A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  In their translation, the translators suggest both the particular situation of Amina, who comes from a traditional family and whose husband has confined her to the house, and the general costs that traditional life entails for women like her in terms of their isolation and segregation from the world outside. Amina is illiterate, and the modernization that was to be such a feature of twentieth-century Arab societies has not yet reached the Cairo middle classes, particularly not the female members of them. Taken as a whole, the Cairo Trilogy can be understood as a kind of ‘grand narrative’ that shows the passing of traditionalist conceptions of life, as well as of much of the patriarchal authority that sustained them.

  These considerations are certainly present in the original text, and the translators have preserved features of it like the jinn and the suras from the Qur’an without resorting to footnotes or paraphrased explanation. While the jinn may be familiar to western readers as the often malevolent beings described as ‘genies’ in translations of The Arabian Nights, the suras, or chapters, of the Qur’an may be less so. Sura 112, for example, which consists of just four lines of text, is usually called ‘The Unity’ in English, since it deals with the oneness of God, while the opening prayer of the Qur’an is termed the Fatiha, which means the ‘opening’, or introduction, to the whole. Any translator of Arabic literature needs to strike a balance between references that western readers may reasonably be expected to know (such as to the jinn), those that they can infer (that a sura is a chapter of the Qur’an), and those that they may not know but that are not strictly necessary to appreciate the text. The ‘lattice-work screen’ that Amina peers through onto the street below is mashrabiyya, for example, a form of decorative turned wood that made it possible for women to see out of their houses without being seen in them. It will be familiar to anyone who knows the traditional areas of Cairo and other Arab cities.

  While the translators have made this novel available to English-speaking readers in such a way that the world it presents is neither unjustly naturalized nor exoticized, Arabic writing sometimes presents more difficult problems, as in the case of the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North, one of the most important written in Arabic in that turbulent decade. A paragraph from Denys Johnson-Davies’s translation reads:

  ‘You’re not only drunk but mad,’ said Mahjoub. ‘Mustafa Sa’eed is in fact the Prophet El-Khidr, suddenly making his appearance and as suddenly vanishing. The treasures that lie in this room are like those of King Solomon, brought here by genies, and you have the key to that treasure. Open, Sesame, and let’s distribute the gold and jewels to the people.’ Mahjoub was about to shout out and gather the people together had I not put my hand over his mouth. The next morning each of us woke up in his own house not knowing how he’d got there.14

  There is no explanatory material included with the translation, presumably because the translator wants it to stand on its own without support. Nevertheless, in this case the decision to present the text ‘as it is’ may have come at the price of full comprehension on the reader’s part. Season of Migration recounts the stories of an anonymous narrator and an enigmatic older man, Mustafa Sa’eed, both of whom have returned to village life in the Sudan following extended periods abroad, during which they were studying for higher degrees. Whereas the narrator at first believes that this experience has not changed him, and that he is as much at home in the village on his return as he was when he left, Mustafa Sa’eed appears to have had greater difficulty in integrating the two sides of his personality, that part of him that is Sudanese and that part of him acquired through education abroad in a foreign culture. At the point in the text from which this paragraph comes, Mustafa Sa’eed and the contents of his house are being discussed, Sa’eed being compared to the Prophet El-Khidr, a legendary figure who first appeared in the Qur’an and subsequently played a prominent part in various popular stories,15 and the contents of his house to the fabled treasure of the Biblical King Solomon, who, according to the version presented in the Qur’an, had power over the jinn.16 The story of the treasure of course comes from the story of ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ in The Arabian Nights, Ali Baba’s command ‘Open Sesame’ being familiar to generations of English pantomime-goers. In Arabic the command is ‘iftah ya sim sim’, meaning the same thing.17 The scene incidentally appeared for many years on the wall of one of the Cairo cafés in which Naguib Mahfouz used to hold his literary meetings.

  Some of this material might come to the minds of western readers reaching this passage, as it might do to Arab readers, but it is unlikely that all of it will. While Season of Migration, a novel that has its own fascinating rhythm, can probably manage to hurry the reader past such local difficulties without explanation on the translator’s part, this may not be the case for other novels and other novelists, perhaps particularly not for more recent works that have employed pre-modern Arab literary materials, or have used cultural references obscure even to speakers of Arabic. Here the problem is that readers are likely simply to get bored by texts they cannot understand, and such problems are only exacerbated in the case of modern Arabic poetry, much of which employs a quite different rhetoric, and addresses the reader in a quite different way, from, say, most contemporary English poetry. A novel like the Kitab al-tajalliyat by the contemporary Egyptian novelist Gamal al-Ghitany, for example, may well be almost unintelligible to western readers without a battery of footnotes, as its French translator has admitted, and even then there is the larger problem of appreciating the writer’s interest in his way of proceeding.18

