Bakhtin Analysis

In his essay Bakhtin provides an analysis of the relationship between individual utterances and the ideologically charged forces that affect them, he writes:

“The dialogic interaction of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness) creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse, creates the potential for a distinctive art of prose, which has found its fullest and deepest expression in the novel.” (275) i.e. there are dialogic relations between the narrator and the writer, the author and the character, the story and other stories, culture and text and society and text. A novel is in fact characterized by heteroglossiawhere many voices (writer, character, society) are mixed which gives originality to the text.

Also through Salwa’s grandmother who tells a traditional Palestinian children’s tale entitled “Nus Nsays” , Halaby made a dialogic relationship between the novel and the Arabic culture, when Salwa asks her grandmother why Nus Nsays is so small, her grandmother responds, “To show that with determination and a clever wit, small characters can defeat larger evils. Every Palestinian has a bit of Nus Nsays within him or her” (98).

Halaby depicted the American way of life in Salwa and Jassim who were absorbed in the American culture:

That afternoon, driving up recently repaved asphalt to his nestled-in-the hillshome, Jassim pulled up his glinty Mercedes next to one of many identical expectant mailboxes, each painted a muted rusty brown … in the coolness of his house, Jassim removed a gleaming glass from a

Through Penny, Halaby criticizes the polarizing discourse put forward by Bush after the attacks, particularly the known statement, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” By creating this relationship, Halaby depicts the actual reaction to not only to the attacks on the Twin Towers, but also to the so-called war on Terror.

Finally, Once in A Promised land is a polyphonic novel. As defined by Bakhtin a polyphonic novel is one in which there emerge ‘(a) plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (Bakhtin,6 ). In Halaby’s novel the characters maintain a dialogue with other characters and with themselves including Jassim when he hits the boy, Salwa, when she is pregnant and lost in her won world, Marcus; Jassim’s boss and friend, when he knew about Jassim’s accident…etc.

Accordingly, history and morality are written and read within the infrastructure of the novel which makes it