Self Is Meaningless When the Other Is Not Truly Understood: Revisiting the Persian Mystical Parables of Rumi’s Mathnavi and Pomerance’s The Elephant Man

Abstract

The Other, whose presence is essential for the construction of the Self, has almost always been depicted peculiarly in the literary texts of the East and the West. The investigation of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s parables and Bernard Pomerance’s play, albeit the genres, time, place, and cultures are totally different—Rumi’s parables are classical Persian poems and Pomerance’s work is a modern American play—well indicates how the Other is mistakenly delineated and how the Colonizer’s attempt at making the Other “almost the same, but not quite”—as Bhabha states—fails and leads to the unsophisticated fabrication of the Other. Self is well understood in relation to the understanding of the Other. In this research, it is shown how both the Other and the Colonizer fail when there is no thorough mutual understanding.

Keywords

• self, other, Rumi, Pomerance, Mathnavi, The Elephant Man