The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence

THE POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC NOVEL: Debating Ambivalence MUHSIN JASSIM AL-MUSAWI BRILL THE POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC NOVEL ST...

Author: Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi

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THE POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC NOVEL: Debating Ambivalence

MUHSIN JASSIM AL-MUSAWI

BRILL

THE POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC NOVEL

STUDIES IN ARABIC LITERATURE SUPPLEMENTS TO THE JOURNAL OF ARABIC LITERATURE EDITED BY SUZANNE PINCKNEY STETKEVYCH

VOLUME XXIII

THE POSTCOLONIAL ARABIC NOVEL Debating Ambivalence

BY

MUHSIN JASSIM AL-MUSAWI

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2003

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data al-Musawi, Muhsin Jassim. De postcolonial Arabic novel : debating ambivalence / Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi. p. cm. -- (Studies in Arabic literature, ISSN 0169-9903 ; v. 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-12586-8 1. Arabic fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Narration (Rhetoric) 3. Discourse analysis, Narrative. I. Title. II. Series. PI7572.N37M87 2003 892. 7'3609--dc21

2002043734

ISSN 0169-9903 ISBN 90 04 12586 8 © Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

“But let us not be cultural missionaries either, torn between gallant self-sacrifice and remorseful self-pity, preaching about giving, yet set out to take and to model everything according to our own image.” (Jaroslav Stetkevych, )

To Jaroslav Stetkevych, the man, the critic, the scholar, and the friend

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations and Editorial Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Introduction. Prefatory Thresholds: Scheherazade Avenged . . . . . .

1

Chapter One. Postcolonial Matters in Arabic Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . In Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postcolonial Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity Formation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Active Body Politic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . And the Awakening Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Women Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Problematic of Anti-Colonial Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Reductionist in the Postcolonial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discursive Alliances against Neopatriarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Politics of Discontent: Postmodernism and Postcoloniality . . . . . . Neo-Patriarchy and Neo-Colonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Fight for Narrative Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History Revisited: Against Imperial Readings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 23 29 32 35 37 41 46 49 52 56 58 60 61

Chapter Two. Writing Scheherazade Now: The Growth of Modern Arabic Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Scheherazade Trope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elitism and Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Canons in Arabic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Bourgeois Epic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-Nahd. ah Popular Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scheherazade’s Appeal: Stages and Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71 74 76 82 87 88 94

Chapter Three. Debating Ambivalence: Socio-Political Engagements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 The Experimental and the Indigenous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 The Real and the Allegorical of the Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121



  

The Urban Complex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Individualism and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Narrating the Postcolonial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Return of Epistolary Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Public Intellectuals: Types and Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Outsiders or Heroes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-modernity Discontents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creativity and Dissent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Undermining Unitary Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Debating Novels of Apprenticeship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Apprenticeship as Identity Affirmation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Colonial Referent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

125 128 134 136 139 142 145 147 152 154 157 158

Chapter Four. Arabs and the West: Counternarratives and Narrative Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arabs’ Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Existentialist Thought in Arabic Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Image-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thresholds for East-West Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arab Homecoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Encounter’s Postcolonial Intertext . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

163 169 178 185 190 196 198

Chapter Five. Women in Arabic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Veiling and Unveiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dunyazad Avenged . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discoursing Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Women’s Writings: Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Feminist Politics and Poetics: An Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Female Body as Confrontational Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Women’s Ancestry: Anxieties of Belonging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity Regained in War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Body Politics: Self-Affirmation vs. Symbols and Acts of Denial Female Consciousness and Male Intrusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Identity Nexus: Nation and Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Debating Revolutionary Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Male Tradition in Women’s Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Voice of Their Own . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Male Feminism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Desire as Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

205 207 210 212 218 221 222 225 228 230 232 234 237 238 239 240 242

  



Colony for the Divorced . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decolonizing Women: Agendas and Discursive Strategies . . . . . . And Against Masculine Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Male Fantasies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ideology and Desire: The Male Views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

244 246 248 251 252

Chapter Six. A Voice for Dissent: Rogues, Rebels and Saints . . . . . Narrating Dissent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sociological Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Futuwwah Redrawn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Advent of Shaykhs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knaves and Rogues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rebels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Graveyard Populations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shepherds and Dervishes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

255 256 257 261 263 271 272 277 278

Chapter Seven. Site as Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory and Forgetfulness: The House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site as a Nation-State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spatial Narrative Variations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Chronotope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ironic Site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Poetic and the Representational . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Journey against Cultural Hegemony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thresholds of Ambivalence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. Site as Narrative Inversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. The Female Interrogator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetics of Inversion: Sites of Shi#ite Rituals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Banquets as Language Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sites of Micro-politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

281 282 285 286 286 288 290 292 293 294 295 297 300 302

Chapter Eight. Time in Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Retrospective Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Process Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Polytemporal as Textual Density . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time Flux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The National and the Personal as Time Schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sufi Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mad time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

307 309 310 311 313 314 316 320



   Dead or Collective Time? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322 Time In-Between: The Cyclical and the Eternal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 Undermining Clock Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

Chapter Nine. Cultural Contestation and Self-Definition in Arabic Metafiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Author in the Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Debating Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Theorizations for Narrative as Invention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metafiction and Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Metafictional Critical Typologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Textualizing Social Dissent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transference and Transposition: The Textual and the Personal . . . . . . Narrative Fragmentation and Dissident Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Idealizing the Narratee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reclaiming the Suppressed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Embodying Abstractions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Building up Sites of Selfhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

337 340 342 345 349 351 351 353 358 362 364 367 368

Chapter Ten. Scheherazade’s Gifts: Mahf¯ . uz’s . Narrative Strategies in Lay¯al¯ı Alf Laylah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375 In Lieu of Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389 Bibliograpphy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arabic Novels & Relevant Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A. In Arabic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B. In European Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

391 391 397 397 399

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413

ABBREVIATIONS AND EDITORIAL NOTES

The Library of Congress standard transliteration system is used unless there is a need to do otherwise, especially in the use of nisbah (iyyah) or in names and phrases pertaining to the super-natural or the humorous tradition. Full documentation is also used throughout, to make information accessible to readership beyond the European and American orbits, despite the MLA latest suggestions to minimize some details. To draw attention to different scholarly efforts, references are not restricted to outstanding or highly and widely recognized writings. Many promising and insightful readings and studies are also included. Abbreviations are kept to minimum, but frequent reference to the following makes it needful to do so: JAL JNES GEBO MADN

Journal of Arabic Literature Journal of Near Eastern Studies ¯ Al-Hay"ah al-Mis. riyyah al-#Ammah lil-Kit¯ab (General Egyptian Book Organization) Al-Mu"assasah al-#Arabiyyah lil-Dir¯as¯at wa-al-Nashr


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During the many years spent in the preparation of this book, I have benefited greatly from the support, encouragement and solidarity of a large number of colleagues and friends who are also among the most prominent in the fields of modern and classical Arabic literature. During my stay at Duke University, during summer  and summer , as a Fulbright Visiting Professor, I had the advantage of meeting both miriam cooke and Bruce Lawrence, who were generous, not only in ideas, discussions, and illuminations, but also in enabling me to borrow miriam cooke’s Arabica, locating most of her collection at my office at the Franklin Center. I also benefited from miriam cooke’s suggestions and comments throughout lengthy discussions of the Arabic novel. Their abode on the outskirts of Durham was no less enticing, not only for their wonderful hospitality, but also for its separate study domain, where books were no less inviting. Roger Allen and Mary Allen made it easy for me to carry on research and make use of books at home and at the University of Pennsylvania library. But their generosity, friendship and support explain one side of my gratitude, for Roger Allen read the manuscript twice, and made many comments and suggestions which proved very helpful in the preparation of this final version. While at Temple University, summer , I had the benefit of knowing in person Peter Gran and his wife Judy, and benefited from Peter Gran’s discerning intellect and very supportive temper. While offering lectures at Indiana, I stayed with Salih J. Altoma whose hospitality is equaled only by his scholarly support. To him and to Amal, Um T. ¯ıba, I am the most grateful. I must elaborate on the friendship and support throughout these years of two friends and formidable scholars: Suzanne and Jaroslav Stetkevych. Suzanne P. Stetkevych read the manuscript thoroughly. Her editorial expertise and sharp critical insight helped me greatly in refining it for publication. Her personal and scholarly temperament comes to my rescue more often than one can imagine. To her, I feel the greatest gratitude and appreciation. As I have known Jaroslav Stetkevych for years, and as we are close friends, I should not elaborate





further, but I may only reiterate the obvious in asserting his sincere and serious commitment to the field of Arabic studies, his deep and thorough knowledge of the classical and the modern periods along with the Pre-Islamic. His acute understanding of the needs of the field and his sharp critical insights were very helpful in my preparation of this book. To him, I dedicate this book. I should mention, however, that omissions or faults are my own responsibility. I should express my gratitude to the Council for International Exchange of Scholars for a Fulbright grant, which enabled me to carry research between –. I should also mention my gratitude to the librarians at Temple University, The University of Pennsylvania, and Duke University. I should also mention the people at the Franklin Center at Duke University for their support and help. I have to thank my former student and present colleague Hager Ben Driss for proofreading the manuscript. It will be churlish to conclude without expressing my love and gratitude to Bahira and my daughters, Rawa, Wafa, and Zainab and my son Adnan, for tolerating my preoccupation with books, notes, and preparations for classes and lectures.

 PREFATORY THRESHOLDS: SCHEHERAZADE AVENGED

This book deals with long narratives in Arabic that manifest keen awareness of Arab life and culture. It avoids periodization in order to tackle issues that cut across time and space despite their material relevance insofar as social justice, political freedom and national or communal independence are concerned. As a study and critique of the modern Arabic novel, especially in its post-Mahf¯ phase, this . uzian . study makes use of some earlier studies and readings, but it attempts to go beyond these in its engagement with postcolonial issues that relate to identity formation, the modern nation-state, individualism, nationalism, gender and class demarcations, and micro-politics. My reading aspires to locate Arabic narrative in the mainstream of world literature, and to establish the modern Arabic novel within the contemporary literary critical world of postcolonial studies. While it provides a socio-political survey of the cultural scene, its focus is on the postcolonial, not only as a historical framework, but also as an awareness of identity, individuality, conflict, contacts among peoples and cultures, and challenge on personal, communal and national levels. Its issues cut across gender, race, class, and religion, throughout pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial times reaching to the emergence of neo-patriarchies and the challenge of the New World Order. Novels from North Africa (Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Libya), the Middle East, and Egypt are studied in context to offer the reader a deep and panoramic view of Arabic narrative. The appearance of the native intelligentsia, with its divided aims and pursuits, receives, and with good reason, great attention in this book. As some of these elites are behind the emergence of the nation state, there is a sustained reading of the texts that address issues of identity, essentialism, authoritarianism, and neo-patriarchy. Prison narratives, narratives of women’s plight, and madhouse narratives, are analyzed, among others, to understand the formation of neo-patriarchy. One of the many challenges to students and critics of modern Arabic fiction is the amount of presumptions, platitudes, fabrications, and





distortions that makes up a counter-culture, not only among non-Arabs, but also among some Arab audiences and their cultural affiliates due to the absence of serious engagement with the real. A detailed study of texts within contexts may well challenge the tendency to sweeping generalizations and platitudes, which usually betrays subordination to master narratives of some Eurocentric, Islamist or nationalist stamp. I aim at an eclectic vision to inform the argument, and a multiple critique to unravel complexity and fathom material reality, history and belief as they unfold in narrative. There is also an aspiration to make the endeavor one of passion, love and value. As Jaroslav Stetkevych argued long ago (), “…anything of value that we may do in Arabic literary studies henceforth will require of us a taking of a position and a commitment.”1 Contextual analysis, conditioned and tempered by relevance and literary taste, occasionally becomes a congenial framework within a wider concern with cultural consciousness. The underlying thesis in this book stipulates that a serious engagement with Arab life and culture requires not only a careful reading and appreciation of literary manifestations but also a focus on the details of daily life, as these furnish the micropolitics of narrative, along with the emerging engagement with war, expatriation and World politics. Especially in civil war, prison, and exile narratives, there is more inwardness, confession, and revelation that bring the reader closer to the human and the real. Laid bare as such, human life, with its tribulations and joys, should engage the attention of the reader in a new contract of intimacy that may recompense authors of these narratives for their losses and disappointments not only due to oppression as practiced by dictatorial or colonial power, but also because of their acute awareness of social and political evils. To define at some length the purpose of the book is not meant to pre-empt the reader’s questions and responses. Indeed, the reader may well require some justification for the use of more than one frame of mind, methodology, and analytic strategy, especially in respect to the collapsing of postmodernism and postcolonial theory. Multiple perspectives derive their potency from the narratives under discussion. While these narratives develop thematic engagements and discursive strategies of great variety, they also veer away from exactitude and chronol1 Jaroslav Stetkevych, “Arabism and Arabic Literature: Self-View of a Profession,” JNES, , no.  (July ), pp. –, at p. . Originally an address delivered in February  at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

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ogy, inviting therefore a revisionist reading that problematizes issues and leads the reader into further domains. I owe the reader some explanation in this respect. It is significant that a number of narratives targeted here are of a postmodernist thrust, which nevertheless gives way to the postcolonial emphasis on identity formation in its individual and national dimensions. Several narratives under consideration contest, in a postmodernist fashion, early autonomous literary writings of normalization, totality and selfhood. The postcolonial drive behind my analysis picks on stratagems of postmodernism, its self-referentiality, irony, and ambiguity as oblique ways to uncover the hegemonic and the repressive, and also to evade censorship. Aesthetic experimentation, usually associated with postmodernism, is methodologically manipulated to broaden the cultural scope of fiction, and to blur the separation between art and mass culture. The style in these narratives is often fragmented, tense and cryptic to articulate the anxieties of love and disenchantment, and the bewildered attempt to make sense of chaos where war and marriage take place at the same moment, and where the jailer plays the role of the benevolent host. Among these narratives, there are also ones of imitative nature, with a tendency to succumb to exoticism or to stereotyping in its postcapitalist phase. In Assia Djebar’s Ombre sultane (; English translation: A Sister to Scheherazade, ), for instance, the h. amm¯am, the veil, and polygamy become central inhibitions and markers that cater to a specific reader whose Algeria is a tyrannized land in search of some French savior. In one instance, the narrative suggests “only the women have eyes for you,” and “you can feel their piercing gaze linger after they have passed.”2 Yet, Djebar also comes across officers’ letters from the s military campaigns that speak of Algeria “as a woman whom it is impossible to tame,” or a woman whose appearance of acquiescence hides deep-seated national pride and resistance.3 Each narrative offers a number of positions and issues, and a number of languages and accentuations that defy the attempt to apply the non-critical, non-synthetic method of placing each novel under a single heading or chapter division. The framing Scheherazade trope accom2 Assia Djebar, Ombre sultane (); English translation: A Sister to Scheherazade, trans. Dorothy Blair (London: Quartet, ; New York: Interlink Books, ), p. . Further references are within the text. 3 Qtd. in Mildred Mortimer, Journeys through the French African Novel (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, ), p. .

