A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  Debate on these issues has been set out in a recent book by Brian Whitaker,31 the terms of which recall debate over women’s rights in Arab societies. Is the campaign to bring the treatment of gay and lesbian people into line with international norms guaranteeing non-discrimination and equal rights part of an attempt to force alien standards onto Arab societies, ones which may seem to conflict with the traditions of those societies themselves? One author quoted by Whitaker certainly seems to think so, and he fulminates against the ‘Gay International’, which is trying to ‘impose a European heterosexual regime on Arab men.’ Prior to ‘the advent of colonialism and Western capital’ such men had been content to live their sexual lives spontaneously, unworried by political or identity conceptions about who was ‘gay’ and who was ‘straight’. Hidden behind the ‘universal’ discourse of human rights that insists on non-discrimination there is an ‘orientalist impulse’ and an attempt to ‘impose’ western conceptions of heterosexual or homosexual identity on non-western societies. In reply, Whitaker points out that whatever the theoretical positions involved, what is ‘often presented as a choice between cultural authenticity on the one hand’, which apparently requires heterosexuality, ‘and the adoption of all things Western on the other’, which does not, in fact concerns individuals who are often considered either as sinful or as suffering from psychological illness in their own societies. There is also a background of sometimes harsh penal codes.

  16. The Yacoubian Building, Cairo, setting for Alaa Al Aswany’s novel of the same name, now an international bestseller

  The whole question is complicated by the fact that male homosexuality, though stigmatized in contemporary Arab cultures, is represented as a ‘natural tendency’ and entirely unexceptional in classical Arabic literature, an attitude reflected in the earlier works of Mahfouz. This makes it difficult to see male same-sex desire as culturally inauthentic, or the result of the influence of the West.32 The real question, Whitaker concludes, is one of individual freedom and of the freedom of both individuals and cultures to develop. This debate seems likely to rumble on and on.

  A writer sometimes left out of this discussion is Hoda Barakat. In a series of novels including The Tiller of Waters and The Stone of Laughter, this Lebanese author resident in Paris has imagined the lives of male homosexuals in Arab societies from within, the first-person narrators of both these works being attracted to men. In The Tiller of Waters,33 for example, the narrator struggles to recreate a familiar space amid the destruction of the Lebanese civil war. Safe in the basement of the destroyed family fabric store, he spreads out the surviving fabrics, rolling in them luxuriantly as he remembers his mother’s world, ‘composed as it was of a very few windows, all of them firmly closed,’ but nevertheless at odds with the masculine hustle of the city outside. In The Stone of Laughter the narrator, Kahlil, stares longingly at Naji, a neighbour’s son, his ‘very black, tangled hair, gleaming beautifully, like his looks’.34 Conventional styles of Lebanese masculinity, business for the rich, militias for the poor, are closed to Khalil, and, unable to leave his flat because of the snipers on the streets outside, he retreats into obsessive cleaning rituals, trying to construct some sort of haven in the midst of the violence. Barakat has explained that her interest in both novels is in individuals who are ‘orphaned’ in their own societies, having tried and failed to find a place for themselves outside their communities. Where can such people ‘find a place in a world that is split between extremism and moral disintegration,’ she asks, as is the case in contemporary Lebanon.35 From the evidence supplied by these two novels the answer seems to be nowhere.

  Contemporary writing has also explored regional identity, two authors in particular, Idris Ali and Haggag Hassan Oddoul, putting Nubian identity onto the literary map in works such as Dongola and Nights of Musk, respectively.36 The Nubians, inhabitants of the southernmost areas of Egypt and the northern portions of the Sudan, have their own culture and languages, though most are bilingual in Arabic. They were moved off their lands when these were flooded after the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Other casualties were the Pharoanic temples at Abu Simbel, also moved to prevent inundation. However, as Awad al-Shalali, protagonist of Ali’s novel Dongola, reflects, while ‘the world helped to save the temples’ through an international campaign, the Nubian ‘people [were left] to their fate’. For men like him this meant menial employment in Egypt’s northern cities. Now part of the Nubian diaspora, al-Shalali returns to what is left of Nubia full of bitter memories at the prejudice and exploitation met with in the north. However, once there he discovers that experience in the north has changed him, and that he is accepted only reluctantly by the community.

  Oddoul’s Nights of Musk, a collection of stories, is a more frankly nostalgic, less political work. It too dwells on the loss of Nubia (‘Where is our old village? Where is our Nile? Where are our palm trees and our spacious houses?’), with the tone sometimes veering on the folkloric (‘long, long ago, south of the rapids, the nights exuded incense and oozed musk’). Nevertheless, Oddoul’s stories also ask questions about Nubian identity. Is this simply a matter of looking impotently back on the past and at a community that has all but disappeared, or do Nubians have a future outside their traditional homeland? Both authors write stories of return, and though returning to Nubia can be identity-reinforcing, allowing al-Shalali access to his ‘roots’ for example, it can also be frustrating because the culture of origin is backward-looking and unable to move forward. These issues dwell somewhere beneath the surface of the first story in Oddoul’s collection, for example, in which a boy recounts a visit to his Nubian grandmother. According to her, he is ‘gorbatiya’, non-Nubian, since though his father is Nubian, his mother is Egyptian, and he is insufficiently black (the Nubians ‘are dark, dark, dark, for our sun shines upon our faces’). Yet, who, in reality, is ‘a real Nubian’, now that ‘[we’ve been] pulled up by our roots, and we’ve become like brushwood’? Part of the answer may depend on extending the limits of Nubian identity, whether in what is left of traditional Nubia or outside it.

  Finally, there is Ibrahim al-Koni, a Libyan writer also relevant to the regional theme. In a series of texts of indeterminate genre, long short stories or short novels, al-Koni has presented the experience of the Tuareg people in the southern deserts of Libya and Algeria, spreading into neighbouring Mali and Niger. In The Bleeding of the Stone, one of his best-known books,37 he describes the life of Asouf, a Tuareg herder, who is employed at the rock art sites of Msak Mallat in the southern Sahara guiding parties of ‘men and women, old and young, Christians of every sort’ on behalf of the state antiquities service. Tuareg society is linked to the desert caravans reaching the area from the south as much as it is to the northern coastlands, and over generations it has developed a relationship of respect mixed with fear with the surrounding desert. Part of this involves the waddan, a rare species of mountain sheep that figures as the Tuareg’s ancestor and a kind of totemic animal in traditional tales, representing the special covenant that links them with the desert. When two northerners arrive to hunt the waddan, Asouf refuses to help them, remembering the covenant that links him with the waddan and, through it, with the surrounding desert.

  Al-Koni was born in 1948, and he is the author of over forty books, few of which have been translated. He left Libya for Moscow while still a student, and he has lived for many years in Switzerland. His novels interpret Tuareg culture for Arabic-speaking audiences much in the way that works by Ali and Oddoul interpret Nubian culture for them. Together, these three writers have broadened the scope of modern Arabic literature, while drawing attention to the different cultural and linguistic groups living within Arab countries. The Tuareg themselves speak Tamasheq, a kind of Berber, and to outsiders they are probably best known for their practice of male face veiling, Tuareg men wearing elaborate turbans complete with veils that leave only the eyes visible. Al-Koni’s novels about them chart the destructive impact of technology on the
environment and the destruction of the traditional covenant that binds the human and non-human inhabitants of the desert together.

  These ‘regional’ novels are part of larger trends in contemporary Arabic literature that have seen a turning away from the centre and towards the margins, and from the politically committed literature of the post-war decades towards the experience of individuals, minority groups and women.

  Conclusion

  At the end of this brief introduction to modern Arabic literature, it may be useful to try to draw together some threads as well as to ask what the immediate prospects for literary writing might be in the Arab world, particularly in the light of developments alluded to earlier in this book and referred to again below.

  The literature discussed in this book, and the conception of literature to which it mostly belongs, is a modern development, and the ‘pioneers’ of modern Arabic literature looked in part to European models, adopting the liberal idea of literature and the writer and producing the ‘first novel’, the ‘first play’ and the first examples of modern poetry drawing on modernist experiments that had been underway in Europe. Modern literature thus in some respects meant ‘foreign literature’, or foreign-influenced literature, and this equation of the modern with the foreign gave rise to debate in the works of Taha Hussein, Yahya Hakki, Tawfiq al-Hakim and others, as we have seen.

  More recently, there has been a turning away from European models, and towards elements from the pre-modern literary heritage and from the oral and popular culture. Gamal al-Ghitany has excavated the writings of the Arab historians and pre-modern literary or religious writers, for example, while Tayeb Salih and Naguib Mahfouz in the later part of his career have drawn upon oral traditions and the popular heritage, producing works of ‘magical realism’. This part of the story has been one of imitation giving rise to hybridization, as has perhaps been the case in other postcolonial literatures. Another part of it has been the extension of realist or modernist experiments, as in the works of Sonallah Ibrahim and Edwar al-Kharrat.

  The contemporary Arab literary scene thus contains the results of various trends, the liberal nationalism of Mahfouz, and the ‘commitment’ of the post-independence period, giving way first to the growing sense of the autonomy of literature and its critical function in the work of the sixties generation, and then, today, to the various postmodernist, feminist, regional and other trends seeking to express the experiences of the previously marginalized. As is the case elsewhere, postmodernism has found literary expression in narrative fragmentation and an emphasis on self-expression, together with the abandonment of obvious political concerns. In this respect at least, modern Arab literature has found itself aligned with international trends.

  However, there has also been another trend pressing on the Arab literary scene over the last two decades or so, and this has been the growing intolerance of literary expression generally, which has made what was always perhaps a minority activity into one that is now that of a sometimes embattled minority. Religious conservatism tends not to value literature on the liberal model – literature, in other words, that carves out a space for intellectual exploration and freedom of expression – since this can challenge religious truths. In the contemporary Arab world writers have been threatened and their works banned as a result of religious pressures, these pressures being possibly stronger than those that in the past used to come from the state. Mahfouz, for example, was attacked in Cairo in 1992 by assailants inspired by a fatwa, or religious judgment, against his work by an Islamist preacher. He was badly wounded and lost the use of his right arm. Similarly, Nawal al-Saadawi, one of the Arab world’s best-recognized feminist writers, has received threats from religiously inspired elements not sharing her views or not agreeing with her right to express them. Even in the comparatively liberal environment of Cairo, literary works have been withdrawn from sale as a result of religious pressures, pressures that are greater in some other parts of the Arab world. These developments seem to recapitulate campaigns that had once been thought to belong to the history books, such as the campaign mounted by traditionalist elements against Taha Hussein in the 1920s, resulting in the withdrawal of his book on pre-Islamic poetry.1 While the development of the Internet in recent years has greatly extended possibilities for free expression, both for bloggers and for literary use, there have also been many attempts to police it. When Shohdy Surur, an Egyptian webmaster, published poems by his father Naguib Surur on the Web in 2002, for example, he soon discovered the limits of free expression, being sentenced to one year in prison for offences against ‘public morality’.2

  Long-term observers of the literary scene, such as the critic Pierre Cachia, have written of the special kind of elitism that characterizes modern Arabic literature ‘in a part of the world where the majority [was] illiterate and where the modern Renaissance [the nahda] was sparked off mainly by contact with European culture.’ Moreover, that elitism has sometimes been considered out of touch with what might be called the ‘traditional’ culture: ‘most Arab writers look upon themselves as nothing less than the cultural and social guides of their contemporaries through troubled times,’ but the guidance they offer, ‘of western origin, … [is] likely to be shunned by those with a more traditional turn of mind.’ While Political Islam has emerged as the most important contemporary social and political trend in the Arab world, able to mobilize populations in a way Arab nationalism no longer seems able to do, ‘there is scarcely any sign of approbation or even recognition [of this] in the literature of the elite.’ Whereas earlier generations of writers ‘patronized the masses but meant well by them’, the present generation seems to have lost the confidence that it has anything to say to them, adding to the sense of crisis that reigns in parts of the Arab world.3 These are Cachia’s views. Another more recent survey of the development of modern Arabic literature ends with the comment that ‘the outlook for the sort of literature discussed in this volume remains a somewhat precarious one’.4

  Nevertheless, literature continues to get written, and readers continue to read it, and recent decades have even seen an increase in the outlets and the money available to authors, following the expansion of the media and literary publication in the Gulf. Moreover, many more Arab writers have successfully made a name for themselves outside their countries of origin and in translation, and some of them have even managed to escape the traditional niches into which Arab authors have tended to be put, as was noted in Chapter 1. In concluding this book, one could do worse than consider the fortunes of two recent novels, popular in the Arab world, which have also struck chords with western readers and which seem to augur well for the continuing vitality of Arabic literature. These novels, Gate of the Sun by the Lebanese writer and journalist Elias Khoury, and The Yacoubian Building by the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, already mentioned in Chapter 6, conform to conceptions of literature outlined in this book, while also suggesting that Arabic literature has now become a literature like any other as far as international readers are concerned. Humphrey Davies’s translation of Gate of the Sun won the UK Banipal Prize for Arabic Translation in 2006, for example, while The Yacoubian Building has become an international bestseller, a first for any novel originally written in Arabic.5

  Khoury, born in Lebanon, has dealt in his work with the fortunes of that country and with the experience of Palestinians made homeless by the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, the year in which he was born. Gate of the Sun gives a panorama of this experience, including references to events in 1936, 1948, 1970 and 1971 and after 1975 during the civil war in Lebanon. It does this through the character of Khaleel, a doctor in a refugee camp in Beirut charged with taking care of Yunis, a Palestinian fighter on his deathbed. Yunis’s career seems to recapitulate Khaleel’s own experiences and those of his generation, but how do these fading memories of a dying man relate to the present? Can a coherent story be made out of them that can serve as a guide for the future? The novel, Khoury notes, is a relatively new literary g
enre in Lebanon, as it is elsewhere in the Arab world, but it is one in which history can be written on a human scale and historical themes given concrete expression. While ‘Lebanon’s new ruling class wants to make the country part of the petro-dollar system and to convert it into a small Hong Kong,’ he says, there are other options including making the country ‘part of the search for democracy, identity and change in the Arab world.’6 His novel, designed to be part of the exploration of those other options, shows Khoury taking seriously his role as the conscience of the nation.

  Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building also deals with history, though this time the focus is Egypt. He introduces easily recognizable characters and presents social issues in concrete form, and as a result it has much in common with popular forms of television drama, as critics have noted. It cannot have done the book any harm either that the Yacoubian Building of the title in fact exists (it is an apartment building located in a mixed commercial district), and it is easy to imagine Al Aswany’s characters crossing each other on this building’s stairway as they do in the pages of the novel. Among these characters are Zaki Bey el-Dessouki, an impoverished representative of the class that ruled Egypt until the country’s 1952 Revolution, various members of the nouveaux riches who have profited from the country’s opening to the international capitalist system from the 1970s onwards, and representatives of the country’s increasingly pauperized lower-middle and working classes. There is also Taha el Shazli, whose story draws attention to the restricted options available to young people: the son of the building’s doorman, his ambitions to become a police officer founder because of his modest social origins and he is drawn towards extremist violence. Al Aswany’s novel draws attention to the atmosphere of nostalgia that seems to have taken hold in today’s Egypt, idealizing the past in contrast to a disappointing present and to a future that seems blocked. Above all, he illustrates the makeshift compromises that almost all the characters have to resort to in order to get by in a society in which corruption has become rife, notably in politics and the business world, making life, for many, into a kind of bitter choice between poverty or emigration. A second novel by Al Aswany, Chicago, was published in Cairo in 2007, and it cannot be long before this too is available in translation.7