Pulling the threads of the various voices of characters rehashing non-identical pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that makes the story of the physically absent hero, this paper demystifies the un-orchestrated polyphonic ambiguities in order to unify the seemingly disconnected events that make the plotline of Walid’s story and his baffling disappearance from the outset of the novel. In this context, Bakhtin’s polyphony is used to deconstruct and reconstruct the fictional world which Jabra must have pedantically created in this fragmentary novel to send a holistic, non-fragmentary message. As the novel hosts multiple characters with distinct voices, each telling his/her own version of the reminisced memories with the protagonist, there is a need to stitch up these parts in search of a possible vision lurking in the offing of the tale. It is the story of the mysterious disappearance of the protagonist Walid Masoud who does not flesh out as a character in his own right although he fills the world of the novel from beginning to end.

This paper makes use of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony to approach In Search of Walid Masoud, a novel written in Arabic by the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in 1978 and translated into English by Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar in 2000. To investigate the ways in which female political prisoners maintain their sanity and humanity, this paper is based on Elaine Scarry's analysis of torture, and Judith Herman's study of trauma. The aim of this paper is to present a comparison of the aesthetics of resistance and survival employed by female political prisoners as presented in Malika Oufkir's Stolen Lives:Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (1999), and Alicia Kozameh's Steps under Water(1996). Political prisoners' mechanisms of resistance and strategies of survival differ from one to another, yet they exhibit some affinities because of the remarkable commonalities of global political prison experience. Yenna Wu defines political prisoners as the prisoners who are incarcerated due to their active and passive involvement in political activities and prisoners of conscience associated with non-political activities.

Political prison narratives express an extremely delicate, and totally distinctive experience that has an unforgettable effect on the heart.

Stolen lives 20 years in a desert jail