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modates diversity in techniques and broadens the discussion, beyond modes and genres, to account for historical dynamics of social and cultural change. It is deliberately placed as the heading for the preface to account for the growth of the genre in Arabic, in correspondence with the reclamation of The Thousand and One Nights after centuries of virtual neglect by the classicists. But, the reclamation entails some transformation in vision, taste, and position, the parameters that fit well in the postcolonial episteme. This reclamation involves recognition of popular culture beyond classical criticism, its restrictive criteria on moral and compositional grounds. As the case in The Thousand and One Nights, the inexhaustible Scheherazade stands also for the fight against death and extinction, the glorification of mutual understanding and vital participation in life. Her narrative presence, the opening and the suspension of every narrative night, acts on the temporal to negate its mastery. The emanating art gradually establishes itself in space, not only as the site for narrative but also, and more significantly, as panoptical of life, for the rest of the society outside the Sultan’s domain is waiting in suspense for the miracle to take place as promised by Scheherazade to her bewildered father the minister. Scheherazade plays on limits and frontiers, but her narrative technique has the poetics and politics of the threshold. It is neither a termination nor a start, but a deliberate manipulation of means to delay authoritarianism as practice while establishing a counter culture of great diversity and richness. Indeed the threshold, as trope, suits the planning of my present book under thematic and cultural divisions. Every chapter is meant to move back and forth in relation to a complex intersection, which is significantly couched in the Scheherazade metaphor. Each signals a moment of crisis, to use a Bakhtinian reading, which, in Arabic narratives, captures the spatial and the temporal in their density and complexity. In this rich and prosperous land of ancient history and exuberant life and tradition, there is also the ironic torturing and disheartening reality of discomfort and restlessness. Foreign and outside powers have something to do with unrest, to be sure, as many narratives explain, but there is also the greed that incites “natives” to manipulate every means to stay in power, on every level and structure. The threshold and its related chronotopes recur frequently in almost every narrative under discussion. It is there in a desert, a rocky land, a palace, a dungeon, a house, a staircase, a corridor, a passage, a square and a street, but it is also there in metaphorical manifestations of indecision and longing where the soul becomes the site of fears and discontents. Moments

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and spaces are also intersections of obsessions, preoccupations, desires, dreams, commitments and possible disengagements. The threshold is pregnant with crisis, decision, suspense and ambivalence. While debating ambivalence as a moment of absolute irony, these narratives rarely end on a note of closure. Their multiple perspectives leave the door open to further questions that problematize the seemingly acceptable. A narrative by the late Palestinian writer Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, or the Egyptian Y¯usuf al-Qa#¯ıd,4 for instance, goes beyond direct representation. The real is defamiliarized through other modes of writing, a mixture of the tragic and the comic, to account for a bewildering reality imposed by brutal powers, whether they are “native” or colonialist. The appropriation of multiple analytic styles is called for by the nature of the scope of narratives under consideration. Narratives build up a repertoire of significations, markers, tableaus, and registers of every sort. Indeed, borrowed techniques, words, phrases, images and paradigms in many intellectualized narratives betray pervasive cultural contamination. In this contested space, there are warring positions and techniques, but there are sites of rapprochement and smooth convergence, too. In this respect, discursive strategies, including metafiction, are given substantial attention in order to uncover forms of identity and/or its loss. Narrative strategies vary and multiply, therefore, partly due to some playfulness or imitative tendency, but mostly in answer to a shocking reality. Burlesque, irony, sarcasm, doubling and satire are used. Such is the narrative style of Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, for instance, in AlWaq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah f¯ı-ikhtif¯a" Sa# ¯ıd Ab¯ı al-Nah. s al-mutash¯a"il (, ; The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist ).5 Of some relevance in this collapsing of styles and discourse analysis is the presence of narrative encounters. In my reading of postcoloniality, East-West encounters with their bearings on elites and publics, and the individual and society, have a great significance in that they address the very rapprochement and conflict, and the concomitant issues of moder4 Reference here is to Y¯ usuf al-Qa#¯ıd, Al-Harb f¯ı barr Mi¸sr (Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, . ; English translation: War in the Land of Egypt, trans. Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley (London: Saqi, ), p. . Citations in the text are from this translation. 5 Im¯ıl Hab¯ıb¯ı, Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah f¯ı-ikhtif¯a" Sa# ¯ıd Ab¯ı al-Nahs al-mutash¯a"il (Jerusa. . lem: Mansh¯ur¯at Sal¯ . ah. al-d¯ın, , ); English translation: The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, by Emile Habiby, trans. Salma K. al-Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick (New York: Vantage, . Interlink Books, ). Citations in the text are from this translation.

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nity, post modernity, identity, class and gender. The challenge of the West, however, is not limited to an emanating consciousness of identity formation or rebellion against tradition, for the issues of identity transposition, stereotyping, unconscious or deliberate appropriation of exoticism as a Western outlook are no less conspicuous in these narratives. In sum, in its extensive readings of a large corpus of contemporary narrative, this book aspires to offer a broad and a dynamic view of life and culture in the Arab world through an analysis of Arabic narrative in order to make sense of its present concerns, variety, traditions and roots in their postcolonial formations. It implicitly resists platitudes and myths, which gloss over the particular and the distinctive in Arabic traditions and cultures. Many Arabic long narratives offer visions that are bound to engage readers in an intellectual pursuit which is exciting for its multiplicity and difference, as there is a focused engagement with matters of class, gender, race, cultural and social consciousness. Debating homogeneity by their very polyphonic narrative layering and multi-voiced accentuations, Arabic novels with postcolonial consciousness contest a number of hegemonic positions and contaminated discourses like the strictly nationalist and even the reformist that succumb to colonialist compartmentalization of the colonial subject. The latter carry the scars of the encounter with the West, and end up in subservience to colonial hegemony, whether in rejection and disavowal or unwitting subscription to Western colonialist paradigmatic representation of the other’s stagnation and dormancy. The encounter goes beyond the fight against aggressors. In this respect, multi-voiced narratives may well develop a narrative space of the mythical, the theological, the political and the national in order to cope with complexity. As an example, Ily¯as Kh¯ur¯ı’s Mamlakat alghurab¯a" (; The Kingdom of Strangers, ) is a narrative of many tales and engagements. It includes factual encounters and details. It plays on these, however, to uncover the dilemma of living in a present of lies and fabrications that strive to deprive people of their right in a homeland and a peaceful life. The narrative plays on the written, in order to defamiliarize and, along with it, uncover the present scene of occupation and violence. It brings the oppressed together, regardless of religion and ethnicity, but it obliquely targets the source of evil. The oppressed identify with Jesus, and the writer or another of his informants is face to face with him, telling the Messiah that he is “Just the one writing this story.”

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“He turned and asked me, ‘What story?’” “Your story, Master,” I said. “But it is written,” He said. “I am writing it because it is written,” I said. “We always write what has been written. If it were not written, we would not write it.”6 Aside from the deployment of the metafictional to draw attention to the narrative art itself, the writer undermines the oppressor’s mythical pretext and discourse of originary root. Playing on the present participle “written” or the “makt¯ub,” the writer undermines theological metaphysics, and the emphasis on the sacred and the preordained. On the other hand, the act of re-writing is a revisionist endeavor with an invested interest in upholding the cause of social justice against centuries of distortion and manipulation of religion. A counter text is resurrected to dislodge the enforced one. Narratives usually take issue with authoritarian texts in an attempt to disentangle life and thought from both the unitary and the neo-colonialist, widening thereby the prospects of understanding and the spectrum for dialogue. Further to my explanation of the scope of the book and its analytic concerns, a word should be said about its parameters of explanation, definition of the colonial referent, and limits, especially respecting choice of texts, the rubric of Arabic culture, and the use of the written, and the colloquial, or the classical and the vernacular. Due to the nature of Arab culture, its diversity and geographical variety, selections are made from a large number of narratives that cover the whole Arab scene and argue, thereby, for heterogeneity and diversity. These selections make no claims to representational totality, but they also debate assumptions that all North African novels fall under a Francophone umbrella that sets them apart from the rest of Arabic fictional literature. While there are novels with exotic color and appeal, there are many others that share another register, which happens to be the staple of postcolonial Arabic culture. The struggle against the French has many similarities with the struggle against the British or the Italians, while the issues of class, race, and gender inform themes, language formations and strategies of address and accentuation. Some novels are written in French, not because of their writers’ willful inclination, but due to colonization as a cultural imposition. Some of these are stud¯ ab, ); English 6 Ily¯ as Kh¯ur¯ı, Mamlakat al-ghurab¯a’: riw¯ayah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ translation: The Kingdom of Strangers, by Elias Khoury; trans. Paula Haydar (Fayetteville, AR: Univ. of Arkansas Press, ), pp. –.

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ied in this book. But, behind the exclusion of some representational Francophone novels and their Anglophone counterparts is the language issue, for a writer’s choice of the medium of expression strongly pertains to the targeted audience. A writer’s preference of language makes a lot of difference, and a novel originally written in English or French has another target and agenda, but it certainly offers a glimpse into its own cultural context. Hence, many of these are sparingly mentioned. The use of coloniality as referent in this book stems from a belief in its validity to understand, and account for, the complexity and richness of narrative strategies and concerns that mark Arabic fiction. Aside from the very formation of the colonial subject and the transfer of power to the native elite in a number of ways and struggles, which had already drawn the attention of Franz Fanon, the present is still entangled into a long and complicated history of domination, be it Ottoman since , European or neocolonialist. Passing through colonial and mandated periods, cultures in the Arab World grew and changed in dialogue and confrontation. Reformists, liberal leaders and Islamists are not the only people who are the agents of change, despite their formative influence, for professionals, peasants, groups and guilds are no less dynamic. Women’s participation in the struggle for freedom and cultivation of life at large, in urban centers and rural areas alike, refuses homogenization and contests platitudinous surveys of the so called sameness of women’s conditions. In Arabic narratives, much space is given to markers of identity and difference. The emerging narrative constructs of dervishes, rebels, rogues, singers, along with festivals and carnivals, set gender, however, within a larger context in which material reality defies naïve and sweeping categorization of powerless women or muted groups. While authoritarian discourse uses its ideological language to control and contain these groups, there are also counteracting and subversive languages that undermine this discourse and lead to its failure and consequent demise. Indigenous oral practices that find their way into modern narrative reveal their potency in undermining authoritarianism and essentialism. A foray into these issues is not an excursion in time or exotic locations, but a rewarding engagement, which cuts across issues of identity at large. Although repression historically deprives women and ethnic or guild societies of a probably rich written product in the colonial period and its aftermath, there is a compensating corpus of songs, anecdotes, practices of social and political nature, including festivities,

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customs and family vocations that signify participation and dynamic involvement. Many novels are devoted to these to revive and engage life styles and indigenous ways of thinking. Some scholars are drawn to these, too, to account for regional cultural richness. Using Lucien Goldmann’s genetic structuralist analysis, Marnia Lazreg, for instance, looks upon these practices as a “conceptual language,” in Goldmann’s terms, that depicts women, in Algeria in her case, as “active agents.”7 Perhaps, more than anthropological research and field studies, narratives offer access to the interiors of households; scenes of festive nature, gatherings that defy many generalizations that tend to flatten out cultures of great multiplicity and exuberance. Although this study is written under the rubric of Arabic, there is no underlying assumption that Moroccan narratives, for instance, are identical with the Lebanese, or the Iraqi with the Egyptian. Societies have their distinctive and particular ways and colors. Even within a specific society, region or community, there are differences that defy the attempt to homogenize. But, the context of Arabic language and its abiding impact on the mind and consciousness of writers are no less markedly present, not as mediums of expression, but more significantly as ways of acting and thinking. Publishers insist at times on annotations, explications and classical replacements of the colloquial or local and regional dialects not only to reach wider readerships throughout the Arab homeland and its peripheries and margins, but also to retain affiliation with and belonging to the classical tradition. Critiques of the power of classical Arabic in patriarchal discourse are, paradoxically, stated in classical Arabic, too.8 Publishers vary in their positions regarding the classical and the vernacular. The late Salm¯an Sub . h. (d. ), the very enlightened and leftist publisher of Ibn Rushd Press in Beirut, retains the vernacular in the Iraqi Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s novel Al-Raj# alba#¯ıd (, Distant echo; English translation: The Long Way Back, ),9 ¯ ab Press but the committed arbiter of literary taste Suhayl Idr¯ıs of al-Ad¯ 7 Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question (New York and London: Routledge, ), p. . 8 See on this point, Hisham Sharabi, “The Neopatriarch Discourse in Contemporary Arab Society,” in Arab Civilization: Challenges and Responses: Studies in Honor of Constantine K. Zurayk, edit. Ibrahim M. Oweiss, pp. – (Albany, N.Y.: State Univ. of New York Press, ), p. . 9 Fu’¯ ad al-Takarl¯ı, Al-Raj# al-ba#¯ıd (Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ); English translation: The Long Way Back, trans. Catherine Cobham ( Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ).

