Salma is rushed into protective custody, where her newborn is ripped from her arms and where she sits alone for years before being ushered to safety in England. Despite the insult it would commit against her people, Salma has the child and suddenly finds herself a fugitive on the run from those seeking to restore their honor. Salma has committed a crime punishable by death in her Bedouin tribe of Hima, Levant: She had sex out of wedlock and became pregnant. By so doing, the diasporic women identity is revealed in a state of becoming, straddled in between two hostile cultures of the Orient and the Occident.Timely and lyrical, The Cry of the Dove is the story of one young woman and an evocative portrait of forbidden love and violated honor in a culture whose reverberations are felt profoundly in our world today. Moreover, it makes use of some psychoanalytical notions such as ego, alter ego, and introjection. Thus, the paper builds upon writings of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Sudesh Mishra and Elaine Showalter. Fadia Faqir’s novel, The Cry of the Dove, is analyzed as an example of Muslim Arab diaspoetics. Stereotyping, introjection, male gaze, colonial sentiments are analyzed to show repressive and aggressive schemes that affect the processes of women identity formation in both cultures. They create ambivalent identities that show attraction to and repulsion of both cultures of the Occident and the Orient. Muslim Arab women writers in diaspora produce diasporic literature with identities in transit. The present paper examines the Arab folkloric character of Scheherazade within the paradigm of diaspoetics through doublings, anachronistic spaces, and contrapuntalism to interrogate the hybrid and ambivalent Muslim Arab women identity oscillating between Oriental heritage and Occidental culture.
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