Crumbling under the Disciplinary Gaze: Power Relations and the Illusion of Freedom in Shaila Abdullah's Saffron Dreams and Laila Halaby's Once in a Promised Land, a Foucauldian Reading

Discipline has been a basic constituent of life ever since the first man and woman came to earth with a legacy of resistance, an awareness of their subjectivity and the knowledge that being watched will always be a part of life. After the Towers' disaster, the need ensued to subject Muslims to the gaze of the American nation. In their novels, Laila Halaby and Shaila Abdullah depict USA after the disaster. This paper, besides translating and introducing the texts into Arabic, investigates the new forms the exercise of power takes shifting and changing relations among and between individuals and institutions. The American society abounds with judges of normalcy who tighten the standards and exclude people on new terms. Foucault's novel understandings of basic concepts give the framework for this paper. "Normative judgments", "metaphysical and political freedom" and "force relations" help interpret the personal experiences of the characters, while "biopower" highlights the difference between the policies of their governments. Parallel to the discourse of discipline that characterizes US society, goes that of fate in Jordan and Pakistan, where predestination negates personal freedom and "fate" helps refer the misfortunes that befall countries as a result of the absence of a clear, biopolitical agenda to the discourse of religion. Lack of organization appears in the overlap between discourses; the religious discourse overlaps other discourses. American citizens are subject to constraints that organize public behavior while Jordanians and Pakistanis are burdened with historical constraints that target personal life. Instead of liberating their true selves from under the debris of fallen kingdoms, they wear their subjectivities like iron masks, abiding by the traditions of countries they chose to abandon. Others expand their hearts cherishing both homelands using Foucault's "arts of the self" and detach themselves from cultural barriers to form true, instead of disciplinary subjectivities.