A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  While Jahine and Haddad died in the 1980s, Nigm and al-Abnoudi, their heirs, are very much alive, and reading them is an invigorating experience for foreign readers, used, perhaps, to a different idea of the poet and of the poet’s audience. Both men made their names through performance poetry written in the colloquial language, and their appeal is to an audience that might not have much time for the formal language or difficulty of ‘high-brow’ poets like Matar. Much of their work has been set to music as songs. Nigm, in particular, became a minor celebrity thanks to his performances of poetry containing often scurrilous satire, these being circulated, samizdat fashion, on tape cassette. A performance of work by al-Abnoudi can have an atmosphere more familiar from a sports event than from a poetry reading, which in European countries tend to be sedate, almost apologetic affairs. Nigm has identified himself with the ‘ibn al-balad’, the perpetual underdog or ‘salt of the earth’, on whose behalf he claims to speak, and visiting him in the Cairo district of al-Darb al-Ahmar in the 1990s was quite unlike visiting a European poet of comparable fame, or, indeed, like visiting one of Nigm’s own fellow poets, for example at their offices at al-Ahram. Nigm did not have a telephone, and it was necessary to track his movements from street vendors on the way. He was friendly and affable, though not particularly interested in receiving visitors, especially foreigners with whom communication tends to be limited.24

  One has the feeling, visiting Nigm or attending one of al-Abnoudi’s poetry readings, that theirs is a genuinely popular poetry. There are also traditions of vernacular poetry outside Egypt, for example in Iraq, where one of the best-known vernacular poets is Muzaffar al-Nawwab (b. 1934), who has also written poetry with a directly political content.25

  Finally, a new generation of poets emerged in the 1990s whose work is also still under-represented in translation. These poets, ‘rebels’ according to their translator Mohamed Enani, have ‘rejected the idea of serious art and [embraced] an eclectic mix of cultural input[s].’ They have a marginal position with regard to the cultural establishment, shunning publication in mainstream reviews and setting up independent magazines instead with names like al-Garad (‘locusts’), al-Kitaba al-Ukhra (‘alternative writing’) and al-Khitab al-Hamishy (‘marginal discourse’), in which they publish material that marks out new territory in the manner of any avant-garde. Enani’s introduction to this material is perhaps more eloquent than any statement by a foreign writer: these poets’ ‘modes of statement’, he says, ‘are deliberately anti-Arabic’, indicating a desire to break with certain ideas of tradition. Their poems, ‘anti-cooperative’ and written in a ‘private language’, can leave their readers at sea.26 All these qualities are shared with parallel developments in prose writing, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  This chapter would not be complete without some account of the drama, which now began to build upon the traditions established by al-Hakim. Whatever other qualities the latter may have had, modesty seems not to have been one of them. He was given, for example, to pointing out that the lack of a tradition of dramatic writing in Arabic presented Arab dramatists with special difficulties, obliging him ‘to undertake in thirty years a trip on which the dramatic literature of other languages had spent about two thousand years.’27 Al-Hakim’s play People of the Cave, a version of the Qur’anic story of the Sleepers of Ephesus, was greeted on its publication in 1933 as ‘the first work in Arabic literature that may be properly called drama’ by no less a critic than Taha Hussein, and it bears witness to al-Hakim’s determination to make drama into a ‘serious branch of literature’ and not just a form of entertainment. Yet, while al-Hakim was perhaps almost alone in his endeavours until the 1950s, from this decade on striking developments in drama began to take place across the Arab world, a particularly talented new generation of playwrights emerging in Egypt and swiftly followed by developments in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.

