Trauma, Recovery, and Self-Discovery in the Arabophone Queer Bildungsroman. A Reading of Fī ghurfat al-ʿankabūt (2016) by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Nabī

This article examines Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Nabī’s Fī ghurfat al-ʿankabūt (2016) as a queer and contemporary reconfiguration of the Bildungsroman, a constitutive genre in the Arabophone literary panorama. The novel narrates trauma, recovery, and selfdiscovery in contemporary Egypt, setting the plot against the historical backdrop of the 2001 “Queen Boat Affair,” the mass detention of 57 men that occurred in 2001 on and near a Nile disco boat. In particular, the novel follows Hānī, a gay man whose imprisonment for suspected homosexuality becomes the catalyst for a non-linear process of self-reconstruction. The narrative intertwines “personal growth” narratives with a “crisis plot” and combines autobiographical confession, fragmented temporality, and multiple developmental trajectories. Through textual analysis and references to the scholarship on Global queer narratives, I will show how Hānī negotiates the loss of voice caused by state violence and articulates a plural, performative subjectivity that resists binary models of identity through the practice of memoir writing. By foregrounding the body, life writing, and the politics of visibility in his previous life as a non-binary subject, the novel positions queer experience at the center of the process of individual (re)construction after trauma. Reappropriating and rewriting what has been defined as a historically “normative genre” by literary critics, ʿAbd al-Nabī situates Fī ghurfat al-ʿankabūt at the intersection between the Egyptian novelistic canon and the global queer Bildungsroman, asserting the legitimacy of queer subject formation within a national literary tradition.