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stipulates the use of the classical as a condition to make the same novel ¯ ab edition appeared in ). On available for a wider audience (Al-Ad¯ the other hand, the Libyan Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı has to explain in footnotes some Am¯az¯ıgh¯ı Berber phrases that occur in his dialogues. But no matter how publishers and writers debate the case, the common denominator is their agreement on a lucidly written Arabic as argued by the Egyptian intellectual T¯ in his response to the conser. ah¯a Husayn . vative Egyptian intellectual Mus.t.af¯a S¯ . adiq al-R¯afi#¯ı (d. ) on the th of June . He wrote that the “the question of the old and the new is not restricted to language in its accentuations and meanings, for it relates to language and other material and moral manifestations and conditions in life.”10 Language concerns relate to the colonial question, too. The language issue is loaded as it cuts through national identity questions and the other concerns of social groups. In its classical, written, form it is summoned as weapon against the colonialist, but it is also expected to cater to the communicational needs of the underprivileged. The revivalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century advanced classical Arabic as the most worthy weapon against colonialism. With the proclaimed fight against Arabic in mind, as practiced by the occupying French army in Algeria for instance, the revivalists developed a discourse of great rhetorical rigor to undermine the counterattack. Yet, classical rhetoric could not tackle the complexity of life, its need for a middle ground to account for its contemporary manifestations. In respect to the colonial question, classical Arabic was called upon in the Algerian fight against the colonizer. The year of independence, , intensifies preoccupations with issues of identity, nation and narration, and the language issue as identity figures with prominence in the postindependence agenda. Algerian narratives of rigorous engagement with issues of nationalism, socialism, human rights and civil society are not many, however, compared to the others that have been exoticizing the scene to reach French audiences.11 On the other hand, there are both male and female narratives that have debated ambivalence and argued for a better grasp of a complex material reality. The Egyptian scene is no less involved than the Algerian, for instance, not only because of the Ottoman occupation since , the French expedition of , and the British occupation in , but also because Cairo of the late nine10 11

T¯ Had¯ . ah¯a Husayn, . . ıth al-Arbi#¯a" (Cairo: D¯ar al-Ma#¯arif; Print , n. d.), Vol. , p. . See Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence, pp. –.

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teenth century has retained its Fatimid and Mamluk status as the center for intellectuals from all over the Arab lands. Thus, the colonial question assumes its complexity in association with the Nahd. ah (Awakening) since the second half of the nineteenth century,12 its mixed discourses of modernity and tradition, and its secular and enlightened religious approaches to issues of Arab and Islamic revival. Religious leaders, the #ulam¯a" or the learned, along with secular intellectuals were to tackle modernization, Islam and unity within a number of contexts that have recognized the role of women in the fight for a better society. The association between language, identity, and change undergoes qualifications, too. The growing political awareness, especially after the Second World War, diversifies attention beyond the debate between tradition and modernity, and Islam and Europe, which was paramount in the Nahd. ah stage. The impact of the war on the lower classes, and the complications of the political scene, especially in regard to the Palestinian issue, made it imperative that narratives develop a polyphonic space, a multi-voiced text that caters to social groups and also accommodates their languages. Novels such as the Iraqi Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah . Farm¯an’s (–) Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an (The Date Palm and the neighbors, )13 are polyphonic, not only in their mixed use of the classical and the Baghdadi dialect, but also in the attempt to recover scenes and anecdotes typical of periods of transition, change and challenge. The significance of Farm¯an’s novel, for instance, lies in its focus on the dialogic principle to let people, and women in particular, voice their views and commitments against the encroaching foreign powers and their compradors. As it was the interest of these powers to keep the masses under control, there was also a corresponding effort to ensure hegemony by redeeming the patriarchal and the reactionary under some outworn covers of tradition and religion. Narratives resort to irony, satire and stylization to subvert these discourses and sap their foundational tenets. In these narratives, there is also a multi-voiced stance that defies presumptions of some inherent and categorical neopatriarchal discourse, for parents and members of families and small communities have recourse to the languages of everyday life in expressing their own preoccupations and desires. Even characters that belong See George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (; New York: Capricorn Books, ). 13 Gh¯ a"ib Tu#mah Farm¯an, Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an (The Date Palm and the neighbors; . Lebanon, Sidon: Al-Maktabah al-#As.riyyah, ). . 12

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to religious sects or privileged groups may demonstrate some political disinterestedness, in Arnoldian terms, which enables them, in the manner of Goldman’s transindividual subjects, to achieve a maximum consciousness beyond immediate interest. On the other hand, narratives of no particular ideological agenda let their sites and characters unfold with specific and distinctive markers in defiance of sameness and homogeneity. With the unfolding variety, such narratives defy the Eurocentric labeling of Arab culture as patriarchal. Even classical language, and outside unitary and religious discourse, is a site of variety rather than sameness. Its manipulation in postcolonial narratives all over the Arab land and its sites of exile signify as much. Indeed, random critiques of classical Arabic language as mutable and dormant manifest the limitations of the speaker, for, as writings in late classical period and the Mamluk era demonstrate, some writers have made very good use of the flexibility of Arabic to suit their sardonic and satirical accounts. On the other hand, such a contemporary writer as Sal¯ım Barak¯at (b. ) demonstrates in his novels that Arabic classical language can profusely and elegantly flow to engage the complexity of the real and the mythical whenever the writer is in command of its variety and richness. A Syrian Kurd, Barak¯at has put to shame many whose claims to Arabism have never enabled them to write in acceptable Arabic. Between the richness of a language and its manipulation there lie very many debatable grounds, however. At a certain time, a religious discourse may dominate. On other occasions, a nationalist or a dictatorial one may assume ascendancy. Every hegemonic discourse has its register and agenda that are apt to constrain competing agendas. But, the implications of unitary discourse apply to every language. They result from the self-righteous practice, and the consistent use of specific rhetoric, which dislodges other competing structures and terms, for as Foucault argues, “power is not something unitary that exists outside us.”14 A nationalist discourse, with a unified national identity that relegates all society to sameness, increases in momentum, for instance, in pace with its manipulation of war rhetoric, the ham¯ . asah language, and reminders and markers of a glorious past. Its maturation in the rhetoric of the neopatriarch, the only ruler and the Am¯ır al-Mu"min¯ın (the commander of the faithful), for instance, is a combination of two unitary

14

Linda Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, ), p. .

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discourses, the religious and the nationalist. It trims and tailors each to produce the new one, a freak with a clear-cut drive to deceive and dupe others. Fiction undermines this deceptive, yet authoritarian, discourse through irony and parody to uncover its contradictions and explode its myth of national commitment and anti-imperialist posture. It exposes its use of women as ideological pawns in the rhetoric of war and honor and its contradictory appropriation of symbols to serve political expediency. In sum, this book strives also to offer these prospective readings of Arab life and culture in a narratological corpus that aspires to describe and analyze narrative texts. Narratology, as Mieke Bal explains, is “the theory of narrative texts, images, spectacles, events; cultural artifacts that (tell a story).”15 In Arabic discursivity, the variety of means, forms, issues, verbal and nonverbal narratives justify such a reading of Arabic narratology. The overlapping between theory and practice, better explained in the noticeable recourse to metafiction, should direct attention to this theoretical segment, as the plan of the book hopes to demonstrate. This plan is divided in  chapters that cover the reasons behind the growth of the genre and its maturation between tradition, modernity, and the colonial and neo-colonial challenge. The Scheherazade trope covers the historical framework within which the narrative art develops its strategies of appropriation, rejection, inventiveness, and accumulation. Although emphasizing the urban concerns of the novel, its representational nature insofar as the urban population is concerned, there is also the counter argument, not only in respect to the appearance of ethnic sagas and desert and war narratives, but also in relation to some susceptibility to postmodernist indecision and “suspensiveness,” to use Alan Wilde’s words.16 Narratives assume multiplicity and polyphony through a number of strategies that are central to the decolonizing and decentering endeavor that makes up the postcolonial Arabic novel. As I explain in Chapter One, Postcolonial Matters in Arabic Narrative, these strategies defy periodization, for a novel written in the s may well capture irony more effectively to give vent to writers’ transindividual stance beyond the limits of immediate affiliation in order to cope with the colonial Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Trans. Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press, ), p. . 16 Alan Wilde, “Modernism and Aesthetics of Crisis,” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, ), p. . 15

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moment in its density and challenge. History itself, as well as the encounter with the West, undergoes revision in these writings, and they are forwarded to the reader in a new light, inviting further analysis and engagement. In more than one sense postcolonial fiction practices an affirmative post-structuralist exercise to demystify ideological aura and homogenizing rhetoric. The first chapter argues that the postcolonial matters for any serious acquaintance with Arabic culture. In Chapter Two, Writing Scheherazade Now, the theoretical drive of the first chapter is placed within historical, social and generic contexts so as to account for the increasing narrative product, its stupendous growth as if in a counter-response to traditional elitist distrust of story telling. A reading of the reclamation of Scheherazade in modern Arabic literature, and narrative in particular, is carried out in context. It is set within a postmodernist and postcolonial understanding of the nonsensical demarcation or separation between the literary and the folkloric and popular. Read against a background of rejection and reluctant accommodation, the folktale images of people in The Thousand and One Nights are discussed in relation to their burgeoning in contemporary narrative, as they order themselves “around the motifs of transformation and identity,” to use Bakhtin.17 Both motifs are of great significance to postcolonial narrative, with its socio-political and ontological implications. But, as I argue in this chapter, narrative regains significance in Arabic culture in proportion to the increasing appreciation of Scheherazade in the West. Yet, to assume that The Thousand and One Nights has achieved smooth vogue in the West is to overlook the complications of taste and class formation in Europe since the Enlightenment. While drawn to these tantalizing and exciting tales of adventure, variety and sexual intrigue, the pater familias is keen on keeping them away from daughters who, nevertheless, know how to get hold of these in time. The scene in Arab upper class families is not different, and the Arab revivalists of the early twentieth century were not enthusiastic for Scheherazade and narrative proper in view of their Islamist or pan-Arab agendas. It is only at a later stage that Scheherazade becomes the trope for the aesthetic, the feminine and the resourcefulness of women. She has become since then a feminist prototype whose presence and achievement signify also the potential of 17 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edit. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: Univ. of Texas Press, ), p. . Hereafter, citations from this book are in the text.

