50 pages • 1 hour read
Ahdaf SoueifThe Map of Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Language and Untranslatability
Language in The Map of Love serves as a metaphor for what can and can’t be communicated.
The shape of languages—in life as in this novel—often reflects foundational cultural ideas and philosophies, and some words simply cannot be fully translated between languages: the ideas they express are just too specific to a place or a people. Even beyond this difficulty, all language in its inherent metaphoricity (the semiotics of Lacan’s signifier and signified) is at some level struggling to recreate what can’t be fully recreated—that is to say, reality.
All the characters in the book run up against the frustrations and joys of translation. Anna and Sharif, for instance, must communicate their deep emotions in French, a language that is at root alien to them both. This very alienness serves as a meeting-place for them: in their love as in their language, they are both inhabitants of a whole new country, both familiar and new. Their shared world is in territory that’s a little strange to them both. This understanding of language reflects the book’s whole ideal of cross-cultural connection (and human connection), not as homogenization, but as the sharing and holding together of differences.
Isabel’s struggle to understand Arabic roots uncovers similar themes of what can and can’t be communicated across cultures. Amal helps Isabel to understand that certain basic elements of sound in Arabic, usually consonants, are combined and recombined to form related concepts; those concepts sometimes seem very different from each other on the surface, but their shared roots reveal their hidden similarities.
Soueif is particularly interested in “loan words” that spread across cultures as an image of what underlies all human experience across differences. For instance, consider Sharif’s explanation of the word “Amen”—which comes up when Isabel wonders if it’s the same word as that which she’s heard pronounced “Ameen” in Egyptian Arabic: “Amn is safeness and security and amana is to believe—to become secure in your belief. When someone says something and you say Ameen, you are saying you believe in what they’ve said and also that you wish to secure it” (485-86). This point of translation touches on the universality of love and of belief, even in a world in which different threads of faith are frequently and often violently opposed to each other.
Cause and Effect, Past and Present
Early in the novel, Amal reflects on the comfort she finds in the past. The present moment, she observes, can’t be fully understood, while the past has a shape, a beginning, and an ending. The reality, as she comes to understand, is more complex than that. The (sometimes surprisingly) interwoven events of The Map of Love reveal the lie of the idea that the past is something distinct and separate from the present or the future: not only because of the knock-on effects of ancient decisions, but because the past gives us a way to think about and filter our own experience and because we inhabit the past through our own present.
Egypt, as Isabel notes, is a particularly potent setting for the examination of such questions: “It’s like going back to the beginning. Six thousand years of recorded history” (19). Not only does Egypt have an ancient and tumultuous history, its strong sense of enduring national identity preserves the link between the past and the future. It is easy for Amal (and Soueif) to draw parallels between Egypt’s early 20th-century struggle for independence from occupying powers and contemporary suffering and land wars in the Middle East. Soueif also emphasizes that politics are just the actions of people, and people are often driven by forces they don’t fully understand. Isabel and Anna both speak of having a sense of destiny and fate around their loves and their progeny, and the events of the book support this belief with inexplicable mystical visions. While Amal can’t quite believe that Isabel met the ghosts of their mutual ancestors, neither can she explain the strange story away; the mysterious is seen to be a key force in human experience, and perhaps the strongest.
Many characters are linked or doubled not only by blood but by the events of their lives: Amal, Anna, and Isabel all share or recapitulate each other’s life events, and the later characters’ knowledge of the earlier characters’ stories influences their own interpretation of their lives’ courses. Amal and Isabel both intensely identify with Anna, and this strong connection means the past becomes very alive and very present to them. There’s even a rebirth, in the form of little Sharif, the elder Sharif’s great-great-grandson.
Finally, the basic rhythms of life similarly repeat, demonstrating that no beginning and no ending is really “the,” but “a” beginning or ending. Though Amal has suffered many endings, her relationship with the past (in the form of the symbolic trunk and its contents) and the future (in the form of baby Sharif, among other births) slowly shows her that no ending—not even death—is ever complete.
Colonialism and National Identity
Soueif’s deep concern with the responsibilities, pleasures, and difficulties of identity is often expressed through a critique of colonialism. Her Western characters repeatedly encounter an Egypt that is not what they expected: a place that is less “the mysterious Orient” and more a wildly complicated, intellectual, artistic, and lively world of its own. As Sharif writes in his summative essay, Western reactions to this surprise are often either aggressive or dismissive: “When [the European] comes here, he finds that the land is inhabited by people he does not understand and possibly does not much like. What options are open to him? He may stay and try to ignore them. He may try to change them. He may leave. Or he may try to understand them [...] The last two options are harmless, but they are never chosen—unless it be by individuals” (481-82). The Western colonizers of the 1900s remain willfully ignorant of the realities of Egyptian culture to justify their greed and their own sense of superiority. Even well-meaning contemporary Isabel reveals a deep ignorance of the complexities of Egypt’s political situation.
The difficulty with colonial thought is that it seeks both to ignore the separate culture of colonized peoples and to establish its own culture in its place. Soueif’s heroes, no separatists, are interested in more complex forms of cultural sharing, influence, and exchange. Acknowledging the difficulty of truly “translating” between cultures, they hope instead for meeting in the middle to change both worlds for the better.
That said, the book also suggests an unshakeable sense of Egyptian identity. Both Amal and Sharif, in the end, wish to step back from the day-to-day hurly-burly of politics to do local good where they can, seeing movement on the national scale as a part of life rhythms too big to alter on one’s own. Within that resignation there is both sadness over the inevitability of conflict and a faith in the idea of Egypt itself as an identity, a place, and an idea that can outlast the vagaries of history. Unlike mercurial young America, Egypt has lived a little, and will go on.
