Naming as oppression and/or liberation: A feminist reading of Triple crónica de un nombre

The short novel Triple crónica de un nombre (Triple Chronicle of a Name) is the prizewinning first novel of writer and photographer Ivonne Saed. Saed was born in Mexico City in 1961, in the third Mexican-born generation of a family of Damascene Jews. I show here how Saed’s short novel sheds significant light on the question of how patriarchal hegemony shaped the existential project of Syrian Jewish women in Mexico. We can analyze Saed’s critique of patriarchy through two main feminist theoretical devices: the feminist critique of compulsory heterosexuality and the feminist critique of maternity as a powerful patriarchal tool for the oppression of women. I use some of Derrida’s concepts to address Saed’s idea of naming as restricting and of naming differently as a medium for opening spaces and giving freedom.