American Literture and Culture

ABSTRACT: Many transformations occur in the daily lives of the peoples of the Arab Gulf.
Undoubtedly, such changes have left very deep influence in the varied areas of lives. Writing
Gulf Sates literature in general and narrative in particular is reshaped by the daily events and
concerns. The daily social and political, cultural and race/sectarian prejudice issues become
the core of the Gulf writers' concerns. In the Gulf communities, migrants come from around
the world with their different cultures, languages, religions, but social conventions on the hope
of finding their living. The immigrants become a part of the Gulf community and affect the
culture and social conventions of the Gulf Communities, regardless of the Gulf people who
travel abroad for study or tourism or searching for a better life and come back with new identity
and new style of life. How do the writers express problematic of identity and the hybridity in
such globalized world and cosmopolitan atmosphere? The article addresses transformations
in the Gulf States identity and the rapid changes in social and political arena as portrayed by
the Gulf writers in the area of narrative. The article focuses on two narratives by two Kuwaiti
writers: Saud Al Sanousi's winning novel of International Prize of Arabic Fiction (IPAF), and
the Kuwait State Award: The Bamboo Stalk, 2012, and Sada Al Da'as's Being Black, the
winning novel of Kuwait State Award of Appreciation and Encouragement, 2010.
KEYWORDS: hybridity- problematic- identity- narrative- Gulf- Racism- Black- Kuwaiti

For the poet H.D. and the novelist Thomas Pynchon, a personified World War II represents the masculine appropriation of a feminine, reproductive Nature. I argue that Pynchon’s notions of nature and war are partly developed in response to H.D.’s mystical depictions of gender, especially her sense that we must choose between the “resurrections” of nature gods and of modern warfare. Where H.D. in Trilogy conjures a new Eve to resurrect a war-ravaged nature, Pynchon despairs that men will never again reproduce anything but more structures of death.

Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow’s opens with a bitterly ironic paraphrase of a male credo of nature; here Wernher Von Braun, the German rocket engineer, claims: “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.” This nature can not kill, or at least can kill only physical selves, leaving spirit and species abstractly immortal. Even the matter of our bodies can’t be destroyed, but is perpetually converted into new shapes to serve Nature; this process also makes our seemingly intrinsic identities wholly malleable. But these transformations precisely epitomize the function of Pynchon’s demonic war, not H.D.’s benign transcendental nature. As suggested by the source of Pynchon’s opening passage—a designer of weapons—it is war, not nature, that now controls a
“spiritual existence after death,” but not through resurrection, but war recycling. The war, not nature, comes to oversee a ceaseless shuffling of recycled human parts, without creation or extinction. In earlier transcendental American literature, nature had controlled a complex series of transformations, for example animating inanimate matter to life. (We encounter much the same questions we do in Moby-Dick: does nature have a human or inhuman will, and is it worse to be killed by a purposive nature or by blind chance?) In Gravity’s Rainbow, the war usurps this transcendental American function, and like nature it knows no extinction, only the perpetual transformation of its subjects. Pynchon’s war is transcendental because, like Von Braun’s nature, it guarantees death to the individual but immortality to the species. To the war, all matter,
including human bodies, is plastic and can be restructured as anything.