Empty Feeling: The Vagaries of the Sixties

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Youssef Rakha

: Cover of The White Tiger: A Novel

The Egyptian writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s cast a long shadow over decades of Arabic fiction. Youssef Rakha considers the vexed legacy of a generation.

Hunger: A Modern Arabic Novel
Mohamed el Bisatie, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
American University in Cairo Press
Dh90

In July 2007, I met the novelist Gamal al Ghitani in Cairo to discuss the Egyptian State Merit Award, which he had just received (too late, he felt). We agreed that the group of writers known in Egypt as the Generation of the Sixties – a politically engaged, predominantly working-class group of poetically-inclined writers who made their names in the late 1960s and early 1970s – remain the principle reference point for much contemporary Arabic literature. Al Ghitani said that the Sixties’ achievement comprises only two kinds of writing. “One draws on the news and other immediate manifestations of history to take realism to its logical conclusion; it is represented by Sonallah Ibrahim. The other, which is inspired by old books and uses the old storytelling to comment on the present, is my own.”

It seemed unnecessary to disagree at the time, but I thought to myself that there was a third Sixties contingent, one typified by Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed el Bisatie. Their work is even more typical of “the movement” than either Ibrahim’s brand of hyper-realism or al Ghitani’s heritage-orientated approach. It embodies all the qualities that come to mind when you think of the Generation of the Sixties: it focuses on collective rather than individual experience. It works through evocation and insinuation, is often almost too subtle to understand, and prioritises style over storytelling. It asserts the importance of the lower-middle and working classes, which were more visible under the Nasser regime than they had ever been before.

What sets Aslan and el Bisatie – the former a postman-turned-editor, the latter (like Naguib Mahfouz) a lifelong civil servant – apart from their generational cohort is their almost exclusive emphasis on the experience of marginalised groups, rather than all of society or the ebb and flow of history. Their short stories – always short, sometimes rambling – are Faulkneresque in their focus on small communities and their vernaculars. Aslan has the Nile-side Cairo slum of Kitkat, el Bisatie an unnamed small town overlooking Lake Manzalah in the north-eastern Nile Delta. Like Ibrahim, both authors engage broad themes like sex, religion and politics, but only indirectly, only to the extent that they play out in the lives of the disinherited, and generally in a more personal register. Like al Ghitani, they situate their narratives in an explicitly historical context, but only on behalf of the small, poor communities in question.

In addition to his numerous short stories, Aslan has only produced two novels – Malik al Hazin (Heron, 1983) and Asafir al Nil (Nile Sparrows, 2000). Recently, in an unprecedented move for a Sixties Generation writer, he has branched out into literary non-fiction. El Bisatie, on the other hand, has spent the last three decades steadily producing short novels of starkly uneven quality. To a greater extent than Aslan, he has failed to remedy the shortcoming inherent in much of the new writing celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s: a lack of strong characters or gripping storylines. The power of language to convey an intimately observed environment – particularly one where common people live – was thought to be enough for literature. But it rarely is; now that the Sixties’ political points are no longer fresh, their style frequently seems stale as well.

“Hunger” is the idiomatic translation of both Al Ju’ and Ju’: the definite and indefinite forms of the word, respectively. El Bisatie’s choice of the latter as the title of his latest book (since published as Hunger by the American University in Cairo press) reflects a particular humility of the Sixties: the belief that, when the title of a book is a one-word abstraction, the definite article is too presumptuous to include. To call the book Al Ju’ (so goes this absurd argument, advanced by a whole range of Sixties critics) would imply that the author is laying exclusive claim to the concept of hunger (this is the rough opposite of how it works in English).

Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger – another recent book about poverty in the third world, one that recognises the age-old literary virtues of character and storyline – I was reminded of many such Sixties hang-ups (all of which Adiga transcends). They include a paradoxical combination of commitment to “the people” and a lack of concern for accessibility, a tendency to prioritise flashy language over storytelling, and commitment to the unwritten commandment “Thou shalt not make context clear or state the facts”. These qualities occasionally combined to produce an exquisite short story or novella (and are much less pronounced in al Ghitani and Ibrahim than in Aslan or el Bisatie), but they restricted the scope of much talent, alienated many readers and effected a huge drop in novel sales, which had reached a peak in the mid-1960s with the works of journalist-novelists like Ihsan abdul Quddous and Fathi Ghanem; contemporary Arabic literature has had serious trouble building a readership ever since.

********************************

El Bisatie devised his technique of a collective narrative voice in two 1978 novellas, Al Maqha az Zujaji (The Glass Cafe) and Al Ayyam as Sa’bah (Hard Days): simple, sad evocations of the lives of geographically isolated town-dwellers. In these books, as in the bulk of el Bisatie’s subsequent work, the narration is either delivered by an amorphous “we” or by a rapidly shifting blend of individual voices – in both cases, it as if el Bisatie’s small town itself is telling its own tale.

It is a technically impressive mode of writing, one el Bisatie employed to brilliant effect as recently as 1994, in Sakhab al Buhairah (Clamour of the Lake), a prose poem-cum-foundation myth of life in the rural space between the lake and the sea in the governorate of Domyat. But none of the collective voice’s potential poetic power (often squandered by sloppiness and repetition) makes up for a lack of absorbing drama or vivid individual characters. This helps explain why Ju’ is such a slow and dreary read.

The book opens with a woman named Sakina sitting by the doorstep of her rough-and-tumble, mostly mud-brick family house, her headscarf in a bundle between her legs. Her perpetually unemployed husband, Zaghloul, uses a piece of straw to clean his teeth – his way of telling her that she had better borrow a reghif or two of bread from the neighbour who baked that morning. Inside the house, their sons (Zaher, 12, and Ragab, 10), barely awake, caress their tummies. Dialogue between husband and wife is intermingled with their respective internal monologues, all rendered in a language somewhere between dialect and standard Arabic. El Bisatie’s usual poetic intensity is replaced by a more true-to-life, mundane idiom that is neither absorbing nor (as the intention sometimes seems to be) comic.

From the start, it is hard not to recall far more powerful depictions of the subjective experience of hunger (in Mohammad Choukri or Knut Hamsen, for example). You race through the next few pages, hoping for some more compelling situation or scene. But having taken in that first image, it turns out you have taken in the whole book: paper-thin characters on the lookout for food, only food, and not thinking much at all.

Ju’ is built around four anecdotes recalled without any indication of when they occur or how (or if) they relate. First, Zaghloul takes to eavesdropping on a group of young men from the town who are studying at university in Cairo. Home for the holiday, they are meeting at the cafe around which Zaghloul hovers (hoping against hope for a free drink, perhaps?). “Oh Sakina,” he later recalls to his wife, “education is so sweet… Sitting on the mastaba by the wall, I hear them talking. And, oh, what talk! I understand bit, I don’t understand a bit… They say that one shouldn’t work everyday like a water buffalo tied to a water wheel, one has to have time to think. But, people, think about what? They did not say. I wanted to ask them but I was silent.”

The encounter, far from influencing Zaghloul one way or the other, acts only to dehumanise him for the reader, to solidify him as a caricature of the sub-proletariat. Likewise, in the second anecdote he blasphemes: “God in His glory created the world and the people and everything, and ordered them to worship Him. I say to myself, if He created all this, what does He need their worshipping for … If He in His glory wants them to worship him, why doesn’t He appear in whatever form He likes and say ‘I created you, worship Me!’ Then nobody will say no.” This is a silly caricature of shallow atheism – neither interesting in its own right nor useful in developing Zaghloul’s character, which remains opaque and stereotyped: the poor man with poor thoughts who invariably ends up being beaten by the imam.

The third anecdote involves Hagg Abdur Rahim – a man who “returned home from foreign countries” to the village with as much new money as new weight, which renders him immobile. Zaghloul works for Hagg Abdur for two months, bringing his family a rare stretch of financial stability. In the fourth – and perhaps the most interesting – anecdote, Sakina is similarly subcontracted as a servant by the two female teenage servants of Hagg Hashem, another affluent member of the community. When she moves into Hashem’s house, she brings along her husband and children, who feast on the household’s supplies. But once again, the protagonists reveal no individuality, enacting their destiny (acquiring what food they can) like shadow puppets, two-dimensional and skin deep.

Ju’ ends with Zaher being beaten up by the father of his relatively affluent friend Abdalla, who has been providing him with much-needed snacks. “His father,” who does not want him to mix with such rabble, “was a teacher at the primary school and he had not one but four galabeyas, he wore an undershirt and had three meals a day.” Zaghloul accepts a few meters of fabric as compensation, but when Abdalla’s father hands Zaher a galabeya to replace the one that was torn during the beating, Zaher throws the garment on the ground and walks away. In The White Tiger, Adiga has his poor man protagonist, Balram, rebel – and transform himself with a brutal murder. In Ju’, el Bisatie has Zaher make a feeble, hackneyed gesture, without the slightest indication of whether or how the rebellion will improve (or worsen) his lot. Perhaps a gesture of this type is in character for Zaher; we never know him well enough to say.

********************************

Perhaps what al Ghitani was getting at (consciously or unconsciously) in our conversation was not that the Sixties produced only two kinds of writing but rather that only two kinds of writing have survived since. Aslan and el Bisatie’s mode, arguably the most characteristic of the Generation, is fast dying out, just like the predominantly deferential, ineffectual characters it depicts. Today, the Zaghlouls of Egyptian fiction are more like Adiga’s Balram: upwardly mobile heroes who at least try to change their lives. The heirs of the Generation of the Sixties (prose poets-turned-novelists some three decades younger, often referred to quite aptly as the Generation of the Nineties) have turned the principles of their forebears upside down. Writers like Mustafa Zikri and Ibrahim Farghali – however else you evaluate their achievement – have traded the collective for the individual, the musical swirl of the “we” for the developed narratives of the “I”. As a vehicle for conveying modern reality, el Bisatie’s collective voice sounds less and less convincing – like the echo of an echo, no longer beautiful twice removed. It is doubtful that the poetic style he perfected in Shakhab al Buhairah will live on much longer.

Early on, partly in response to the Sixties Generation’s obsession with “the people”, the Nineties writers avoided social and political engagement altogether, and edged away from the vernacular towards a dynamic, thoroughly contemporary standard Arabic designed for finding the magic in the quotidien. As a result, they are realists only insofar as they use everyday contemporary life as their starting point. They write about foreigners and rich people with fully developed and convincing personalities – and about ghosts, psychotic breaks, unrealistic and fantastical turns of events. Their styles borrow from across high and low culture. Most importantly, they show at least as much interest in plot and character development as style. They tell stories of love, death, hunger and the full range of specimens who experience them. In doing so, they offer the reader so much more than the Sixties version of reality which, through relentless, obstinate insistence on being true to the grassroots vernacular of its time (and nothing more), already appears unreal.

Aravind Ariga’s The White Tiger Head Up Longlist for Impac Prize (readersread.com)
A modern take on Tudor tale (thestar.com)
The Price of Colonialism (nytimes.com)

