Birds of Feathers may not Flock Together: Avian Imageries in Contemporary Arab Diasporic Novels

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how birds and avian metaphors are used by Arab writers in diaspora to reflect themes of exile, displacement and dispersion. In particular, in Inaam Kachachi’s The Dispersal (2023) and Walid Nabhan’s Exodus of the Storks (2021) birds and avian images are thematically and aesthetically significant motifs since the covers of some editions of the two novels feature a scene from each novel in which birds are of great importance to some characters, key events and sociopolitical, historical and cultural contexts of the texts. The deployment of these imageries on the covers of some editions represents a relatively recent tendency adopted by Western publishers to reflect the complex nature of literary representations of recent developments in the Middle East rather than relying on a long history of Orientalism to mediate this process of presentation. Furthermore, the study draws on the tripartite division of the notion of translation by Roman Jakobson (1959), particularly, his notion of the intersemiotic translation to highlight the links between a novel’s cover design and the themes that it depicts.

Keywords

• arab diasporic literature
• avian imagery
• birds
• book covers
• intersemiotic translation