  Theatre, unlike other forms of literature, depends upon the work of other people besides the author. It also depends upon suitable institutions. When al-Hakim started writing plays, there were few suitably trained actors, directors or theatre staff, and there was no state support for the theatre. This gave rise to the myth that his plays were part of a ‘theatre of the mind’, being unsuitable, or not meant, for acting, whereas in fact the plays could not be acted because the infrastructure was not in place to stage them. From the 1950s onwards, however, the state both in Egypt and in other Arab countries began to play a role in supporting ‘serious’ theatre, and by 1966 there were ten state companies working out of nine theatres in Cairo alone. These addressed an audience that had got used to viewing theatre as a form of ‘ersatz parliament’, in other words as a place for the ventilation of social and political ideas.28

  M. M. Badawi, from whose Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt the above statistics are taken, notes that the new generation of dramatists that emerged to serve this new theatre included some of the most important writers of the time, among them al-Hakim. While the latter’s theatrical odyssey took him from realist ‘plays on social themes’, as a 1950 collection of plays put it, to the introduction of the ‘theatre of the Absurd’ to Arab audiences through plays such as The Tree Climber and Fate of a Cockroach,29 other dramatists such as Nu’man Ashur were experimenting with ‘a new note of harsh realism, of urgency and commitment’ in plays such as The People Downstairs and The Dughri Family. Alfred Farag was writing plays influenced by Brecht’s epic theatre, such as Sulayman of Aleppo and Ali Jinah of Tabriz, while Yusuf Idris wrote a landmark play in al-Farafir, variously translated as ‘The Underlings’, or ‘Small Fry’, which represented an attempt to invent an ‘indigenous tradition’ for Arab theatre out of pre-modern literary materials like the village samir, described by Badawi as ‘a popular type of social get-together’. (Farag also drew on materials from The Arabian Nights and other pre-modern narratives.) The poet Salah Abd al-Sabur wrote a verse play, The Tragedy of al-Hallaj, in 1965 that betrayed the influence of experiments carried out by T. S. Eliot. Arabic drama in the 1960s saw no shortage of experiment.

  Aside from the formal qualities of the plays, and the state funds on hand to support them, the drama also had an important social role to play. As noted above, much of the period’s prose writing, both before and after the 1967 war, was at least implicitly critical of the regime, a posture of alienation and the making of veiled criticisms being typical of the work of the ‘generation of the 1960s’. This was also true of the dramatists, whose work performed a ‘cathartic’ function: the performance of work that was even indirectly critical of the regime helped to give the impression of public debate, real possibilities for which were curtailed. Thus, al-Hakim’s The Sultan’s Dilemma and Anxiety Bank, among other plays, are sometimes read as criticisms of the regime in the same way that Mahfouz’s presentation of alienation in his novels from the 1960s, Ibrahim’s writing about paralysis, and al-Ghitany’s dramatization of blanket fear and censorship have all been seen as the symptoms of a system that, did it but know it, was in a deep state of crisis.30

  In an environment where everyone was being watched, avant-garde experiment, even the apparent avoidance of political themes in the theatre of the Absurd, could be seen as a political act.

  While Egyptian theatre went into decline in the 1970s, many dramatists of the sixties generation either going abroad or ceasing to write, increased resources elsewhere led to the foundation of various public and private-sector theatre companies and to the inauguration of international arts events that served to showcase their work, among them the Baalbek (Lebanon) and Jerash (Jordan) festivals. Cairo itself has hosted an annual Experimental Theatre Festival over the past two decades, serving as a venue for contemporary Arab and international drama.31 Probably the best-known Arab dramatist of recent decades is the Syrian Saadallah Wannous, an author who, in plays such as The King is the King, used traditional stories (in this case from The Arabian Nights) to make criticisms of Arab regimes, while at the same time presenting the material in a
way that shows his indebtedness both to the dramatists of the Absurd and to Brecht, as mediated by the Egyptian playwrights of the 1960s. Wannous died of cancer in 1997. Before doing so, he published a short ‘memoir’ of time spent in hospital that mixes present circumstances with memories, fantasies and fragments of unwritten plays.32

  In this memoir, Wannous writes that ‘memories accompany death like voice recordings’, and in the drama of his own death he remembers the young man who ‘had to speak out against the environment in which I was living … who looked for the existentialism, the freedom and the beauty that other countries enjoyed. I had to express my irritation at the complications and outworn traditions that obliged us to live poverty-stricken lives. I had to write tracts calling for revolt and liberation and stick them up on people’s doors after midnight.’ All this once again shows the important ‘cathartic’ role taken on by modern Arab theatre.

