Abstract: This article analyzes corporality in La File d’attente by Basma ʻAbd al-‘Azîz through its confrontation with power represented by the Portal of an inaccessible government building. This confrontation is steeped in the waiting that dominates the life and entourage of the protagonist. Events unfold in an unnamed Middle Eastern country where the borders between fiction and reality overlap in a single action: fruitless waiting in front of the closed “Portal” of power.
