‘What? You Don’t Want the Baby Anymore? Well, I’m Not Sure if I Do Either’: A Kind of Decolonial Love in Shaida Kazie Ali’s Not a Fairy Tale

Abstract

What do fairy tale representations that trouble normative configurations of identities offer feminist imaginings of love about and for people of colour? How does the re-writing of conventional fairy tales, framed within decolonial epistemologies that open up space for marginalised knowledges, allow us to think differently about selfhood and our relations to others? This article considers these questions through paying attention to what love looks like in Shaida Kazie Ali’s reworked fairy tales in Not a Fairy Tale, published in 2010, where the characters are of colour, are Muslim, the women transgressive, and some men questioning of patriarchal masculinities. This article argues that Kazie Ali’s tales take seriously a feminist re-thinking of gender, and is unique in destabilising myths about women and men of colour. This article asks: What does it look like when normative gender binaries written into Islam are unsettled? What does love look like when the desire to possess is absent? In other words, what could a decolonial form of love look like?

Keywords

• Shaida Kazie Ali
• Not a Fairy Tale
• decolonial love
• feminist re-writing