Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey by Joyce Zonana
2009; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 83; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2009.0002
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo, is difficult to characterize this sort 1 of writing as a series of digres i sions, since there is no real topic to 1 digress from. The narrator attacks i ill-defined "parasites"; he recounts ' occasional trysts with a younger i woman named Viva; early on, , he establishes a parallel between i his practice at a shooting range , and seeking the perfect words for 1 his texts; he regularly attempts to i express the ineffable significance 1 of his highly aestheticized form of i religiosity.Every now and then, the narration switches from first to sec i ond person: "Vous prenez Tavion , ? Hong Kong, vous atterrissez ? 1 Chengdu" (You get on a plane in i Hong Kong, you land in Cheng 1 du). These stylistic transitions are i as random as the narrator's mean [ derings through time, space, and i literary sketches, outside ofwhich, , as he informs us: "Je suis repris 1 par le cauchemar de Texistence" , (I am once again caught up in the 1 nightmare of existence). Within his i textual domain, Sollers is obviously 1 enjoying himself, and perhaps he i has convinced himself that aim , less rambling is a form of poetry, i that aristocratic detachment and a , superficial form of erudition can 1 compensate for ineffectual writing, iEdward Ousselin 1 WesternWashington University ! Joyce Zonana. Dream Homes: From i Cairo to Katrina, an Exile's Journey. [ New York. Feminist Press at CUNY. ' 2008. 221 pages. $15.95. isbn978-1 55861573-1 i Among countless diasporic mem ' oirs, we remember those that most i hauntingly etch a private history , that somehow speaks to our own. ' Dream Homes is such a book. Joyce , Zonana, a professor of literature and women's studies, subtly blends experiences, verbal and photo graphic images, and family recipes into a literaryrepast that embodies both her complex ethnic, religious, and sexual identityand her lifelong search for "home." In 1951, as Arab nationalism and government repression mount ed in Egypt, Zonana's parents fled with their eighteen-month-old daughter fromCairo to Brooklyn. Without a sense of origin, caught between two worlds, Zonana must assemble her past, "the memory I do not have," from "tiny pieces of moveable property" (e.g., jew elry,a prayer rug) and fragmentary responses reluctantly given by par ents unwilling to remember. Extended tropes that link cook ing to writing permeate the text. Repeatedly driven to stuff grape leaves for departmental parties, Zonana traces this persistent need to her parents' New York house hold, Egyptian in its gender roles. Her mother's "sacrament" is food, her own, language. Yet after leav ing Radcliffe in her freshman year and fleeing her parents' home to her own apartment, she is hired to write a cookbook and so learns to cook in order towrite. Food and language also high light her isolation. Shopping with her father, Zonana senses that he feels most athome among theEgyp tian spices, speaking Arabic with the Middle Eastern grocers. But knowing just English and French, the child cannot participate. To her Ashkenazi peers, meanwhile, as a non-Arab Egyptian and Sephardic Jew unaware of gefilte fish,Yid dish, or "kosher," she is neither a real Egyptian nor a real Jew. Zonana cogently captures the forces that fuel her breakdown at Radcliffe and self-destructive E behavior thereafter, as she strugE gles to free herself from the con- E straints of her upbringing: her E paternal grandmother's tyrannical E longing; her mother's early free- E dorn, squelched by marriage, and E her later need tomold Joyce into E a proper Egyptian Jewish girl; her E family's silence about "God, death, E and sex," because of which she E seeks to affirm her existence by E crossing sexual boundaries; her E parents' lost dreams and divided E loyalties; her sense of shame that E Egyptian Jews generally, and her E parents in particular?through their E use of French, allegiance to Euro- E pean culture, and negative stereo- E typing of Arabs?were passively E complicit inEgypt's colonial past. E In ten chapters arranged E around central ideas, people, and E places rather than pure chronol- E ogy, Dream Homes meanders from E New York...
Referência(s)