Abstract :
The heroʹs quest of identity is considered in Rashīd a-a‘īfʹs works on two levels, personal and collective. A-a‘īfʹs novels, and especially ‘Azīzī as-sayyid Kawabata and Nāiyat al-barā’a, reveal a process that is developed through three steps. The hero, who is autodiegetic, aims in the first step at the construction of a personal identity. He affirms his singularity and takes his distance with the familial group to adhere to a social and political community with which he believes that he will share the same ideals and convictions. A second step is marked by the collapse of this process. The hero multiplies the acknowledgments of failure on different levels: personal, ideological, political, cultural and religious. In the novels posterior to ‘Azīzī as-sayyid Kawabata, this disappointment leads him to a third step where, plunged as he is in an utter confusion and anguish, he doubts of all kind of salutary dynamism. And we must insist on the fact that the influence of the Lebanese civil war is decisive in this evolution. Although Rashīd a-a‘īfʹs writing is ‘intimate’, it raises many questions about social and cultural burning problems in the Arabic world and especially its links with modernity. It reflects a new kind of commitment that is called ‘post-modern’ by the author himself.
