So Vast The Prison Chapter Analysis

In the Last Chapter, Leila Abouzeid represents her female character as being a postcolonial agent. From the very beginning of the novel, we come to know that Aicha is an independent woman who rejects the socially and culturally constructed gender roles. This is manifested in peripheralizing women and subordinating them. Aicha, as the protagonist of the novel was among the first Moroccan girls who have received education which during that time was mainly for male children, “there were two of us in a class of forty two.” Being in a class which is fully dominated by boys, and living in a society which is overwhelmed by patriarchy, the protagonist is a self-independent postcolonial agent who is able to study and draw the exception in her society.

Therefore, they attempt at reconstructing a new image of Muslim women as self-independent agents, intellectuals, and courageous enough to resist patriarchy alongside the western feminist’s discourse over Muslim women as being totally illiterate and submissive housewives, who are unable even to represent themselves and tell their own stories. Isma, in So Vast the Prison is the best example of the powerful, courageous, rebellious, and independent woman who is able to decide for her own life. In the following passage the narrator confesses

In which she explores many images of women, in the first scene of her film, she describes:

The arable woman seems asleep, an almost traditional image of her wearing a red scarf, an elusive image. The first “shot” of my work show a clear defeat for the man. I said: “Action.” I was gripped by an emotion. As if the women of the harems had whispered “action” with me. Their complicity excites me. Only what their eyes see matters to me from now on. Resting on these images that I assemble with the help of their invisible presence over my shoulder. Thus, Djebar reflects her own experience in filmmaking in Isma’s career as a way to present other women’s voices and stories. She adds “this gaze, I claim it as mine. I see it as “ours.” A single gaze piercing the walls of past centuries, escaping beyond the tomb-house of today, concentrated, seeking a place to alight. Giving pause to the rhythm of things, slowing its pace.” Indeed, each gesture the heroine makes and each gaze and breath represent other women’s oppression, sufferings and their desire for getting their