  In addition to such problems of translation and presentation, there is also a particular problem that the Arabic language presents for any translator, and this perhaps goes some way towards explaining what can sometimes come across as the rather ‘stilted’ quality of even some of the best literary translations from Arabic. This problem is related to the diglossia of the Arabic language, in other words to the fact that the written and the spoken languages are very different from each other. Because of the way in which Arabic has developed, the written language has remained constant over time, with the result that, allowing for some changes in vocabulary and the simplification of style, the language of the Qur’an, a text first set down in the seventh century ce, is close to that of modern books and newspapers. This means that an educated Arab reader can read both materials with something like the same degree of facility. It goes without saying that such a situation is impossible to imagine for a language such as English, which achieved its modern form comparatively late and for which the equivalent seventh-century form might be the Anglo-Saxon used in Beowulf. Yet, while written Arabic has remained remarkably constant, and is constant from one end of the Arab world to the other, the spoken language has changed over time, and there is often a great distance in matters of vocabulary and grammatical structure between the spoken and written languages. The dialects of Arabic spoken in different parts of the Arab world are sometimes almost mutually unintelligible. Furthermore, the written and the spoken languages have different connotations: while the written language bespeaks a high level of education, the spoken language has people’s experience behind it. It is hard to imagine anyone telling a joke in ‘classical’ Arabic or even having a day-to-day conversation in it, which is why it is often fascinating to watch Arab television and note the speakers’ linguistic choices.

  This situation complicates literary expression in various ways. In the first place, there is the question of the appropriate language to use in literary texts. While no one supposes that people in real life express themselves quite in the way that characters do in novels, the historical development of the realist novel in Europe has nevertheless gone hand in hand with a desire to use the ‘actual language’ in literary texts, rather than the ‘artificial’ language associated with literature. This means that there has tended to be little or no stylistic distinction between direct or indirect speech in novels, making possible realist styles like free indire
ct discourse, in which the voice of the narrator mixes with the thoughts of the characters, or modernist styles such as stream of consciousness or internal monologue, in which the language of the narration is presumed to coincide with the actual thoughts of the characters.

  These styles are of course possible in Arabic narrative, and Mahfouz, for example, has used all of them, free indirect discourse in the Trilogy, and stream of consciousness and internal monologue in the shorter novels written in the 1960s. Yet, an Arab writer still has choices to make that can be avoided in English. Should the characters speak using the colloquial language they would actually use, for example, or should the novelist ‘translate’ their speech and thoughts up a peg or two in the interests of decorum? If the novelist does this, as convention demands, then the result can be a flattening out of the voices present in the novel. If the novelist does not do it, and uses the colloquial language instead, then readers not familiar with the dialect may not be able to understand what the characters are saying. There is the additional problem of how the ‘vernacular’ or ‘colloquial’ language, which almost by definition does not exist in written form, can properly be represented in writing. How should one spell it, for example? Moreover, an Arab writer choosing to write in the dialect might also be accused of offences ranging from undermining pan-Arab unity, since readers in one part of the Arab world will not be able to understand the writings of another if the dialect is used, to encouraging sloppy linguistic habits, since the vernacular obviously does not depend, unlike the standard language, on formal education.

  While an author’s choice of language is a fascinating subject in its own right, for the purposes of this book linguistic issues have only been referred to when they have some special importance. Mahfouz, for example, always used the written language, never the colloquial, and this choice seems to have had something to do with his conception of Arabic literature and the cultural mission of the writer as offering a model of correctness to his readers. This role was common to the writers of the nahda, or Arab renaissance, discussed in Chapter 2, who saw themselves as modernizing and reinvigorating the Arabic language as well as Arabic literature.19 Mahfouz’s fellow Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakim, on the other hand, was prepared to entertain the use of the colloquial, particularly since his preferred form of expression was drama: many people have thought there is something ridiculous in having characters from various walks of life all express themselves in formal speech. Al-Hakim’s solution was something he called the ‘third language’, a sort of ‘educated speech’ that could be read as either standard language or vernacular depending on the desire of the reader.20

  An author’s use of language can say something about his or her conception of literature and the audience he or she wishes to reach. While the use of the vernacular is not necessarily a wholly anti-elitist gesture, since the truly marginalized can neither read nor write, nodding in its direction can nevertheless function as an attack on literary hierarchies of ‘high’ or ‘low’ or on the division between the culture of the establishment and the culture of the masses. This is the case, for example, in its occasional use in stories by the Egyptian writer Youssef Idris, discussed in Chapter 3, or in the work of his compatriot Yahya al-Taher Abdullah. It can also serve as a way of asserting regional or national specificity. The novels of Tayeb Salih are full of the language of the Sudan, for example, though the grammar used is standard. The Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni and the Egyptian Nubian Haggag Oddoul, discussed in Chapter 6, have also made vernacular language a badge of regional identity against the standard language’s powerfully centralizing pull.

