Multiple Cultural Contacts in Gulf Anglophone Literature

A Renewed Approach

Abstract

If a great number of Middle Eastern Anglophone writers have tackled the problem of cultural encounters and their effects on their selves, a new generation of anglophone writers in the Gulf add more layers of complexities to these encounters. For them, it is not simply a binary matter of East meeting West and vice-versa, it is a multi-layered experience of encounters with cultures outside but also within their own countries. The Qatari Sophia Al-Maria’s The Girl who Fell to Earth (2012) offers one of the most complex interesting examples of a multi-layered identity: her character Sophia/Safia inherits her Arab and American parents’ reverse journeys to and from the United States and has to cope with other encounters as a descendant of a Bedouin tribe living in an urban environment; moreover, she studies in Egypt where other cultural layers are added or peeled off. This paper, based on several recent anglophone novels from the Arabian Gulf, will tackle the different levels of contacts between cultures that have already permeated.