A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  The parallels between the fictional history presented in Munif’s novels and the real history of Arabia and the Gulf are explored in detail by Hafez in the essay quoted from above, together with the part Britain, and then the United States, played in it. Both Khureybit and Hamilton have historical parallels. In his final works, Munif turned his attention to Iraq, examining the country’s nineteenth-century history when it was a province of the Ottoman Empire in the novel Land of Darkness and focusing on what for him was the nefarious role played in it by the British. In Notes on History and Resistance, a non-fiction work, he explored twentieth-century Iraqi history from the 1917 British occupation to the present day. In this book he also criticizes the actions of the United States in the country and those of the post-2003 Iraqi governments, in his view ‘a collection of stalls selling lies and illusions.’25 Munif is also the author of a memoir of a childhood spent in the Jordanian capital Amman.26

  As well as seeing major achievements in the novel and short story, post-war decades also saw a revival and transformation in the fortunes of Arabic poetry. However, while prose writing was dominated by Egyptian writers, developments in poetry tended to take place elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Lebanon.

  Poetry, as suggested in Chapter 2 above, has long been considered the diwan al-‘arab, the ‘record of the Arabs’, and it did not remain aloof from the changes sweeping the Arab world at the time of the Arab renaissance, or nahda. Yet, if the post-war period saw widespread demands for the root-and-branch renovation of Arab societies, leading to political change in many of them and a new conception of prose literature in the vanguard of that change, such demands were perhaps all the more keenly felt in poetry. Whereas prose literature had at best a limited rhetorical role, poetry could be used to address mass audiences directly (though novels, suitably adapted, could still reach large audiences when adapted for films). Partly as a result of this, post-war Arabic poetry saw innovation both in formal terms, leading to the eclipse of traditional metres and verse forms, and in terms of diction, which now became less elaborate and closer to the language that people actually spoke, if still not identical with it. Both these changes reflected changing conceptions of the role of the poet in society and the nature of the poet’s audience. Moreover, they reflected, too, a greater openness to European poetry and particularly to the kind of innovations that had earlier been made in it, some Arabic poetry from the 1950s onwards being influenced either by the fragmentation and wide-ranging cultural reference to be found in the works of T. S. Eliot, or by the dislocations of language – Rimbaud’s dérèglement de tous les sens – familiar from modern French poetry.

  These themes can be seen in the ‘free verse’ movement that dominated post-war Arabic poetry, first in Iraq and then in Lebanon. There was, first of all, the rejection of past poetic practice, with poets such as Nazik al-Mala’ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab in Iraq, and the poets associated with the reviews Shi’r (‘Poetry’) and al-Adab (‘Literatures’) in Lebanon, casting off inherited forms and diction in favour of poetry that was more direct and could speak to large audiences and not just to the elites that might traditionally have interested themselves in literature. Together with this emphasis on a new language and forms for poetry, ‘freeing’ it from the traditional constraints of Arabic verse, there was a call for subject matter that was more engaged with social themes, even if the poet’s individual voice was often as much in evidence as ever, some post-war poets continuing to achieve ‘celebrity’ status across the Arab world. Poetry was now often seen as a natural part of a ‘committed’ literature calling for social change. Finally, there were calls for the new poetry to have different ideas about itself, sometimes pointing in the direction of semantic investigation, as in the poetry of the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Sa’ad, who has taken the pen name ‘Adonis’ and has been influenced by European, and especially French, ideas, sometimes being more explicitly political and capable of rousing large audiences, as in early works by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish or the Syrian Nizar Qabbani. New poems by the latter two poets, often coming after major public events, have been greeted in the Arab world as events in themselves.

  All this is a far cry from poetry considered as a form of linguistic ingenuity, or poetry as a form of aristocratic entertainment, with the poet acting as an ornament of the patron’s circle.

  While we do not have space here to look in detail at the Arabic poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, anyone wanting guidance should perhaps be familiar with the work of certain ‘canonical’ modern Arab poets.27 Al-Sayyab would certainly be one of these, having fashioned what one critic calls a poetry of ‘myth and … archetype’ that suggests, something as Eliot had done in The Waste Land, that rebirth could only come from the ‘aridity of Arab life’ in a way ‘analogous to the falling of rain over a parched land’. It is to poems such as ‘In the Arab Maghreb’, written at the time of the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s, that ‘al-Sayyab owes his fame and supremacy in modern Arabic poetry,’ as well as to perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Song of the Rain’. Al-Sayyab’s compatriots, al-Malai’ka and al-Bayati, are also securely in the canon, the latter sounding much like Ezra Pound in calling for the ‘crushing’ of ‘Romantic sentimentality, Classical rigidity, oratorical poetry and the literature of ivory towers’ and the fashioning of a radically new poetry.28

  From the Lebanese group and mostly Levantine poets publishing in the Shi’r and al-Adab reviews, Adonis calls for special mention. This poet, impossible to summarize, sees poetry as ‘a challenge to logic … a change in the order of things, a rebellion against traditional forms and the poetic order’, pointing to the influence on him of French ideas of the poète maudite and the poet’s ‘revolutionary’ role, at least with regard to language. Adonis has set out his ideas in essay form, for example in his Introduction to Arab Poetics,29 which argues for a ‘modernism’ in Arabic poetry that looks both to classical Arab models and to modern European, especially French, poetry. It imagines modern Arabic poetry as being in a state of permanent revolt against ‘traditionalist mentality’. A rather different poet, less obviously associated with the manifestos coming out of Beirut, is Qabbani (d. 1998), a poet who did more than most to bring the language of poetry close to the standard language, perhaps accounting for the popularity of his lyric poems and political pieces like ‘Footnotes to the Book of Defeat’, written in the wake of the 1967 war with Israel, and ‘When will the Death of the Arabs be Announced?’, a response to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. There are also Mahmoud Darwish and the Palestinian poets, whose work is discussed in Chapter 4.30

  Your eyes are a forest of palms at dusk.

  Or two balconies before the moon’s departure.

  When your eyes smile the vines bring forth leaves,

  And the lights dance like the moon on the river,

  Trembling under the oars, softly in the dusk,

  As if stars are glittering in the depths …

  And then sink in a cloud of transparent sorrow

  Like the sea open-handed, cloaked by night,

  With winter warmth and autumn’s trembling;

  Like birth and death, darkness and light.

  My soul wakes to a tremulous weeping,

  A wild rapture embracing the sky,

  Like a child’s ecstacy when he fears the moon,

  As if the arches of clouds drink in the mist

  And drop by drop it melts into rain.

  The children shouting in the vineyards

  And the stillness of sparrows in the trees tickled by

  The rainsong …

  Rain

  Rain

  Rain.

  10. From Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s poem ‘Song of the Rain’, translated by Mursi Saad El-Din

  11. The Syrian poet Adonis, one of the last century’s great experimentalists

  Naturally, there are far more poets than these in the post-war canon, even for the restricted period considered here. Egyptian readers
, for example, brought up on the works of Egyptian poets in both the classical and colloquial languages, such as Salah Abd al-Sabur, Ahmad Abd al-Mu’ti Hegazi and Amal Dunqul writing in the former, and Salah Jahine, Fu’ad Haddad, Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi in the latter, might be surprised to read one critic’s estimate31 that despite its ‘long critical experience’ the country failed to ‘produce … a poet great enough to utilize all the knowledge gained’, unlike in the ‘poetic stronghold’ of Iraq.

  In poetry, as in politics, there has long been a rivalry for leadership in the Arab world.

  Occupation and Diaspora:

  the Literature of Modern Palestine

  Modern Palestine has given rise to a literature that is in some respects unique in the Arab world, and Palestinian writers and intellectuals have enjoyed an influence in Arab letters out of all proportion to the country’s size, matching the role that Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have played in Arab affairs since the end of the Second World War. That much at least, lifted from the introduction to this book, is well known and relatively uncontroversial. However, the fact that modern Palestinian literature is in the main not politically propagandistic can be surprising to those who do not know it well. While Palestinian literature cannot help but be politically aware, its relation to politics is usually oblique.