Tractatus Franco-Arabicus

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Youssef Rakha

wpid-murad_bey_by_dutertre_in_description_de_l_egypte_1809-2011-09-2-17-57.jpg

Reading Sonallah Ibrahim’s last two books, Youssef Rakha suggests an early Wittgenstein-style formulation of the kind of literary problem Bonaparte’s Campaign to Egypt might present
1. An Arab novel can be written about Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801).
1.1. At first sight, this is perfectly self-evident: a novel in Arabic (or by an Arab writer) can be written about anything at all. But an Egyptian novelist writing about the Egyptian Campaign is, by definition, responding to a particular colonial legacy from the position of the colonised.
1.1.1. Bonaparte’s failed bid to take Egypt and Syria was intended to safeguard French trade in the Middle East and obstruct the British route to India. What it achieved was the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the 22-volume Description de l’Egypte, as well as bringing the first print press into the country.
1.2. An Arab novel about the Egyptian Campaign is, by definition, a response to both the left-wing idea that the campaign abused Egyptians and the right-wing idea that it propelled Egypt, a nominally Ottoman province ruled by feudal Mamelukes, into the modern age.
1.2.1. It was in the wake of the Campaign, and at least partly as a result of it, that the Ottoman general Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769-1849) founded the modern state of Egypt and Greater Syria, establishing not only a precedent for non-European modernity but also the basis of an Arab commonwealth in the Middle East, one whose energy and foresight initially made it a stronger world power than the Ottoman empire.
1.3. A novelist who has chosen to write about the Campaign will probably have political as well as literary motives.
1.3.1. Whether he agrees with him or not, it is likely that he will seek historical counsel with Abdel-Rahman Al-Jabarti (1753-1825), whose canonical chronicle, Aja’ib Al-Aathar fil-Tarajim wal Akhbaar (better known in English as Jabarti’s History of Egypt), remains the principal Arabic reference on the topic.
1.4. Already, these conditions moderate the notion of a novel considerably.
1.4.1. However else defined, a novel should remain fictitious, it should present individual characters in the process of change; it should make no concessions to a predetermined view of the forces affecting their lives.
1.4.2. The Arab novel as exemplified by its celebrated practitioner, Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), has seldom had a political agenda. Even when it is intended as a statement on a historical period (Al-Karnak, 1974; The Thief and the Dogs, 1961), even when it is generically historical (Rhadopes of Nubia, 1943; The Struggle of Thebes, 1944), Mahfouz’s novel never presents history as a debate in which the writer might take sides (however representative or typical of that writer’s national identity the side he takes).
1.4.3. In this respect, Mahfouz follows in the footsteps of many 19th-century Russian and (ironically in the context of this tractatus) French masters of the novel.
1.4.4. To a greater or a lesser degree, younger (so called Generation of the Sixties) heirs of Mahfouz like Sonallah Ibrahim (b. 1937) were too morally or intellectually bound by historical grand narratives and political positions to practise novel writing with the same degree of political detachment.
1.4.5. Ideas of and about history affected these writers’ work to varying degrees, transporting much weight from the individual to the collective and from the shifting consciousness of a character in history to the fixed consciousness of the writer as a possible agent of historical change.
1.5. These ideas underpin what modification of the novel has taken place since Mahfouz. Apart from the more universal registers of Marxism, they have tended to converge on the image of an abused nation shedding the tethers of colonialism. Novelists like Ibrahim were, to use a word that did not yet exist when the Generation of the Sixties emerged on the scene, postcolonial.
1.5.1. In contemporary Arabic literature, “the Generation of the Sixties” remains an amorphous term, but with Ibrahim, at least, it is safe to define its significance in terms of a response to (the failure of) Arab nationalism, the earliest reflection in the language on what independence from British rule in 1956 and the emergence of a populist military dictatorship could mean for ordinary Egyptians.
1.6. Ibrahim’s standpoint will automatically favour the idea that the Campaign abused the people over the idea that it facilitated the emergence of Muhammad Ali’s commonwealth.
1.6.1. Its socialist dimension prevents him from sympathising any of the relevant historical parties – Ottomans, Mamelukes, French, British – since none of them can be identified with the people.
1.6.2. Its nationalist dimension precludes a positive view of the cultural intermingling and ethnic multiplicity those three years made possible even as he depicts them, since it prioritises the political significance of the event in them-and-us terms (the “us” in question being an undifferentiated and ultimately mute majority).
2. An Arab novel about the Egyptian Campaign is likely to be written from a Generation of the Sixties standpoint.
2.1. This is because only a “postcolonial novelist” like Sonallah Ibrahim is likely to write such a novel.
2.1.2. A writer who is interested in neither the position of the colonised in general nor the French colonial legacy in particular – or one who is interested in these topics in a less prescribed way – cannot write such a novel without undermining basic precepts of Arab nationalism (in however sophisticated or watered-down a form these precepts may now be expressed) and in so doing he risks being called a traitor.
2.1.3. Such a writer is unlikely to find the subject of the Egyptian Campaign immediately appealing or directly relevant to the process of pronouncing fictitiously on contemporary Arab life anyway.
2.2. However disinterested in Jabarti per se, Ibrahim will peruse Aja’ib Al-Aathar to corroborate his standpoint. His novel Al-Amamah wal-Qubba’ah (The Turban and the Hat, Dar Al-Mustaqbal,2008) takes the form of a newly discovered manuscript – the secret diary of a fictional 18-year-old student/scribe of Jabarti’s who lives with the historian and works at one of the Campaign’s “scientific” centres in Cairo.
2.2.1. Somewhat too conveniently for comfort, and often sounding a far more modern note than would be expected of a person from Jabarti’s era, this unnamed chronicler has an affair with one of Napoleon’s courtesans, comes in close contact with the Coptic collaborators seeking independence from the Ottoman-Mameluke stronghold, and befriends the Syrian student Suleiman al Halabi – the assassin of Napoleon’s successor in Egypt, General Kléber – who will eventually be impaled on a stake.
2.2.2. Though he achieves a prose very like the 19th-century historian’s – creating a contemporary correlative of the relevant parts of the chronicle – Ibrahim reads Jabarti’s life and work with an agenda.
2.2.3. Jabarti, rather than being a source of inspiration as such, acts to bolster up a predetermined grand narrative in which the Ottomans (including Muhammad Ali) were holding back the people, and the French through a mixture of brute force and immoral guile exploited and abused them.
2.2.3. Jabarti himself becomes party to all manner of political scheming, hiding and replacing versions and/or parts of his own chronicle when he realises the Ottomans will replace the French as the Mamelukes’ conquerors of the day. (This is the moment directly preceding Muhammad Ali’s arrival as part of the Ottoman army.)
2.3. From a historical standpoint, as a student of Jabarti, it seems easy to contest this view of the genesis of the modern Arab nation. Yet it is equally easy to understand it – even, to some extent, sympathise with it – once Ibrahim’s standpoint is taken into account.
2.4. To demand that Ibrahim should have a different or less predetermined standpoint is to demand that he should not write about the Egyptian Campaign.
2.4.1. To demand that Ibrahim should have a different standpoint and still write about the Egyptian Campaign is to demand that Arab intellectual consciousness since the mid-1950s should change radically (that it should shed all vestiges of nationalism, for example).
2.5. Such demands are historically impossible.
3. An Arab novel about the Egyptian Campaign can only say so much.
3.1. This becomes especially clear in Al-Qaanoun Al-Faransi (The French Law, Dar Al-Mustaqbal, 2009), a kind of sequel to Ibrahim’s novel Amrikanli (Dar Al-Mustaqbal, 2003) in which the Cairo University historian protagonist of the latter, Dr Shukri, travels to France to participate in a conference on the Egyptian Campaign with a newly discovered manuscript by an apprentice of Jabarti’s.
3.1.2. That manuscript is The Turban and the Hat.
3.2. That an Arab novel about the Campaign can only say so much becomes clear in The French Law in a number of different ways.
3.2.1. One of these is that, without the pretence of being an 18th-century history student who happens to be sleeping with a lover of Bonaparte’s, Ibrahim’s political observations are far more resonant.
3.2.2. “The reason for all the problems we suffer in the Arab world,” Dr Shukri tells his colleagues during a meal at one point in the course of his trip, “is that we did not manage to establish an advanced national industry. At the beginning the Ottomans divested us of the kind of human and material resources that go into the accumulation necessary for the move into the age of the machine, and after them came the French and the English. Every attempt we made, the West immediately aborted.”
3.2.3. It is beyond the scope of the tractatus to advance an argument against this line of thinking. Such an argument is not only possible but necessary.
3.2.4. If they are neither Mamelukes nor Ottomans nor quasi-Ottoman proteges of the West, who are the “we” Dr Shukri refers to? Where would that advanced national industry come from, if not through the very colonies he sets out to critique? What might modern Arab consciousness be identified with beyond the peasants who had no role to play in the unfolding of history except through an originally Ottoman army?
3.3. Here as in Amrikanli, Dr Shukri stands in stark contrast to both his morally (for which read politically) compromised Arab colleagues and the more or less racist Westerners he comes in contact with.
3.4. As in The Turban and the Hat, from the aesthetic if not the intellectual point of view, the clash between east and west is most poignantly portrayed in an interracial amorous or erotic encounter.
3.4.1. Dr Shukri’s encounter with Celine, who does community work with the children of immigrants, is a strong expression of that clash. The two characters’ growing closeness is melodramatically and somewhat unconvincingly cut short when on Dr Shukri’s last night in France Celine, who has by then confessed to having breast cancer, gets drunk, becomes increasingly aggressive, and gives in to a seemingly irrational rage directed at Dr Shukri.
3.4.2. Celine not only dismisses Dr Shukri’s statements on postcolonial politics as so much rubbish, she also confesses to hating the children of immigrants with whom she works. (This seems a somewhat crass way of dismissing Western pretensions to equality and the desire to benefit humanity at large, regardless of race or creed, even though one might understand the urge to dismiss such pretensions).
3.5. The Turban and the Hat ends with the image of Dr Shukri waking up at 5 am to prepare for his return to the homeland – only to find that copy of the conference programme on which he had written his address for Celine to have on the floor outside the door to his room.
3.5.1. “I picked it up to find a line in pencil beneath my address… ‘My response is precisely that you are a naive, backward human being.’ I put the programme in my handbag and proceeded to the lift with heavy steps.”
4. An Arab novel about the Egyptian Campaign cannot go beyond that image.

Related articles by Zemanta

Death of the Nile (guardian.co.uk)
Middle Eastisms, Pt. 2 (liveactivecultures.net)
Aleppo, Syria: my kind of town (telegraph.co.uk)

Longlist Announced for International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011

Posted on November 12, 2010 by Youssef Rakha

عنوان الرواية	إسم المؤلف	إصدار	الجنسية
القوس والفراشة	محمد الأشعري	المركز الثقافي العربي	مغربي
البيت الأندلسي	واسيني الأعرج	منشورات الجمل	جزائري
رقصة شرقية	خالد البري	دار العين للنشر	مصري
صائد اليرقات	أمير تاج السر	ثقافة للنشر	سوداني
عين الشمس	ابتسام إبراهيم تريسي	دار مسعى	سورية
حياة قصيرة	رينيه الحايك	المركز الثقافي العربي	لبنانية
جنود الله	فواز حداد	شركة رياض الريس للكتب والنشر	سوري
حبل سري	مها حسن	الكوكب	سورية
معذبتي	بنسالم حميش	دار الشروق	مغربي
اسطاسية	خيري أحمد شلبي	دار الشروق	مصري
بروكلين هايتس	ميرال الطحاوي	دار ميريت	مصرية
طوق الحمام	رجاء عالم	المركز الثقافي العربي	سعودية
فتنة جدة	مقبول موسى العلوي	الكوكب	سعودي
الخطايا الشائعة	فاتن المر	دار النهار	لبنانية
نساء الريح	رزان نعيم المغربي	ثقافة للنشر	ليبية
اليهودي الحالي	علي المقري	دار الساقي	يمني

www.arabicfiction.org

· Seven women make the longlist of 16, the highest number in the Prize’s history
· Religious extremism, political and social conflict and women’s struggles emerge as key themes

The Judges of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011 today, Thursday 11 November 2010, announce the longlist contenders for the Prize, one of the most prestigious and important literary events of its kind in the Arab world .

The judging panel whittled down the longlist of 16 from a total of 123 entries, from 17 countries across the Arab world. They included for the first time this year, Afghanistan. The highest number of submissions came from Egypt. The number of submissions is up on the previous prize year, when 118 titles were entered from 17 countries. 29% of the works submitted were by female writers, compared with 16% the previous year.

The longlisted titles range from a woman’s account of the underbelly of present day Mecca to a story of Ottoman nationalism at the end of the 19^th century and a tale of star-crossed teenage lovers in the Yemen. There are two novels about fathers whose sons join Al-Qaeda, whilst another looks at the ordeal of a prisoner in an American prison in Morocco. The struggle of the Arab expatriate in Western society is the focus of two novels, both in the UK and in America. This year sees solid representation from North Africa.

The list features four authors previously nominated for IPAF, for the 2009 Prize: Fawaz Haddad, shortlisted for The Unfaithful Translator and longlist contenders Renée Hayek, Ali Al-Muqri and Bensalem Himmich for Prayer for the Family, Black Taste, Black Odour and The Man from Andalucia respectively.

The 2011 longlist is, with author names in alphabetical order:

Title	Author	Publisher	Nationality
The Arch and the Butterfly	Mohammed Achaari	Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi (Arab Cultural Centre)	Moroccan
The Doves’ Necklace	Raja Alem	Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi (Arab Cultural Centre)	Saudi Arabian
Turmoil in Jeddah	Maqbul Moussa Al-Alawi	Al-Kawkab	Saudi Arabian

An Oriental Dance	Khalid Al-Bari	El-Ain Publishing	Egyptian
God’s Soldiers	Fawaz Haddad	Riad El-Rayyes Books	Syrian
Secret Rope	Maha Hassan	Al-Kawkab	Syrian
A Short Life	Renée Hayek	Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi (Arab Cultural Centre)	Lebanese
My Tormentor	Bensalem Himmich	Dar El Shorouk	Moroccan
The Andalucian House	Waciny Laredj	Jamal Publications	Algeria
Women of Wind	Razan Naim Al-Maghrabi	Thaqafa l-al-Nashr (Cultural Publications)	Libyan
The Handsome Jew	Ali Al-Muqri	Dar al-Saqi	Yemeni
Common Sins	Fatin Al-Murr	Dar An-Nahar	Lebanon
Istasia	Khairy Shalaby	Dar El Shorouk	Egyptian
The Hunter of the Chrysalises (or The Head Hunter)	Amir Taj Al-Sir	Thaqafa l-al-Nashr (Cultural Publications)	Sudanese
Brooklyn Heights	Miral Al-Tahawy	Dar Merit	Egyptian
The Eye of the Sun	Ibtisam Ibrahim Teresa	Arab Scientific Publishers	Syria

The Chair of Judges commented on the longlist: “This year’s novels were thematically varied, covering the issues of religious extremism, political and social conflict, and women’s struggle to liberate themselves from the obstacles standing in the way of their personal growth and empowerment. We are delighted with the very high percentage of women who reached the longlist compared with previous years.”

The 2011 Panel of Judges will be revealed at the same time as the 2011 shortlist announcement is made on 9 December 2010 in Doha, Qatar, the 2010 Arab Capital of Culture.

Joumana Haddad, Prize Administrator, commented on the longlist: “The Prize in its fourth year has become a critical conscience and a literary reference in all that relates to the modern Arabic novel, in both the Arab and Western worlds. The 2011 longlist is proof of that.”

2011 marks the fourth year of the Prize, the first of its kind in the Arab world in its commitment to the independence, transparency and integrity of its selection process. Its aim is to celebrate the very best of contemporary Arabic fiction and encourage wider international readership of Arabic literature through translation.

To date, the three winners of the Prize have been translated into English, in addition to a range of other languages including Bosnian, French, German, Norwegian and Indonesian. Bahaa Taher’s Sunset Oasis (2008) was translated into English by Sceptre (an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton) in 2009, Youssef Ziedan’s Azazel(2009) will be published in the UK by Atlantic Books in August 2011 and news of an English translation of Abdo Khal’s Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles (2010) will be announced shortly. In addition, a number of the shortlisted finalists have also secured translations, the most recent of which is an English translation of Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter through the Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation.

Jonathan Taylor, Chair of the Board of Trustees, commented: “The longlist for the fourth International Prize for Arabic Fiction is as varied, talented and powerful as ever and includes writers from seven Arabic countries, a high proportion being women.”

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is awarded for prose fiction in Arabic and each of the six shortlisted finalists receives $10,000, with a further $50,000 going to the winner. It was launched in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in April 2007, and is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation and the Emirates Foundation for Philanthropy.

The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011 will be announced at the awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi on Monday 14 March 2011, the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

The Booker prize (guardian.co.uk)
2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Shortlist Announced (readersread.com)

K for kitab

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Youssef Rakha

At the 20th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, Youssef Rakha wonders if the United Arab Emirates might end up being the Arabs’ answer to an international publishing hub

After turning one of the Arab world’s worst read cities into a vibrant literary venue for five days, the 20th Abu Dhabi International Book Fair (ADIBF, 2-7 March) folded quietly on Monday 7 March. It was followed by the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature (10-13 March), organised by Magrudy’s Bookshops and any number of sponsors in Dubai – that slightly better read New York of the Gulf where the Arabic language is alas all but completely absent.

The Emirates Festival requires separate coverage, but it is worth mentioning in the context of ADBIF in that it shared with that event a profoundly multicultural atmosphere. By the time ADBIF closed, even the predominance of Arabic books there had not reduced the overriding sense that here, finally, was a international, multilingual publishing event or series of events drawing together variously important figures from the four corners of the global village.

Neither bang nor whimper marked the end of what seemed like a separate and self-contained world within the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC), an isolated space of glass and concrete on the outskirts of the city proper – recently completed by the addition of a high-rise corporate-style hotel, ensuring not only accommodation but taxi transportation from the fair grounds. With the vast majority of the fair’s non-resident patrons already gone by Friday, business proceeded as usual until it came gradually to a halt.

Initially the fair had proceeded alongside a major gun show, subjecting unsuspecting bibliophiles who entered by the wrong gate to unnecessary, airport-like security. Deceptively low-key from the outside, ADIBF was at least as busy as the killing carnival next door.

Activity centred on the by now haloed Discussion and Poetry Forums and the Kitab Sofa, where writers (sometimes attended to by television crews) performed to small, inevitably distracted audiences. Interviews, readings, and discussions often involving more than one writer shed light on an enormous motley of subjects, from the history of the translation of Indian literature into Arabic to whether and to what extent contemporary American literature can engage with postmodern tendencies firmly embedded into consumer culture.

Highlight appearances ranged from flash-in-the-pan celebrities (Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and the Algerian novelist Ahlam Mustaghanmi, for example) to award winners and writers whose relative fame may be better deserved from the literary standpoint (Adam Haslett, Yann Martel, Amit Chaudri, Pankaj Mishra, Alawiyya Sobh, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Sinan Antoon). There was a spaceman advertising new translation technologies, several dozen illuminated manuscripts (Islamic and otherwise) from various Europe-based dealers, and a Show Kitchen Programme featuring the authors of cookbooks demonstrating their recipes live – perhaps the most popular fixture.