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narrative as a decentering art. Addressing authority as represented by the Sultan Shahrayar, Scheherazade emerges from the battle for survival with narrative triumphs of great acumen and recognition, like the novel in Arabic. Liberating herself and women at large from control, this very Scheherazade is a decolonizing trope, too, as the significations of liberation narrative resonate with reference to women in their material reality or as symbols of the ummah or the nation in its fight against the colonizer. But, the trope has a complexity that emanates from its very richness. The colonizer who feminizes the land to be conquered and exploited has already appropriated the Arabian tales in the receiving Western culture, and Scheherazade has almost lost identity in the West. Some Arab writers, male and female, have come under the impact of the exoticizing tendency, too, offering us another sensational story of the harem (har . ¯ım). We need to read Assia Djebar’s A Sister to Scheherazade (pp. –) and compare it to Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s postcolonial reading in Suq¯u.t al-Im¯am (; The Fall of the Imam, ) to understand the difference in approach between the primarily exotic and the engaged.18 On the other hand, the Arab nationalist who equates the beloved and the mother with the land assumes a sovereign monopoly of warfare discourse and the rhetoric of independence, which is predicated against the assumed powerlessness of women. The nationalist discourse, as the narratives of the s demonstrate, is no less unitary than the religious and the colonialist. In Chapter Three, Debating Ambivalence: Socio-Political Engagements, there is an extensive reading of the novel in its contemporary growth beyond the formative years, but in tandem with the achievement of Scheherazade in weaving narratives of challenge. The urban novel is discussed here, not to endorse the view of the genre as a bourgeois epic, but to compare it to other narratives of desert poetics, for example, which restore the indigenous to narrative proper. It also focuses on magic realism as a strategy to cope with brutal occupation of the lands in Algeria, Palestine, and North Africa at large. Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (; The Bleeding of the Stone, ),19 Rash¯ıd Ab¯u Jadrah, [Boujedra] Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, Suq¯u.t al-Im¯am (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mustaqbal al-#Arab¯ı, ); English translation, The Fall of the Imam, by Nawal El Saadawi; trans. Sherif Hetata (London: Methuen, ). Citations in the text are from this translation. 19 Ibr¯ ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (London: Riad El-Rayyes (sic), ); English translation: The Bleeding of the Stone, trans. M. Jayyusi and C. Tingley (New York: Interlink Books, ). Citations in the text are from this translation. 18

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),20 and Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah, for instance, are discussed to explain the combined outlook of postmodernity and postcoloniality in context of cultural dynamics of exposure and challenge. While aware of the contemporary scene and culture at large, these narratives delve into the making of ideologies of greed and oppression with their deceptive discourse and brutal machinery of coercion and control. The ramifications of generic growths are seen in contexts of change, however. Every narrative strategy has some function in view of the determining factors behind its appearance and recurrence. Novels assume their postcoloniality not only as partial representations of change and reflections of awareness of this very transformation, but more significantly as dynamic cultural proponents of socio-political consciousness, especially in its local manifestations. This is complemented by the following emphasis on the cultural encounter with the West. Chapter Four, Arabs and the West, studies sites of challenge in the Western metropolis, especially whenever the protagonist tries in retrospect to impose meaning on a life experience there. These encounters are significantly postcolonial for being inner journeys into the self, too. The physical presence of the protagonist may act on the other site whereas the inner journey of this very individual reveals the scars that have been left by the encounter. Caught between tradition, faith and belonging on the one hand, and the attraction and challenge of the new location, on the other, along with its offers of knowledge and possible love or revulsion, the narrative career of protagonists sums up the whole encounter between the East and the West which is so important to postcolonial discourse. In these encounters, the image of the female is central. Whether in association with, or separation from, tradition, the female presence is culturally and narratively formative, for reasons that relate to the very grounding and cultural upbringing of the authors themselves who are tellingly present in the career of their protagonists. These narratives only attest to Bakhtin’s saying that the issue of authorship “is a formal and generic concern as well” for the novel (The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Chapter Five, Women in Arabic, attempts to cite examples from narrative accounts by women and male feminists or writers at large, so as to understand images of women, the formation of female identities, and Rash¯ıd Ab¯u Jadrah, [Boujedra] Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits, al-Jaz¯a"ir: Al-Mu"assasah al-wat.aniyyah lil-kit¯ab, ). 20

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the time and place of these formations. While restoration of individuality to women is a given in any polyphonic narrative that has female characters, the case is more complicated when narratives offer enough space for women to enforce their will and discourse against patriarchal assumptions. Not specifically Arabic or Chinese or any other nationality, this strategy in men’s writing is worth noticing as it subverts customs and ways of behavior by challenging platitudes and stock images. Women appear in these discursive terrains as fighters for identity. They cut across the given and the familiar with rigorous analysis and keen insight. Women writers are eager to uncover the damage done to their constructs due to social, political and traditional ways of thinking. They are more capable, in general, of defining their locations where their protagonists take cognizance of their identity and selfhood against dire circumstances. Hysteria and madness are explored as ways of coping or not coping with a shocking and bewildering reality. Madness is also a strategy of escape. The chapter argues, however, that there is a distinctive feminist narrative in contemporary Arabic fiction, which is generated by wars and disappointments, but also within a historical context of women writing in Arabic tradition and culture. Chapter Six, A Voice for Dissent: Rogues, Rebels and Saints, continues the issues of marginalization or repression, and investigates narratives that deconstruct history so as to give voice to the muted and the repressed. History undergoes revision, not in the manner called for by the “only leader” or ruler of the post-independence state, or as fabricated by the empire and its neocolonialist readers of originary Biblical past, but as it invites probing through its gaps and empty spaces. Writers delve into these and come up with characters that are usually overlooked or marginalized by the elitist, the commissioned, the fundamentalists, and the obsessed with power. Yet, the narrative canvas is broad enough to reclaim Sufis, rogues, rebels and characters of every sort who are usually excluded from official historiography. This awareness, which reaches towards the muted, the excluded and the silenced or marginalized, reclaims humans as individuals, and positions them as they deserve against hegemonic discourse. In Chapter Seven, Site as Narrative, and in Chapter Eight, Time in Narrative, the spatial and the temporal are explored as they make up the elemental formation of the postcolonial. Land, home, institution, history and tradition are human sites, but they are also tellingly present in behavioral psychology and motivation. They stand behind every desire, individual, communal, national or colonial. It is the land

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in time that draws the attention and invites intrusion and conquest. The human at a certain moment in a certain place acts on another or is the object of another desire. In a marvelous blend of the magical and the real, Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı in Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar, for instance, brings these elements together in the timeless and the mystical conflict with the encroaching greed of the human and the neocolonial. Space as wilderness suffers intrusion and disruption that is more devastating than the usual challenge of drought or flood. Every location and moment is laden with a semiotic dimension and signification. In Chapter Nine, Arabic Metafiction: Convergence with Postcoloniality, the metafictional in Arabic is explored, not only to demonstrate its postmodernist poetics or politics, but also to show its aesthetic supplementation to the postcolonial. Writers ask themselves at times about the rationale behind their endeavor. They need to rejuvenate the art, or make sense of experience at large. Under pressures concomitant with the politics and practices of the post-independence state, writers experiment with practices of theoretical nature, which draw attention to the art while obliquely offering their dissenting views. Self-reflexive writing is not always a Western self-pleasuring, though some writers, like the Tunisian Sal¯ . ah. al-D¯ın Buj¯ah, find in tradition justification enough to enjoy such experimentation. Chapter Ten, Scheherazade’s Gifts, deals with Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (; English translation: Arabian Nights and Days, ) to underscore its recapitulation of the Scheherazade trope, so as to tie up the discussion, and bring the novelistic tradition in its diversity and complexity together. Hence Sindbad’s rejoinder stands as Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s, . for “calls from a thousand and one marvels have flowed” (p. ). Mahf¯ . uz’s . engagement derives its postcolonialty from three perspectives: it reclaims the indigenous, and contributes to the retention of the native and the local in its popular and folkloric dimensions, thereby decentering elitist and official discourses; it uses this reclamation to indict authority and vindicate the underprivileged, without overlooking the fact that greed and wickedness cut across class and gender; and third, it empowers women so as to enable them to expose male lust for their bodies. Body politics in this compact Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah includes women bodies as sites for greed, lust and exploitation. But to speak of the postcolonial drive in narrative, and to simultaneously lean on the ambivalence of postmodernist poetics, may still raise many questions in the reader’s mind. The postcolonial Arabic novel is not merely concerned with a post-independence stage in the first place,

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for it argues an outlook and a frame of mind. Delving into platitudes and exposing practices, it runs against subordination to hegemony. Its polyphony lays bare patriarchal habits of thought and ways of coercion and exploitation. It questions authority, in its colonial, postcolonial and native formations. It debates ambivalence, to be sure, and argues for freedom, equality and understanding. It interrogates and questions stratagems of oppression and abuse of power. It challenges foreign occupation, whatever garb it wears, and uncovers the masks of dictators, but it rarely resorts to traditional strategies of representation. Its methods, modes and strategies make use of the traditional corpus of satire, comedy and foolery, but it also applies psychoanalysis. Its frontiers are not always clear-cut or categorically demarcated. Hence, the debate is rich, but it is never absolute in claims or formations. If I tend to manipulate postmodernist poetics, including its tropes of ambivalence and strategies of parody and pastiche, it is with a design to account for the upsurge of fragmented narratives whose authors, like Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at., for instance, inscribe their personal experience of imprisonment and torture within a fragmented text that may well escape censorship. Fragmentation becomes another strategy of indirection that works in tandem with many others of different method and scope. With this understanding, I assume that the postcolonial Arabic novel makes a rewarding reading, and I hope that the venture would enhance interest in this rich and variegated narrative space.


  POSTCOLONIAL MATTERS IN ARABIC NARRATIVE “The papers published the names of everyone notable who was caught, but merely gave general reference to the rest. The rest—yes, that was me.” Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı1

My commitment to Arabic narrative dates back to the early s with my first book on political thought in Arabic fiction, al-Mawqif al-thawr¯ı f¯ı al-riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah al-mu#¯as. irah (The Revolutionary situation in modern Arabic fiction, ).2 That early engagement has been amplified and, indeed, superseded since then by three more books, the last of which is Infir¯a.t al-#iqd al-muqaddas: Mun#a.taf¯at al-riw¯ayah ba#da Mah. f¯uz. (Revoking the sacred contract: directions of the post- Mahf¯ . uz. novel, ).3 The latter book cites no less than sixty experimental novels with multifarious narrative techniques and discursive strategies, including parody, irony, travesty, reportage, collage, travelogue, folklore songs, grotesquery, and carnivalesque scenes. These practices use ancient, modern and post-modern perspectives. They manipulate the art at large, but they survey and, at times, ransack both Muslim tradition and Arab history. They indicate a radical change in outlook and perspective that entitle us to speak of a post-Mahf¯ novel in the . uzian . sense that Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. (b. ) is the canonized representative of the novel in its urban, specifically Cairene, milieu. Yet, in this book, I use the “post-Mahf¯ . uz” . label to indicate the practice, not the periodization, the collapsing of genres and time dimensions, the attention to ethnic and marginalized groups, and the significant awareness of and sensibility to other realities and prospects. In covering these or delving in Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah; The Secret Life of Saeed, p. . Hereafter, citations from this translation are in the text. 2 Muhsin J¯ asim al-M¯usaw¯ı, Al-Mawqif al-thawr¯ı f¯ı al-riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah al- mu#¯as. irah . (Baghdad: Mansh¯ur¯at Wiz¯arat al-I#l¯am, ). 3 Muhsin J¯ asim al-M¯usaw¯ı, Infir¯a.t al-#iqd al-muqaddas: Mun#a.taf¯at al-riw¯ayah ba#da Mah. . f¯uz. (Cairo: GEBO, ). 1

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their complexity, there is frequent reference to Mahf¯ . uz, . nonetheless. The novel in Arabic has gained enormously from Mahf¯ . uz’s . contributions to its urban growth and from his representational narrative of the emerging bourgeoisie. But, like any formidable presence, Mahf¯ . uz. has also offered norms and patterns that challenge or even intimidate innovation and change. The Nobel Laureate in Literature () is after all, “widely recognized as the founding father of the Arabic novel,” as Roger Allen rightly notes.4 Mahf¯ . uz’s . impact is so overriding that many fiction writers of his generation find it difficult to dislodge his literary encroachment. The late Luw¯ıs #Awad. is reported as saying in  that Mahf¯ . uz. “has become in our country an established literary or artistic institution,” not “only a government institution, drawing sustenance from official recognition, but a popular institution that people talk about spontaneously in cafés, at home, and in ordinary literary gatherings.”5 Yet, Mahf¯ . uz. derived great deal of public recognition from his subtle criticism of bureaucracy and misuse of power.6 It is good to know, too, that Mahf¯ . uz. admits the difficulty of comprehensive accounting for radical upheaval and change. As awareness in its epistemological implication is intertwined with some historical and ideological grounding, Mahf¯ . uz. acknowledges the problems involved in representations that fall beyond the scope and the prism of specific consciousness and concern. Speaking to the Egyptian critic and journalist Fu’¯ad Duw¯arah, the novelist made the following statement: “The  Revolution broke out and my desire to write about these remaining themes [the realistic phase] was smothered.” He added: “The decline of the old way of life obliterated my wish to criticize it. It seemed to me that my career as a writer was over, that I had nothing more to say. I publicly announced this feeling and was sincere about it.”7 A sense of identification with a Roger Allen, Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), p. . 5 Qtd. in Gaber Asfour, “Najuib Mahfuz’s Critics,” trans. Ayman al-Desouky, in Najuib Mahfuz from Regional Fame to Global Recognition, ed. Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, pp. – (New York: Syracuse University Press, ), at p. . 6 Among the many articles in this respect, the reader may consult Menahem Milson, “Najib Mahfuz and Jamal #Abd Al-Nasir; the Writer as Political Critic,” in Writer, Culture, Text: Studies in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Ami Elad, pp. – (Fredericton: York, ); and Trevor LeGassick, “Mahfuz’s al-Karnak, the Quiet Conscience of Nasir’s Egypt Revealed,” in Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, ed. Trevor Le Gassick, p. – (Washington, D. C: Three Continents, ). 7 Fu’¯ ad Duw¯arah, “A Journey in the Mind of Naguib Mahfouz,” an interview, con4