  Palestinian writers have tended to stand back from what has seemed to be the permanent state of crisis that has enveloped their country since at least the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, mostly choosing to address the human consequences of this situation. They have emphasized the suffering that this crisis has brought to individuals from every walk of life, sometimes employing a black sense of humour to do so. They have also explored what it might mean to be identified as a ‘Palestinian writer,’ particularly when Palestinians have long been divided between those living ‘within’, whether in the Occupied Territories or in Israel proper, and those living ‘without’, in the Arab countries or further afield. Should Palestinian writers write about Palestine at the expense of everything else, aiming to serve as ‘spokesmen’ for the people from whom they come? Or should they have the same kind of loyalties as any other kind of literary writer, first and foremost to their writing? Questions of this sort are explored in this chapter, which gives an overview of main themes in modern Palestinian literature, including Palestinian historical experience, the fact of dispossession and exile, and the possibility of return.

  The declaration of the state of Israel in May 1948 divided the British mandate territory of Palestine into three parts. There was, first of all, the part of it that became Israel, and most of the Palestinian refugees forced out by the violence that accompanied the declaration came from here. An estimated three quarters of a million of them poured into camps in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, or into those parts of the former mandate territory that were ceded either to Jordan or to Egypt, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively. These areas now made up the second and third parts of what had until then been one Arab country. The experience of 1948 and its after-effects, whether in the bitterness of dispossession and exile or in the new problems that arose for the Arab citizens of the new state of Israel, henceforth became leading themes for generations of Palestinian writers.1

  One of the best-known of these is Ghassan Kanafani, a writer, journalist and political activist who was himself caught up in the 1948 exodus from Palestine. Like many others in similar circumstances Kanafani lived an unstable life, living and working by turns in Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon and finally becoming a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the political factions that emerged in the 1960s. He was assassinated in Beirut in 1972. Kanafani’s literary work, collected in various volumes of short stories published in the 1960s and several novels, captures Palestinian life in exile in the decades after 1948, notably in the novellas Men in the Sun and All That’s Left to You.2

  Men in the Sun is Kanafani’s best-known work, and it is probably also one of the best-known pieces of modern Palestinian literature. In it, he describes the attempt of four Palestinians to cross the border from Iraq into neighbouring Kuwait in search of work. The latter country, experiencing an economic boom as a result of oil, is in need of cheap labour. However, the Palestinians, being stateless, do not have the necessary entry papers, and they are forced to fall back on one of the human traffickers that ply the desert roads between the two countries. ‘A man can collect money in the twinkling of an eye in Kuwait,’ one of the four assures himself, having first made the long desert crossing from Jordan to Iraq and now waiting to be smuggled across the border into Kuwait. Before he can collect that money, however, he must make the crossing, and as is often the case with such operations, extortion, or worse, is the norm. There are horrifying stories of Palestinians being abandoned in the desert by unscrupulous traffickers, who leave them to die under the baking sun.

  The four eventually meet a lorry driver who agrees to take them across the border in exchange for five dinars, considerably less than the standard fee. The plan is for them to hide in the lorry’s tank as it crosses the border (it is a water-tanker), re-emerging from the stifling heat inside once safely past the border controls. All goes well until the driver is held up at a border post, and his human cargo suffocate before he is able to release them. As he drives around the outskirts of Kuwait City looking for somewhere to dump the bodies a question comes to his mind: ‘why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you bang on the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?’

