The Dissolution of the Nubian Identity in Yasser Abdellatif ’s "Qānūn Al-Wirātha" (The law of inheritance) and Samar Nour’s "Maḥallak Sirr" (Stalemate)

How is the Nubian identity expressed in the works of writers of Nubian origins who were born and brought up in urban areas away from their homeland? What transformation has the Nubian identity gone through in a new urban world? And to what extent has this identity overlapped with, or become dissolved in, a larger identity? Is the world image of the ancestral Nubians still present in the world image of their descendants? Where do these images converge and where do they diverge? Answering these questions and similar ones, this chapter considers two recent novels by novelists Samar Nour and Yasser Abdul Latif, Maḥallak Sirr (Stalemate, 2013) and Qānūn Al-Wirātha (The law of inheritance, 2002) respectively. The novelists are of Nubian origin but were born and grew up in Cairo. Their texts are read as micro texts within the macro tradition of the Egyptian and the Arabic novel. In dealing with the two novels, this chapter attempts to monitor the image of the Nubian identity in the 1990s and later. It also deals with character relationships, in addition to recall and memory in the two narratives.