A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  Nevertheless, though a life spent looking back on a lost homeland cannot be a satisfying one, trying to forget that homeland, or never having had it, are not solutions either. Barghouti reflects on the experience of Palestinians, born in exile, who have no memories of home. While his own memories may be distorted, and a habit of looking back on loss may have ‘forced us to remain with the old’ at the expense of the new, at least he has memories of a childhood home, a ‘first well’ in Jabra’s terms, to which in adult life he can return. Israel, on the other hand, ‘has created generations without a place whose colours, smells, and sounds they can remember: a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles.’ The occupation of the West Bank in particular ‘has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved: distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror.’

  Finally, no account of modern Palestinian literature would be complete without mention of Palestine’s poets, at least one of whom, Mahmoud Darwish, has an international reputation. While modern Palestinian poetry can scarcely be understood without reference to modern Arabic poetry more generally, its specific feature is its ‘Palestinian’ character. This can lead to a temptation for Palestinian poets to write about Palestine at the expense of everything else, or to present themselves as ‘spokesmen’ for the people from whom they come.

  Darwish himself has perhaps not been immune from this temptation, the danger of which is that it can lead to poetry drawing on stock motifs. In the Palestinian case the dangers of political ‘platform poetry’ are acute, and they are referred to by Barghouti in I Saw Ramallah. While Palestinians can scarcely ignore politics, he says, this does not ‘justify the overt political approach of Palestinian poetry, in the homeland or the Diaspora. Comedy is also necessary … Our tragedy cannot produce only tragic writing. We are also living in a time of historical and geographical farce.’ This was also Habiby’s insight, and it led him to write Saeed the Pessoptimist. However, Barghouti goes on to suggest that ‘the political approach’, if this is understood to mean writing only about politics, or, worse, being close to politicians, is all the more dangerous for poets in that poetry naturally entails ‘displacement’. The poet strives ‘to escape the dominant language to a language that speaks itself for the first time’, which can mean writing about almost anything but a narrow conception of politics.

  12. Mahmoud Darwish, national poet of Palestine

  In his best work Darwish has explored similar issues. Born in 1941 in a village in Galilee, he and his family were forced into exile in 1948, and he has lived since in various Arab capitals, including Cairo and Beirut. He has been the editor of an important literary review, al-Karmel. Darwish’s poetry can be read in various English translations,16 and it contains textbook examples of poems of Palestinian loss and exile, pieces such as ‘We Travel Like Other People’ (‘We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere’) or ‘Athens Airport’ (‘Athens Airport changes its people every day. But we have stayed put … waiting for the sea’) from the 1986 collection Fewer Roses, capturing such experience. However, his work also contains material that attempts larger reflections, including an ambitious memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness, written after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut.17

  This book, a long work of ‘prose poetry’, connects the author’s experience of being trapped in his flat in war-torn Beirut to the fate of the Palestinian refugees around him, who, deprived of work and equal rights in their host country of Lebanon, are seen as the problem, ‘making trouble, violating the rules of hospitality,’ and now allegedly responsible for the war. ‘Why don’t you go back to your own country?’ he is asked. Israel will then have less reason to invade. Making coffee in his flat, walking through the streets, visiting friends as the bombs rain down, what, Darwish asks, is the role of the Palestinian poet under such circumstances? ‘Palestine has been transformed from a birthplace to a slogan,’ and one that all too often does not even serve the Palestinians’ interests, now that Beirut, ‘birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who know no other cradle’, is being evacuated under the impact of Israeli bombs. ‘No one wants to forget. More accurately, no one wants to be forgotten,’ he writes, and as a result he chooses to ‘join battle’, in his translator’s words, ‘against oblivion’, producing a memory for forgetfulness that is ‘not chronicle, journey, history, memoir, fiction, myth, or allegory, but all of them together’.

