filled with a great deal of folkloric as well as old and modern references in Egyptian and Middle Eastern history. There are two references, for example to Abuzeid and Antar: two characters endowed with exceptional warrior bravery and heroic deeds in popular Arabic folklore. Many other allusions refer to modern history particularly the problem of Palestine, Arab–Israeli conflict as well as many political and economic events taking place during the era before and during British colonization. Most of these references, however, are explained well in the body of the narrative without presupposing prior detailed knowledge. The following citation from one of the conversational interactions in the novel refers to the background of the digging of the Suez Canal:


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We were a part of a dying Ottoman Empire. Our Khedive Ismail loved modernism and Europe and – le spectacle. He likes the Suez Canal project and so he borrows money … (Soueif, 1999: 223) 4.4 Greetings and conversational formulas Many examples of code switching in the novel include greetings and conversational minimal responses. The use of such greetings as: Izzay el-sehha: (how is your health?); kattar kheirak: ((May God) increase your bounty, as an expression of thanks); misa al-khairat; (evening of many good things) emphasize the elaborateness, rhetorical flourish and flowery nature of greetings in the Egyptian culture. To make sure that this point is not lost to the monolingual English-speaking reader, some of the greetings are occasionally reduplicated after their first occurrence in Arabic by translating them into English. Use of conversational Arabic formulas is also prevalent and could be illustrated by such expressions as: Itfaddal: (do me the favour, as an expression for invitation); al-hamdu-l-illah: (thank God); Khalas ya Setti: ((I hope) it is it done my lady); Insha’ Alla: (God willing); masha’ Allah (Look what God has willed, as an expression of admiration for someone’s achievement or good fortune). Soueif’s use of many of these conversational routine formulas or clichés in Arabic shows the extent to which religious references are normalized in regular Egyptian non-religious discourse. Some western readers might be shocked by the practice of regularly invoking the name of God (Allah) in Arabic conversations and might confuse it with swearing in a negative sense. Unlike the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, invoking ‘the name of the Lord’ in Arabic culture is a religiously sanctioned and socially approved discourse practice. 4.5 Inter-language dialectal variation An interesting point related to the use of the Arabic language in the novel is the occasional use of some standard Arabic words, as opposed to dialectal Egyptian expressions. In Arabic, with its dichotomy between al-fusha and al-ammiyya, or its high and low varieties, there is a unique diaglossic nature that creates a semi-bilingual situation in which the vernacular language diverges from the written one (Ferguson, 1959: 336). Use of standard Arabic words (e.g. akhi, my brother, Amrad, a man who has no facial hair) signals a high level of education or a formal discourse occasion. Ya akhi, no [no my brother], says Mahgoub. No. The pieties speak against killing and bombing. It all comes back to economics. (Soueif, 1999: 226) These subtle connotations indexed by the transition between the standard and vernacular Egyptian dialect in Arabic will be completely lost to the western reader unfamiliar with the diaglossic nature of Arabic. A reader with a thorough knowledge of classical Arabic (al-fusha) and Egyptian colloquial Arabic