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way of life, the bourgeoisie, for instance, could have led Mahf¯ . uz. into thinking of the end of the road in the s, its ultimate conclusion in the revolution of  and the radical transformation that ensued thereafter. Irrespective of the writer’s worldview, the timely recognition of the crisis sounded so real at that early, but significant, stage of his career that the writer passed through a process of identification with his representational object, the bourgeoisie as the available dynamic force before Jam¯al #Abd al-N¯asir’s (Nasser) socialist measures of the late s and s.8 To use a Foucauldian notion, a certain frame of mind could face the impasse of identification with a specific class and its concomitant limited consciousness, for, to apply to Mahf¯ . uz’s . world, the “bourgeoisie, in attempting to recount its own ascension, encountered, in the calendar of its victory, the historical density of institutions, the specific gravity of habits and beliefs, the violence of struggles, the alternation of success and failure.”9 The case is more complicated when a specific segment, the Egyptian national bourgeoisie in this case, took upon itself the double role of radical transformation and authentication of ways of life, or leftist modernity and traditional Arab fervor. In Theory In this chapter, as in the following readings, I am more engaged with the ensuing awareness in narrative as rooted in the modern episteme, usually described as postcolonial. In these narratives, which I shall discuss in detail in the next chapters, there will be focus on this awareness that looks upon experience in its present manifestations with an interrogating and debating mind. Such a perspective targets issues of analogy and representation in narrative, without minimizing their sigducted by Fouad Dawwarah, trans. by Hoda El Sadda, in Naguib Mahfouz, Nobel : Egyptian Perspectives. A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M.M. Enani, pp. – (Cairo: GEBO, ), p. . 8 See in this respect, Hasan M. al-Shamy, “The Traditional Structure in Mahfouz’s Trilogy: A Behavioristic Text Analysis,” in Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, ed. Trevor Le Gassick, pp. – (Washington, D. C: Three Continents, ); Marius Deeb, “Najib Mahfuz’s Midaq Alley: Socio-Cultural Analysis,” in Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz, pp. –; Roger Allen, “Naguib Mahfouz and the Arabic Novel: The Historical Context,” in Naguib Mahouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition, ed. Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, pp. – ( Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, ); and the present author’s survey, in Al-Mawqif al-thawr¯ı f¯ı al-riw¯ayah. 9 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random-Vintage Books, ), p. .

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 

nificance, for the novel, in sum, is representative in focus. But, there are two points that invite elucidation: the lack of socio-economic grounding in many novels of societal considerations until sometime in the s; and the tendency to analogize in order to come to grip with issues of political complexity like the Palestinian nationhood, land and identity. Trevor LeGassick has noticed the first problem when assessing the novel until the late s. He argues, that although “frequently evincing their sympathy and regret for the hard lot of the workers and peasants, their stories [Arab fiction writers of middle and upper class affiliation ‘for the greater part of this century’] often strike one for their essential detachment from basic economic issues.”10 Even when tackling problems of some social and political urgency, as Mahf¯ . uz. does in the early novels, both place and conflict unfold in a linear manner to fit a representational framework. It is only when the author questions the status quo, undermining its holdings in society, family and state, that things take a different direction, usually pursued through greater dialogization and absorption of many voices. In the writer’s Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (; English translation: The Thief and the Dogs, ),11 the protagonist’s linear progression from faith to disillusionment, and from love to murder, gains richness from the play on the inwardness of the hero, his repugnance at treachery among his early radical mentors and associates like his wife. But in Thartharah fawqa al-N¯ıl (Chatter on the Nile, ; English translation: Adrift on the Nile, ),12 frustration at social and political evil is pushed to its other extreme, and life looks and sounds as a site of impotence and failure. Every night a group of pseudo-intellectuals gather in a mood of ennui, exchanging sex freely and smoking hashish, while dabbling in every political issue with no serious commitment or concern.13 In these novels, the ensuing oppositional sense gathers its potency through multivoiced narratives, and alienation emerges as the condition of intellec10 Trevor LeGassick, “From Naïve Simplicity to Sophisticated Obscurity-Arabic Fiction in a Century of Change,” Mundus Artium, , n.  (), pp. –, at p. . 11 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The Thief and the Dogs, trans. M.M. Badawi and Trevor LeGassick (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). On this novel, see Mohamed Mahmoud, “The Unchanging Hero in a Changing World: Najib Mahfuz’s al-Liss wa "l-kilab,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –. 12 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Thartharah fawqa al-N¯ıl (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English trans.: Adrift on the Nile, trans. Frances Liardet (New York: Doubleday, ). 13 For a discussion of these novels, see the standard study by Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm: A Study in Najib Mahfuz’s Novels (Leiden: Brill, ).

    



tual life in the aftermath of the post-independence state, its fall in corruption, and massive use of coercion against opposition and dissent. This divergence from authorial omniscience stands only for a stage in the burgeoning consciousness, for the nation state body politic, its machinery and rhetoric, and the community are readdressed from a number of perspectives that are unable yet to tackle complexity through further manipulation of narrative strategies. Anger and disappointment are paramount, and for good reason, in directing the novel of social and political protest. In a story of biting irony, in his collection AlRa#d (; The thunder), the Syrian Zakariyya T¯amir speaks of eight days of genesis, for in the eighth, “He [God] created interrogators, who came down to the cities with the police, the prisons and the iron chains.”14 While these make up the serious material of the Arabic novel, the Palestinian issue is the most scorching to writers’ conscience. As LeGassick rightly notes, the “shock and humiliation felt by all Arabs at the loss of Palestine in the war of  seem to have an important catalytic effect on the directions since taken in Arabic fiction.”15 Subsequent Israeli invasions, along with use of massive power against Palestinian communities and refugee camps since , involve writers in a double narrative venture, to target the roots of corruption in Arab regimes, and to tackle the misery and tragedy in more sophisticated terms beyond the politics of direct dissent. The effort is not easy, as the scope looms too large, before the later growth of the tragic and its own dramatic parameters in narrative. The Syrian-born writer and novelist Hal . ¯ım Barak¯at in #Awdat al-.t¯a"ir il¯a al-bah. r (, The return of the Flying Dutchman to the sea; English translation: Days of Dust, ) is in search for a plan to accommodate the sense of disappointment, frustration and anger in a novel that deals with the  defeat and failure.16 In a poignant use of the symbol of the Flying Dutchman, the sailor who cannot be redeemed from roaming the seas unless through discovery of self and true love, the author looks upon the details of defeat from many angles, when the present offers nothing, and when only the future seems as the ultimate space for selfaffirmation and regain of identity. More important to the author is to 14

Qtd. in Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Two Types of Hero in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” Mundus Artium, Special Arabic Issue, , n.  (), pp. –, at p. . 15 Trevor LeGassick, “From Naïve Simplicity to Sophisticated Obscurity-Arabic Fiction in a Century of Change,” Mundus Artium, , n.  (), pp. –, at p. . 16 Hal¯ım Barak¯ at, #Awdat al-.t¯a"ir il¯a al-bah. r (); English trans. Days of Dust, trans. . Trevor LeGassick ( Wilmette, Ill.: Medina, ).



 

locate the issue in worldwide concerns, for the Palestinian as targeted by massive force is no less than the European Jews in the concentration camps. As it is beyond the scope of the novel to accommodate such broad concerns, it has to analogize the whole issue: “The wailing of European Jews in concentration camps mixed (in the ears of the hero) with the cries of the Arab refugees.”17 In other words, writers are given the incentive at that pioneering stage to search for methods and techniques to deal with a complex reality, but the urgency and the immediacy entangle them in poetic techniques, rhetoric, grand and mythical architexts, and analogy. In due time, the burgeoning consciousness acts on the creative to go beyond intellectualized responses or the early ones of mere registration or overt documentation. This consciousness entails attention to detail human desires and practices that could have been bypassed by narratives of great cultural and ideological visions. These preoccupations are not oblivious to the nature of encounter with invaders or colonialists. On the contrary, this very consciousness grows in defiance and response to this challenge, as the narratives under discussion demonstrate.18 Even narratives that appeared in French, like the Algerian K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s (d. ) Nedjma (), are worth citing, not only because Nedjma, for instance, “remains a profoundly Arab work” in its concept of time and synthetic framework, as its editors note,19 but mainly because it gets its incentive from the th of May, , the first anti-colonial uprising in Algeria which was brutally put down by the French colonizer. The word that gives the title to the novel, means “star” in Arabic, and the writer creates the female presence as symbolic of Algeria throughout its struggle, and also as narrative unitive catalyst, which attracts and holds together many divergent elements. Although connected to each other, people in the novel are of dubious origins (pp. –), as brutality and colonialism play havoc in the lands. While there is “a denunciation of feudal theocracy and patriarchy,” the novel made use of the “the colonizing 17

Qtd. in Salma Khadra Jayyusi, “Two Types of Hero in Contemporary Arabic Literature,” p. . 18 See Halim Barakat’s discussion of the complexity of the social and the political in his significant contribution, Visions of Social Reality in the Contemporary Arab Novel (Washington, D. C: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, ). 19 See K¯ ateb Yac¯ıne, Nedjma, trans. from the French by Richard Howard (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia-Caraf Books, ), pp. viii–ix.

    



traditions of French fictional discourse and its generic reductiveness” to develop its own “anticolonial discourse and a discourse of double differentiation,” as Bernard Aresu argues in his introduction to the novel.20 I am inclined therefore to subscribe to the premise that “post-colonial literatures are a result of… interaction [resulting from European Imperialism] between imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices,” as suggested by the editors of The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.21 But my concern is focused on narratives that construe a postcolonial stance within and beyond this immediate encounter, insofar as there is relevance to the search for selfhood and meaning amid both diversity and totality. The act of selecting from among the emanating narrative corpus could invite arbitrary judgment, but my focus is on the narrative tendency to interrogate fundamentalist, traditionalist and colonialist scriptory traditions, as this particular narrative drive is basically geared towards subversion and demystification. It problematizes issues rather than resigns itself to customary attendance. The Scheherazade trope that gives the title to the preface and to the last chapter is more inclusive in this context, not only for its prioritization of narrative or its feminist accentuations, but also for its deployment of narrative stratagems of free expression, recognition of diversity and attention to human aspirations and desires. Along these lines and stratagems, much of the postcolonial awareness responds to adversarial situations (whether patriarchal, colonial, social, economic, or cultural) with counter readings, that make use of available tools and discursive mechanisms including historical reconstructions, parodic narrativity, stylization, transgeneric practices, and feminist engagements to explode myths of infallibility, ordinance, filiations, lineage, continuity and historical truth, which mark hegemonic discourse. Processes, issues and power relations are narrative terrains for postcolonial fiction where flux and space interact, and where human agency assumes roles and meanings in response to, or in dialogue with, constructions of authority. To read through novels since the late s, the reader may be surprised by the variety and richness that belie periodization or thematic classification. There is also the underlying cultural sub-

Bernard Aresu, “Introduction,” Nedjma, pp. xiii–l, at p. xxxii. Bill Ashcroft, et al., eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, ), p. . Hereafter cited in the text as PCSR. 20

21



 

text held together by Arabic in its permeating classical norms. Identity builds on this shared property, to develop and grow into issues of great poignancy and challenge. The social in Al-Raj# al-ba#¯ıd by the Iraqi Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı (b. ) (Distant echo, ; English translation: The Long Way Back, ), for example, may exceed the concerns of the Egyptian Sabr . ¯ı M¯us¯a’s Fas¯ad al-amkinah (; English translation: Seeds of Corruption, ),22 yet the latter offers more in terms of political consciousness. On the other hand, a novel by the Egyptian Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı could offer enormous explorations against patriarchy, but it cares less as narrative for postmodernist poetics, for instance, than Y¯a Ban¯at Iskandar¯ıyyah (; English translation: Girls of Alexandria, ) by the Egyptian Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at. (b. ).23 On the other hand, there are mutual echoes and exchanges that demonstrate shared engagements. Narratives of alienation, bewilderment and resignation, to offer another pattern, are many in the face of both the post-independence state and the post-capitalist metropolis. These include the Egyptian Sun#all¯ ah . Ibr¯ah¯ım’s (b. ) Al-Lajnah (; English translation: The CommitJal¯al’s Muh. ¯akamat muntas. af al-layl tee, ),24 the Egyptian Muhammad . (; English translation: Trial at Midnight, ),25 the Palestinian Jordanian Ibr¯ah¯ım Nas.rall¯ah’s Bar¯ar¯ı al-Humm¯ a (; English translation: . Prairies of Fever, ),26 and the Egyptian Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Sha.th. alMad¯ınah (City Trance/ Distant City, ).27 Yet, these and many others also manifest diversity and difference. Their common denominator, besides Arabic language and culture, is their underlying political and cultural awareness of the need to be an agent of, and a witness to, change.

