Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt as a Postmodern Allegorical Narrative

Abstract

The study elaborates Abdel Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984/1989) as a postmoderrn politico-historical allegory. Fredric Jameson’s premise that all third world literature is necessarily allegorical has been combined with the rhetoric of postmodernism which hypostasizes its radical break with the past through a revival of allegory. Rejection of metanarratives marks the postmodern. The denunciation is suggestive of a positive development since grand theories are constructs tending to disregard the potential of the individual event and the natural existence of disorder and chaos in the universe. Along with ignoring the heterogeneity of human existence, metanarratives become unreliable because they are produced and fortified by power structures. Hence the discussion concludes that in the milieu of the third world the personal and the political are so intertwined that the one cannot be separated from the other; and Munif’s narrative working as an apparatus of allegorical enunciation is capable of not only bringing about biopolitical change but also undermining the hegemonic discourse of Eurocentrism.