by Alia Mamdouh
Naphtalene captures a world that no longer exists because it has been banished forever from the experience of Iraqis. Yet the characters the author portrays and the relationships that bind them to each other transcend time and geographical boundaries, giving the novel a universal appeal. It is this very universality that is at the core of all Alia Mamdouh’s writing.
F. A. Haidar
London
2004
REFERENCES
Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London & New York: Routledge, 1993.
Badran, Margot & Miriam Cooke (eds). Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. London: Virago, 1990.
Buck, Claire (ed.). The Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 1992.
Ghazoul, Ferial. Survival and Bonding (review of The Loved Ones), Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue No. 706, September 2-8, 2004.
The Handstand. An Interview with Alia Mamdouh, by Mona Chollet (translated from French by Michael Taylor), August 2002
Woffenden, Richard. Coming of Age (review of Miral al-Tahtawy’s Blue Aubergine), Cairo Times, October 24-30, 2002.
United Nations Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (UNOCHR), Situation of Women in Iraq, Occasional Paper, May 28, 2003.
Novels by Alia Mamdouh (in Arabic):
Leila and the Wolf (Leila wa al-Dhi’b). Baghdad: Dar al-Hurriyyah, 1981.
Naphtalene (Habbat al-Naftalin). Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-Masriyya al-Ammah lil-Kitab, 1986 (1st ed). Reprinted Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 2000.
Passion (Al-Wala‘). Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1995.
The Loved Ones (Al-Mahboubat). London and Beirut: Al-Saqi, 2003.
Translations:
Mothballs (English translation of Naphtalene by Peter Theroux). Arab Women Writers Series, series editor Fadia Faqir. Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1996.
La Passion (French translation of Passion by Michel Galloux). Paris: Actes-Sud, 2003.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALIA MAMDOUH, winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Award in Arabic Literature for The Loved Ones, is a journalist, essayist, and novelist living in exile in Paris. Long banned from publishing in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, she is the author of essays, short stories, and four novels, of which Naphtalene is the most acclaimed and translated.
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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
Baghdad Burning
Riverbend
eISBN: 9781558616165 | ISBN: 9781558614895
In her riveting blog, a remarkable young Iraqi woman gives a human face to war and occupation. In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events.
Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city—of neighbors whose homes are raided by U.S. troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons, and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman’s perspective, she also describes a once secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without a head covering and a male escort. Interspersed with these vivid snapshots from daily life are Riverbend’s analyses of everything from the elusive workings of the Iraqi Governing Council to the torture in Abu Ghraib, from the coverage provided by American media and by Al-Jazeera to Bush’s State of the Union Speech. Here again, she focuses especially on the fate of women, whose rights and freedoms have fallen victim to rising fundamentalisms in a chaotic post-war society.
With thousands of loyal readers worldwide, Riverbend’s blog is recognized as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media.
“Riverbend’s commentary [is] passionate, frustrated, sarcastic and sometimes hopeful. . . . It offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A cross between an underground manifesto and a polished cultural history. . . . With its blend of first-person mouthing off and spirited documentary style, Baghdad Burning offers fair and balanced coverage from inside one of the most rapidly changing—and poorly understood—regions in the world.”
—Time Out New York
“Her descriptions of normal life in Iraq, adds a dimension to the war coverage that Western journalists have largely missed. Highly recommended to anyone following the conflict.”
—Library Journal
The Loved Ones
Alia Mamdouh
eISBN: 9781558617636 | ISBN: 9781558615564
As the once vibrant Suhaila lies in a coma in a Paris hospital, her son becomes re-entangled in his problematic relationship with her as well as with his war-ravaged homeland.
As a network of Suhaila’s friends watch over her bedside, they slowly introduce Nader to the mother he never knew: a woman in love with dancing, poetry, and excesses, a woman far removed from his memories of a mother who quietly submitted to constant abuse from his father.
“[An] intimately moving, polyphonic narrative of displacement and nomadism . . . a hymn to friendship and to boundless giving that ultimately restores life. Written in exile, it invents a language of exile with which to resist dispossession.”
—Committee of Judges, Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Arabic Literature
“[In this novel the]. . . . Booth’s translation is a labor of love and talent, a skill coupled with devotion.”