22 Sabr¯ı M¯ us¯a, Fas¯ad al-amkinah (Cairo: Mu"assasat R¯uz al-Y¯usuf, ); English . translation: Seeds of Corruption, trans. Mona N. Mikhail (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ). ¯ ab, ); English 23 Idw¯ ar al-Kharr¯at., Y¯a Ban¯at Iskandar¯ıyyah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ translation: Girls of Alexandria, trans. Frances Liardet (London: Quartet Books, ). 24 Sun#all¯ ah Ibr¯ah¯ım, Al-Lajnah (Beirut, n. p., ; Cairo: Mat.b¯u#¯at al-Q¯ahirah, . ); English translation: The Committee, trans. Mary St. Germain and Charlene Constable (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, ). 25 Muhammad Jal¯ al, Muh. ¯akamat muntas. af al-layl (Cairo: GEBO, ); English trans. lation: Trial at Midnight, trans. Nehad Selaiha (Cairo: GEBO, ). 26 Ibr¯ ah¯ım Nas.rall¯ah, Bar¯ar¯ı al-Humm¯ a (Beirut: MADN, ); English translation: . Prairies of Fever, trans. May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed (New York: Interlink Books, ). 27 Jam¯ al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Sha.th. al-Mad¯ınah (Cairo: D¯ar al-Shur¯uq, ).

    



Postcolonial Discourse But, issues of identity and consciousness demand poetics and stratagems that can cope with the complexity of colonialist discourse. In the words of Elleke Boehmer, this discourse “can be taken to refer to that collection of symbolic practices, including textual codes and conventions and implied meanings, which Europe deployed in the process of its colonial expansion and, in particular, in understanding the bizarre and apparently unintelligible strangeness with which it came into contact.”28 While colonialist discourse demonstrates the mechanism of mastery, it betrays its moments of hesitation, fear and desire, a point which Frantz Fanon dwelt on his Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Mask, two books which have become central to further analysis of the encounter in view of Lacanian theory.29 On the other hand, the very contact and encounter in the Arab world, as in many other parts, defies stratification. Contamination, as Ashis Nandy demonstrates in his Intimate Enemy, is as real as the genuine search for identity in the emerging outcome.30 The complexity of the ensuing consciousness invites and demands critical strategies from more than one perspective. Although I make use of Foucauldian discourse analysis in following up this consciousness in Arabic narratives, I am no less concerned here with the dynamics of economic and political change, and cultural politics. Marxist dynamism is not enough by itself, however, nor are Frantz Fanon’s articulations of cultural contamination and the politics of encounter. On the other hand, Foucault’s “technologies of power,” the amalgam of relations, processes and strategies that obfuscate hegemony, are not only real, but also very pertinent to our detailed analysis of Arabic narratives. In History of Sexuality, Foucault recognizes how these “force relations” operate in a powerful way, leading thereby to social hegemonies of great bearings on class and gender relations.31 Hik¯ . an al-Shaykh . ayat Zahrah ( The Story of Zahra) by the Lebanese Han¯ Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, ), p. . 29 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, ); The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, ). 30 Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford, ). 31 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Pelican, ), p. . 28



 

(b. )32 or Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an (The Date Palm and the neighbors) by the Iraqi Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah Farm¯an (–), for instance, . offer narrative terrains of micro-politics, while simultaneously debating a backgrounded grand narrative of ideological weight. But, delving into the matrix of these master narratives, Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Zahrah or Farm¯an’s young women in (Date Palm and the neighbors) also uncover the amount of fossilization that inbreeds within these discourses and their subtexts of custom and outworn beliefs, and which turns them into weapons unsheathed against the marginalized. On the other hand, semiotics at large also helps in tracing significations of acts, languages, codes and contexts. As narratives manipulate strategies and codifications to fit into their ultimate interest, we, as readers, end up looking “for the generic and discursive structures that enable and constrain meaning,” to use Robert Scholes’ terms.33 By the same token, we can dislocate signs of power in every utterance of some rooted foundation in cultural or religious interpretation and practice, for as Pierre Bourdieu argues for his relational mode of thinking, there is a “constitutive power” which lies not in the language itself but in the very group “which authorizes it and invests it with authority.”34 Narratives restore voice and identity in a number of ways that enable us to see through the use and misuse of language as site of power. Narrative strategies are mediums for both the empowered and the powerless on every level of empire, nation, state, class, community, and individuals. The documentary record of empire betrays a paradoxical sensitivity to, and rejection of, national discourses, especially their traditional architexts. A case in point is Lord Cromer’s discourse, in speeches as well as in his Modern Egypt, as representative of the British Empire in its heyday of imperial rhetoric and arrogance in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.35 National discourse, however, is no less attentive to the rhetoric of empire. Since the French expedition in , the virtual invasion of Egypt, the emanating one is Han¯ . an al-Shaykh, Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Nah¯ar, ); English translation: The Story of Zahra, trans. Peter Ford (London: Quartet Books, ). 33 Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, ), p. . 34 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), p. . 35 See Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play: Child Rearing in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, pp. – (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, ), at pp. –. 32

    



a mixture of accommodation of, and revolt against, the imperial legacy. As the colonial power has an ideology of its own, the colonized has to identify its own, too. Yet, there is more than one ideology for the nationals, and hegemonic discourse within these has to revive some patriarchal norms to empower itself the more against competition and challenge. Every colonized nation, including its contested terrains, has ideological platforms and parties that may exceed in number, but not in effectiveness and functionality, these of the colonizing power. Each one monopolizes force for gain, but it is the strategy of the empowered to declare mastery and to make it clear to the powerless that they are bound and entitled to conquer. As the Israeli officer tells Saeed, in Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah, they have the latest equipment “to monitor your every movement, even what you whisper in your dreams.”36 But, the underlying understanding is nonetheless entrenched in fights for legitimacy through belonging, succession, or—in the case of empires—history and missionary assumptions. Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s narrative is a middle ground between the belletristic and the popular, and its downtrodden individuals and communities suffer a double persecution. Indeed, the native elites and the privileged may side with the occupying power against the marginalized that happen to be the mass population. But accounts also abound in Arabic Adab, belles lettres that speak of, and at times for, marginalized groups. However, the belletristic tradition frames the reported matter for a purpose, usually to serve a dominating culture, which could recourse to virtual destruction and erosion of every text of opposition. These practices occurred in the past, as the Egyptian historian al-Maqr¯ız¯ı (d. ) explains.37 And they have continued ever since in tandem with exploitation and injustice, a point which the Egyptian novelist Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı (b. ) picks up in his Khi.ta.t al-Gh¯ı.t¯an¯ı (),38 where hegemonic discourse evolves its jargon against the #ajam, or the foreigners, the underprivileged and the different who are ostracized by the discourse of the Master, the Ust¯adh, as the very representative of neopatriarchy.39 As a topographical narrative with historical underpinnings, the latter work legitimizes its presence Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah; The Secret Life of Saeed, p. . ¯ ab, See Kit¯ab al-maw¯a#z. wa-al-i#tib¯ar, known as Al-Khi.ta.t (Cairo: Maktabat al-Ad¯ rpt. ), vol. , pp. –, . 38 Jam¯ al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Khi.ta.t al-Gh¯ı.t¯an¯ı (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mas¯ırah, ). 39 Samia Mehrez, “Re-writing the City: The Case of Khitat al-Ghitani,” in The Arabic Novel since : Mundus Arabicus, a special issue, , ed. Issa Boullata, pp. – (Cambridge, MA: D¯ar al-Mahjar, ), at p. . 36

37



 

within a genre in Arabic historiography that collates the spatial and the temporal to suggest the complexity of the political and the social under foreign occupation and its subordinates from among the natives. Al-Maqr¯ız¯ı, as the pioneer, offers popular traditions enough space to debate and undermine power structures. In line with this generic tradition, writers since the s have made use of this genre; and dissent emerges, not as mere inscription, but also in signs and oral tradition such as anecdotes, songs, festivals, proverbs and sayings. These become a repertoire in a postcolonial endeavor to restore the trace in a reconstructed inventory that defies annihilation and erosion. Identity Formation Foremost among narratives of dissent are these that relate to a “body politic,” in its political and social complexity, beyond its Foucauldian origination, its ramifications in practices and symbols with bearings on gender, race, and class and identity formation. Broadly speaking and in relation to the beliefs and practices of daily nature, the phrase refers to the “inherently political nature of symbols and practices surrounding the body politic and the human body.”40 To give name to the whole drive, one may cite Simon During in suggesting that the “post-colonial desire is the desire of decolonized communities for an identity.”41 Identity could be very elusive, however, especially when applied to societies of ancient tradition and past. Societies, and also rural communities, may find it absurd to emphasize the obvious, but identity undergoes challenge whenever there is an immediate encounter. Intellectuals of the early Nahd. ah (Arab Awakening), in the late nineteenth-century, passed through this experience, as the Egyptian Shaykh Muhammad #Abduh’s (d. ) discourse demonstrates. It . is embedded with Orientalist and colonialist jargon, and its reasoning is no longer the jedal or dialectic of tradition and its rationalist underpinnings since the classical period. On the other hand, the challenge of Europe brought into narrative a conscious effort to articulate an identity, forged from a collective self, as the well-known Egyptian writer Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım attempts to do in #Awdat al-r¯uh. (; English transAihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, “Introduction,” Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, eds. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . 41 Simon During in PCSR, p. . 40

    



lation: Return of the Spirit, ).42 Native intellectuals’ locations tell a lot on their language, and perspective. In the metropolis, the sense of alienation may involve writing in greater anxiety and a search for selfhood, as Boehmer conjectures.43 The native counterpart at home has other concerns and preoccupations. The issue is even more complicated in a New World Order that makes use of every means of power to erode identities and undermine beliefs and patterns of life. Identity crisis is real as it never before, and the challenge to formations and malformations has already worked its way into narrative strategies. Indeed, we have to re-read Sun#all¯ ah Ibr¯ah¯ım’s Al-Lajnah (; English translation: . The Committee, ), to come to terms with the complications in the encounter between the nation-state and the post-capitalist power, their joint projects and hidden agendas, which end up not only in the victim’s mistrust of the state, but also in a sense of alienation and absurdity. With its bare narrative, the novel, through the anonymous protagonist as narrator, offers a compelling reading of the protagonist’s utter helplessness in the face of the post-independence state machinery with its coercion and absurdity, especially during the s, as I shall explain in chapter three.44 In the light of these issues, it may be more tenable to speak of applications to individuals, groups and communities, without bypassing social class and ethnic identities. Narrative proper is mostly engaged in the ramifications of nation, ethnicity, class and gender, for the socalled national rhetoric, the politicized state jargon of achievement, has become the butt of satire since the  Israeli defeat of the nationstates. In postcolonial narratives, the national issue is there, but it is mostly posited in a relational nexus whereby the need for individual freedom is highlighted and the counter-assertion of identity takes place in the most unexpected manner. The human agent assumes significance and secures a position even in the most disturbing sites. The subject is an actor, even as an outsider or a marginalized human being, for 42 Tawf¯ıq al-Hak¯ım, #Awdat al-r¯uh (Cairo: Matba#at al-ragh¯ a"ib, ); English trans. . . lation: Return of the Spirit, trans. Williams M. Hutchins (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). The protagonist Muhsin listens in the train compartment to a dialogue which foregrounds the deep rootedness of Egypt versus the veneer of Europe. See pp. –. Yet, it is the train, the European product, that provides a rite of passage towards change, too. 43 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, p. . 44 See Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel: Bibliography and Critical Introduction, –, six vols. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, ), vol. , pp. –.



 

he/she is given voice to write back, uncovering brutality and absurdity. “I am not one of your so-called leaders,” writes Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s protagonist Saeed in Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah, “someone thought worthy of notice by an elite. What I am, my dear Sir, is the office boy” (p. ). The underprivileged and the marginalized may regain voice only in fantasy, in the company of “creatures from outer space,” as Saeed is in Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s novel (p. ). But writers offer this possibility at least to uncover hegemonic schemes and designs. Most often a counter-inscription takes place to assert the body and the self not only against powers of occupation as the case is in Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s narrative, but also against a nationalist rhetoric that recycles a libratory jargon to buy more time and thereby bypass and evade the demand for democracy. Narratives of identity take issue with ideological rhetoric in times of crisis, its deliberate use of history, and its markers of libratory jargon. Postcolonial narrative unveils this jargon, parodies it and recovers the muted and the silenced. Such is Y¯usuf al-Qa# ¯ıd’s reading of the village chief ’s rhetoric in al-Harb f¯ı barr . Mis. r (; English translation: War in the Land of Egypt, ),45 for instance. Taking the October war of  as the catalyst and subject matter, the novelist dwells on the disparity between the national issue and the corruption and exploitation that undermine national sentiment and fervor. The #Umdah’s son is drafted into the army, but the father persuades a peasant to send his son under the name of the #Umdah’s son. When the peasant’s son dies as martyr, the #Umdah is keen on receiving the glory, too. The writer uses a number of narrators to tackle the complexity of a situation in which the real and the farcical and the absurd fuse into each other, directing attention to the post-colonial state as a number of sites, where conflict is the dynamic of the real.46 The polygamous #Umdah, village chief, speaks of patriotism in glowing terms, as long as this exempts his son from military service in times of war (pp. –). The land is even more of a locus and catalyst in narrative than the war, as the latter is about land and people, not only because the land incites the greed of foreign powers under many pre-

45 Y¯ usuf al-Qa#¯ıd, Al-Harb f¯ı barr Mis. r (Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ); English trans. lation: War in the Land of Egypt, trans. Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley (London: Saqi, ). Citations in the text are from this translation. 46 See the present writer’s Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabyyyah: al-nash"ah wa-al-tahawwul (Beirut: . ¯ ab, ); Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, p. ; and Paul Starkey, “From the D¯ar al-Ad¯ City of the Dead to Liberation Square: The Novels of Y¯usuf al-Qa#¯ıd,” JAL, , no.  (March, ), pp. –.

