Self Is Meaningless When the Other Is Not Truly Understood: Revisiting the Persian Mystical Parables of Rumi’s Mathnavi and Pomerance’s The Elephant Man
Article Sidebar
121-138
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Anafora provides open access to all its content to support greater global exchange of knowledge. Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of the full texts of the journal’s articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose, without the author’s and the publisher’s permission, provided that the original work is properly cited.
Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal (this applies to both the print and electronic issues). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution.
Main Article Content
Absztrakt
The Other, whose presence is essential for the construction of the Self, has almost always been depicted peculiarly in the literary texts of the East and the West. The investigation of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s parables and Bernard Pomerance’s play, albeit the genres, time, place, and cultures are totally different—Rumi’s parables are classical Persian poems and Pomerance’s work is a modern American play—well indicates how the Other is mistakenly delineated and how the Colonizer’s attempt at making the Other “almost the same, but not quite”—as Bhabha states—fails and leads to the unsophisticated fabrication of the Other. Self is well understood in relation to the understanding of the Other. In this research, it is shown how both the Other and the Colonizer fail when there is no thorough mutual understanding.