The Supernatural
摘要
Chapter 3, ‘The Supernatural’, picks up on the haunting and spectral aspects of Chap. 2 to examine the explicitly supernatural elements of some Arab feminist Gothic texts. Ghosts, jinn, qarina and doubles, and other supernatural elements register the question of “living with the ghosts”. This chapter builds on the previous thinking through spectrality as a condition of womanhood under capitalist modernity, and the violences that entails. I firstly examine the supernatural in the Arab world and its relationship to modernity and “disenchantment”, before engaging with references to the Thousand and One Nights [’alf layla wa layla] as a foundational cultural object that Arab feminist writers parody and pastiche. In this chapter I contend with how ghosts, jinn, revenants and goddesses, and finally the qarina, or spirit double, all unravel the distinctions between evidence, knowing, and uncertainty for peripheralised subjects. An unseen and unacknowledged world that sits alongside the clear logics of the daytime is brought into relief through the supernatural in Maryam’s Maze [matāhat Maryam] (2009 [2007]) by Mansoura Ez Eldin, The Honey (1999) by Zeina B. Ghandour, Minor Detail [tafṣīl thānawī] (2020 [2017]) by Adania Shibli, El Love in the Kingdom of Oil [ḥubb fīzaman al-naff̣t] (2001 [1993]) and The Fall of the Imam [Suqūṭ al-imām], and The Square Moon: Supernatural Tales [al-qamar al-murabba‘: qiṣaṣ gharā’ibiyyah] (1998 [1994]) by Ghada Samman.