    



texts, but also because the village chief and his likes are empowered by its material and symbolic wealth. It synthesizes time and space, and becomes the slogan and the goal of rhetoric. The land is never neutral. Whether it is deviled by aggressors or yearned for by the native, it has a meaning and an impact on the lives of others. In times of floods or drought, it also acts on life, and As¯uf ’s mother in al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (The Bleeding of the Stone) is cut to pieces because of the flood, which scatters her flesh all over the valley, as if in another paradigm of identification and fusion between the mother and the land. The novel brings forth the naturalness of life as it unfolds through the encounter and rapprochement between the human, the wild life, and nature. It focuses on the upheaval and crisis attending the intrusions of foreign powers with their lackeys from among the greedy natives who are given biblical and Qur’¯anic connotations of greed and betrayal. The novel spreads the narrative canvas to include the reference to the Italian occupation of Libya (–), and the subsequent intrigues to control its oil, but this issue becomes intertwined with the very struggle for authenticity and naturalness against intrusion and greed. Its accentuations in the text are more imbued with a panoramic vision, which plays on the totality of myth while negotiating a number of sites and voices. The cruelty of nature is there, too, and the powerless human being is to suffer from this cruelty. After collecting the remains of the mother and burying them in a number of places, “his martyred mother had five graves along the tops of the wadi [valley], each far from the other. The memorial stones stood like signposts, condemning the unknown transgressor” (p. ). In narrative, land retains and sustains this combination of time and space, and history and being, for, as Bakhtin argues, all “the novel’s abstract elements, philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the power of art to do its work” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Manifestations of form in time and of identity in situational occurrences vary, but they usually bring the narrative into a focused dialogue of great bearing on postcolonial poetics. The Active Body Politic A counter strategy of awareness and political consciousness, for instance, lies in the conspicuous thrust of desire and body inscription, its deep and sincere commitment to life against war, erosion and death. In



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the Lebanese Hud¯a Barak¯at’s Hajar al-d. ah. k: riw¯ayah (; English trans. lation: Stone of Laughter, ), women in civil war situations settled in a newspaper building, just to “find themselves caught in the newspaper at that time, because they were alone.”47 The novel deals with micropolitics, intimacies, aspirations, relations and fears, in a real civil war situation, in Lebanon of –. The irony lies in the discrepancy between the newspaper, and its building which they use, that offers in times of peace the news, the inroads of power, and the sense of assurance and knowledge, and the present situation in which all are equal in their fears and disappointments. Young helpless women are ironically empowered by their very helplessness and sense of indifference to the parameters of loss and gain. They were there to participate in life and to regain a human familiarity beyond restrictions and constraints: “In order to take the high probability of death as a pretext to get rid of the last remnants of their mothers’ moral teachings, in order to show the capacity of their hearts, in circumstances such as these, to embrace the sorrows of the young men” (Ibid.). Desire unfolds in narrative, in Scheherazade dialectic, to undermine patriarchy, not only through narrative design and wit, but also through systematic unveiling of a system that levels the blame on the other, in this case women, for its own omissions and faults. Yet, desire manifests itself in other accounts of homosocial and homosexual nature, too. Its other manifestations are practices, relationships, and cross-class marriages and others that transgress sectarian and ethnic limits, along with acts of elopement and prostitution, which have occupied the attention of women and men writers in their drive to account for identity formation.48 These manifest self-awareness as much as they depict a willful recognition of the body not only against entrenched customs that assert some public modesty and shyness with connotations of mortification of the flesh, a stance which Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s women defy, but also against deeply rooted assumptions. Barak¯at’s women, in the same novel, “stretched out with studied carelessness in sad surrender, in the Hud¯a Barak¯at, Hajar al-d. ah. k: riw¯ayah (London: Riy¯ad. al-Rayyis, ); English . translation: Stone of Laughter, by Hoda Barakat, trans. Sophie Bennett (New York: Interlink, ), p. . Hereafter, citations in the text are from this translation. 48 See in this respect miriam cooke, “Men Constructed in the Mirror of Prostitution,” in Naguib Mahfouz from Regional Fame to Global Recognition, ed. Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, pp. –; and Michelle Hartman, “Re-Reading Women in/to Naguib Mahfouz’s al-Liss wa-al-kilab (The Thief and the Dogs),” in Research in African Literatures, , n. , Fall, , pp. –. 47

    



dark corners where the light does not reach, and where nobody goes” (ibid.). This act is, nevertheless, one of will and desire. It is recognition of the self against traditional dismissals. In almost every novel under discussion there are women who explain elopements, secret marriages, sexual encounters, along with political action in terms of will and determination. The Iraqi #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s (–?) Fakhriyyah in AlZahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose, )49 chooses to work in a night club in secrecy, but when she notices that love for the protagonist may often lead her to discussions of choice she decides to disappear, leaving him to his life concerns (pp. –). The novel narrates the protagonist’s intellectual journey in context of the political and social scene in Iraq since the late s. Its offerings, in terms of women’s issues and political dissent, are many, and its women escape the dichotomous pairing of early Arabic fiction. On the other hand, the Palestinian Sahar . Khal¯ıfah’s (b. ) #Af¯af in Mudhakkir¯at imra"ah ghayr w¯aqi#yyah (Memoirs of unrealistic woman, )50 repeats her family’s epithet waqih. ah, impudent, in reference to herself. Describing herself as impudent, and repeating her family’s derogatory language, the protagonist in the novel preempted the word of its pejorative connotations of insolence, and undermines thereby the empowered family discourse, while she strenuously inscribes the word in a new behavioral register of feminist willfulness and affirmation. Narratives abound with acts of assertiveness, however, as we will see in other chapters. In these, there is a perpetual drive towards socio-political consciousness against containment and control. And the Awakening Discourse No less significant for postcolonial theory is the recourse to the discourse of the Arab enlightenment since the late nineteenth-century. In more than one instance this discourse has a more courageous and daring thrust than present day writings. Before the stupendous growth of censorship,51 that polemic used to openly challenge essentialism, authoritarianism and unitary discourse. The writings of Farah. An¸tu¯ n 49 #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯ asim, Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose; Cairo: GEBO, ). Citations hereafter are within the text. 50 Sahar Khal¯ıfah, Mudhakkir¯at imra"ah ghayr w¯aqi#yyah (Memoirs of unrealistic woman . ¯ ab, ). (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ 51 There are many articles and books in this respect. Among these is Sam¯ ah. Idr¯ıs, ¯ ab, ). See also Marilyn Booth, Al-Muthaqqaf al-#Arab¯ı wa -al-s. ul.tah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ “The Continuing Struggle: Interview,” Index on Censorship, ,  (Feb. ), pp. –;



 

(d. ) and Shibl¯ı Shumayyil (d. ) in Egypt, among others throughout the Arab land and Mahjar,52 provoked the reformists like Shaykh Muhammad #Abduh to argue for a modern Islam “against . indifference…and conservatism.”53 Writing since the Nahd. ah, the “Arab Awakening” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, demonstrates serious intellectual engagement with issues of tradition and modernity, and these were to leave an abiding influence on the formation of postcolonial discourse.54 The Iraqi writer Salm¯an Fayd. ¯ı (– ¯ az (awakening) in , wrote ), who issued a newspaper called al-Iq¯ . his Al-Riw¯ayah al-¯ıq¯aziyyah (The Awakening novel) in , against the . British, but within the framework of an Arabo-Islamic tradition that calls on intellectuals to learn languages, make use of the achievements of others and participate in the growth of a national infrastructure. Books by T¯ Sal¯amah M¯us¯a (d. ), Farah. An¸tu¯ n, for . ah¯a Husayn, . example, along with translations from other languages,55 resurface in postcolonial Arabic narrative, offering the reader a great opportunity to understand the complexity of the encounter between these intellectuals, their own cultural milieu, and post-wars generations of writers, especially in matters of tradition, religion, desire and love. Indeed, the Iraqi Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı (b. ) lets his gender-conscious male protagonist in the Al-Masarr¯at wa-al-awj¯a# (Gladnesses and pains, )56 admit, for instance, the impact of T¯ autobiography Al-Ayy¯am (seri. ah¯a Husayn’s . alized in the s; English translation: An Egyptian Childhood, ),57 and Marina Stagh, The Limits of Freedom of Speech: Prose Literature and Prose Writers in Egypt under Nasser and Sadat (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, ). 52 The term mahjar signifies the location of Arab intellectuals in the Americas in the aftermath of the massacres against Arab Christians in the s and the s in Damascus when the region was under Ottoman domination. Although many brilliant intellectuals settled in Egypt and fully participated in the enlightenment, the term is reserved to the school of émigrés in the Americas. 53 Albert Habib Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, – (London & New York: Oxford Univ. Press, ), p. . 54 Pierre Cachia is of the belief that the awakening “stimulation, however, came more directly and dramatically to the Arabs with the Bonaparte expedition to Egypt in , especially as the French came not only with an army using the latest technology then available, but also with teams of translators and scientists who were enormously active during their short stay in the area.” See “Introduction: II. Translations and Adaptations,” in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M.M. Badawi, pp. – (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), at p. . 55 See Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel, pp. –. 56 Fu’¯ ad al-Takarl¯ı, Al-Masarr¯at wa-al-awj¯a# (Damascus: al-Mad¯a, ). 57 T¯ autobiography Al-Ayy¯am appeared in the journal Al-Hil¯al, in the . ah¯a Husayn’s . s, and appeared in book form, too. The Cairo, D¯ar al-Ma#¯arif, edition appeared

    



though, paradoxically, he works against it under another influence as I explain later. In a feminist vein the Arab Egyptian feminist Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı (b. ) takes issue with some portions of the same narrative in her Mudhakkir¯at Tab¯ . ıbah (; English translation: Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, ),58 as noticed by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, reversing thereby in her Mudhakkir¯at Tab¯ . . ıbah “the dynamics of the Husaynian text, recasting them from the point of view of a female protagonist.”59 In other words, narrative engagements since the Nahd. ah offer a negotiatory space of great bearing on postcolonial epistemology. Its intersectional nature resists absolutes, to be sure, but it is not a space of inertia or inaction. While interacting with its others, narrative makes up its intertext in relation to other influential texts, as manifested in the autobiographies of T¯ Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ah¯a Husayn, . . ¯ım and Ibr¯ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı (–) if we take the latter’s Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯atib (; English translation: Ibrahim the Writer, ) as a partial and veiled autobiography.60 Autobiographies and their intellectualized sequels like T¯ . ah¯a Husayn . Ad¯ıb (Man of letters ),61 or Tawf¯ıq al-Hakim’s #Awdat al-r¯uh. (; . English translation: Return of the Spirit, ),62 for example, only manifest this anxiety amid identity and alienation. Especially when read against a background of maltreatment and dislocation, this ambivalent space is, paradoxically, rife with difference, not indifference, and anxiety not settlement.

in . Translated by E.H. Paxton as An Egyptian Childhood (London: Routledge, ). The second part appeared in Arabic, in book form, in , and in English translation as A Stream of Days, trans. By Hilary Wayment (Cairo: Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop, ; and the Longman’s edition, ). Part three appeared in , and in English translation as A Passage to France, trans. Kenneth Cragg (Leiden: E.J. Brill, ). See Allen, The Arabic Novel, p. . For some specific detail, with slight differences from the above, see Trevor LeGassick, “The Arabic Novel in English Translation,” in The Arabic Novel since : Mundus Arabicus, a special issue,  (), pp. –, at pp. –. ¯ ab, ; English trans58 Naw¯ al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, Mudhakkir¯at Tab¯ . ıbah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ lation: Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, trans. Catherine Cobham (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ). 59 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, and Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in AraboIslamic Writing. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press), pp. –, at p. ; and also her Men, Women, and God(s) (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, , p. . In Woman’s Body, she says: “Her reaction to T¯ text is not by any means . ah¯a Husayn’s . fanciful. Al-Ayy¯am is a sexist, if not misogynist, text.” P. . 60 Ibr¯ ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı, Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯atib (Cairo: D¯ar al-Taraqq¯ı, ); English translation: Ibrahim the Writer, trans. Magdi Wahba (Cairo: GEBO, ). 61 T¯ Ad¯ıb (Cairo: Mat.ba#at al-I#tm¯ad, ). . ah¯a Husayn, . 62 Tawf¯ıq al-Hak¯ım, #Awdat al-r¯uh; English translation: Return of the Spirit. . .