  The Contemporary Scene

  While it is impossible to be certain about the permanent standing of individual authors, it is perhaps easier to be confident about trends, and three main trends in contemporary Arabic literature will be discussed in this final chapter, various works being considered in relation to them. Most, though by no means all, of the writers mentioned are Egyptian, which suggests that Egypt has managed to retain its leadership of the Arab world in literary matters, for the time being at least. Naturally, many writers of the senior generation continue to be active, including many of those described earlier: Edwar al-Kharrat, Gamal al-Ghitany and Sonallah Ibrahim are all still writing, and to their names can be added those of a host of others, many of them ‘sixties writers’. Such names include those of Ibrahim Aslan, Baha Tahir, Mohamed el-Bisatie, Gamal Attia Ibrahim, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, Mohamed al-Makhzangi and others. While each of these established authors deserves consideration, this chapter by necessity confines itself to developing trends.

  The first of these trends has to do with the connection between contemporary literature and politics. While many Arab writers have been imprisoned by the governments under which they have lived, with others having been either unable to publish or forced to live abroad, today a general weariness of politics seems to have become the norm. This apparent depoliticization is presented either as a variety of postmodern distrust of ‘grand narratives’ or as a reaction to the climate of religious conservatism that has reigned in the Arab world over recent decades. In this way of looking at things, the turning away from politics is related to disappointment at the failure of earlier aspirations for social and political change or apprehension in the face of current events. Many works, including some of those discussed below, contain evidence of a stifling atmosphere of oppression.

  A second trend is the striking growth in the number of women writers, and the increasing interest both in excavating the voices of women from the past and in reflecting on particular features of ‘women’s writing’. One recent critic, for example, has spoken of what he calls the ‘feminization’ of the ‘literary field’ in contemporary Egypt,1 while others have pointed to the women writers that have emerged in Lebanon, the best known of whom is probably Hanan al-Shaykh.2 These developments have been accompanied by growing interest in Arab women’s writing abroad, which goes some way towards explaining the thinking behind recent translations.

  Finally, a third trend, linked to the first two, has been the emphasis placed on individual experience in contemporary writing at the expense of larger, public themes. This ‘lyrical’ trend, going hand in hand with the deconstruction of large narratives, has led to an emphasis on experience sometimes felt to have been excluded from mainstream literature. There has been a growth in writing dealing more explicitly with sexuality, for example, notably through its treatment of gay themes, as well as a growth in ‘regional’ or ‘ethnic’ writing. Writers in Egypt have drawn attention to Nubian identity over recent decades, while the Libyan author Ibrahim al-Koni has written a series of novels drawing attention to the Tuareg people in the Sahara.

  Illustrations of postmodernist styles in contemporary Arabic literature can be found in the form and the content of recent texts. One such might be Miral al-Tahawy’s Blue Aubergine, a novel which could also be discussed in the context of contemporary women’s writing.3 Another might be Ahmed Alaidy’s Being Abbas el Abd, a stylish debut novel.4 Al-Tahawy, born in 1968, first attracted attention for The Tent, a novel which draws on her Bedouin background,5 while al-Aidy, an Egyptian author born in Saudi Arabia in 1974, apparently intended Being Abbas el Abd to be a kind of anti-novel or comic book and certainly as a text situated outside ordinary literary categories (an influence is Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club). Both these novels experiment with reproducing personal experience in the face of confusing social demands, employing a kind of postmodernist collage of different registers of language to do so.

  Blue Aubergine, the story of a young woman who bears this nickname, is an assemblage of texts, including memories, fantasies, fragments of dreams, authorial comments, scribbles, interpolated stories and bracketed extracts from a PhD thesis entitled ‘The Dialectic of Rebellion and Gender Oppression’ that is written in an academic langue du bois that is just one of the novel’s many styles. These texts, jostling against each other, possess no obvious hierarchy. The narrator’s comments, seemingly authoritative, are seen ironically, for example, and the psychological discourse on which they draw is undermined by the surrounding noise. When the narrator intervenes early on in the text to comment that Blue Aubergine will understand her childhood feelings only ‘when she has read many pages and drawn lines, as she thumbs through her sources, under the words rebellion and guilt and aggression between the mother and her daughter,’ it is suggested that this is just another handy re-description of Blue Aubergine’s confusing experience. It is not authoritative, and it does not trump others. The novel apparently contains no single key.

  Nevertheless, individual experience seems to offer a vantage point on the jostling possibilities surrounding Blue Aubergine. ‘Our neighbour was the first man to talk to me about Marx and the rotten bourgeoisie and the patriarchal system and sexual freedom. He offered to give me lessons in philosophy and psychology one school year, and then he stuck his hand under the table’ and made a pass, she remembers. Personal experience, if not entirely devaluing what the man had to say, at least invites scepticism about it. ‘I cried in front of him but he just continued talking about intellectual awareness and self-criticism and the military wing, and imitation and innovation.’ Described as ‘drowning in the present’, Blue Aubergine is assailed by competing political and social discourses, some of them coming from her father’s generation and Arab nationalism and socialism (‘Abdul Nasser’s revolution, that’s the only true solution’), some of them filling present horizons with the ‘third way’ of religious discourse and cultural specificity (‘East or West, Islam is best’). Sometimes understanding can be gleaned from reading authoritative-sounding academic texts, reassuring bits of which are spliced into the narrative. The upshot seems to be that though the discourses surrounding Blue Aubergine are more or less devalued and are parts of what is felt to be a threatening linguistic jungle, personal freedom remains a value to aim for, one expressed, for example, in an adolescent dream. ‘People came … looking through the eyes of a woman, bulging and misshapen. She came and did the same thing; she slapped me on the face. “I can look at boys any time I want to,” I said. “The streets are full of them.”’

  Blue Aubergine’s demand for self-expression is echoed in al-Aidy’s Being Abbas el Abd. This novel, told backwards, presents a confused and confusing mass of competing possibilities that include consumer products, drugs, sex, seductive movies, American lifestyles, bits of pan-Arab politics, echoes of nationalism, all of which are zapped through like satellite television channels or product lines in shopping malls. The novel contains a lot of text-messaging on mobile phones, disorientation being the main feature of the street-smart main character’s experience. Like Blue Aubergine, it is s
triking both for its assemblage of texts taken from wildly differing discourses, American television to pop psychology, suggesting no significant hierarchy among them, and for the way in which it treats the political, cultural or nationalist thought of previous generations, parodying, misquoting or draining it of meaning by pulling statements out of their original contexts and trivializing them in others. Some of these remain useful as ‘great quotes’, but on the whole they are revalued (devalued?) in irreverent postmodern terms. Of the political aspirations of previous generations, the narrator comments that Egypt has now ‘had its Generation of the Defeat’, in other words the generation that fought the Israelis over Palestine. ‘We’re the generation that came after it. The “I’ve got nothing left to lose generation”. You want us to progress? So burn the history books and forget your precious dead civilization. Stop trying to squeeze the juice from the past.’

  Growing interest in ‘women’s writing’ in recent years, particularly from the developing world, has benefited modern Arabic literature, and it has enhanced awareness of this strand of Arab social and intellectual history, both at home in Arab societies themselves and abroad among those interested in Arab cultures and societies. While this is not the place for a survey of Arab feminism, some background may be necessary to understand modern literary writing by Arab women.6

  The origins of modern Arab feminism are often dated, like so much else, to the period of the nahda in Egypt and in particular to the alliance between nationalism and the struggle for women’s rights in the work of reformers in the circle around Abdu mentioned in Chapter 2. The work of nationalist and feminist women’s organizations, such as the one set up in Cairo in the early decades of the century by the pioneering feminist Huda Sharaawi, was also important in advancing women’s causes. Qassem Amin, a member of Abdu’s circle, presented the intellectual case for women’s rights in the liberal manner adopted by Mill a generation before, and Sharaawi took her cue both from Amin’s promotion of women’s rights within the context of the struggle for political independence and from contemporary feminist activism in Europe. Her agitation for women’s suffrage in Egypt took place at much the same time as that of the suffragettes in Britain; for example, women were demonstrating in the streets of Cairo against the British occupation in 1919, one year after British women over the age of thirty had been given the right to vote.