For a moment on Saturday, with the Kerala Islamic scholar Sheikh Aboobacker Ahmad drawing a huge crowd to the Kitab Sofa in what seemed like a misplaced Friday prayers sermon, the more palpably Muslim aspects of the UAE’s cultural constituency became apparent, recalling what yearly threatens to turn into an Islamist takeover of the Cairo International Book Fair back home. Yet the atheistic and erotic titles published by the German-based Dar Al-Jamal, for example, were neither torn up nor burned. Islam is not about terrorism, was what Sheikh Aboobacker, in slighly broken Quranic Arabic, continued to reiterate.

Still, people filed through the labyrinth of booths representing various publishers from the Arab world and Europe, occasionally stopping at one or more of the three larger, prominently marked enclosures occupied by the fair’s own organiser, the Abu Dhabi Organisation for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), and its two initiatives, the Qalam series for Emirati writing and the Kalima megaproject of translation into Arabic.

And judging by the multi-ethnic composition of the audience, the broad spectrum of participating institutions, including the Goethe Institut and the British Council, and the currency of topics like the secrets behind the success of best sellers, the impact of literary awards on Arab culture or the state of comics and the graphic novel in the Arab world, it seemed the event was effectively introducing Western publishing norms into the as yet isolated Arab industry. How long will it take for that industry to be fully integrated?

Instead of enthusiasm from Abu Dhabi’s tiny community of Arabic book lovers, anyway, the fair now clearly bases its credentials on KITAB (Arabic for “book”), the joint venture of ADACH and the venerable Frankfurter Buchmesse, forged in 2007 to bring the event up to speed. For three years now ADIBF, founded in 1987 as a conventionally “Arab” fair, has been mutating into a global industry-standard publishing forum. So, at least, is its perception among a growing number of Gulf-culture champions who respect its aspirations. Two main concerns inform Arab cultural interest in the Gulf and the fair suggests answers to both of them.

First, it seems unfair that an oil-rich Emirate with hardly a single celebrated writer to its name should be positing itself as a literary centre of gravity, until you realise that what Western-style benefits Abu Dhabi manages to garner wearing the cultural-capital hat – literary prizes, publishing ventures, translation initiatives, copyright-protection measures – it will garner for beneficiaries across the Arab world.

Secondly, the fact that the UAE has – contentiously, for some – pioneered cultural projects managed by or modelled on Western institutions (the Saadiyat Island Louvre and Guggenheim initiatives, the Sorbonne and New York University campuses, etc.) has endangered cultural identity only within the borders of the UAE, where Arabs coexist with comparably sized non-Arabic speaking Asian and Western communities. In traditional cultural capitals like Cairo, the overwhelming incidence of Arabic language and literature, not to mention Arab mores and morals, makes culture more or less immune to what atrophy or confusion the adoption of a harshly capitalist, foreign (and once colonial) system might subject it to. But that remains a subject for much more involved debate.

With the Frankfurt Book Fair managing and developing it, at least, ADBIF does focus on the process of publishing, not (like the much older and by now proverbially disorganised Cairo International Book Fair, the most populous book-based event on the Arab map) on selling as much as possible regardless of substance or procedure.

At ADBIF there is no censorship, no fear on the part of security forces of an Islamist takeover of the fair grounds, no working-class-family-outing atmosphere, no shoddy infrastructure, no sudden and inexplicable absence of previously announced big names or enforced lack of access to them, no stiff formalities, and no dire shortage of information or facilities.

Property rights across languages and borders and the editor’s role in the writer’s career are just two of the areas where ADACH hopes to make a radical even if wholly imported contribution to the industry. On the basis of that contribution it is attempting to turn Abu Dhabi into “the region’s publishing hub”, as the official press package already puts it (emphasis mine), the region being all of the (Arab) Middle East and North Africa.

And notwithstanding the difficulties inherent in this business, ADACH just may be succeeding. Certainly ADBIF now looks and feels far more like Frankfurt than Cairo. In a relatively small-scale, comparatively relaxed event, just as much emphasis is placed on the profession of publishing and cross-national networking as on book-related amusements and book-buying opportunities for the public.

***

Established in 2007 in memory of the founder of the UAE, the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards have since 2008 been overshadowed by the the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, better if less accurately known as the Arabic Booker), a joint venture of the Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Foundation and the prestigious Booker Foundation (judging by this writer’s taste in recent years, Booker and Man Booker short lists have in fact seldom lived up to the name). Yet occurring within 24 hours of each other at the Emirates Palace and Beach Rotana Hotels, respectively, the awards ceremonies demonstrated just how much more interest the Booker commands at every conceivable level.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Awards this year went to the Lebanese Albert Habib Mutlaq for his translation of The Animal Encyclopedia, the Algerian Hafnaoui Baali for Comparative Cultural Criticism: An Introduction, a contribution to the field of literature, the Emirati Qais Sedki for the children’s book Gold Ring, the Egyptian Ammar Ali Hasan for The Political Establishment of Sufism in Egypt – deemed the Best Contribution to the Development of Nations – and the young Moroccan critic Mohammad Al Mallakh for Time in Arabic Language: Its Linguistic Structure and Significance, as well as His Highness Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi as Personality of the Year.

Far more engaging was the awards ceremony and the press conference of the Arabic Booker, which had generated the greatest controversy in its short history this year. Predictably for the vast majority of commentators, the Saudi novelist Abdu Khal’s She Throws Sparks won the grand prix, whether because it was the least controversial novel on the short list, or the work of the short list’s best respected author, or (according to some views) because books that could have competed with it – notably Alawiyya Sobh’s Its Name Is Love – had not made it that far or had been excluded from the start.

Many had contended that the exclusion of important contributions from the long and (more controversially) the short list was intended to facilitate the emergence as the final winner of a book from the Gulf; and subsequent statements by the head of the jury, the Kuwaiti novelist Talib Al-Rifa’i, to the effect that it was time that novels from the Gulf should be introduced to the Western world seemed to give credence to this theory.

Of course, should this be the case, it would be contrary to the regulations of the prize, and Al-Rifa’i in his eagerness to defend the jury, whose names, also contrary to regulations, were published in Cairo two weeks before the short list, ironically worked against it. All manner of accusations and conspiracy theories had been levelled at the jury and the board of trustees, but the head of the Booker Foundation, Jonathan Taylor, seemed confident of the administration of the prize. There was a leak,پh he responded to the question of how the names of jury members could have been known so early. پgI am sorry there was a leak.پh

More to the point, when asked why the judges of the Arabic Booker (unlike those of the Booker and the Man Booker) are not made known to the public in advance, Taylor said, “We were told that this would make it easier for the jury to do its work.” Once again inadvertently, Taylor seemed to give credence to the notion that the corruption of the Arab literary scene may have seeped into a Booker Foundation-managed institution after all.

—————————————

The “Arabic Booker” Short List

The London-based Palestinian writer Rabie Al-Madhoun’s Ass Sayyidah min Tal Abeeb (The Lady from Tel Aviv) has been called a work of “post-Oslo resistance literature”. It tells the triple story of Al-Madhoun himself, his writer-protagonist Walid Dahman, and the hero of Dahman’s own fictional novel-in-progress. On a plane from London back to Gaza to see his mother for the first time in decades, Dahman meets an attractive Israeli actress who is subsequently killed in cold blood as a result of a previous love affair with the son of an Arab leader.

The young Lebanese writer Rabee Jabir’s America is a fictional account of early 20th-century Lebanese immigration to the United States, told from the viewpoint of a country woman who follows her husband to New York.

The older Egyptian novelist Mohammad Al-Mansi Qindeel’s Yawm Gha’im fil Bar al Gharbi (A Cloudy Day on the West Side) tells the story of a Muslim woman in late 19th-century Upper Egypt who abandons her young daughter, Aisha, to protect her from the brutality of a merciless stepfather, baptising her as a Christian. This conversion, it later turns out, leads Aisha – who grows up to become a translator – to fall in love with a fictional version of the famous British archaeologist Howard Carter.

The Palestinian-Jordanian writer Jamal Naji’s ’Indama Tashkish adh Dhi’aab (When Wolves Grow Old) has a wide cast of characters and a plot drawn from detective genre fiction. It depicts the social malaise of contemporary Amman, exposing sexual and political repression, the hunger for power among intellectuals and religious leaders, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

The young Egyptian Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Wara’ al Firdawss (Beyond Paradise) chronicles an obscure episode in the history of the Nile Delta, when surging demand for red brick made from the mud in the Delta created a sudden explosion of wealth among some enterprising local landholders, but in so doing depicts the intensely personal journey of a young female literary magazine editor from her small town to Cairo.

Abdu Khal’s own Tarmi bi Sharar (Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles), set in a destitute Jeddah neighbourhood and in the palace that has recently been built next door to it, shows the brutality of the owner of that palace, a well-connected, wealthy and powerful if sadistic tycoon who seizes and tortures his enemies. He employs the narrator – a child of the neighbourhood notorious as a homosexual and a bully – to sexually abuse his victims, who are videotaped as they suffer.

A literary prize fight: politics and the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Posted on February 12, 2010 by Youssef Rakha

Youssef Zeidan, the winner of the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel Azazeel (Beelzebub), accepts the grand prize – and a $60,000 award – at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi last March. Andrew Henderson/The National

A fine shortlist of nominees for the third ‘Arabic Booker’ has so far been overshadowed by manufactured controversy, Youssef Rakha writes.

For the third time in as many years, the discussion surrounding the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) has descended into bickering over literary politics. In the Arabic press, where the prize has received considerable attention and attracted equal amounts of controversy, the focus has rarely been on the virtues or demerits of the nominated titles – instead, in the three years since the award was introduced, debate about the politics of the prize has overshadowed discussion of the nominated books.

It seems self-evident that the entirety of any literature cannot be reflected in a single prize, however representative it aims to be – and IPAF does not aim to be representative. Yet since its launch in 2007, writers and publishers have tended to see the “Arabic Booker” as the alpha and omega of literary achievement. Disappointment and distress can hardly be unexpected.

When this year’s longlist of 16 books was released in November, the controversy began with geography: Egyptian authors won the prize in each of its first two years, and when only two Egyptian books turned up on the longlist, a spate of allegations were launched – mostly by disgruntled Egyptians – claiming that the jury had neglected Egyptian fiction to appease the rest of the Arab world.

Complainants like the Egyptian novelist Ibrahim abdul Meguid, who resented the exclusion of his novel Fi kull Usbou’ Yom Jum’ah (Each Week There is a Friday), declared that there was corruption within the IPAF and insisted “a conspiracy against Egypt” was afoot.

Soon thereafter, the conspiratorial consensus shifted to one of the longlisted books, Issmuhu al Gharam (Its Name is Love), by the Lebanese novelist Ulwiyya Subh. Her book, which had been popular and well-reviewed, was regarded by many as the likely winner of the eventual award – some of whom may have concluded that, after two male Egyptian winners, the jury might be inclined to shift its favour to a Lebanese woman.

This speculation took a more sinister turn, however, when interested parties alleged that the book was not merely likely but certain to win. The Lebanese poetry journal Al Ghawoun claimed to have “uncovered a clandestine deal” to fix the results, slinging accusations at Subh herself; at Joumana Haddad, a Lebanese writer and the administrator of the prize; at the Kuwaiti novelist Talib al Rifaie, who sits at the head of this year’s jury; and at the senior Egyptian critic Gaber Asfour, an avowed admirer of Subh.

These conspiracy theories were not dented by the fact that Subh’s book did not make the shortlist of six titles announced in December – instead the critics shifted course, insisting that the uproar over the initial accusations had led the jury, “cowing in to media intimidation”, to deliberately leave Subh off the list.

More controversy ensued with the resignation from the jury of the Egyptian critic Sherine Abu El Naga, who told this newspaper at the time that “the voting method was my main reason for resigning,” protesting that the shortlist decision was made without “dialogue or discussion”. As the gang imagined by Al Ghawoun started bickering among itself – Subh publicly insulting al Rifaie, for example – it became clear how random all the accusations had been.

The prize committee, alas, may have invited some of this speculation: though the members of the jury are supposed to remain secret until the shortlist of finalists is announced, this year the details were leaked and published in a Cairo newspaper two weeks prior to the announcement, more than enough time for speculation about hidden motives and social connections to run wild.

Each member of the jury, it turned out, was a friend or acquaintance of Subh, giving fuel to the conspiracists – and yet such circumstances are partially inevitable: Arab literary circles are small and perilously cliquish.

The public consternation – at least in those same tightly-wound literary circles – over the administration of the prize has served to obscure the grander intentions of the award, the valorisation and promotion of Arabic-language fiction. Instead, the literary community has been polarised into pro- and anti-Booker factions, ensuring that future rounds will continue to be clouded by suspicion, particularly over the nomination of younger writers whose reputations have not yet been established.

A more sensible way of evaluating the prize might be to look at the previous laureates, and to ask what each one signifies as a work of Arabic fiction – and as the book chosen by the prize committee to be sent forth into English translation, where it will represent the impossibly diverse range of literature in Arabic for western readers.

Baha Taher’s Sunset Oasis, which took the first prize in 2008, depicted Egyptian-British relations during colonial times; its translation was funded by a grant from the British philanthropist (and Granta owner) Sigrid Rausing, and published by Sceptre in 2009. Last year’s winner, Azazeel (Beelzebub), by the Egyptian novelist Youssef Zeidan, which tackled religious intolerance in the pre-Islamic Middle East, will be published in English this spring by Atlantic Books.

If there is a common thread that connects the first two winners – each of which, it should be added, was chosen by a separate jury – it is that both stand as affirmations of a pluralistic and liberal value system, one that generally looks positively at the encounters between East and West: in Sunset Oasis, the equality of the races and the right to (national and personal) freedom despite the horrors of colonialism; in Azazeel, the importance of tolerance and understanding in the face of dogma and religious extremism.

Among this year’s shortlisted titles, the London-based Palestinian writer Rabie al Madhoun’s Ass Sayyidah min Tal Abeeb (The Lady from Tel Aviv) hews closest to this East-West tune, but with a more immediate pitch than the historical fictions of Taher and Zeidan.

The novel, which has been called a work of “post-Oslo resistance literature”, tells the triple story of al Madhoun himself, his writer-protagonist Walid Dahman, and the hero of Dahman’s own fictional novel-in-progress. On a plane from London back to Gaza to see his mother for the first time in decades, Dahman meets an attractive Israeli actress. Later, back in London, she is killed in cold blood as a result of her previous amorous involvement with the son of an Arab leader.

The novel has been praised as much for its entertaining narrative as for being among the first Arabic books that deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict undogmatically, showing psychological depth on both sides while accurately portraying the Palestinian tragedy. By prioritising the human over the political, opposing the racism inherent in “nationalist” discourse and siding with human rights, it goes even further than the previous two winners in affirming liberal values.

In the young Lebanese writer Rabee Jabir’s novel America and the older Egyptian novelist Mohammad al Mansi Qindeel’s Yawm Gha’im fil Bar al Gharbi (A Cloudy Day on the West Side), themes of confessional and ethnic intermingling come to the fore in the context of long, multifaceted narratives with heavy historical components. In both cases the encounter between East and West again figures prominently. America is a fictional account of early 20th-century Lebanese immigration to the United States, told from the viewpoint of a country woman who follows her husband to New York.

Yawn Gha’im fil Bar al Gharbi opens with the story of a Muslim woman in late 19th-century Upper Egypt who abandons her young daughter, Aisha, to protect her from the brutality of a merciless stepfather – but baptises her as a Christian before doing so. This coincidence of conversion, it later turns out, leads Aisha – who grows up to become a translator – to fall in love with a fictional version of the famous British archaeologist Howard Carter, transcending the boundaries of religious, national and ethnic identity alike.

