F. Elizabeth Dahab-Haydn  (California State University, Long Beach)
Saad Elkhadem's The Plague and Wings of Lead : Two experimental novellas by a major Egyptian-Canadian writer

This abstract proposal is part of a work-in-progress book-length monograph on Arabic-Canadian Literature which will account for, survey, analyze and process a growing trilingual body of literary texts written and published throughout Canada and produced by first generation Canadians of Arabic origins, with the aim of making this literature more available and accessible to the mainstream of Canadian and European (French and English readership) historical, literary and cultural research.

Arabic-Canadian Literature was born in the early seventies at the hands of first generation Canadians of Arabic origins. This literature, weakly institutionalized and insufficiently known to mainstream scholarship as it is, has produced nevertheless in all genres. It covers styles of writing ranging from the realist to the post-modernist. It is produced in French, English and Arabic, and it can presently join ranks with "other solitudes" Canada has come to acknowledge, admit and embrace. I have published several articles on this topic as well as an anthology (Voices in the Desert: The Anthology of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers, Toronto: Guernica, 2002).

For the purpose of the present abstract proposal, it is worth noting that Saad Elkhadem (1932-2003) is one of the prominent figures of this literature. He is an Egyptian-Canadian expatriate, writer and translator of his own writings, who has produced over 17 works of fiction. His books, some of which have been banned in Egypt, were published in Cairo and New Brunswick (Canada), couched in two languages, Arabic and English. Two languages, two countries, two awarenesses, and an array of shifting perspectives partaking in the larger postmodern vision shared by many.

I propose to study Elkhadem's bilingual (Arabic/English) novellas, Wings of Lead (1971/1994) and The Plague, (1989), highlighting the underlying narrative techniques used in their making, and the transnational themes harbored at their core. In so doing I will recall Deleuze and Guattari's pronouncements on the characteristics of minor literatures, namely, the mark of the political, the collective value of utterances and detteritorialisation (Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (1975)