A critical reading to a short story by Ramzia al-Eryani

الملخص EN

Much has been written about the theme of encounter be-tween Arabs and the West in Arabic narrative fiction.

However, most if not all of the previous studies have a masculine stamp in that they speak about the experience of many Arab males and their encoun-ters with Western females.

Many attendant thematic issues have been dealt with in such representations as culture shock, cultural values, personal attitudes and religious distinctions between in-volved characters.

Ramzia Al-Eryani, a prominent Yemeni female writer and an active feminist, however, provides a totally different thematic treatment of this encounter.

In fact, she has participated in and contributed to the dialect between Arabs and the West from a feminist perspective.

She has reversed the norm by characterizing a Yemeni girl who was desired by an American man to be his wife, not his girlfriend.

In her short story entitled Algaribah, "The stranger", pub-lished in her third collection of short stories entitled Assama tomter qutnan translated as "The sky is raining cotton"(1999), Al-Eryani provides a novel treatment to such theme.

Furthermore, her repre-sentation has a local flavor since she attempts to deal with an endur-ing problem forthe Yemeni female whose rights to marry and select her partner has been hijacked by her male guardians.

She has tack-led the issue from a feminist perspective that is quite distinctive from other treatments by Arab male writers.

Building on an eclectic theoretical framework, this paper attempts to analyze one of Ramzia Al-Eryani's short stories that are still imprisoned within the local Yemeni linguistic and cultural barricades.