Once again, the writer speaks for the rights of the individual woman and opens up humane spaces within an otherwise unequal colonial set-up, while showing the flimsy nature of religious identity for what it is.

The remaining three novels on this year’s shortlist give less attention to the crossing of borders and the intermingling of cultures; each zeroes in on the particularities of national or local cultures, delving into local specifics – in one case, with savage satire – to reveal the tensions within changing societies.

’Indama Tashkish adh Dhi’aab (When Wolves Grow Old), by the Palestinian-Jordanian writer Jamal Naji, employs a wide cast of characters, and a plot drawn from the world of detective genre fiction, to depict the social malaise of contemporary Amman – a panorama of the city that sets out to expose sexual and political repression, the hunger for power among intellectuals and religious leaders, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

The young Egyptian Mansoura Ez Eldin’s Wara’ al Firdawss (Beyond Paradise) steers clear of the explicitly political to chronicle an obscure episode in the history of the Nile Delta – a period, which concluded in the late 1980s, when surging demand for red brick made from the mud in the Delta created a sudden explosion of wealth among some enterprising local landholders. As in Naji’s book, there are many characters and a complex, if hardly suspenseful, storyline, which follows the intensely personal journey of a young female literary magazine editor from a small town in the Nile Delta to Cairo.

Though the so-called “Arabic Booker” has not, for obvious reasons, attracted the same attention from gamblers as its British namesake, the smart money this year may be on the Saudi novelist Abdu Khal’s grotesque satire of power, Tarmi bi Sharar (Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles). Khal is the most established and celebrated writer on the shortlist, and one might be forgiven for expecting the jury to embrace the least contentious choice after so much public acrimony.

But Khal’s book is not without its own potential for controversy, and it has little to offer in the way of cross-cultural pieties or the tolerance afforded by such encounters. The novel is set in a destitute Jeddah neighbourhood and in the palace that has recently been built next door. The owner of the palace is a well-connected, wealthy and powerful man, about whose origins little is known. The owner, a ruthless and sadistic tycoon, seizes and tortures those who have crossed him; he enlists the narrator – a child of the neighbourhood notorious as a homosexual and a bully – to sexually abuse his victims, who are videotaped as they suffer.

But the narrator, in Khal’s account, is not just an unthinking instrument in the hands of power: he is a participant in the violence, an agent of political oppression, but also a victim of economic dispossession. Khal’s depiction of the narrator’s extended family and neighbours – particularly his bravely disapproving aunt, from whose eyes the sparks of the title emanate – reflects an entire society caught up in the horror of inequality and the absurdity of power.

Of course, this year’s shortlist does not reflect the entirety of contemporary Arabic literature, but there can be plenty of merit in six books. While the bickering will inevitably continue well beyond the announcement of the winning title on March 2, it is important to note that not one of these books is in any sense unworthy of the award. Reasonable critics can disagree whether they are the absolute best or most innovative on offer. I for one, was surprised to see that the Iraqi novelist Ali Badr, a prolific chronicler of Baghdad who combines engaging plots with a sharp and versatile intellect, failed for the third time to make it from the longlist to the shortlist, this time for Mulouk ar Rimal (Sand Kings).

It was similarly disappointing to see the exclusion of the Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Farghali’s Abnaa al Gabalawai (Children of Gabalawi), which represents the vanguard of a home-grown Egyptian magical realism that is very different from its Latin American counterpart. But it seems indisputable that these six books are in fact reasonably representative of contemporary Arabic literature. And regardless of the extent to which the “Arabic Booker” remains dogged by ungrounded accusations of favouritism, this year’s shortlist demonstrates that, while writers and publishers may not be entirely immune to such faults, the literature they produce remains a strong statement against them.

On Fawwaz Haddad’s The Unfaithful Translator

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Youssef Rakha

The Butterfly Dream

Fawwaz Haddad, The Unfaithful Translator, Beirut: Riyad El-Rayyes, 2008, 488 pages

In the third or fourth century BC, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly – so vividly that when he wakes, he wonders if he may in fact be one. In that case, he reasons, at this moment I must be dreaming that I am a man, which would make me a butterfly all along.

Zen koan, Sufi riddle, nursery rhyme: the trope has proven particularly popular in the post-modern literary imagination, where the constructed and the factual tend to intersect and overlap at a rudimentary level.

In the case of Al Mutarjim Al Kha’in or The Unfaithful Translator by the Syrian novelist Fawwaz Haddad, improbable events and brazenly forced plot turns – one could draw up a whole inventory of accidents and coincidences – keep the artificial side of the exchange near the surface of consciousness, a la Brecht, but at the same time, intimate descriptions of the cafes and streets of Damascus, true-to-life dialogue between the characters and the way they respond to public events like the fall of Baghdad are historically rooted and empirically tenable – to the point of being exact.

This potentially jarring medley of fact and fancy jazzes up a more or less predictable story line and gives the fundamentally moral message of the book subversive zing. But, more importantly, it manages to do so without upstaging the idea of a dual world in which dreams can be confused with reality:

Carried away by his creation, the writer wonders if the characters in his book might actually be creating him. He wonders if the alternate reality presented to him by literature might not turn out to be the real world, and his own life an invented fiction.

Like Bishop Berkeley’s claim that the tree would cease to exist if there were no one to perceive it, the Butterfly Dream is a quaint, insolvable question of little application. Yet by producing one of the language’s first coherent, full-length meta-novels, Haddad gives that central idea unprecedented and culturally specific edge. Finally the Butterfly Dream has been nationalised.

Zhuangzi, a more or less mythical figure, is now reincarnated as the Damascus-dwelling, post-millennial literary translator-cum-cultural editor-cum-ghost writer Hamid Salim (whose silent doppelgänger is of course Haddad himself): a no less mythical (or at least mythicised) figure. In his own very different way Hamdi recalls the one statement to which the Chinese philosopher’s entire contribution tends to be reduced:

“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.”

***

As a budding poet Hamid is discouraged by the establishment critic Mohsin Ali Hassan, an autocratic Ustaz who rides the wave of “engagement theory”, making his name and gathering around him an obsequious circle of acolytes by promoting literary engagement as “a life raft to save literature from the communist octopus”. Mohsin advises Hamid to write novels, but instead the young intellectual – unbeknown to the older critic and to his chagrin – turns to the age’s most relevant intellectual endeavour: translation.

Despite his bookish inattention to matters of immediate concern – which results in his wife leaving the house (taking the children with her), and gives him the undeserved reputation of a suspicious snob among his neighbours – by the time the book opens Hamid has had a relatively successful career as a translator of English works of fiction. He is widely believed to be competent, and makes enough to support himself and his family.

The translator spends his time tortuously labouring over every last phrase in the book he happens to be working on. His talent, imagination and sense of cultural, not to say national identity force their way into the process in the form of perilously creative glosses on the original words, sentences and even entire paragraphs or sections of the book he is “transporting”, to borrow a traditional Arabic expression for translating.

But no one seems to notice that the results are inaccurate or compromised. (The dual implication is that few critics know enough English to realise, and that they would not care if they did, so long as there was nothing about the realisation to advance their careers or help them promote the party line.)

Then, in a moment of postcolonial fervour, Hamid alters the ending of a novel by an African author that he has been translating. He makes the hero break up with his western partner and return to his country instead of marrying her and staying on in the west (as he does in the original). But even then, it is only by coincidence that his climactic act of betrayal is exposed: the novel happens to win an international prize and it is consequently summarised in the Arabic press, so people notice the discrepancy between the original and the Arabic version they have read.

However cooped up in his ivory tower, Hamid has been unable to avoid the small-mindedness of the establishment, and a few months ago he defended himself against an unprovoked attack on the part of the influential if patently ignorant journalist Sherif Hosni (at some level, the Syrian equivalent of a party hack). This is Sherif’s chance to pounce back.

Sherif sets about discrediting Hamid, and he proves so efficient that in a matter of weeks Hamid can no longer find work anywhere. For a while he goes hungry because he cannot afford to buy food.

And so, through a string of encounters, reunions and recollections, amorous and detective scenarios, assumed names and identities, Hamid embarks on a series of secret jobs under three different pseudonyms (Halafawi, Hafalawi, Halafani), which take on the form of alter egos whose overbearing presence increasingly torments him.

Finally, on the point of throwing the last of his secret employers, the long unproductive author Samir Farout, over a bridge, Hamid is approached by a man who manages to stop him in his tracks. When he asks where that man came from – in the meantime Samir has managed to crawl away – the reply is, simply and shockingly, “Reality”. There is nothing in the novel to suggest that this visitor from outer space is Haddad, the author, but it is tempting to read the ending as if it were.

Now I do not know whether I was then Haddad dreaming of Hamid, or whether I am now Hamid, dreaming of Haddad.

***

And yet there is more to this enormously multifarious book than the Butterfly Dream. The notion of translation is a strong metaphor for what it means to be an intellectual in the Arab world: someone who is able to bring otherwise inaccessible culture or truth into the arena of the everyday.

Perhaps a more effective rendition of the title is Translator Betrayer (Arabic does not differentiate between the adjective and the noun), since the book is less about Hamid’s betrayal of the texts he works on than the Arab intellectual betraying his “historical role”, to borrow an expression from the nationalist rhetoric Haddad targets with his satire.

Irony upon irony: Hamid is betrayed by the Literary Mafia represented by, among others, the critic Jamil Halloum (according to Hamid’s old friend Sami, an uneducated middle-man with connections in criminal and intelligence circles, they are capable of murder in their relentless drive to cut short the rise of any genuine talent that may threaten their position).

But members of that mafia may in turn be betrayed by someone like the university professor Hakim Nafie (a possible ally whose agenda does no always chime with theirs).

Hakim becomes Hamid’s first secret employer when his scheme to improve the grades of one of his female students in return for sexual favours is discovered by Hamid’s deformed friend Mahmoud. So Mahmoud forces Hakim to employ Hamdi in order not to expose him.

Mahmoud is only a beggar- or criminal-turned-Muslim fundamentalist, but he is capable of turning this insane hierarchy on its head (at least for a while, until he is taken in by the police, apparently because another of Hamid’s employers wants him out of the way). He can threaten the personal safety of someone like Nafie.

Mahmoud is a kind of guardian angel who, wandering around the streets of Damascus, his unbearably hideous face wrapped in a scarf, gathers critical information simply by overhearing people speaking to themselves or thinking out load – as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

***

Translation is intrinsically a betrayal whether or not the translator betrays the text, but so is the charge levelled at social and political renegades in the police states of the Arab world: by breaking with the party or the leader, they become khawanah (the plural of kha’in), betrayers of the nation and, more crucially, of their own well-being. They become ostracised and go hungry.

Haddad’s main purpose in this book is to expose, through a self-referential parable sufficiently panoramic to cover the full genus of Arab Intellectual, the corruption and impotence of its full range of species. But hischoice of translation as the profession of his protagonist goes beyond its metaphorical significance. Hamid’s access to English allows Haddad to place his Damascus-bound theatre within a new-world-order context.

He juxtaposes the incredibly pan-Arab biography of Hamid’s childhood love Lailah Shouman with an imagined novel by a fictional American author named Elisabeth Markend:

Laila, also known as the new-wave poetess Lamis Abbas, author of an erotic collection poems, was married to a Palestinian freedom fighter who took her to Beirut and then Tunis, and after he was murdered she returned to take up with an Iraqi sculptor.

Translating Markend’s The Jailed Virgin, a tour de force of global espionage, western-Islamic strife and complicated love that reflects Laila’s “real-life” biography, Hamid is finally defeated by the first of his alter egos, Afif Halafawi, who manages to impose his plan to produce an accurate, almost literal translation against the betrayer’s will.

Before he forges the final plot twist, taking the whole symphony several abrupt octaves up through the paradoxically satisfying anticlimax of someone appearing from reality to prevent a fictional murder, Haddad manages to weave together all three strings of the book:

1) the satirical critique of the Arab Intellectual, a creature unable to translate culture or truth while he attends to his principal task of building petty personal glories by colluding with brute force, whether in the form of dictatorship or crime;

2) the many metonyms for this narrative term, which include Kafkaesque , Joycean and Noir registers, embodied by a cast of archetypes including, poignantly, the ostracised author Samih Hamdi, who is still working on an endlessly gargantuan novel when he dies – the cue for his one remaining heir, his spinster sister, to promptly burn the manuscript; and

3) the idea that reality, especially a reality that revolves around literature, is practically interchangeable with imagination: only through their imaginative capacity for identifying with corruption and oppression, Haddad seems to suggest, do Arab intellectuals become corrupt, oppressed and oppressive, but ultimately powerless to pursue their raison d’etre except at the most hollow rhetorical level.

Considering the size of the undertaking, Haddad’s consistency of tone and the subtle pacing with which he maintains the action, balancing each element against the other, is no mean feat.

***

Since the 1960s, at least, big fat novels like The Unfaithful Translator have been read reluctantly and frowned on for their sheer size. Notwithstanding the popularity of the short story and the novella until the 1990s, the idea is that the full-length novel is a thing of the past, reflecting societies and ways of being – French and Russian if not pre-modern – that are so temporally or geographically distant as to be irrelevant. Whether or not you share this view, there exists a pragmatic argument for not writing them: they do not encourage reading, and so they help to keep the readership small.

This may not be entirely true; the counter argument is that dedicated readers – the only kind who read novels – are unlikely to be put off by a long book; they may even treasure an accomplished intellectual project of this kind once it has captured their attention. The Unfaithful Translator is no breezy read, but the point to be made about it is that it could not have been any shorter: its power resides in the way it weaves together three apparently disparate literary projects, for only against the backdrop of Haddad’s critique of the intellectual community is the Butterfly Dream adequately incorporated into Arabic literature; and only the many intersecting dramas make the critique readable and convincing.

Somehow, despite remaining essentially a work of the mind, The Unfaithful Translator manages to leave a haunting – and naturalistic – impression in the mind. Like many Arab intellectuals in real life, there is something of the Kafkaesque arthropod about its hero, the solitary little man: lacklustre, droning, alienated and alienating. Hamid leads an isolated life, he seems to exist solely within a mental space he carved out for himself, sealed off from physical experience, human contact, and memory. Yet his sheer existence embodies a deep yearning for these very things.

A world of promise

Posted on December 23, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

: Image via Wikipedia

Bianca Brigitte Bonomi

The Hay Festival, which is now in its 22nd year, is a literary institution that is helping to foster a global interest in Arab writing. Richard Stanton

At the London Book Fair two years ago, Arab literature took centre stage. It was the subject of lectures, debates and interactive sessions with authors and publishers. Despite its prevalence over the course of the week, however, we learnt that Arab literature hadn’t made significant inroads into the West. Factors ranging from censorship to an under-developed publishing infrastructure and a paucity of translators were contributing to its status as a largely untapped literary market.
Two years on, and progress is being made. There is an increasing literary awareness within the region and a growing international interest. A number of prestigious awards are being offered to stimulate reading and translation in the Arab world. We have an “Arab Booker” prize, publishing houses including Penguin and Bloomsbury are expanding into the Gulf and authors such as Alaa el Aswany are becoming household names: all paying testament to the serious drive to place Arabic texts alongside writing from more heavily marketed parts of the world on western bookshelves.
Beirut39, a Hay Festival project that aims to select and celebrate 39 of the most interesting Arab writers under the age of 40 as part of the Beirut World Capital festivities 2009/10, is a forerunner in promoting this literature on a global stage.