  A last issue to bear in mind when reading modern Arabic literature is the geographical spread of the Arab world and its division into the countries of the Mashraq, situated in the eastern Mediterranean and south-west Asia, and those of the Maghreb, situated in North Africa. The standard formula describing literary production in the Arab world, ‘Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Iraq reads’, is clearly only good for the Mashraq; in the Maghreb, Algiers has also ‘written’, as has Tunis or Casablanca, producing an Arabic literature in French following the independence of the countries of the Maghreb from France in the 1950s or early 60s. Algerian authors of the stature of Kateb Yacine, Mohamed Dib and Assia Djebar are not considered in this book, nor are Moroccans like Tahar Ben Jelloun, since they wrote, or write, in French, not Arabic. They are, however, all distinguished contributors to modern Arabic literature. Nevertheless, lines have to be drawn somewhere. Perhaps the modern literature of the Maghreb will be the subject of another book in this series. Naturally, there is also an Arabic literature written in Arabic in the countries of the Maghreb, leading figures including Tahir Wattar, whose novel The Earthquake is available in English, Waciny Laredj and Mohamed Choukri, who is one of the best-known Arab novelists internationally thanks to his novel For Bread Alone, introduced to western audiences by the American writer Paul Bowles (the French translation, intriguingly different from the English, is by Tahar Ben Jelloun).21 Nevertheless, this literature, too, must be considered as separate from the focus of this book, which is on the east of the Arab world.

  Two last points might be borne in mind when reading modern Arabic literature from a position outside the Arab world. The first of these has to do with Arab publishing, readership and, broadly speaking, the role that literature plays in Arab societies. The second concerns some contemporary western academic approaches to literature that may be relevant to reading modern Arabic literature.

  Unlike in western societies, where industry consolidation has become the norm, Arab publishing tends to be arranged more like British publishing before the Second World War, with many small houses producing specialized lists, some of them only numbering a handful of titles a year and these having limited distribution. Some of the most important Cairo publishers in literature and the humanities, for example, are small concerns, often run by their founders, though there are also some larger private-sector publishers and a handful of public-sector publishers in Cairo, a legacy of the Nasser-era nationalizations. This pattern of an assortment of small private-sector publishers, often no more than extensions of bookstores or private ventures by individuals, combined with a few larger private-sector concerns and an overbearing state sector is reproduced in many Arab countries.22

  In the formula quoted above, Cairo is imagined as originating literary works that are then printed and distributed in Beirut and read in Iraq. However, this has become less true, chiefly because the reasons that once made Beirut an attractive centre for publishers – the comparative freedom of the Lebanese capital when compared with the rest of the Arab world and its links to wider markets – now also obtain in other Arab capitals. Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the years of UN sanctions against the country before it, there is now no publishing industry in Iraq and few possibilities for the population to obtain books. However, western capitals, among them London, have emerged as centres of Arab publishing, and it is not uncommon to find works of modern literature that would perhaps in previous years have been published in Beirut now published either in Beirut and in London, or in London alone. The development of the Internet has also led to changes in Arab publishing. While the distribution of books in Arabic is still extraordinarily poor, books published in one Arab country often being unavailable in another, the advent of the Internet has meant that readers who have access to a computer and a bank account can in theory order books from a Beirut- or London-based online bookseller. Even so, for most people the only occasion on which anything like the full range of Arab publishing is open to display or purchase is during one of the Arab world’s many book fairs, like the one that takes place in Cairo every January. A European event is the Salon Euro-Arabe du Livre, held biannually at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

  Such considerations have meant that while it is usually not difficult for Arab authors to be published – quite a few publish their books themselves – it is much more difficult to gain a public profile or
readership, and it is almost impossible to make a living from writing books. As a result, Arab authors almost always have full-time jobs, often in the large bureaucracies that are a feature of Arab countries, reserving their writing for their spare time. It is well known, for example, that Mahfouz kept a steady job almost up to the end of his life, first as a bureaucrat and then as a newspaper commentator, and many memoirs by Arab writers complain about both the need to earn a living and the absence of public interest in their literary work. The temptation is always strong to take some bureaucratic job, which can have disastrous effects on an author’s writing.

  Today, however, these things may be changing, the traditionally penniless Arab literary world having received cheering injections of money from the oil-rich Gulf countries. Sometimes lucrative pan-Arab literary awards have replaced fading state patronage in countries such as Egypt, and regional outlets in the shape of the dozens of magazines and newspapers now put out in the Gulf countries can also provide Arab authors with ready cash and even careers, and their appearance has given rise to publishing strategies that would have seemed quite foreign to an ‘old-fashioned’ author like Mahfouz. While in the past Arab authors published where they could, for example in Beirut to escape harsher conditions at home, today a more usual strategy might be to approach the problem of making a living from books almost in the manner of a European author, serializing a novel in a newspaper in one country, publishing a short story in a magazine in another, and then bringing out the novel or the short stories in book form, which in most cases will make the author far less money. Such strategies have the advantage that an author can reach multiple audiences through them, and it is always possible that the readers of newspapers or magazines may be tempted to purchase the later book, if they can get hold of it.