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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF LANGUAGE USE
and political dimensions. In this sense Hammad is “appropriating” English and
French, the languages of Sykes and Picot, who divided the Arab Ottoman prov¬
inces into British and French mandates during WW and the interbellum, the era
in which the novel is set. This can be seen as a way of “the Empire writing back."
THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
In what follows, I will discuss the ways in which English, the matrix language,
French and Arabic, the imbedded languages, interact in the text on the basis
of five salient examples. Theoretically and methodologically, my analysis is
inspired by Michelle Hartman’s work." In her analysis of nine French-Lebanese
novels by female authors, Hartman discusses the ways in which these authors
incorporate Arabic words and expressions into the main text in French in
order to comment on gender and class and how the languages interanimate
each other, creating a new creative literary language. Hartman describes this
interaction between French and Arabic as “gendered interference,” “feminist
punctuation,” and “writing as translation.” However, there are some important
differences between “The Parisian or Al-Barisi” and the novels Hartman dis¬
cusses. For one, the authors discussed by Hartman grew up in Lebanon and
spent at least a substantial part of their lives there, whereas Hammad has a
Palestinian background but was born and raised in Britain. The novels analyzed
by Hartman were published between the 1930s and 1990s, while “The Parisian”
was published in 2019. In the Lebanese novels “only” two languages interani¬
mate each other, namely French and Arabic, while Hammad extensively in¬
corporates French and Arabic in the English main text. Finally, the novels
discussed by Hartman are all feminist novels, commenting not only but fore¬
most on gender and class. Hammad’s novel, though definitely dealing with
gender in several ways, is not a feminist novel in particular. Despite these
differences, Hammad uses techniques that are similar to the ones described
and analyzed by Hartman and they very much yield the same effect as what
Hartman describes as “writing as translation,” making the novel resemble a
“resistant” or “foreignizing” translation, in which the translator deliberately
deviates from the conventions of the target language in order to make the
readers aware of the “foreignness” of the text and the fact that they are reading
a translated text.’ In combination with the mixing of genres described above,
° Bill Ashcroft — Gareth Griffith — Helen Tiffin: The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice
in Postcolonial Literatures, New York, Routledge, 1989.
6 Michelle Hartman: Native Tongue, Stranger Talk. The Arabic and French Landscapes of Leb¬
anon, New York, Syracuse University Press, 2014.
? Lawrence Venuti: The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, New York, Routledge,
1995.
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