The Hay Festival’s interest in Arab literature is linked in no small part to the obvious potential of this emerging market. “The statistics speak for themselves,” says Bachar Chebaro, the owner of Arab Scientific Publishers and the secretary general of the Arab Publishers Association. “Twenty-four Arab countries, a population of 340 million and 422 million Arabic speakers living outside of the region.” In the current economic climate, western publishers are increasingly tempted by this huge potential readership and the world’s largest festival of books has taken note.

Hay, now in its 22nd year, is a literary institution. In May, more than 100,000 people braved the rain to head to the sleepy book town on the Welsh border. The festival has hosted ex-presidents, rock stars and Booker prize winners and has extended its global reach in recent years to include offshoots in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, Segovia and Alhambra in Spain and Nairobi, Kenya. Beirut39 follows Bogotá39, which launched in the Colombian city in 2007 and identified many of the most promising rising Latin American talents, including Daniel Alarcón, Junot Díaz, Wendy Guerra, Andrés Newman and Juan Gabriel Vásquez.

In the past, Arabic texts translated have generally been those produced by established writers. Important new literary awards have increased the profile of Arabic literature in the Arab world and worldwide, but the writers who have benefited have for the most part already enjoyed long careers. In recognition of the fact that the difficulties facing emerging Arab writers are particularly acute, Beirut39 set out to identify writers at the start of their careers struggling to find a wider audience. First or second-generation Arab authors born after 1970 with at least one published work of fiction or poetry were eligible for inclusion and nominations were solicited from publishers and literary critics across the Arab world and internationally. Members of the public were invited to nominate writers online and – controversially – authors could nominate themselves.

Around 500 young authors from across the Arab world as well as the Arab diaspora in Europe and America submitted their works. The vast majority of these texts were written in Arabic.

“England has always struggled to get interested in any literature not written in English,” says Cristina Fuentes La Roche, the Hay Festival project director. “They translate less literature than other countries in Europe. At the moment there are some terrific Arab authors succeeding in the western world, but they all write in English or in French. This project will give Arabic writers a real boost,” she says.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair last month, the entrants were whittled down to the final 39. Members of the committee, headed by the Egyptian literary critic Gaber Asfour, and including the Lebanese novelist Alawiya Sobh, the Omani poet Saif Al Rahbi and the Lebanese poet and critic Abdo Wazen, focused on the degree of potential shown by the authors. The winners include the Saudi-born Abdullah Thabit, the Moroccans Abdelaziz Errachidi, Yassin Adnan, Abdelkader Benali and Abderrahim Elkhassar, Lebanon’s Hala Kawtharani, the Egyptoian Youssef Rakha, the Palestinian Adania Shibli and the Iraqi Ahmad Saadawi. Faiza Guene, a young French-Algerian writer whose first novel was published at the age of 19, is on the list, as is the award-winning short-story writer, novelist and translator Randa Jarrar. Her first novel, A Map of Home, was released to critical acclaim in six languages, and won the Hopwood Award, the Gosling Prize and the Arab American Book Award. The Iraqi poet and playwright Bassim Al Ansar was also shortlisted. In 1999, Ansar started a contemporary literature magazine in Denmark, his current home, and has had several books of poetry published.

The 39 authors will travel to Beirut in April for four days of literary talks, debates and recitals. Libraries, bookshops, cafes and universities will welcome visitors to discuss the issues at the heart of Arab contemporary fiction. The festival hopes to attract a diverse audience, reflecting the power of writing to stimulate social cohesion and cultural understanding.

To mark the occasion, Bloomsbury will publish Beirut39, an anthology of fiction and poetry by the selected authors with an introduction by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. The book will be published in English and Arabic in the UK, the US and the Arab world.

“This is one of the most exciting projects Bloomsbury has undertaken in recent years and is entirely in keeping with its commitment to the best writing from all over the world,” says Bill Swainson, the senior commissioning editor at Bloomsbury London. “We are hugely appreciative of the judges’ careful work in considering submissions and delighted with the scope, energy and quality of their final selection.”

The backing of the publishing house is a boost to the project and will facilitate the sharing of literature around the globe. For the author and former National staffer Rakha, however, the problem of engagement is about understanding and appreciation as well as infrastructure. “Pessimistically, I think perhaps westerners are not as interested in the contemporary Arab world as we like to think they are, and when something is written in a language so different from French or Spanish and published by a small house with no contacts on the other side of the Mediterranean, there is no reason to expect publishers or readers who might feel culturally superior to pay attention to it,” he says.

“The irony, of course, is that a lot of Arabic writing could actually be very relevant and engaging to westerners at the basic, human, universal level – if only they had the means and inclination to read it. Should the resources become available to translate and publicise the right books in the right contexts, which I feel they increasingly are, I think we can expect the situation to improve. But the most encouraging development is that many Arab publishers are increasingly aware of the global publishing industry and working hard to reach out.”

القائمة القصيرة لجائزة الرواية العربية

Posted on December 17, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

: Image via Wikipedia

الثلثاء 15 كانون الأول 2009

الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية (البوكر العربية) 2010

الإعلان عن اللائحة القصيرة

www.arabicfiction.org

جمال ناجي، ربعي المدهون، ربيع جابر، عبده خال، محمد المنسي قنديل ومنصورة عز الدين هم الكتّاب الستة الذين اختيروا ضمن اللائحة القصيرة لـِ”الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية” (البوكر العربية) لسنة 2010، وهي الامتياز الادبي المرموق الذي يهدف الى مكافأة التميّز في الكتابة الروائية العربية المعاصرة والى توسيع دائرة قرّاء الأدب العربي في العالم.

وقد أعلن رئيس لجنة التحكيم الكاتب طالب الرفاعي اسماء اللائحة القصيرة خلال مؤتمر صحافي انعقد في إطار معرض بيروت الدولي للكتاب في البيال، يوم الثلثاء 15 كانون الأول 2009.

اختيرت الأعمال الستة من اصل 115 عملاً تأهلت للمشاركة وهي للكتّاب الآتية أسماؤهم، مع جنسياتهم، وعناوين الروايات، وأسماء الناشرين: (بالترتيب الألفبائي):

العنوان	اسم الكاتب	الناشر	جنسية الكاتب
عندما تشيخ الذئاب	جمال ناجي	منشورات وزارة الثقافة	أردني
السيدة من تل أبيب	ربعي المدهون	المؤسسة العربية للدراسات والنشر	فلسطيني
أميركا	ربيع جابر	المركز الثقافي العربي	لبناني
ترمي بشرر	عبده خال	منشورات الجمل	سعودي
يوم غائم في البر الغربي	محمد المنسي قنديل	دار الشروق	مصري
وراء الفردوس	منصورة عز الدين	دار العين للنشر	مصرية

وعلّق رئيس لجنة التحكيم طالب الرفاعي قائلاً: “جرى نقاش حرّ وموضوعي، وكان الهدف الأهم الوصول الى قائمة متوافق عليها من جانب جميع أعضاء لجنة التحكيم. هذه القائمة تمثّل رأي المحكّمين، مع الاحترام والتقدير لجميع الروايات المشاركة في هذه الدورة”.

وقد أذيعت اليوم أيضاً أسماء الأعضاء في لجنة التحكيم المرموقة، الذين ينتمون الى البلدان الآتية: الكويت وتونس وعُمان ومصر وفرنسا. وهم طالب الرفاعي، روائي وقاص كويتي؛ رجاء بن سلامة، أستاذة محاضرة في كليّة الآداب والفنون والإنسانيات في منوبة، من تونس؛ سيف الرحبي، شاعر وكاتب عُماني؛ شيرين أبو النجا، أستاذة أدب انكليزي ومقارن في جامعة القاهرة، من مصر؛ وفريدريك لاغرانج، باحث أكاديمي ومترجم ومدير قسم الدراسات العربية والعبرية في جامعة السوربون (باريس 4) من فرنسا.

تحتفل الجائزة الأدبية المهيبة هذه السنة بعامها الثالث، وتهدف إلى مكافأة الامتياز في الكتابة العربية الإبداعية المعاصرة، إلى جانب توفير أكبر عدد ممكن من القرّاء العالميين للأدب العربي الجيد. أُطلقت الجائزة في أبو ظبي في الإمارات العربية المتحدة، في نيسان 2007، بالتعاون مع جائزة البوكر البريطانية، وبدعم من مؤسسة الإمارات.

خلال المؤتمر الصحافي الذي عقد اليوم، قال جوناثان تايلور الذي يرئس مجلس الأمناء: “الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية هي جائزة رائدة في عالم الأدب العربي. تأثيرها بات لا يقبل الجدال، مع اعتبار الفائزين بها وكتّاب اللائحة القصيرة من أهم الأقلام في الأدب العربي المعاصر. والكثر منهم وصلوا إلى العالم اليوم عبر ترجمة أعمالهم، وذلك بفضل الجائزة”.

أما رئيسة برنامج الثقافة والفنون في مؤسسة الامارات سلوى مقدادي، فأضافت: “مؤسسة الامارات فخورة برعايتها هذه الجائزة المتزايد تأثيرها في الحياة الثقافية العربية. ففي غضون ثلاث سنوات فقط، استطاع نفوذها الثقافي واستقلالية مجلس أمنائها ولجان تحكيمها على السواء، صيرورتها الحائزة الأدبية الأبرز والأهم في العالم العربي”.

تأهل للجائزة هذه السنة 115 كتاباً من 17 بلداً عربياً هي: مصر، سوريا، لبنان، الأردن، فلسطين، العراق، الإمارات العربية المتحدة، الكويت، المملكة العربية السعودية، اليمن، البحرين، عمان، المغرب، ليبيا، السودان، تونس، والجزائر. وكانت أعلنت اللائحة الطويلة من 16 عملاً في القاهرة خلال تشرين الثاني/ نوفمبر الفائت.

وعلّقت المديرة الإدارية للجائزة جمانة حداد قائلةً: “نحن فخورون بأن تساهم الجائزة العالمية للرواية العربية في زيادة الاهتمام بالأدب العربي المعاصر قراءةً وترجمة. لم تحظ أي جائزة أدبية عربية بهذا القدر من الانتباه والتأثير من قبل، وقد جاءت البوكر العربية لتلبيّ حاجة ثقافية ملحّة في حياتنا الأدبية”.

يحصل كل من المرشّحين الستة النهائيين على 10000 دولار، أما الرابح فيفوز بـ 50000 دولار إضافية. وينعم كتّابها بالقدرة على الوصول الى جمهور واسع من القرّاء على الصعيدين العربي والعالمي في آن واحد، وعلى تأمين عقود ترجمة لأعمالهم. الفائزان السابقان بالجائزة، بهاء طاهر عن “واحة الغروب”، ويوسف زيدان عن “عزازيل”، لم يُنشر عملاهما بالإنكليزية فحسب في بريطانيا، في داري “سبتر” و”أتلانتيك”، بل حصلا على عدد كبير من عقود الترجمة العالمية جرّاء الجائزة”.

يذكر أخيرا أن هوية الفائز بالجائزة النهائية سوف تعلن خلال حفل رسمي في ابو ظبي، مساء الثلثاء 2 آذار 2010، وهو اليوم الأول من “معرض أبو ظبي الدولي للكتاب”.

عندما تشيخ الذئاب، جمال ناجي

منشورات وزارة الثقافة، عمان، 2008

يختار الروائي الفلسطيني الأردني جمال ناجي تقنية تعدد الوجوه والأصوات، فينسحب الراوي العليم ليفسح المجال أمام شخصيات متعاقبة، تروي أحداثا ومشاهد تتكرر وتختلف وتتنامى من شخصية إلى أخرى. رواية تصور الهشاشة البشرية والتعالق المعقد بين الجنس والدين والسياسة، وتقدم لوحة حية عن عوالم الوعاظ والجمعيات الخيرية والساسة، وأسرار الارتقاء الاجتماعي من الحارات الفقيرة إلى مراكز السلطة والثراء في عمان. الشخصية الرئيسية في الرواية لا تتكلم وتبقى لغزا رغم انكشافها الجزئي: عزمي الوجيه. فهل هو الذئب الوحيد الذي لا يشيخ؟

السيدة من تل أبيب، ربعي المدهون

المؤسسة العربية للدراسات والنشر، بيروت، 2009

يتناول الكاتب الفلسطيني ربعي المدهون في روايته قضية الصراع الفلسطيني/ العربي/ الاسرائيلي ويختار لحظة مشحونة بالهواجس والتوتر والريبة حدَّ الانفجار. البطلان هما وليد دهمان العائد من مغتربه الاوروبي بعد سنين طويلة لزيارة أهله في غزة عبر مطار بن غوريون في تل أبيب، والاسرائيلية دانا أهوفا التي تشاء المصادفات أن تجلس في المقعد المجاور لمقعده. هكذا يبدأ التماس بينهما، وما يشبه الحوار المتقطع الذي يأخذ القارئ الى أصقاع نائية في الذاكرة والتاريخ والذات البشرية. رواية تحاول مقاربة الحقيقة في تعقدها ولبسها وغموضها، ولا تركن الى أحكام ايديولوجية جاهزة.

أميركا، ربيع جابر

المركز الثقافي العربي، بيروت- الرباط، 2009

تستحضر رواية اللبناني ربيع جابر ملحمة هؤلاء الذين دفعهم الفقر وروح المغامرة الى ترك سوريا الكبرى في السنوات الأولى من القرن العشرين ليجربوا حظهم في أميركا الناشئة، حاملين “الكشة” عبر السهول والجبال، يندمجون تدريجيا في نسيجها الاجتماعي ويشاركون في حروبها. يركز السردعلى سيرة مارتا التي تقرر الذهاب وحدها إلى نيويورك من أجل العثور على زوجها بعدما انقطعت عنه الأخبار. تأتي الرواية تحيةً من الباقين إلى الذين رحلوا في أراضي المهجر، متخطين ما كانت ظروفهم تقدّره لهم من مصير، حتى يصنعوا هوياتهم الجديدة بأيديهم وعزيمتهم.

ترمي بشرر، عبده خال

دار الجمل، بغداد – بيروت، 2009

يأتي قص الكاتب السعودي عبده خال حاملا تكملة لعنوان الرواية: ترمي بشرر “كالقصر”. قصر بهيج هو جنة جحيمية، ترمي بشررها على جحيم الحارات البائسة في جدة، فيمتد الحكي جسرا بين عالم سيد القصر ومن تحولوا دمى بشرية وعبيداً، من اجتاحهم القصر وسلبهم بحرهم وقوارب نجاتهم. رواية ساخرة فاجعة تصور فظاعة تدمير البيئة وتدمير النفوس بالمتعة المطلقة بالسلطة والمتعة المطلقة بالثراء، وتقدم البوح الملتاع لمن أغوتهم أنوار القصر الفاحشة فاستسلموا إلى عبودية مختارة من النوع الحديث.