  Men in the Sun presents the plight of Palestinians unable to find work in the sometimes appalling conditions of the refugee camps, or, legally, elsewhere. All That’s Left to You presents a variation on this theme, ‘what is left’ to the characters in this story being either poverty as refugees in the Gaza Strip, or death while trying to cross into Jordan. Like Men in the Sun, the story employs several narrators, and it is told from multiple points of view, including that of the surrounding desert. Also like Men in the Sun, it captures the ‘balance sheet of remnants, the balance sheet of losses, the balance sheet of death’ that lies in wait for Palestinians living as refugees in the camps and overtaken by feelings of frustration and bitterness. This half-life is buoyed up only by thoughts of escape or of return to a homeland that has now itself been absorbed by Israel.

  For Hamid, the story’s protagonist, sixteen years of living as a refugee in Gaza have brought only bitterness, and he resolves to make the twelve-hour desert crossing to Jordan. For his sister Maryam, life in the camps has brought other pressures, and she feels obliged to give up hopes of a better life and to settle instead for the one she has, deciding to marry Zakaria despite the latter’s reputation as a collaborator. Hamid condemns her for this, all that’s left for her in his eyes being shame. ‘The slut couldn’t wait,’ he comments. ‘She came to me with a child throbbing in the womb. And the father? That dog Zakaria.’ One interesting feature of this story is its focus on a woman’s frustration, and not just a man’s, and this is told through the ebbing away, over time, of a young woman’s hopes of marriage. ‘Every morning, as I changed,’ Maryam reflects, ‘the clock would sound its melancholy chime.’ Marriage to Zakaria seems to offer her some hope of a future, since there is no other form of escape.

  Kanafani’s work deals with the lives of Palestinian refugees in the decades after 1948, presenting an account of the results of dispossession and exile. Another writer presenting this experience is Emile Habiby, though his work is very different from Kanafani’s, and it is possibly unique in its focus on the Arab citizens of Israel rather than on the Palestinian refugees. These people, the ‘Israeli Arabs’, are composed of Palestinians who remained within the borders of Israel after that state’s declaration. Habiby, born in 1922, was himself a leading member of them, becoming both a well-known journalist (editor of El-Itchad from 1972 to 1989) and a member of the Israeli Knesset (1951–1972 Communist Party List). His best-known
work, the strangely titled Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist,3 mixes pessimism with optimism about the Israeli Arabs’ situation, hence the novel’s title. So bizarre can this situation seem that Saeed, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry.

  Written in short sections, the book purports to be the story of Saeed’s life, beginning with his ‘claim to have met creatures from outer space’ and a ‘report [that] his life in Israel was all due to the munificence of an ass’. Yet, though employing a form of black humour for which Habiby became famous, the book touches on serious themes, such as the persistence of Palestinian memory despite attempts to uproot it and the connections between Palestinian history and the wider history of the Arabs. Indeed, Palestine, Habiby emphasizes, is not just a Palestinian concern. It is also an Arab one, and its history is a part of that of the wider Arab world. ‘Take Acre, for example,’ Saeed’s teacher instructs him. This ‘is not a new city’ but instead is one that has a long history behind it, which, until recently, was part of the history of the Arabs. In the medieval period the city often changed hands – when the Crusaders conquered it, for example, or when it was liberated by Saladin after the battle of Hittin (1187) – and it has continued to do so up until the present. However, the important thing, Saeed’s teacher tells him, is not the fact that Acre, like the rest of the region, has a colourful history of conquest and counter-conquest behind it, but rather that the conquerors, whoever they may be, tend to ‘consider as true history only what they have themselves fabricated.’ This entails a need to put together an alternative history, which is that of the conquered. While Palestinian villages in Israel have been demolished or renamed in an attempt to deny the Arab history of the area, this does not mean that the memory of them has been lost. On the contrary, memory – history – returns under the most unlikely circumstances, as it does in Saeed’s narrative when people vie with each other to give the names of their obliterated villages. ‘Please do not expect me, my dear sir, after all this time, to remember the names of all the villages laid waste to which these figures made claim,’ says Saeed ironically, having just listed them. ‘We of Haifa used to know more about the villages of Scotland than we did about those of Galilee,’ used, that is, until they are reminded of them in Habiby’s novel.