WLP Scholar Series: George Baroud on Salim’s ‘Comedy of Oedipus’

In his Comedy of Oedipus: You’re the One Who Killed the Beast, the Egyptian playwright Ali Salim ingeniously inverts several formal aspects of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. As the title suggests, Salim transforms this drama from a tragedy to a comedy, and transposes the action from the Greek to the Egyptian Thebes.

Assistant Professor George Baroud argues that these literary choices have profound implications that position the play as a piece of “counter-discourse”: a reworking of a Classical text that serves as an act of resistance that “writes back” against European empire and cultural hegemony. By transposing a tragedy to a comedy, Salim demonstrates his own control over the medium as a response to (Western) literary critics who have adduced the lack of a native dramatic tradition in the Arab world as evidence of literary, cultural, and indeed racial inferiority.

Second, by transposing the action from the Greek to the Egyptian Thebes, Salim re-appropriates and reclaims Classical mythical figures and pointedly (re)centers Egypt itself as the space in which mythical action takes place at a time when postcolonial Arab and African authors are interrogating the literal and metaphorical boundaries of the Classical world. In so doing, Salim implicitly subverts European cultural and scholarly pretensions of a monopoly on Classical heritage and implicitly argues that Egypt itself is an integral part — rather than an alien Other — of the Classical world.

At the same time, Baroud argues that this play is also a “self-directed” piece of “counter-discourse” that expresses an ambivalent and critical attitude to the Nasserite regime at home. In so doing, Baroud hopes to establish a more nuanced view of the diverse ideological, social, political, literary, and cultural aims that drive literary reception, especially as a mode of decolonization and liberation, not only from foreign but also native oppression.

To join, RSVP no later than Wednesday, February 17, 11:30 pm, on Eventbrite. The Zoom link will be emailed the morning of the event.