يوم غائم في البر الغربي، محمد المنسي قنديل

دار الشروق، القاهرة، 2009

يحيي الروائي المصري محمد المنسي قنديل فترة الاكتشافات الأثرية والنضال الوطني في مصر، ويضمنها ملحمة فتاة تهرب بها والدتها من زوجها المغتصب، وتودعها ديرا في أسيوط بعد أن تغير اسمها وتدق على ذراعها الصغيرة صليبا. ثم يتداخل مصير الفتاة وقد أضحت مترجمة، مع مسيرة شخصيات تاريخية مثل هوارد كارتر واللورد كرومر وعبد الرحمن الرفاعي. ويتداخل القص الشيق مع التوثيق الدقيق في وصف الأمكنة والأزمنة.

وراء الفردوس، منصورة عز الدين

دار العين للنشر، القاهرة، 2009

تتناول رواية الكاتبة المصرية منصورة عز الدين الطبقة البورجوازية في الريف، وذلك من خلال شخصية سلمى التي تعمل محررة في جريدة أدبية وتحاول أن تتخلص من ماض طويل محمّل ذكريات أليمة وصوراً سلبية عن الذات، مما شجعها على كتابة رواية خاصة بها، تسرد فيها تاريخ العائلة، تاريخ الحب، تاريخ الجسد، تاريخ الحراك الطبقي داخل القرية، تاريخ الجنون، تاريخ الكتابة: وكأن الذات قد انشطرت قسمين، قسماً يراقب ويسرد والآخر ينقب بهستيريا عن مكنونه لتخرج الرواية.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction was officially launched in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in April 2007. It is the result of a collaborative effort by the Booker Prize Foundation, the Emirates Foundation and the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue, whose aim was to develop a dedicated prize for Arabic fiction.
A steering committee of Arab literary experts, publishers and journalists was established to advise on the set-up of the Prize and its independent Board of Trustees, whose members have been drawn from across the Arab and Anglophone worlds, and are responsible for the overall management of the prize. The Emirates Foundation pledged its financial and substantive support for the initiative.

The Prize is specifically for the novel literary genre, and it awards $10,000 to each of the six shortlisted authors, with an additional $50,000 to the winner.

About the Booker Prize:

The Booker Prize Foundation is a registered charity which, since 2002, has been responsible for the award of the Man Booker Prize (formally the Booker Prize).

Established in 1968, the Man Booker Prize (formally known as ‘The Booker Prize’) is a prestigious literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.

The judges of the Man Booker Prize are selected from leading literary critics, writers, academics and notable public figures. The judging panel changes each year to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize and its integrity.
A Russian version of the prize was created in 1992. And an African version, the “Caine Prize”, was launched in 2000 .
The winner of the Man Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and success. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be nominated for the Booker longlist or selected for inclusion in the shortlist.

About the Emirates Foundation:

Established in 2005, the Emirates Foundation is one of the leading philanthropic organizations in the UAE. It is committed to improving the quality of life for all people in the UAE, through a variety of local and international projects that stimulate intellectual and social growth, as well as increase access to cultural, educational and technological resources, and foster increased participation in civic life.

Booker in The National

Posted on December 1, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

: Image via Wikipedia

Contenders for ‘Arabic Booker’ aim for shortlist

Alison McMeans

ABU DHABI // Sixteen books are in the running to make the shortlist of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) 2010, it was announced yesterday.

Works by authors from 17 countries including the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Oman were submitted for the competition. However, no UAE piece is among the 16 books up for consideration for the final shortlist.

The award, founded in 2007 and often referred to as “the Arabic Booker”, showcases the best of contemporary Arabic literature.

Zaki Nusseibeh, an IPAF trustee and the vice chairman of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, said: “The previous two winners – Bahaa Taher [2008], and Youssef Ziedan [this year’s winner] – have joined a long list of Arabic literary greats.”

Joumana Haddad, the IPAF administrator, said: “It is so rewarding to see how the prize is already changing our cultural scene, by increasing book sales and encouraging translations.”

The final shortlist and the judges will be announced on December 15.

Each of the six authors on the shortlist will receive US$10,000 (Dh36,700), with the winner getting an additional $50,000.

amcmeans@thenational.ae

Bidoun Review of Sons of Gebelawi

Posted on November 4, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

Abnaa al Gebelawi (Children of Gebelawi), By Ibrahim Farghali, Cairo: Al Ain, 2009

In Ibrahim Farghali’s Abnaa al Gebelawi, all of the texts of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. This happens without explanation, reason, or ostensible cause: wherever they might be found – not only in libraries and bookshops but also on bookshelves and bedside bedside tables – novels by Mahfouz in their original Arabic are simply nowhere to be found. The authorities’ attempt to remedy the situation in the face of worldwide and (notably, if somewhat incredibly) popular uproar are juxtaposed with sightings of Mahfouz’s characters in a variety of locales, seldom having anything to do with the settings in which they actually appear in Mahfouz’s books.

With six – now seven – books to his name, Farghali (b. 1967) is among the most prolific novelists of his generation. In his devotion to the genre and his formal conservatism, he is perhaps the worthiest heir to Mahfouz (1911-2006), the Nobel prize winner most known for his mid-century tales of Cairo. Unlike Mahfouz, however, Farghali is firmly steeped in a magical realist tradition. Running through much of his prose are echoes of Jose Saramago’s nightmarish humour or shades of Italo Calvino’s fascination with the fantastical nature of fiction. He is taken by twins, telepathy and teleporting, and his firmly middle-class characters – otherwise utterly ordinary – have been known to reappear after they have died.

In Abnaa al Gebelawi – Farghali’s latest and greatest work – we face the prospect of a world without literature. The myriad voices in the book — for the young narrator cum author assumes many guises throughout these pages — express concern as to the fraught future of Arabic literature, about the erosion of the liberal and humane values that Mahfouz and his work represent, and (reflecting perhaps the essential fear of all true writers) about oblivion at large.

The events of the book are staged around a relatively uncomplex love affair involving the narrator and the eccentric daughter of a well-to-do family— occasion for Farghali to probe the psychology of class and sex in contemporary Egyptian society. Further in, however, the story breaks up and morphs into countless alternative and subordinate plot-lines, until it becomes clear (although it is never stated) that the whole of Abnaa al Gebelawi is but the barely coherent waste of a single pluralistic mind – the mind of a young writer concerned with the literary wasteland around him. The allegorical dimension remains predominant, and in this way recalls Awlad Haretnah (Children of Our Alley, 1959), the title of whose earlier English translation Farghali translates back verbatim for his own.

As it happens, Awlad Haretnah was the only book by Mahfouz to suffer censure from the religious establishment. In it the history of a popular residential quarter in Cairo stands in for the sum total of humanity’s spiritual experience. That quarter’s oldest, strongest and most benevolent resident – for many generations hidden away in his mansion – is called Gebelawi. Gebelawi has envoys or representatives, descendants or grandchildren, whose struggles to spread peace and justice make up episodes of the saga. Each is a retelling of the life of one of the prophets of Islam, starting with Adam and ending with the False Messiah. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all feature, but at the end a rumour spreads that Gebelawi himself has died. In Arab literary circles it is frequently claimed that if not for Awlad Haretnah, Mahfouz would not have received the Nobel Prize. But it proved too much for orthodox, let alone radical Muslims, for whom Mahfouz would become the enemy soon enough.

a letter from Mahfouz to Mohammad al Badawi

Radical Islam had claimed many lives since the 1980s when in 1994 Mahfouz barely survived being knifed to death outside his house in Cairo. The irony was that, of all the helpless octogenarians his bearded young assailants could have targeted for apostasy, he was probably the least secular. A typical Cairene of the pre-bin Laden era, the man had led an all but exemplary (for which read profoundly unadventurous) life. He did not seek revolution, he did not take great risks. He had no utopian or transcendental illusions. And perhaps it was thanks to this and this alone that he was able to invent and reinvent the novel, the youngest genre in the language, defining it for generations of writers down to Farghali.

Applying every novelistic model at his disposal, Mahfouz produced a phenomenal number of readable books: social chronicles, political critiques, philosophical manuals. None was too difficult or experimental to render it inaccessible to even the most common reader. None sought to undermine whatever pillar of the status quo it came in contact with. Notwithstanding the elaborately veiled, painstakingly respectful Ages-of-Man narrative in Awlad Haretnah – a Muslim treatise on the meaning of life if ever there was one – in Mahfouz’s books, the family, the creed, the government are never attacked for what they are or what they stand for, but only for their most striking deviations, omissions or excesses.

For a magic realist like Farghali, Mahfouz may not be the most obvious point of departure; the Nobel laureate is, after all, best known for devotion to the real even in his least realistic works, and one would have trouble imagining him so much as hinting at the paranormal or the fantastical. Yet in Abnaa al Gebelawi, the grand opera to Farghali’s various arias, Mahfouz is an embodiment of something not so different from the sense of sight. His books stand in for almost everything Farghali values: Literature, Thought, Freedom, Knowledge, even Love. The premise could not have been more powerful.

Sharh Diwan Zikri

Posted on September 9, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

شرح ديوان ذكري

Sharh Diwan Zikri

Reading novelist Mustafa Zikri’s new collection of essays, Youssef Rakha follows the example of several canonical works on the great 10th-century poet Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi, all titled Sharh Diwan Al-Mutanabbi or The Elucidation of the Diwan of Mutanabbi

Yawmiyyat (A diary)

At first, this sounds like a misnomer for the numbered pieces making up the latest book by the novelist and screenwriter Mustafa Zikri (b. 1966), Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’: Yawmiyyat (On Tiptoe: A Diary), published by Dar Al-Ain last month. Though initially circulated on Facebook as entries in an ongoing diary of some sort, the pieces comprising Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’ read less like the pages of a journal than the occasional work of a cultural columnist. Zikri’s stated formal ambition was to eschew if not actively attack the predominant, established genres, notably the novel-cum-novella that has been his preferred medium (in recent years, as he points out, the novel has increasingly become the alpha and the omega of literary endeavour in Arabic). He also wanted to relax the iron fist with which he maintains the “literary purity” of his work, guarding the gold of true art from possible intrusions by the lead of politics or society (both the metaphor and the subsequent quotes, unless otherwise stated, come from a recent interview by Mohammad Shoair).

Yet the more you think about Zikri’s work, while you read, the more sense the subtitle yawmiyyat makes. By the time you turn the last page you are convinced. This book offers precisely the kind of material you would expect to find in the diary of a writer like Zikri: fragmentary meditations on literature and film, ambiguous encounters only marginally connected with whatever real-life experiences they recount, philosophical formulations of no clear import. Entries are as carefully constructed, often as open to interpretation, as poems. And – most important of all: what sets Zikri apart from almost every other Arab writer, in fact – the texts are truly self-referential, with the movement of a passage tracing an expression or a word, not what that expression or word refers to. Narrative reduces to a sort of semantic aesthetics, the protagonist to an idea suggested by a particular turn of phrase. Ironically this tendency is clearer than ever now that Zikri is no longer consciously exercising control. Could anyone expect anything more tangible or intimate from the yawmiyyat of Mustafa Zikri?

***

I thought I was the kind of writer who, measured against his writings, lives a life of paucity at the level of the body and the soul. I think of Borges and Pesão and Dostoevsky… (1.)

While Zikri regards any link between literature and reality as a threat to the purity of his art, it is in fact references like this one – and the sweeping statements tending to go with them – that take away from his credibility. There is definitely room in the world of Arabic writing for quasi-postmodern theorising, however self-centred or contemplatively indulgent. But surely in the context of a novella like Hura’ Mataha Qoutiyyah (Drivel about a Gothic Labyrinth, 1997), it actually undermines “purity” far more than the hypothetical inclusion of social-political commentary, properly contextualised, when the narrator consciously compares himself to Borges: a celebrated genius from a decidedly different culture and one, it might be added, whose relevance to what that narrator is doing is at best obscure. The problem is not that Zikri may be a lesser writer than Dostoevsky. It is in the directed-ness, the apparent artificiality of the kind of westward looking elitism he endeavours to cultivate – the classicism of his ambition constantly in contradiction with his essentially deconstructionist approach. His slim volumes are invariably fragmentary; insanely reworked and polished, but inconclusive.

They are also practically solipsistic – in their failure to engage with the world (a failure for which the attempt to substitute the world for Great Literature, i.e., in effect, modernism and art-house cinema, does not make up). Only on reading Zikri’s yawmiyyat, in which he condescends to discuss his likes and dislikes, to engage with the politics of culture or mention a fellow Egyptian writer like the dentist and best-selling author Alaa El-Aswany or his own former mentor Edwar El-Kharrat, do you begin to appreciate what kind of writer Zikri is. Others – most, I would say – openly seek context and connection, communication. He claims to seek the least contact possible, the smallest number of readers, the company of gods – like Kafka, like Kawabata – who according to him never mix with the rabble. The irony is that it is the rabble-like qualities of his standpoint as a Third World writer that form the substance of his work, informing even the way he interprets Great Literature. Hence the deconstructionism, hence the aversion to politics (a quality Zikri shares with his generation of literati, who are still reacting to the excessive politicisation of literature all through the 1960s and 1970s); hence also the preemptive despair of ever having a readership of his own beyond “the professional reader, the writer and the half-writer”. (It strikes me now that in his systematic self-assuredness, Zikri does recall Al-Mutanabbi, not only arguably the greatest Arab poet of all time but also, famously or notoriously, the most conceited.)

***

I have always been… subject to the signal to start working… which requires me to be completely devoted and constantly ready to receive [it] whenever it might come… (17.)

Few writers have dedicated as much attention or energy as Zikri to analysing the discontents of their creative process – the nature and magnitude of the emptiness just beneath the surface of their texts. Here as elsewhere in his writing – notably in his last work of fiction, Al-Rasa’il (The Messages, 2006) – Zikri spends time on what might be termed negative productivity: the writing that has not happened, or is yet to happen, but will perhaps never happen. He narrates and describes the state of being idle and homebound in anticipation of (and in deference to) literature.

As piece 34 in Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’ demonstrates, Zikri’s negative productivity makes perhaps the most convincing case for an existential perspective on the human condition in contemporary Arabic literature. Contrary to his own, noncommittal claims, it resonates far beyond what he recently described to the journalist Ola El-Saket as “those little things which the other writing,” the engaged, energetic writing that aims to change the world, “assumes to be of no consequence, the small details that recur every day and which some of us take for granted”. Zikri’s dilemma has universal relevance: “34. Preparing and arranging, creating an atmosphere, took me a long time, and though I was unemployed on the pretext of waiting for the appropriate moment, that waiting itself was fuelled only by a long time wasted, which I mostly described, with much effort and work, as an inappropriate moment, or at least an inappropriate moment on the way to becoming an appropriate moment.”

This kind of thinking generates much needed humour in an otherwise cerebral and dry book. It also goes to show that Zikri is not as solipsistic as he might seem. At least he is aware of the irony inherent to his own narcissism, and not too scared to apply it to himself. We write about what we know best, and all that Zikri knows is sitting in his home thinking about writing; that, along with whatever else his literary anxiety happens to latch onto, is what he will write about.

***

At the start of the film The Sacrifice by the director Andrie Tarkovsky, Alexander, the hero of the film, asks his son to help him plant a dead tree on the shore of a lake… (27.)

