Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon As a Noir Novel
A noir genre analysis of Heremakhonon explains the confusion, sensuality, red herrings, and flashbacks that permeate the novel, as well as the primacy of an investigation to the plot. Upon arriving in a newly independent West African country, protagonist Veronica witnesses the arrest of a political activist who opposed the ruling elite. When she investigates his disappearance, Veronica realizes that she is complicit with the elite perpetrators.
Noir Sensibility and the Mystical East in Amir Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” of Amir Muhammad’s KL Noir: Red
This paper examines Amir Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever”, one noir story taken from Amir Muhammad’s KL Noir: Red (2013), a noir anthology published in Malaysia. Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” is a self-claimed noir work contained by noir sensibility with portrayals of postcolonial experiences written from the perspective of contemporary-postcolonial Malaysian society. Both its noir sensibility and postcolonial experiences constitute the darkness and alienation which are commonly associated with noir fiction. Consequently, this paper looks into noir sensibility or noir parameters that construct Hafizi’s “The Unbeliever” and, simultaneously, the inclusion of subversion of the West and East as a fragment of the postcolonial experiences that can also function as noir sensibility. The finding shows that the noir sensibility is manifested, firstly, by the noir theme comprising issues of mysticism and violence and, secondly, by the noir protagonist who is doomed and alienated. Additionally, the mystical East represented by the figure of Nyai Roro Kidul, the Queen of the Sea, has drowned the characters into darkness, chaos and, most importantly, subversion of the West and the East binary. Thus, they impressively shape this story to be a noir narrative with postcolonial issue.  Keywords: noir sensibility; mysticism; subversion; postcolonialism
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.