  Darwish’s work can be understood as an act of memory and a set of meditations on the role and responsibilities of the Palestinian poet. But he himself has been ambivalent about that role, and he has criticized his earlier poems for being too direct, too crude, insufficiently poetic and too rhetorical. Darwish, in fact, is a man of enormous literary culture, and he has reflected deeply about the relationship between Palestinian poetry and Arabic poetry and between Arabic poetry and world poetry, as well as about his responsibilities to himself, to his audiences and to Palestine. Reading a recent collection of interviews with Darwish, one is reminded strongly of W. B. Yeats, whose developing responsibilities to Ireland similarly lay at the root of much of his poetry.18 Being the ‘Palestinian national poet’ is an enormous responsibility calling for a certain distance if one is not to be imprisoned in the role. Less well known, but well worth reading, is Samih al-Qasim, who, born a few years earlier than Darwish (in 1939), nevertheless has not achieved anything like the latter’s international reputation. Like Habiby, he has spent his life in Israel. Al-Qasim writes short, pointed lyrics, such as ‘Travel Tickets’, which perhaps well summarizes the hopes and fears of a whole generation:

  On the day you kill me

  You’ll find in my pocket

  Travel tickets

  To peace,

  To the fields and the rain,

  To people’s conscience.

  Don’t waste the tickets.

  Disillusion and Experiment

  Shortly after the defeat of the Arab forces in the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, a defeat dubbed the Naksah (‘setback’) in Arabic and ushering in a period of sometimes agonized self-reflection, Naguib Mahfouz published a collection of short stories entitled At the Bus Stop. The title story sets the tone. A group of people are waiting for a bus in Cairo, when bizarre, and increasingly violent, events start to take place around them. Are these events being staged as part of a film, and, if so, where are the cameras and the director? A thief runs past; there is a car crash; a herd of camels and a group of tourists pass by, like images taken from a dream, or from a spectacle that is taking place without reference to those watching it. When the people at the bus stop ask the police to intervene, the police turn their guns on them and shoot them.1

  The story might be taken as a bleak verdict on events in the Arab world in the 1960s, but it is by no means alone for that. Regimes across the Arab world had failed to keep their promises with regard either to development goals or to greater democracy and civil liberties. Nasser’s Egypt, which had represented wider hopes across the Arab world, had turned into a police state at home, characterized by fear and a personality cult of an egregious kind. Abroad, the Arab world, with the exception of Lebanon and some other countries, had developed a reputation as a region characterized by dictatorship, together with failing development goals and, often, war and poverty. To cap it all, many of the Arab countries had now suffered a disastrous military defeat by Israel, revealing corruption and incompetence on a wide scale. Aside from the bitter reflections of Mahfouz, the work of two Egyptian writers, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitany, provide contrasting responses to this situation.

  Ibrahim is one of the contemporary Arab world’s best-known writers and a prominent representative of the ‘generation of the 1960s’, in other words of the generation of Arab writers that started to publish in the 1960s or that adopted the label of ‘sixties writers’. For one critic, this was the generation that began to see itself in terms of revolt, sixties writers t
ypically considering ‘themselves as experimentalists in their own right [and] striking out on their own’.2 For another, the writers of the generation of the 1960s, including Ibrahim, are concerned to ‘parody and satirize power’, being engaged in a ‘rereading and rewriting of history in which both writer and reader are implicated’.3 In his first book, The Smell of It,4 the one that made his reputation, Ibrahim uses a quotation from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as his epigraph: ‘this race and this country and this life produced me … and I shall express myself as I am’.

  Stephen Dedalus’s truculence and independence of mind, as well as his insistence that he, as much as the sundry Irish nationalists, Gaelic revivalists and Roman Catholic reactionaries around him, has the right to represent his country, provide a kind of model for Ibrahim, apparently exasperated, like Joyce’s Stephen, by aspects of the society that has formed him. Ibrahim is on record as saying that his aim in this novel was to record ‘reality as it is, without any attempt at interpretation or commentary … simply to record without concern [either] for social conventions … [or] for literary conventions.’ Like Joyce, he experienced problems with the authorities as a result, the complete text of The Smell of It only appearing in Arabic in 1986, some twenty years after the publication of the original, bowdlerized edition and long after the appearance of the English translation.5

  Born in Cairo in 1937, Ibrahim became a writer and political activist at an early age, and he was arrested by the Nasser regime in 1959 and kept in detention until 1964. Since then he has committed himself to writing. In The Smell of It the anonymous narrator recounts the mundane events of his life following his release from prison in a stripped-down prose that has been deliberately voided of affect. He gets up; he reads the papers; he buys some household items and takes the tram into the city centre; he tries to write; he smokes a cigarette; and he masturbates. Literary writing is a particularly complicated activity. Not only is it something that can only be done in breaks snatched between other things, but there is also the question of what to write about and for whom. Rather like in the stories collected in Joyce’s Dubliners, the tone of this novel is one of frustration and paralysis, with earlier models of what a writer should be, or what he should write about, appearing as a kind of mockery. ‘I seized hold of the pen but was unable to write,’ the narrator records. ‘I took up one of the magazines. There was an article about literature and the sort of things one should write about. The writer said that Maupassant said that the artist must create a world that is simpler, more beautiful than ours. He said that literature should be optimistic, throbbing with the most beautiful of sensations … I put my hand down to my thigh and started playing with myself. At last I gave a deep sigh. Tired, I sprawled back in my chair, staring vacantly as the paper in front of me. After a while I got up and … went to the bathroom.’

  Writing as a form of masturbation is a bleak outlook for a professional writer to take, even if it is one that here at least has the virtue of being true to life, unlike the contrasting form attributed to Maupassant. Ibrahim’s writing from the 1960s employs a kind of ‘exaggerated realism’, ‘hyper-realism’ it is sometimes called, being concerned to capture the texture of life as for him it really is in all its boredom and sterility. However, in his later works, Ibrahim has embarked on what is in some respects a more positive literary programme, and works such as The Committee and Zaat 6, though they continue the literary agenda begun so strikingly in The Smell of It, are directed as much at suggesting other possible ways of apprehending reality as at simply rendering how it is in all its banal detail.

  The Committee, for example, recalls the works of Kafka in its presentation of an individual, a writer, who is confronted by an omniscient state that only reveals itself from time to time and then only in the form of a ‘Committee’ made up of eminent personalities. Following an initial investigation, the Committee’s members ask the narrator of this novel to identify something that embodies ‘the notable and timeless concepts of this century’s civilization’. He answers ‘Coca-Cola’. Not only has this product managed to assert itself on a global scale, he explains, ‘transforming workers into machines, consumers into numbers, and countries into markets’, but it has also exerted considerable political influence. Having explained the influence this product has been able to exert in the ‘greatest and richest country in the world’ (the USA), the narrator asks the Committee to ‘imagine how dominant it is in third world countries, especially in our poor little country’ (Egypt).

  Unimpressed, the Committee commissions the narrator to produce a work on the ‘greatest contemporary Arab luminary’. This commission, dreaded at first, turns out to be unexpectedly interesting, and it begins to absorb the narrator’s attention. In particular, it helps him identify the ways in which the apparently unconnected phenomena around him are in fact connected at a deeper level, often seeming to converge on the mysterious figure of ‘the Doctor’, who is the subject of the narrator’s research. Rather like the ubiquitous figure of Zelig invented by Woody Allen in his 1983 film of the same name, the Doctor turns out to be both at the centre of events and marginal to them, appearing at the edges of official photographs, or in the detail of news reports, but seldom if ever occupying centre stage.7 Yet, for the narrator the Doctor is the most important Arab personality of the age because, like Coca-Cola, he is the one that best represents it in its larger character as well as in its smaller details.

