A Thousand and One Laylas
The Politics of Narrative Embedding in Laila Neffa's Ais
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3767095 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Minying Huang (University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Publication date | 2024-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Amerika (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2107-0806 • E-ISSN: 2107-0806 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/amerika.18922 |
| OpenAlex | W4392664887 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 17 |
In Montevideo in 1951, the Uruguayan-born Lebanese poet and translator Laila Neffa published the poetry collection Ais. Framed within the semi-historical legendary story of Layla al-ʿAmiriya and Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, two seventh-century Bedouin poets whose forbidden love resulted in madness and death, this was Neffa's elegiac homage to her brother Ais, who passed away in adolescence. This article reads Ais as a re-appropriation of Jorge Luis Borges' literary sleight-of-hand, involving mise en abyme, enacted by the Argentine author on the Arabian Nights in his 1949 essay "Magias parciales del Quijote". I propose that Neffa's re-appropriative act facilitates a "speaking back to" and an "opening up" of a varied selection of Arab, Arabo-Persian, and Euro- and Spanish-American discursive traditions. These negotiations, translations, and transformations of tradition, I argue, set in motion a recovery of self and others, of Laila and Laylas, in the wake of personal and collective trauma
Appropriation · Art · Art history · Brother · Elegiac · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |