Overshadowed by Neo-Orientalism: The Odyssey in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep

The work of Anglophone Arab women writers, especially after the attacks of 9/11, 2001, attracted and still attracts a lot of attention in the West because it potentially offers an opportunity for western audiences to have access to and understand the Arab world. However, instead of paving the way for better understanding of and communication with Arab culture, this work, written from what Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space of enunciation”, a place of liminality and hybridity, may conversely promote and recycle western neo-Orientalist stereotypical views about the Arab world and its culture, distract readers from grasping the work’s deeper issues and invite reductionist, orientalist readings which rob it of much of its depth and human value. This paper analyzes the novel Willow Trees Don’t Weep, by the Jordanian-British writer Fadia Faqir, to explore and expose the tension between the neo-Orientalist representations of her characters, both female and male, and the deeper expression of their human subjectivity. It argues that, taken at face value and given the fact that Faqir is preoccupied with problems of gender and patriarchy, the novel may be read and interpreted as reiterating neo-Orientalist stereotypical preconceptions of Arab/Muslim oppression of women. However, on a deeper level, Faqir appears to be more concerned with her two main characters’ (a father and daughter) expression of human agency as they embark on Odyssean heroic journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment, comparable to the classical hero’s journey as discussed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, that humanize and help them to heal and be re-conciliated to self and other.