  The question of what form the report should take preoccupies the narrator. Should it be a conventional biography, starting with the Doctor’s birth and aiming to reconstruct his career? This would have the disadvantage of missing out the ‘hidden relationships and connections among a collection of strange and diverse phenomena’ that his research has begun to reveal. ‘Even if the Doctor doesn’t bake the pie,’ one slogan reminds him, ‘he’s first in line for a slice.’ Rather like the case of the narrator’s identification of Coca-Cola as the most important representative of the century’s civilization, the Doctor’s ubiquity is not in question. It is how to make sense of it that exercises the narrator. The Committee asks him how he has managed to find out so much about the Doctor, greeting his answer ‘from the newspapers’ with incredulous laughter, since the news media serve in this novel as much to conceal reality as to represent it. However, this is in fact the truth, even if the narrator has had to read the newspapers in a particular way, rearranging cuttings from them in order to constellate events differently from the way in which they are presented in the standard reports, and producing collage-like assemblages of events that invite different interpretations from those officially on offer.

  Ibrahim has long had an interest in what gets cut out of standard ways of seeing things – possibly because the censor’s scissors have so often snipped at his own texts – and writing for him has increasingly become a form of reconstitution, either setting back together what has been snipped apart, or rearranging the way in which events are customarily seen to allow hidden patterns to be perceived. Procedures of this sort have a distinguished pedigree: Brecht, for example, had hoped both to be able to rearrange reality in order to reveal its deeper structure and to encourage an active habit of mind on the part of his audience through his use of ‘epic theatre’, which also cuts up narrative and imagines different possible interpretations of events.8 Ibrahim’s interest in such procedures, hinted at in The Committee, is taken furthest in his later novel Zaat. In this novel Ibrahim cuts up and rearranges standard representations of reality by inserting bits and pieces from newspapers into the fictional narrative. He then invites readers to make their own connections between the materials he has assembled and to draw their own conclusions.

  Zaat, which means ‘self’ in Arabic, is an ordinary woman, so ordinary, in fact, that she is positively dull, and the narrator of the novel is not averse to treating her humdrum, mostly uncomprehending life with heavy-handed irony. Yet, like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, the petit-bourgeois protagonists of his novel o
f the same name, Zaat is important for her typicality rather than for anything special about her, even if her name also parodies that of a princess in a classical Arabic epic, al-Amira zaat al-Himah. Asking himself where to begin in finding the meaning of such a life, the narrator decides to start at the very beginning, when Zaat emerged, bloody and screaming, from her mother’s womb. However, the narrative only really gets underway when Zaat is engaged to be married sometime in the 1960s, in other words at the time when Ibrahim himself began his writing career during the period of officially socialist, state-led development.

  Both for Zaat and for her future husband, Abdel-Maguid Hassan Khamees, shortened to less of a mouthful as Maguid, the 1960s seem to offer unprecedented possibilities for people from the developing middle classes. There are new products, new places to live, and new forms of communication to enjoy, notably television, and before her marriage Zaat spends many evenings seated before the latter with her fiancé, carefully chaperoned by her mother. However, even during this period of actual and official optimism ominous warning signs are not in short supply. When Zaat is obliged to get a job, for example, since she has no connections or relatives in high places, she is shunted into a lowly part of the state bureaucracy at one of Cairo’s nationalized newspapers, where she works in the ‘Department of News Monitoring and Assessment’. Here she is left much to her own devices, since her boss, knowing what is expected of him, simply submits the same reports over and over again, only altering the dates. As one president gives way to another, marked by a change in the official photographs on the office walls, Zaat and her husband’s standard of living begins to fall as the country’s exploding population starts to overwhelm the city streets, inflation begins to erode salaries, and once gleaming new apartments sink amid the piles of rubbish that no one any longer bothers to collect. Meanwhile, new and exciting consumer goods start to appear on the market, many priced at several times an annual salary, and while the lot of average Egyptians, such as Zaat, declines, huge fortunes start to be made. The streets fill with expensive imported cars, and evidence of conspicuous consumption spills out from the proliferating five-star hotels.