—Ferial J. Ghazoul, from the Afterword
Touba and the Meaning of Night
Shahrnush Parsipur
eISBN: 9781558616318 | ISBN: 9781558615571
A major literary event, the publication of Touba and the Meaning of Night introduces English-speaking readers to the masterpiece of a great contemporary Persian writer, renowned in her native Iran and much of Western Europe. This remarkable epic novel, begun during one of the author’s several imprisonments, was published in Iran in 1989 to great critical acclaim and instant bestseller status—until Shahrnush Parsipur was again arrested a year later, and all her works banned by the Islamic Republic.
In the character of Touba, Parsipur explores the changing fortunes of Iranian women through eighty years of turbulent history. After her father’s death, fourteen-year-old Touba proposes to a fifty-two-year-old relative in order to ensure her family’s financial security. Intimidated by her outspoken nature, Touba’s husband soon divorces her. She marries again, this time to a prince with whom she experiences tenderness and physical passion and has four children—but he proves unfaithful and unreliable. Touba is granted a divorce from him, and lives out the rest of her long life as matriarch to a changing household of family members and refugees.
Touba and the Meaning of Night explores, from a distinctly Iranian viewpoint, the ongoing tensions between rationalism and mysticism, tradition and modernity, male dominance and female will. Throughout, it defies Western stere
otypes of Iranian women and Western expectations of literary form, speaking in an idiom that reflects both the unique creative voice of its author and an important tradition in Persian women’s writing.
“Shahrnush Parsipur’s Touba and the Meaning of Night is considered one of the unsurpassed masterpieces of modern Persian literature.”
—Iranian.com
“Like Parsipur herself, her protagonists are women whose rebellions are not merely political but existential, against a system that denies them their individual dignity and stunts their potentials for growth.”
—Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
“Parsipur’s novel carries the reader on a mystical and emotional odyssey spanning eight decades of Iranian cultural, political, and religious history . . . replete with juxtapositions of mysticism and historical fact, Parsipur’s novel is a rewarding and enlightening encapsulation of her country’s recent past.”
—Booklist
Women Without Men
Shahrnush Parsipur
eISBN: 9781558617599 | ISBN: 9781558617537
This modern literary masterpiece follows the interwoven destinies of five women—including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a prostitute, and a school-teacher—as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men.
This volume is the first author-approved translation of Women Without Men.
“With Women Without Men, Shahrnush Parsipur reaffirms the simple truth that fragility and strength live side by side, and these attributes are volatile, precious, and endlessly female.”
—Shirin Neshat, from the introduction
“Using the techniques of both the fabulist and the polemicist, Parsipur continues her protest against traditional Persian gender relations in this charming, powerful novella.”
—Publishers Weekly
“These delightfully inventive interwoven tales of five contemporary Iranian women take on the author’s world with all the grace of Calvino’s ‘sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness.’ A masterful voice in international fiction now available to readers in the English-speaking world.”
—Robert Coover, author of Briar Rose and The Public Burning
Sultana’s Dreams
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
eISBN: 9781558617353 | ISBN: 9780935312836
Sultana’s Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopia—a tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world. “The Secluded Ones” is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.
Dreaming of Baghdad
Haifa Zangana
eISBN: 9781558616516 | ISBN: 9781558616059
In 1970s Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was at the height of its influence in the Middle East and popularity throughout the West. But a group of activists recognized the disastrous potential of the regime as its charismatic leader, Saddam Hussein, became more powerful. Haifa Zangana was among those resisters, a small group of whom were captured and imprisoned at Abu Ghraib.
From the distance of time and place, Zangana writes during her first years of forced exile from her beloved country about the time of her incarceration, the agonizing loss of comrades to torture and death in prison, the haunted quality of life so far away from home and family, and the ways in which memory conspires to make us forget what sometimes is most dear to us.
“Haifa Zangana is the stuff of which legends are made—and how rare, how precious, how reassuring her voice is. . . . How poorer the world would have been without Haifa Zangana’s courageous testimony. Drop anything you are reading and grab hold a copy of this magnificent book.”
—Hamid Dabashi
“Deftly sketched, simple and poetic, Dreaming of Baghdad drags politics down from the realm of the abstract into the mud, fear, and loneliness of personal experience and psychological ruin that is life under dictatorship. This is a landscape of clandestine struggle and crushing political defeat, of familiar old streets and the alienating structures of exile. Zangana’s story is heartbreaking, but her clarity and resilience inspire awe.”
—The Nation
“In this powerful narrative, Haifa Zangana weaves a rich tapestry that portrays the repression, torture, and resistance in Saddam’s Iraq against a complex social landscape. A must read for anyone who wants to understand Iraq today.”
—Jacqueline S. Ismael, co-editor of the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies