Beyond Punishment: Waiting Under the Panoptic Gaze in Aziz’s The Queue

Abstract

This paper aims to examine how waiting becomes a disciplinary apparatus in the dystopian and Kafkaesque world of Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue (2013). A society structured as a Panopticon forces State approval of every personal and professional work and yet pauses its bureaucratic machinery indefinitely, after facing dissent. Known as the Gate, it imposes and encourages a queue in front of it for approval of papers, while maintaining pervasive surveillance all around. When contextualised within the Arab Spring in Egypt, the queue and the accompanied waiting in the novel raise existential questions and point to the experimental forms of punishments that help maintain hegemonic power over people. The paper examines the prominent instances of waiting in the novel vis-à-vis Foucault’s idea of panopticism and Schweizer’s theory of waiting. In a nation engulfed in the inherent arbitrariness of waiting and its psychological effect, it implies a punishment meant to control and constrain personal freedom. Thus, the paper depicts how disciplinary apparatuses like imposed waiting and Panopticon are used as implicit and perpetual forms of punishment. Basma Abel Aziz uses the conventions of dystopian fiction to envision an alternate reality, developing out of unpleasant realities of the context.