Writing the Self / Writing the Other in Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel and Inaam Kachachi's The American Granddaughter

Abstract

Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel (2004) and Inaam Kachachi's The American Granddaughter (2008) both deal with the crisis in Iraq and its ramifications. Recognizing the important ideological and humanistic role played by literature, both writers choose to assume their moral responsibility in the face of injustice, war and violence. The paper attempts to show how each of them follows a humanistic approach that advocates human rights and equality. It also compares how each evades or otherwise succumbs to the pitfalls of Humanism that turns the sign "human' to a universal category representing humanity according to the Western model. In so doing it examines how the fact of their coming from opposite sides of the cultural divide influences the cross-cultural negotiation of publicly disseminated representations of both the self and its other(s).