Feminist Challenge and Resistance: Ghanem’s Forbidden Love in the Land of Sheba As a Counter-narrative

Abstract

DesignatingQais Ghanem’s fictional work as a Yemeni-Canadian novel, the currentstudy examines the Forbidden Love in the Land of Sheba as a counter-narrative feminist novel. It highlights the author's feminist as well as social preoccupations of his homeland Yemen from the standpoint of an immigrant writer in Canada. The paper explores,from various perspectives, the challenging conditions with which the female characters are represented,contextualizing the fictional discourse withinthe cultural dialectic of narrative and counter-narrative on the one hand, andthe feminist gender sensibility on the other.For thispurpose, the outcomes have confirmed the counter-narrative nature of the novel which voices the feminist concerns of Yemeni women against multiple layers of oppression and their solid resistance. The study concludes that the novel is not only a feminist propaganda but a scheme of a resilient counter-narrative that carries the women voice in Yemen to the world.