| Chapter : | Introduction |
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For Claire, her French lover, Siham evokes images of grapes and grapevines that so characterise the French countryside, and in a manner of speaking, she renders Claire exotic (in that orientalist and orientalising sense) when she writes “Claire makes the Arabian Jasmine wonder at her purity,” (page 81) where purity here is the double-edged sword of exulted racial whiteness as well as the religious iconograph of chasteness (which is particularly ironic in this context). The symbology of Siham’s poems also evokes images of aphrodisiac waves and sea foam, conjuring up the forceful power of a first love and the allusion to Botecelli’s “Birth of Venus.”
In their original language, Siham’s poems appeared entirely as prose. I took on the editorial decision to versify those prose which read like verses and to leave in prose those poetic paragraphs that read better as prose. It seemed more powerful, in some instances, to give emphasis to each clause of a sentence, each image or natural expulsion of breath by setting it as a poetic unit on a line of its own. It seemed, in the original novel, that Siham’s poetry was being limited by the formal structure of the prose to which they were confined.
For the most part, I Am You was written at the level of young adult fiction, even though the subject matter is not what we would normally associate with such a category. In this way, the novel is accessible not only to educated readers but to those with lower levels of literacy. This tactic is effective and appears to pervade Mansour’s style of writing throughout her other works as well. She appears to be interested in presenting complex philosophical and feminist ideas to a predominantly female audience that would otherwise shun the erudite writing of an academic.