In piece 27 as in numerous other pieces, Zikri – who, working with the filmmaker Osama Fawzi, wrote two of the best Egyptian films of the 1990s – endeavours to rewrite world cinema. Not that the novel/novella format prevented him from indulging his love of film in the past – his 1998 novella is entitled, after Fassbinder’s celebrated film, Fear Eats the Soul – but the greater opportunities presented by an “absolutely flexible medium” like yawmiyyat gives him more scope for focusing on particular scenes or techniques – in Hitchcock, in the work of the French New Wave directors, in Tarantino, Bergman – not so much to discuss this or that aspect of a film or a director as simply to see a given cinematic moment from a new and one might say literary angle.

The influence of film on fiction is a huge topic beyond the scope of this Elucidation, but Zikri’s screenwriter’s insights and his intensely individualist taste act to highlight the way words on a page can recreate and totally alter a scene already lodged in the reader’s memory. These pieces seem to reverse the tendency, suggesting new writing that can influence the way we see film. It is as if Zikri, by reference to another medium, is actively showing his reader that the strength of literature is no longer about telling a story but rather about a particular way of seeing or engaging the senses, different from but just as effective as the more predominant audiovisual medium.

Later on in the book, in the course of his bitterly sarcastic critique of Aswany’s Yaqoubian Building (2002), piece 45, Zikri says almost as much: “Yet it is enough for the physician Alaa El-Aswany that a reader with no connection to the novel genre can easily read The Yaqoubian Building, relying on his experience of newspaper reading and oral tale-telling that everyone possesses by virtue of birth, community and homeland. It may seem to the reader that watching the novel through the medium of cinema does not deprive him of penetrating to whatever is deepest in Yaqoubian. Since the novel has irrevocably divorced the tradition of style, there is then no need for reading.”

***

While the pastime appeared to have to do with free time, it actually had to do with the meaning of life. (39.)

Zikri is ostensibly speaking of “the satellite and the computer and the telephone”, initially “promises of something else, more serious” which he approaches as pastimes “within the frontiers of the house”. But here as elsewhere in this remarkably diverse book, he is also intimating a holistic world view, an idea of human existence as a totality of experience only usually available through philosophy or poetry. It is in this sense perhaps that Zikri might be compared to Borges, despite the incomparably more articulate demeanour and learned background of the latter. Though unlike Zikri Borges has a healthy awareness of context, he remains one of a handful of modern writers the world over who communicate such a sense of the totality of existence with the utmost economy of means. In many of the pieces in this book, Zikri’s tight, profoundly thought out constructions evoke the connection between the short, quasi-narrative text and the prose poem – another thing Borges manages to do, even though the great Argentine, once again unlike Zikri, wrote poems which he presented as such.

The one major difference between Zikri and Borges – between Zikri and most writers of Borges’s – is the latter’s capacity for antagonising his readers, often by overwhelming with unnecessary references. Borges in particular was known to say that, unless one is writing a scholarly monograph or a work of science, a text should always be appealing enough for the reader not to have to exert any effort reading it. More Joycean than Borgesian in this respect, Zikri cares little for the enjoyment of the reader. In fact he sets out to antagonise “the reader with whom I have no connection”, the rabble representative for whom there is no room among the gods, or so he says. And yet in most instances – in spite of himself? – Zikri produces an eminently enjoyable text. Is this yet another intractable contradiction presented by his work?

***

And in this world in which all truths stand against each other on an equal footing, meaning becomes an adventure, an endless game of mix and match. (49.)

Nowhere else is Zikri’s idea of literature more eloquently expressed (literature being an inclusive term that also covers philosophy and film, the two subjects in which he earned degrees, as well as the life of the writer, the writer’s “style” or way of using words, and perhaps also the human condition). It is not as eccentric an idea as he makes it out to be. Romantic and postmodern in equal parts, the notion of writing as a sublime but ultimately meaningless game echoes in the widest variety of contexts, from Wittgenstein to Orientalism. The fact that Zikri refrains from formulating it, never saying more by way of justifying his chosen profession than that it is “a private pleasure”, is hardly surprising.

The disorienting combination of Third World postmodernism and puritanical Great Literature reflects the contradiction between Zikri’s thoroughly fragmentary, deconstructionist method and his all but classical outlook. Far from undermining the credibility of his work, it is perhaps this very contradiction, negative productivity – and the incumbent rejection of any possibility of popular recognition or “success” – that makes Zikri, all things considered, among the most important writers working in Arabic today.

Sons of Mahfouz

Posted on July 21, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

Youssef Rakha quizzes out novelist Ibrahim Farghali on his greatest masterpiece to date

Finally, a true event in contemporary Arabic literature: Last month at the Diwan Bookshop, in Zamalek, Ibrahim Farghali (b. 1967) signed copies of his latest novel, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi (Sons of Al-Gabalawi), published by Dar Al-Ain this June, while he was on holiday from his job as a magazine editor in Kuwait. It may seem ironic to call this intimate gathering an event, particularly judged against the much greater media attention paid to much lesser books in the last ten years. Yet from a history-of-literature point of view, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi is probably the closest we have come to a fulfilment of the prophecy that a home-grown magic realist movement would emerge in the new millennium.

The many disparate and as yet shy strands of magic realism linking Farghali’s books with such writers as Mustafa Zikri – it was thought – would eventually cohere into a more readership-oriented, ambitious and articulate body of novels.

Such books would combine the realism and social commitment of the Sixties narrative tradition with the individualism and physicality of the Nineties (the latter thus far accommodated mainly by the prose poem). It would give substance to the notion of an “age of the novel”, espoused by critic Gabir Asfour at millennium’s end, and express a range of recent influences from Gabriel-Garcia Marquez and Jorge-Luis Borges to Umberto Eco to Jose Saramago – all of whom demonstrated how elements of the fantastical could be deployed to intensify reality and/or infuse the public realm with private experience.

Abnaa Al-Gabalwi – and, yes, the title is a translation back into Arabic of the title of the first English translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haretna (1959), also known as Sons of Our Alley – seems to be that rare thing: a self-consciously self-conscious full-length Arabic novel, designed as much as anything to define the language’s most talked about genre and, crucially, conceived on as grand a scale as can be expected.

“Of course Saramago, for me, is the literary model,” Farghali says. “To write a long, big, subtly conveyed text through which to say everything. And with the highest degree of artistic excellency possible, to create a large idea that accommodates numerous smaller ideas, juxtaposes styles and discordant voices. My ambition is a text that could be read and enjoyed and reread and still enjoyed by an ordinary reader as well as a member of the literary elite. It’s an ambition like Dostoevsky’s and Saramago’s, and I hope I don’t sound vain when I say this. I think I had been practising since Ibtisamat Al-Qiddissin,” his 2006 novel, translated by Andy Smart and Nadia Fouad-Smart as The Smiles of the Saints, “to produce a text of this level.”

As a literary critic, Farghali has been the quickest to dismiss such middle-brow, best-selling “phenomena” as Alaa El-Aswany’s The Yaqoubian Building; and his principal argument against such books is that they pander to a growing but limited – and limiting – worldwide market, that “they are not novels at all, but illusions”.

Yet Farghali’s own ambition extends to sales figures too: a fact more evident perhaps in this book than in previous ones. “Aside from theorising or stating the obvious, aside from the conditions of narrative and imagination and construction and the depth of the characters, I think a text to which the term ‘novel’ is applicable must also be an ‘art object’, meaning that it must make sublime, competent and beautiful use of the language, it must use the language in its own specific way. To be called a novel, the text must absorb the narrative methods that have been employed throughout history, it must know its place in the history of narrative. It has to be contemporary, experimental and deep, and work towards abiding by the conditions of the modern as a general context that is influenced in turn by economic, social and historical factors. Only then,” Farghali says, “is a narrative text worthy of being called a novel.”

***

Irrespective of his 1989 Nobel prize – an unprecedented achievement in the Arab world, and one that somewhat overshadowed his already established career – the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) remains an inescapable reference point. His incredibly large body of work acted to define the Arabic novel (the youngest in the language, not having emerged until the turn of the 20th century, and Mahfouz’s preferred genre throughout his life); and in so doing the sheer magnitude of his achievement also seemingly killed it – in time for the so called death of the novel worldwide.

Trying out the widest range of models – Balzak, Dickens, Tolstoy, the historical novel format, the French existentialist novel, the grassroots folk epic – Mahfouz seemed to exhaust the possibilities of the genre. If not, he at least showed up its aesthetic and (more relevantly for the Arab scene) political limitations. He was criticised for being “petty bourgeois”, for standing in the way of social and economic transformation, in effect for importing the one genre that sided with things as they were, not as they should be.

Yet even if a contemporary novelist were to make a point of never reading any Mahfouz, that novelist’s work would still be judged both positively and negatively against Mahfouz’s corpus. Ironically, of course, of the many fiction writers who began their careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Farghali is probably the most like Mahfouz. His comparatively prolific output – six books of fiction in less than a decade, with the first, Bittijah Al-Maaqi (Towards the irises), appearing in 1997 – recalls Mahfouz’s steady, one might even say plodding, approach to writing. It is driven at least as much by patient daily toil as bouts of inspiration and epiphanies.

“I read Mahfouz for the first time when I was 13 years old. I started with The Cairo Trilogy and decided to finish off his complete works – a feat I had actually accomplished by the time I was 17. He is probably the only writer whose every work I read, rereading many of his books over and over, especially The Trilogy and The Harafish,” Mahfouz’s 1977 epic, “and so he occupies a gigantic space in my consciousness. I started writing in his shadow. I wrote excellent ‘Mahfouzian’ short stories which I subsequently tore up in order to rid myself of his direct influence and discover my own specific voice, but I was never free of the marks he made on me. He taught me the importance of structure, and I followed in his footsteps as regards the geometry of the text, before I finally rebelled against him to create my own structure.”

Even though eschewing politics is typical of his entire generation, Farghali’s mode of (not) engaging with society and/or politics, or neutralising the unfolding of history, is less like the so called Nineties Generation’s than Mahfouz’s. While Zikri, for example, remains painstakingly solipsistic, aggressively rejecting any allusion to society as a whole, and religiously ridding his work of any non-literary purpose, Farghali – like Mahfouz – is keen to preserve geographic locations, time frames and character types; he observes society from afar, subtly registering the relevant dynamics, suggesting a world which, though magical, is never unfamiliar.

Farghali concedes that some of Mahfouz’s characters – Amina, the matriarch of The Trilogy, for example – annoyed and repelled him, “but I do not judge Mahfouz’s characters in this text of mine,” which includes very frequent extended quotations from the Nobel laureate, “but rather meet them as they are, and conduct dialogues with them”, literally pulling them out of a particular moment in a given novel. “

“I liked the idea of creating an illusory yet extremely realistic world,” Farghali explains, “like the one he created in The Harafish. None of the things the things this novel talks about – like the strongmen with their clubs, or the tekkes – ever really existed, but he records them as if they were reality. He creates an alternative reality, an artistic and philosophical reality.” This, then, is what Egypt’s latest offspring of Cervantes can take from Mahfouz:

“I learned to conduct my love life from his characters; the heroes of his novels inspired me intellectually and in terms of my actual behaviour; and he inspired me in terms of writing, his complete independence from cliques and political parties and cultural mafias – and ideology,” the greatest anathema of the Nineties. “He taught me that you are not a writer unless you have to be independent even of the cliches of your own generation.” Farghali certainly is. “Mahfouz had charisma, he had presence, he is the only Arab writer who had a novelistic project in any sustained sense. He was well known for his manner of talking, his jokes and disciples, and his films, long before Nobel was ever on the horizon.”

***

Imagine, then, what it would mean for such a novelist – any Arab novelist, really, but especially such a one as Farghali – if the world were to wake up one morning to discover that every last copy of every last book by Mahfouz in the Arabic original has simply, without a trace, vanished off the face of the earth. Mahfouz’s books disappear not only from bookshops and libraries but from private collections, from bookshelves and bedside tables, from every place where they could conceivably be found.

This, basically, is the premise of Abnaa Al-Gabalwi, which nonetheless incorporates numerous other frameworks, notably the appearance of flesh-and-blood reincarnations of some of Mahfouz’s characters both in and outside their original settings, the government’s efforts to do what it can to have the books back – some people apparently know the texts by heart, others attempt to reconstruct them with the help of their knowledge of Mahfouz’s work from translations – and the very complex, gradual intermingling of the fictional world and the world to which it supposedly refers. There are not only characters but narrators, character narrators, doubles, triples, even quadruples. Subplots take on lives of their own, and there are multiple scenarios with a range of possible resolutions.

The fictional acrobatics are of such intensity they frequently if no doubt intentionally disrupt what suspension of disbelief the reader has managed to maintain, but they also undermine the book’s popular appeal and seem to have no purpose beyond themselves.

“The fictional acrobatics are an end in themselves” Farghali insists, “not a means to something else. You could put it down to taste. I like complexity in a novel. More than one time frame, more than one character, more than one voice. My wish is to alter my voice till it becomes a multiplicity of voices in the manner of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pesão, although of course there is a huge difference and I am still a student compared to him. I managed that somewhat in previous works, I created parallel time frames, but in general I totally incline towards this kind of layering. I like The God of Small Things, for example, for that same reason.”

As in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter night’s a traveller (which is made up of novel openings), by the time you have turned the last page, you have read not a novel as such but a range of possible novels. More than any one character or story-line, you retain a sense of what an Arabic novel is, or what Farghali thinks it might be. More importantly, perhaps, you appreciate the disappearance of Mahfouz’s work as a metaphor for the general social-political malaise the book selectively and somewhat fitfully depicts: corruption, purposelessness, physical and mental repression, and the existential loss not only of the private but of the public self all come to mind. Mahfouz’s books stand in for Egypt and all it means.

“I think I am simultaneously preoccupied, as usual, with two projects,” Farghali outlines his usual plan. “I am not sure which of them my demons will take me to. I haven’t been able to gauge the response to Abnaa Al-Gabalwi yet, but I certainly feel that, in writing it, I have realised one of my greatest ambitions.”

