TRAPPED IN THE FIRDAWS, THE GARDEN OF EDEN, OF AZIZ IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’S PARADISE
TRAPPED IN THE FIRDAWS, THE GARDEN OF EDEN, OF AZIZ IN ABDULRAZAK GURNAH’S PARADISE

Summary/Abstract: Abdulrazak Gurnah, both an influential academic of postcolonial studies and a representative of postcolonial fiction, has put less significance on his female characters compared to his male ones in Paradise. However, noteworthy is the fact that even as a minor character, Amina in Paradise occupies a great deal of understanding on Islam and its stress on polygamy with cultural restrictions and interpretations. Being a rehani, pledge of her father’s debt, Amina is given to an older man, Aziz, as his second wife. The unwritten rules destine her to be trapped into the high-walled garden of Aziz where people imagine finding wealth and abundance connoting Firdaws, or Paradise. Regarding the Farsi derivation of it and its interpretation in the narrative together, it turns into a notably crucial moment not to read Aziz’s garden free from the Firdaws, where man is promised more than one wife in the Islamic context with its surrounding walls and the abundance among them. Amina, trapped in the triangle of Aziz, the garden, and Yusuf, another rehani whom she feels emotionally close to and who is also the fictionalisation of Prophet Yusuf of Islam, represents the in-between interpretation of Islamic sense of polygamy double-dimensionally. With an extended reading of the novel with its religious background, this paper aims to elucidate to what extent Gurnah uses Islamic stories of religion of his Islamic background to reintroduce them and the polygamy existing in his cultural context into the Western world.

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