Identity and Taboos in Egyptian novelist, Rauf Mass’ad’s novels: Baydat Anna’amah and Mezaj Attamaseeh

Abstract

This study aims at revealing the political, religious, and sexual taboos in the world of the Egyptian novelist, Rauf Mas’sad, through his novels: Baydat Anna’amah and Mezaj Attamaseeh. By violating the veils of taboos, the narrator exceeded the patterns of societal values, and those of the traditional artistic structures while soaring in the worlds of the body in search of his marginalized self, and his lost identity. He predicts a world of chaos which is full of identity conflicts, repression, oppression, exclusion, hardship, extremism, and violence. This research attempts to emphasize the relationship between the narrator and the text where what is public is mingled with what is personal, what is realistic is tangled with what is imagined, what is sensed with the political, the narrative with the biographic without any system or sequence, but with flashbacks, referrals and predictions which scatter throughout the texts.