Azazeel: Disillusionment

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Youssef Rakha

The Quixote Code
Remembering Borges, Youssef Rakha courts sedition
He did not want to compose another Quixote – which is easy – but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original… – Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
As a literary exercise – or novel – to imagine a diary composed 1,500 years ago: what could be more challenging to a contemporary writer? Few would think to accomplish the task as literally as Pierre Menard, the author imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his first short story, who rewrites Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word, without ever reading it. An author about to produce a 1,500-year-old fictional diary would certainly affirm the kind of human connection that makes characters in books interesting regardless of when the books were written and when the characters lived, but they might also be curious as to how different the world was so long ago, and the ways in which its difference necessarily affected the people they deal with. In the fifth century, for example, the earth was still flat, there was no such thing as penicillin, demons (whether Christian or pagan) had far more physical presence, and slavery was the norm.
But for Youssef Zeidan, author of the year’s most talked-about Arabic novel, Azazeel (or Beezlebub: winner of the 2009 Arabic Booker, upsetter of the Coptic Orthodox Church and, in Arabic-translation-of-Syriac-diary format, resuscitator of the fifth-century Levant), none of these things or the myriad others that separate us from medieval times have any part to play in the action or in thought processes of the characters. Zeidan treats the time gap simply as a technical obstacle, which he overcomes through the device of impersonating the present-day translator, into modern Arabic, of a fictional manuscript. This works for a while – even though at many points, Zeidan’s modern world view seems to burst out of the veneer of the manuscript – but eventually you realise that there is little if any engagement with the otherness or mystery of the past. The author makes no attempt to demonstrate the difference in people’s experience of time, in their sense of authority, in their capacity for spiritual transcendence or thier greater tolerance for bloodshed, sectarian bias, or material hardship. It is almost as if Zeidan is writing generic fiction, the early Christian setting no more than one among many possible palettes to paint the same, atemporal picture.
Still, Azazeel makes a compelling read, which is more than can be said for most Arabic novels published today; then again, generic fiction is by definition compelling. What sets Azazeel apart, in addition to the convincing impression Zeidan gives of an edited manuscript in translation, is the historical accuracy of the major events he covers and the accessible way in which he charts, in outline, the Christological debate between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople, the latter condemned at the Council of Ephesus in AD 451. Not far into the book, however, Zeidan’s engagement with the universe he depicts begins to feel skin deep. Hipa, the protagonist, is less and less convincing – especially as regards his interactions with the Beezlebub of the title: an all-too-innocuous devil whose medieval identity, presumably different from that of the better known Satan or his Muslim cousin, Iblis, does not come through.
Hipa is a Coptic monk doctor who, on leaving Alexandria as it were in a huff, decides to take this name out of guilt over failing to stop (or indeed object to) the massacre by his fellow Christians of the Pagan philosopher Hipatia of Alexandria (AD 355-416), whom he admires – an event for which Zeidan blames Cyril I and which Hipa helplessly witnesses before he leaves the Alexandrine Church of Saint Mark monastery, travelling first to Jerusalem, where he meets an even less lifelike apparition of Cyril I’s archenemy, Nestorius and, on the advice of the latter, moves onto the minor monastery in which he composes this diary in his third language – after Coptic and Greek – north west of Aleppo on the way to Antioch. When you wind down and reflect after turning the last page, you feel Hipa might as well have been a present-day Muslim medical student at the Qasr El-Eini university hospital who, repelled by secular corruption and/or fundamentalist excess, decides (against the dictates of Islam) to live the life of a recluse treating men of religion at an out-of-the-way mosque clinic somewhere in northern Syria; so indistinct are the ancient dimensions of Hipa’s constitution, both material and mental – and so disinterested Zeidan in them.
It is in this context that you are tempted to ask why Zeidan, an Islamic studies scholar and a Muslim, apparently a believer, should choose to express his views on religious tolerance in the framework of the pre-Islamic past. The motivation behind Azazeel seems to have little to do with the world in which this precursor of Satan’s existed; and while the book testifies to immersion in texts and ideas of the period, it does not demonstrate a deep interest in the daily life of its people on the part of Zeidan (at least not to this reader). The motif of Christian brutality towards non-Christians – by far the most recurrent – can be read as a general statement on sectarianism (applicable, even, to Muslims); but why side so wholeheartedly with the one man the entire Eastern Orthodox world considers a heretic? Cyril I (a saint to Zeidan’s former friends at the Coptic Church of Mar Murqus, where Hipa supposedly lived so many centuries ago) may well have been capable of violence and dogmatism, but other than his being the underdog in the relentless march of history, there is no reason to believe that Nestorius, whether or not one agrees with his views, did not have it in him to commit the same crimes. The one line of thought that could justify Zeidan’s bias is the fact that the Muslim account of Jesus’ nature is significantly closer to the Nestorian.
Could it be that Zeidan is making a very roundabout statement about Islam’s theological difference with the Coptic Orthodox Church? Surely, then, in the Egyptian context, he is neither siding with the underdog nor – as the Booker jurors claimed he was – promoting tolerance. Perhaps the ultimate book of this learned and readable book is no greater than mud raking, after all.

BIDOUN REVIEW OF AZAZEEL

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Youssef Rakha



Syriac book, late fifth century

Azazeel, Beezlebub, Youssef Zeidan, Cairo: Dar Al Shurouk, April 2009 (seventh edition)

Last month, at a symposium in Kuwait, I bumped into the Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon, head of the jury of the first round of the Abu Dhabi-based International Prize for Arabic Fiction (better known as the Arabic Booker because it is administered by the Booker Foundation). While bitterly complaining of lack of alcohol, which is illegal in Kuwait, Shimon told me the story of his visit to Wadi An Natroun, the site of some of the world’s oldest monasteries in Egypt, and how he argued with the monks there for still holding a grudge against a man who died over 1500 years ago. I asked him who he meant.

Of course I knew that, like the late poet Sargon Boulus, Shimon was born Syriac Christian; what I did not know was that, while the Coptic Christians of Egypt (along with all other Eastern Orthodox denominations) reject the teachings of Nestorius (AD 386-451) – the Archbishop of Constantinople, about whom the contemporary Archbishop of Alexandria, Cyril I wrote the Twelve Anathemas – Assyrians belonging to the Oriental Orthodox rite of Syria, Iraq and Turkey are Nestorian. It did not seem to matter what the ecumenical dispute was about – not that Shimon, a secular who has spent practically all of his adult life outside the Middle East, would have been able to explain it to me had I asked. It just struck me how he was able to give something so weird and arcane the necessary relevance, talking about a recent experience.

Did the Virgin give birth to God, a human being, both, or something in between? All Nestorius had done when he was declared a heretic at the Council of Ephesus in AD 451 – his would-be supporters, notably the Archbishop of Antioch, John I, were tricked into arriving too late – was reject the term Theotokos (Mother of God) in favour of Christotokos (Mother of Christ). The question sounds absurdly disproportionate to the amount of bloodshed it caused, especially considering that the Virgin’s conception was, anyway, immaculate. But in his novel Azazeel, or Beezlebub – just like Shimon in Kuwait – the head of the Alexandria Library Manuscripts Department, an Islamic studies scholar, Youssef Zeidan manages to communicate a sense of how relevant such issues can still be, and how horrific their consequences.

While reading Azazeel, I spoke to a devoutly Coptic work-mate about Nestorius. “But of course he’s a heretic,” my work-mate said, as if he had had coffee with the Archbishop only yesterday. “He denies that Marium is the Mother of God!” In a slightly lower voice, my work-mate continued, “You know it was a follower of Nestorius who taught Muhammad.” Muhammad? “Yes, your Muhammad. And that’s why Muslims share in the heresy that Jesus was not divine,” he hissed; it occurred to me that he must be thinking, “So the greater heresy, the ecumenical disaster that is Islam is all Nestorius’s fault.”

It is in the context of Zeidan being Muslim that Nestorianism should be nuanced. As he presents it, the claim was that, unlike that of God the Father, the divinity of Christ was not an intrinsic, everlasting attribute but something that happened to him after he was born and grew up to be a human being like any other. Zeidan uses Nestorius to suggest, for example, that in Egypt the Mother and Child was but an extension of the ancient tradition of Isis and Horus – a lesser break with paganism than Nestorius’s (or indeed Islam’s). Azazeel is unequivocally on the side of “the heretics” – how much does this reflect a bias for Muslim theology? Much, I think. With ruefully sectarian irony, while thinking it, I have been listening to Sheikh Mustafa Ismail’s beautiful recitation of a verse in the fourth chapter of the Quran, An Nisa (The Women) which, amazingly, says practically as much: “the Messiah, Isa son of Marium is only a messenger of Allah and His Word which He communicated to Marium and a spirit from Him…” So much for Islam.

Azazeel purports to be the Arabic translation, completed in April 2004 (some four years before the book was published) of seven rolls of parchment discovered ten years earlier in the vicinity of Aleppo, near the Turkish border – “on the ancient road linking Aleppo with Antioch,” the fictional Translator tells us. Written originally in late Aramaic (Syriac), the seven rolls making up the book’s seven chapters recount, in the first person, the life of a Coptic-speaking monk doctor from Upper Egypt named, even more confusingly, after the pagan woman philosopher Hipatia of Alexandria (AD 355-416), Hipa.

Hipa adopted this name in honour of the woman whom he met on his arrival in Alexandria, and whose lynching by the Christian mob – initiated by Cyril I – he later witnessed on the streets of “the Greatest City”. As a frustrated student of medicine at the Monastery of the Church of Saint Mark, Hipa is repelled by the dogmatism and violence of Cyril I, but he does not return to his homeland near present-day Akhmim where, as a child, he witnessed the equally barbaric lynching of his father, a pagan fisherman – a crime his mother incited in order to marry a Christian. Instead, Hipa travels, eventually reaching Jerusalem, where he settles down as a monk-physician, meets Nestorius, and on his advice moves not to Antioch, where Nestorius is a bishop at the time, but to the monastery north of Aleppo where – encouraged by Beezlebub, as the devil is called throughout, without explanation – he records his life story in the present text.

Zeidan carries out the task of mimicking manuscript editing brilliantly, and his message – that Beezlebub’s truest evil, far from heresy or even sin, is his capacity for getting people to excommunicate, massacre and otherwise do wicked things to each other in the conviction that they are doing good – comes through beautifully. And though extremely classical in language and style, the novel makes for an engaging and intelligent read. You are inclined to overlook the more obviously modern interpolations: when Octavia, the woman with whom Hipa sins on his arrival in Alexandria, calls Aristotle “backward” for his classification of women and slaves as below men, for example; or when Hipa, whose rationality chimes with Nestorius’s, begins to sound like an agent of the Enlightenment. But it is with the same sectarian irony, perhaps, that the book should be appreciated as a comment on contemporary political Islam and sectarian strife both within the Umma and between Muslims and Christians. In a beautifully roundabout way what Zeidan seems to be telling the West is, “Dogmatism and violence existed, you know, long before Islam came into being.”

تكريس الشخص: بوكر العربية من أبو ظبي

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Youssef Rakha

: Image via Wikipedia

تعليق على الدورة الأولى، بمناسبة صدور اللائحة الطويلة للدورة الثالثة

كدت أخجل من جهلي حتى تأكدت، بمشاورة آخرين كتاب، أنني لست وحدي الذي لا يعرف – من بين مرشحي «بوكر العربية» الست – سوى ثلاثة أسماء. وظننتُ، مثلي مثل دنيس جونسون ديفز، أن الاسم الوحيد الذي يعني لي الكثير، اسم بهاء طاهر، هو الاسم المرجّح. لكنني إثر الحديث عن رواية مكاوي سعيد التي لم يكن قد تسنى لي قراءتها – إثر إدراك أن هناك شخصاً اسمه خالد خليفة، أيضاً، كتب عن القمع الوحشي الذي مورس ضد الإسلاميين في حماة، ولم يغفل قمع الإسلاميين أنفسهم لاحتمالات مجتمع سوري مفتوح في الثمانينيات – تمنيت لو ينال أحدهما الجائزة الكبيرة.

كانت أمنية موضوعة في سياق. وعلي أن أوضح، في السياق نفسه، أنني من مريدي بهاء طاهر وأذهب صادقاً إلى أنه يستحق كل جوائز العالم. الذي يعنيني من خالد أو مكاوي، فقط، أنهما ليسا «مكرسين». هذه الكلمة التي قرأتها، منذ أجبرني عملي الجديد في أبو ظبي على متابعة التطورات، عشرات المرات – ك، ر، س – تتخذ في رأسي أبعاداً أسطورية إذ أنظر الآن إلى جمع من الموصوفين بها أعتبرهم أصدقاء، وأفرح بوجودي بينهم على غير انتظار. أن تُكرَّس يعني أن توضع في كرسي، والكرسي مكتوب عليه «كاتب معروف». غير أن ارتباطاً بين مصداقية الكاتب العربي، صدقه وصدقيته، وبين امتلاء سطح الكرسي المقصود بالإبر والأشواك يطمئنني. أو كون مؤخرته، على الأقل، تتصرف على هذا الأساس. وهكذا أشعر الليلة إذ أنظر إلى صموئيل شمعون أو حسونة المصباحي – هذا أيضاً علي أن أوضحه في سياق أمنيتي – إلى جمال الغيطاني أو محمد برادة… كانت فكرة بوكر العربية، من زاوية التمني، مناسبة احتفال. وقد شجعني بالذات كلام خالد خليفة للصحافة، بأن نسق الجائزة البريطانية التي سيتبناها الإصدار العربي سيحكم على نصوص دون النظر إلى أسماء كتابها. بوكر هي الأخرى تكرس – تكريساً دفع الناشرين والكتاب على التناحر بالسكاكين، هكذا يتردد، أو كاد: وعد الظهور في الغرب المتحضر أكثر على ما يبدو من احتمالهم – لكنها تكرس بنزاهة وعلى راحتها. تكرس، بمعنى آخر، لوجه الله. هذا الكلام جعل الجائزة دون غيرها شيئاً جديداً، وسألت نفسي إن كان بالفعل سيتحقق. في ارتقاب اللحظة الحاسمة، القرار، توحدت تلك الرغبة مع فوز واحد من اثنين لم يوضع أحدهما في كرسي. فأحبطتُ – وإن كنت أعرف أنه، مثل جمع أنظر إليه، متململ على كرسيه – لما أُعلن اسم معلمنا الأستاذ بهاء.

سهل – اليوم – أن يقول الذي لا يعرف إن بوكر مثلها مثل غيرها تعيد تكريس المكرسين من الكتاب. لكنه مثير – من زاوية أخرى – أن يكون صبري حافظ قد أُفحم في اعتراضه على مجلس أمنائها واتهامهم بالكولونيالية، لا لسبب غير فوز اسم أجمع عليه العرب من غير الكولونياليين ولا أظن حافظ نفسه يستطيع أن يشكك في التزامه. فقط بانتظار دورات قادمة تحمل، ربما، مفاجآت أكثر إثارة – وعدداً أكبر من أسماء لا أصل لها ولا فصل، نقرأها بدافع عشق الأدب والاكتشاف، وليس لأننا نعرف أصحابها شخصياً – الواحد لا يملك إلا أن يعيد النظر في آليات النشر العربية. النسق البريطاني الذي أثنى عليه خليفة يفترض وجود ناشرين محترفين وسوق كتاب، فهل تتوفر مثل هذه الشروط للعرب؟ السؤال الأصعب: هل لنا أن نعمل على توفيرها باتزان؟

top1

The Prize is specifically for the novel literary genre, and it awards $10,000 to each of the six shortlisted authors, with an additional $50,000 to the winner.

About the Booker Prize:

The Booker Prize Foundation is a registered charity which, since 2002, has been responsible for the award of the Man Booker Prize (formally the Booker Prize).

About the Emirates Foundation:

The Sultan's Seal

The blog of (Arabic) literature, journalism and photo art●مدونة الأدب (العربي) والصحافة والفن الفتوغرافي

Tag Archives: Arabic Booker

Empty Feeling: The Vagaries of the Sixties

Tractatus Franco-Arabicus

Longlist Announced for International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2011

K for kitab

A literary prize fight: politics and the International Prize for Arabic Fiction

On Fawwaz Haddad’s The Unfaithful Translator

The Butterfly Dream

A world of promise

القائمة القصيرة لجائزة الرواية العربية

Booker in The National

Contenders for ‘Arabic Booker’ aim for shortlist

Sharh Diwan Zikri

Sons of Mahfouz

Azazeel: Disillusionment

BIDOUN REVIEW OF AZAZEEL

تكريس الشخص: بوكر العربية من أبو ظبي

تعليق على الدورة الأولى، بمناسبة صدور اللائحة الطويلة للدورة الثالثة

Follow “The Sultan's Seal”