Re- writing the Other:Uncovering the Legacies of Slavery in Suad Amiry’s My Damascus

Suad Amiry’s My Damascus (2016) is set in Damascus and spans a period from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. While it tells an illustrious story of her family history, it also involves the narratives of the enslaved people of African descent who maintain the household. In this chapter, I examine Amiry’s representation of two enslaved women in the ancestral home to reflect on contemporary issues of anti-blackness and racism in the Levant. I argue that these enslaved women are othered from a larger bourgeois Arab society, and are further othered by the racialized tone Amiry writes of them. Amiry’s dual layer of othering uncovers the place of slavery and race in contemporary Arab literary production and how people of African descent are marginalized and seen as subaltern in this region.