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(al-ammiyya), however, could feel the cadence of this Arabic duality as an indication of register variation, In a few occasions, Soueif’s style relies on the subtleties of this kind of inter-language shift or variation between these two varieties of Arabic. The shift, however, is determined by a number of contextual factors, among which are degree of formality and location of interaction. 4.6 Translational transfer As for the technique of transferring native Arabic metaphors/proverbs, there do not seem to be very many in the narrative. One example of the few that stand out is the following utterance, ‘Leave this one to me, but be comforted – don’t they say “the son of a duck is no mean swimmer”’ (Soueif, 1999: 152, emphasis added). The example is a saying transcreated from the Egyptian Arabic proverb: ‘The goose’s son is a good swimmer,’ which means ‘like father like son’ (in either a positive or negative sense). Motivated by a desire to give the readers a close literal translation from Egyptian Arabic, Soueif still found it necessary to modify the words of the proverb by replacing the main noun phrase from a ‘goose’ into a ‘duck’, a bird more idiomatically associated with water in the English language (e.g. ‘like a duck to water’). There are, however, numerous examples of idiomatic expressions that echo literal expressions from the structure of Egyptian Arabic (all italics in the following examples are added by the authors): [After Anna’s abduction by a group of revolutionaries, the narrator (Amal) reflects on what could be on the mind of Sabir, Anna’s Egyptian servant]. The effendis outside refuse to put their minds in their heads and fear God. And his charge, this Englishwoman, kidnapped and locked into a storeroom, what does she do? She sits down and opens a book. At first he had thought she was trying to comfort herself by reading the Bible. But then she started writing. Writing! The daughter of the madwoman! Truly they must be made of different dough … (Soueif, 1999: 109) Some other examples include: … ya Sett Amal, tell her to tell her government to lighten its hand on us a little’ (Soueif, 1999: 176) ‘She’s very intelligent’, Tahiyya says. ‘But she’s naughty like the Jinn.’ (Soueif, 1999: 490) ‘May God increase the good that comes from you!’ She smiles, catching the hand on her cheek, kissing it lightly. (Soueif, 1999: 153) [When Amal learns that the doorman’s wife is pregnant for the fifth time] ‘Again?’ I say. ‘Again, ya Tahiyya?’ ‘By God, I never wanted to,’ she protests. ‘We said four and we praised God and closed it on that. It’s God’s command, what can we do?’ … ‘By the prophet, I can’t keep up with them all,’ she says. (Soueif, 1999: 76–7)


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As the examples here illustrate, Soueif carries Arabic native speech habits into English by having her characters verbally interact in English as they would in Arabic. In other words, the characters are in fact speaking Arabic but using English words.

5 Textual hybridity and self translation In the example below, Amal is narrating an encounter with one of her friends: We sit in soft leather armchairs and exchange news: our families, our children, what we have been doing over the past twenty years. We speak as we always have: Arabic inlaid with French and English phrases. (Soueif, 1999: 200, emphasis added). Besides the textual hybridity of English and Arabic, there are a few instances of French words and phrases sprinkled in the novel. French code switching can be tied to the colonial times where Anna (English-speaking Briton) and Sharif (Arabic-speaking Egyptian) must use French (a third-party language) to communicate. Ironically, French, another rivaling colonial language, is used to erase the boundaries and class distinction between the Empire and the other. The use of French here might be viewed as a means of establishing common ground or levelling the distinction between the British and Egyptians in the colonial British context. Whether Arabic or French, however, the art of code switching in this novel is part of the bilingual creativity possibly employed to demonstrate how language could be used to dissolve borders between the English and Egyptian, how language could be used to create barriers between the colonized subjects and British authorities, and how language could contribute to the discovery and redefining of cultural identity. The Map of Love, like Soueif’s other works (e.g. In the Eye of the Sun, 1992) can be read as a sort of ‘self-translation’ and not just in the metaphorical postmodernist sense of cultural translation, i.e. the non-linguistic sense (Bhabha, 1994: 228), or what is often referred to as the cultural turn in translation studies (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998: 3). Soueif’s own reflection on her writing practices seems to support this conclusion by giving us a hint of the kind of negotiations that shape the production of her texts. In a sense, she once observed in an interview with a leading Egyptian English-language newspaper ‘a lot of my fiction is in fact translation’ (Ghazaleh, 2001). Like the character Amal, who admits to being comfortable with ‘Arabic inlaid with French and English phrases’ (Soueif, 1999, 200, emphasis added), Souief’s own narrative, which is written in English and inlaid with Arabic and some French, mimics the code switching that Amal mentions in the cited excerpt. The difference is that Souief is in a sense performing an act of self-translation when she writes in English inlaid with Arabic and French versus writing in her native Arabic language inlaid with English and French. In either case, language boundaries begin to disappear.



