Representations of Women in the Omani Postcolonial Novel: Ahmed Al-Zubaidi as a Case Study 10.35781/1637-000-169-003

Abstract

Abstract
Abstract: This study examines representations of women in the Omani postcolonial novel, taking Ahmed Al-Zubaidi’s (1945-2018) novels, ‘‘A Woman from Dhofar” (Imra’ah min Dhofar), ‘‘Years of Fire” (Sanawat al-Nar) and ‘‘Conditions of the Tribes” (Ahwal Al-Qaba'il), as models for analysis. The study proceeds from a central problem: how is the presence of women constructed narratively and semantically in this corpus? Do women remain marginal figures subordinated to the movement of characters and events, or do they become major interpretive signs that contribute to understanding revolution, society, identity, and memory? Accordingly, the study argues that women in Al-Zubaidi’s fiction cannot be reduced to their thematic dimension. Rather, they are shaped as narrating subjects, revolutionary agents, mothers who establish consciousness, objects of repression, mediators of wisdom and knowledge, and symbolic principles through which place and revolution are feminized. The study adopts an analytical and interpretive approach, drawing on postcolonial criticism, character analysis, and the study of textual thresholds. It traces the actions, utterances, and positions of female characters within the narrative structure. The study is organized into several main sections: woman as an initial textual threshold, the female before and after the revolution as a revolutionary subject, motherhood as memory and as a foundation for revolutionary consciousness, woman as an object within a reactionary structure, woman as a mediator of consciousness, and the feminization of place and revolution. The study concludes that Al-Zubaidi grants women a central position in the imagining of revolution and identity. Their presence exceeds the limits of the individual character, becoming a narrative tool that exposes the violence of social and colonial structures, and a semantic principle that reshapes place, memory, and revolutionary action. Keywords: Omani novel, postcolonial novel, violence and narrative, identity, memory, textual thresholds.