Poetics of Allegory in The Queue: Revolutionizing the Narrative of Arabic Science Fiction between Estrangement and Diglossia

This article examines Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue ("al-Tabur" 2013; translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2016) with special emphasis on estrangement and diglossia. Abdel Aziz portrays the sheer brutality of political power represented in "The Gate" in an artistic yet allegoric manner to elucidate the frustration in outcomes of recent events while simultaneously igniting hope for the future. She is cognizant of the linguistic choices to address local readers to raise awareness about their ongoing issues while using figurative expressions to avoid political complications. By colligating written and spoken linguistic registers of Arabic, she goes beyond the language convention of Arabic Science Fiction (ASF) to address local people on their terms, especially in dialogues. Hence, I argue that through the orchestration of diglossia and the encapsulation of allegorical language, Abdel Aziz revolutionizes ASF while invoking a poetic style to meet local concerns. By relying on the tropes of ASF, she estranges her society by constructing a dictionary of coded lexicons that captures the Arab Spring while concomitantly rendering political critique implicitly.