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6 Readability and intelligibility Understanding any literary text is dependent on prior cultural knowledge. When reading a text within one’s own culture, the author can assume that his or her cultural references are shared by the readers. That is not the case, however, when the literary work is steeped in a different culture. The aforementioned cultural references in the novel, and others similar in nature, are part of the prior cultural knowledge that could be taken for granted by an author writing for a predominantly Muslim or Arab audience, but not for western readers. The quantifying of a chapter’s Arabic word density and complexity may not be readily obvious by simply counting Arabic code-switching occurrences as depicted in Figure 1. By calculating the percentage of Arabic word usage in a given chapter, however, it is possible to gain additional insight into certain narrative sections that may be more challenging to the non-Arabic reader. Figure 2 provides a chapter-by-chapter overview of the percentage use of Arabic words in Soueif’s novel. More specifically, Figure 2 indicates that in Chapter 16, for example, the Arabic word representation is estimated to be 0.9 percent, which is calculated by dividing the occurrences of code switching (43 occurrences as indicated in Figure 1) by an approximate 4700 total word count for the chapter. Contrary to the sixth-ranking position of Chapter 16 in Figure 1, Figure 2 ranks it third in density, which is a point that may be overlooked when only counting the occurrences of Arabic words. Some of the cultural and historical allusions also give a certain density to the language, and could be more integrated and explicated in the text to bring forth its richness for the new readers. Soueif, however, opts mostly for glossing and using minimal explanatory notes. This technique might diminish the readability of her text for some readers, because inserting foreignized speech as a discursive strategy tends to increase the difficulty of understanding for the reader not familiar with the foreign language used. The ‘aggressive’ bilingual style adopted by Soueif seems to be deliberately used to push the reader with no knowledge of Egyptian Arabic to do much work. The monocultural reader, however, may end up having a richer experience because of all the work he or she has to do (Dasenbrock, 1987: 15). Soueif, in this sense, does not seem to be driven by a domesticating impulse for the sake of intelligibility. While more cooperative from a reception point of view, the act of domesticating involves an ethno-centric reduction that tends to erase or suppress the traces of otherness (Venuti, 1995: 148). The foreignizing strategy, in contrast, has the aesthetic value of introducing certain aspects of a different culture without linguistic or translational mediation. It deliberately evokes the other culture without neutralizing its linguistic and cultural differentness in an ‘invisible’ monolingual style. The occurrence of foreignizing strategy, therefore, could be interpreted as more than a simple or innocent act of transference, and the resulting hybrid style could potentially function as a discourse of resistance within/to the dominant Anglo-American language and culture.


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Figure 2 Percentage of Arabic words per chapter



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7 Conclusion Many bilingual writers like Soueif attempt to capture the natural spoken phenomenon of code switching in narrative fiction. One possible reason is the desire to represent some aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of the community of mother tongue without writing in its code. In choosing to use English as a medium of creativity, Soueif in this respect is no different from the West African, Indian or Singaporean writers in English. All of them must decide what to do with English as a dominant metropolitan code. Their options range from confirming it, appropriating it, subverting it or replacing it. A common way of challenging the total dominance of a metropolitan code, however, is for the writer to carry over his or her ‘native language and embody [it] … within the text written in the metropolitan language. The western reader is thereby forced to decode [the] situational if not [the] denotative meanings. In this way, the reader has to work at decoding cultural difference, and multicultural readings are made possible’ (Nash, 1998: 8). In the tradition of prominent postcolonial writers (e.g. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Raja Rao, to name a few), Soueif seems to push the frontiers of the English language so as to express and simulate the multicultural experience of her characters. She uses code switching, particularly lexical borrowing and transferring from Arabic, as a way of finding a ‘new English’, a language between two languages. This mixed new English seeks to encompass both her new home and ancestral home (see Achebe, 1975: 60–62) in order to enable her to participate in both worlds. The hybrid English, then, could become a means by which bilingual writers are able to preserve their cultural identity and capture its flavor while at the same time writing about it in the dominant language.

Acknowledgments The authors would like to express their thanks to the journal editor Professor Paul Simpson and two anonymous reviewers for their thorough and helpful comments and suggestions.

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Addresses Mohammed Albakry, Department of English, P.O Box 70, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, USA. [email: [email protected]] Patsy Hunter Hancock, Department of English, P.O Box 70, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN 37132, USA. [email: [email protected]]
