Bodies Crossing Boundaries Fluidity as a Paradigm in Raǧāʼ ʻĀlim’s Ḫātim

Ḫātim recounts the life of a hermaphrodite child growing up in Mecca at the beginning of the twentieth century. The space is characterized by several types of borders and thresholds, from the rigid separation of the sexes to the separation between the city and the “forbidden zone,” which Ḫātim breaches, thanks to the duplicity and fluidity of his/her body. This literary body is simultaneously an object of discovery and an instrument of transcendence, between tradition and modernity, rationality and irrationality, Orient and Occident.