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Manifestations of Socio-Political conflict during the Italian Colonization of Libya in Alessandro Spina’s The Marriage of Omar

Author Affiliations

  • 1Dept. of Literature, Faculty of Languages, University of Benghazi, Libya

Res. J. Language and Literature Sci., Volume 10, Issue (2), Pages 22-29, May,19 (2023)

Abstract

The Marriage of Omar is one of Alessandro Spina’s sequence of novels and short stories that are set in Cyrenaica, depicting life in colonial and postcolonial Libya. In these historical fictional stories, Spina (a pen name for Basili Shafik Khouzam), mingles the political and armed struggle with social and cultural aspects of two conflicting forces that play major roles in the shaping of the history of early and mid-20th Century Libya. Equipped with his multi-identity and his familiarity with the different dimensions of cultures in both the Libyan and the Italian societies, Spina writes with a panoramic worldview that accommodates western and eastern perspectives. His temporal and geographical upbringing allows him to portray with transcultural perspectives the multiple voices that represent conflicting socio-political views of both the colonizers and the colonized. What makes Spina’s historical fiction significant is that it deals with a historical epoch that has not received appropriate attention in the literature. The aim of this paper is to explore how Spina’s novel, The Marriage of Omar, opts for multifaceted and contradicting perspectives in its engagement with the history of Italian colonization in Libya. The focus of the article is on the deployment of narrative voice in the narration of this historical socio-political conflict.

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