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Within the same enlightenment discourse, the implications of intellectual and political dislocation are many. Historically, many Syrian intellectuals, Christian and secular, resided in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century to escape religious and ethnic troubles. Others, like the Iraqi poet #Abd al-Muhsin al-K¯azim . . ¯ı (–) for instance, fled later to Egypt, after an intimate association with the renowned Islamic Shaykh Jam¯al al-D¯ın al-Afgh¯an¯ı (d. ) during his exile in Iraq, to enjoy later and since  the relatively liberal climate in Cairo. Many writers and poets suffered exile, which also brought them in contact with each other throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Translations and writings demonstrate a fervent activity to cope with the challenge of the modern without radically antagonizing the revivalists who strongly believed then in the need to revive Arabic language and tradition in a classical mold to simultaneously counteract the aftermath of the Ottoman occupation and the challenge of the West. In other words, issues of this nature may well entail great advancement and reform, but they also explain the burgeoning diversity in political and cultural attitudes and positions, as succinctly summed up, in the case of Egypt of the early twentieth century, in Ahdaf Soueif ’s narrative The Map of Love (). In a letter of  December, , her protagonist Anna Winterbourne, otherwise Madame Sharif al-Baroudi, defines these as Islamist, aligning with Istanbul against the British; another calling for a young Arab Caliphate centered in Hijaz; and yet another that argues for an independent Egyptian nation.63 These and many other positions led to the growth of modern Arab ideology, in its liberal and nationalist underpinnings. They also helped in the emergence of the secular discourse, with its Fabian, Saint-Simonian and, significantly, Marxist maturations. Yet, the preoccupations of the early Nahd. ah intellectuals had to evolve in a national narrative, too, for it is in narrative that they could cope with issues of women, patriarchy and independence. Indeed, many Nahd. ah male writers complained against the prevailing prudery, which paralyzes society and culture, and dries up narrative in turn. Hence the emergence of the reformist polemic for the liberation of women, which postcolonial narratives, like Ahdaf Soueif ’s Map of Love, are keen on retrieving to consolidate the awakening legacy with contemporary consciousness.64 Q¯asim Am¯ın took a lot from the Islamic reformer 63 64

See Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love, p. . On discussion of women’s meetings and plans for publications, along with partici-

    

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Muhammad #Abduh to come up with his Tah. r¯ır al-mar"ah (Liberation . of women) in ,65 and with Al-Mar"ah al-jad¯ıdah (The New woman) in .66 His views were not the only ones, for women writers like the Palestinian Mayy Ziy¯adah (d. ) with her famous salon in Cairo, and others in Egypt, like Zaynab Faww¯az (d. ), Malak Hifn . ¯ı N¯as.if (d. ) and Lab¯ıbah H¯ashim (d. ), Ulfat Idlib¯ı (b. ) and Suhayr al-Qalam¯aw¯ı (b. ), among many, were to challenge a resilient patriarchal discourse.67 In a matter of thirty years, women writers were to provide radical theorization for modernity as the Iraqi Nazik al-Mal¯a"ikah’s (b. ) pioneering poetics demonstrates. Women Issues Male intellectualism couches women’s issues in a broad national or Islamic framework. Sal¯ama M¯us¯a, Ahmad Lut.f¯ı al-Sayyid (–), . and T¯ (–) in Egypt, for instance, the Iraqi national . ah¯a Husayn . leader and poet Muhammad Rid¯ . . a al-Shib¯ıb¯ı (–), the Iraqi novelist and essayist Mahm¯ u d A hmad al-Sayyid (d. ), the renowned . . Iraqi poet Ma#r¯uf al-Rus¯afi (–) and the Iraqi intellectual and thinker Fahm¯ı al-Mudarris (–) were among the large number of intellectuals of the first decade who argued the issues of women’s emancipation in a national context. Indeed, Sal¯amah M¯us¯a (d. ), in Tarbiyat Sal¯amah M¯us¯a, was not the only Egyptian or Arab intellectual to associate the fight against British colonialism with “the liberation of women from the veil so as to have an independent character in education, work, production and achievement.”68 Yet, the use of the veil as a marker of backwardness and resistance to the spirit of the

pation in demonstrations, see Map of Love, pp. , . 65 English translation: The Liberation of Women, trans. Samih Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). 66 English translation: The New Woman, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). 67 See Margot Badran, and miriam cooke, eds. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana Univ. Press, ). See Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, ); Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt; and Marilyn Booth, “Biography and Feminist Rhetoric in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Mayy Ziyadah’s Studies of Three Women’s Lives,” Journal of Women’s History, , no.  (), pp. –. 68 Sal¯ amah Mu¯ s¯a, Tarbiyat Sal¯amah M¯us¯a (Cairo: Kh¯anch¯ı [Kh¯an ¯ı], ), p. ; English translation, L.O. Schuman, The Education of Salama Musa (Leiden: Brill, ). The Arabic edition is used, and further references and citations are within the text.

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age also indicates subservience to the colonialist discourse. The latter accumulates a number of these markers to fight back the local tradition, which happens to resist its encroachment.69 Instead of facing up to the real issues of exploitation and plunder, it levels the blame on social practices, which are cited in turn to justify the imperial presence. But, this alliance for the rights of women among liberal intellectuals and Islamic thinkers was not in vacuum. Women began to demonstrate the will to fight. The very act of the Cairene young lady Nabawiyyah M¯us¯a in attending the secondary school general examination in  was one of defiance to the British policy in Egypt. Dunlop, the British counselor for education, was adamant in keeping native women uneducated (Tarbiyat Sal¯amah M¯us¯a, pp. –), whereas Cromer used the issue of education to undermine Islamic culture. With no knowledge of Islamic histories and societies, Cromer used the platitudes and passing social practices to justify the role of the Empire, a point which narratives pick up to develop their strategies of parody and subversion.70 Women were involved in these cultural debates, along with their male counterparts, like Q¯asim Am¯ın who happened to be much influenced in these and other issues by his mentor Shaykh Muhammad #Abduh . (d. ). The latter’s views, and those of his student Rash¯ıd Rid¯ .a (d. ) became some of the main tenets of the whole Islamic revivalist movement, including #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd ibn Bad¯ıs in Algeria, with his emphasis on the role of women in the fight against the French colonizer.71 Although the nature of the revivalist discourse is contaminated by its simultaneous accommodation of the challenge of the West and rejec69 See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, ), p. . 70 See for instance Ahdaf Soueif ’s A Map of Love, where Anna writes, “For Lord Cromer, I tried to interest him in what my Egyptian friends desire for the education of women and he said that if I knew Egypt better I would know that the religious leaders would never agree to women being encouraged out of their lowly status, and he would not hear another word” (p. ). Yet, in his Modern Egypt, he cites the need for education of women as a given in order to achieve his so-called “European civilization.” But, Cromer’s view cares for some “European education which is worthy of Europe.” In other words, he thinks of cultural transposition as a condition for education. See Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers,” pp. –. 71 The reader may consult Beth Baron, The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New York: Yale Univ. Press, ); Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and its Main Trends from  to  (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ); Hilary Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel (London: Ithaca, ); and Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, ).

    

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tion of its overall encroachment, its recognition of the role of women gave impetus to the movement to regain their rights and role. M¯us¯a made a specific mention of their demonstration in  in Egypt against the British colonizer, a participation that lent great weight to the uprising led then by the Wafd Party under the leadership of Sa#d Zaghl¯ul (–) (Tarbiyat Sal¯amah M¯us¯a, pp. –). The poet H¯afiz Ibr¯ah¯ım (–) noticed that demonstration and wrote a poem to that effect, describing how the British used force against them (Ibid., p. ). If they kept to the white veil in the early demonstrations, they put it away later to take full risk in a fight for independence and human rights (Ibid.). Women’s activism was almost everywhere, as Salm¯a S¯a"igh’s experience in Lebanon of the late s and s shows. She cites early advocates for women participation in public life like But.rus al-Bust¯an¯ı in his address of  to educate women. The “first supporter of women,” as she calls him in her book of  (S. uwar wa-dhikray¯at, or Representations and memoirs),72 puts the education of women ahead of other priorities (pp. –). She lists along with him other figures, including writers on women like Muhammad Jam¯ıl Bayham and George B¯az. . More important is her citation of women’s double fight, including her own published reports after visits to women’s prisons, for the improvement of women prisons under the French occupation and for independence and freedom (pp. –). This point is worth emphasis, for the feminist movement in the Arab world combines the struggle against institutionalized patriarchal practices with the fight for independence.73 In , women of Syria and Lebanon established their union, and the concluding remarks of the  conference came from #Anbarah Sal¯am who said, “women, with sincere obligation and generous sacrifice forgot their own preoccupations to tackle what is lacking in the whole nation, searching for what can lead to its development and growth” (p. ). While women activists contributed as well to narrative proper,74 their practices, especially from within the religious institution, is a narrative by itself. Sab¯ıhah al-D¯aw¯ud, the . al-Shaykh Ahmad . daughter of the minister of religious affairs in the first British mandated Iraqi government in , was the first woman to attend the college Salm¯a S¯a"igh, Suwar wa-dhikray¯at (Representations and memoirs; Beirut: D¯ar al. Ha . d¯ . arah, nd edition, ). Citations are hereafter within the text. 73 Joseph T. Zeidan, Arab Women Novelists: The Formative Years and Beyond (New York: State Univ. of New York Press, ), pp. –. 74 See Miriam Cooke, “Telling Their Lives: A Hundred Years of Arab Women’s Writings,” World Literature Today,  (Spring ), pp. –. 72

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¯ı, tore the veil, for instance, in a of law and, with M¯ajdah al-Haydar . demonstration for active participation in social and political life in Iraq in the early s. Perhaps, Sab¯ıhah was not aware then of a simi. lar act of defiance and will practiced by the Egyptian feminist Hud¯a Sha#r¯aw¯ı (–) in .75 She also left a narrative account of her life and role within the context of Iraqi women’s writings which has not received due attention yet. The act, the practice of choice and writing signify decolonizing and decentering strategies, not only because of their validity and pertinence in the fight against the British and their puppet government in Iraq since the First World War, but also because of the latent drive to undermine a resilient Ottoman legacy of patriarchal practice. To restore voice and identity to the repressed is a willful act of great awareness and political consciousness. As we are discussing here a specific period in the history of Arabic culture, the encounter between the Arabs and the West, with all the implications of mutual rejection and need, the issue of women partook, too, of these. Arab intellectuals fought against the powers of occupation, but they borrowed from the culture of the West, at a time when the Ottoman’s legacy was one of backwardness and patriarchal practices. Sal¯amah M¯us¯a in Egypt bluntly confesses that it was only upon contact with the French when he was there in Paris that he understood the need to fight the veil, an awareness that was never brought about or valorized by the mere acquaintance with the writings of Arab reformists. “A new horizon was opened before me whom Ya#q¯ub Sarr¯ . uf and Farah. Ant.u¯ n could not open before” (Tarbiyat Sal¯amah M¯us¯a, p. ). In Syria and Lebanon intellectualism was to take significant directions, especially nationalist and Marxist, and the issues of women emancipation were given great attention in their social and national dimensions, albeit with the limitations and omissions of grand discourse. Qust.ant.¯ın Zurayq (–) on the one hand and Husayn Muruwwah (d. ) . on the other may well represent the directions in that intellectual fervor. Indeed, Zurayq, as I will explain later, took it for granted that women lag behind in social and national participation because, so he argues, of their petty concerns and selfish preoccupations.76 Along with See Huda Shaarawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (–), trans. and ed. by Margot Badran (New York: The Feminist Press, ). 76 Qustant¯ın Zurayq, “Arab Women in the National Life,” in John Haywood, Modern . . Arabic Literature, –, pp. – (London: Lund Humphries, ). Perhaps, Zurayq was under the impression of a certain class of women, whom Ali Shariati speaks of later, in the reign of the Pahlavi regime in Iran, for instance, as “painted dolls,” which 75

    

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these intellectual inroads, there was some space, too, for the Mahjar¯ı mind. No matter how far then were Jubr¯an Khal¯ıl Jubr¯an (Gibran Kahlil Gibran, d. ) and Mikh¯a’¯ıl Nu#aymah (d. ), their views and reviews proved to be very influential, not only in literary matters relating to transgeneric concepts, but, significantly in the context of the present discussion, in societal and cultural issues. Jubr¯an’s views against the clergy, and his defense of women’s rights in his novels were popular.77 On the other hand, other intellectual engagements were no less accountable for political and social consciousness. Populism was to reach Iraq as a school of thought with the coming from Columbia University of #Abd al-Fatt¯ah. Ibr¯ah¯ım who was to establish a coterie in the s, and participated in founding the People’s Party in the s, to propagate his idea of populism, which also entails an emphasis on the role of women in the making of the new society. Orthodoxy was present, too, with its say in these issues and its counter-emphasis on segregation and veil. Paradoxically, it subscribed to the call for equal opportunity in education. These controversies were submerged, however, in the discourse of the anti-colonial movement all over the Arab World, especially since the Sykes-Picot colonial assignments of . Taking advantage of the aftermath of the First World War, the colonizers divided Ottoman dominions among themselves.78 The French took charge of the Maghrib,79 along with Lebanon and Syria. The British became the mandate power in Palestine and Transjordan, while allowing Iraq and Egypt some limited independence. These colonialist implementations provoked the participation of groups, figures and affiliations in the movement against the French, the British and the Italians who occupied Libya in –. Some intellectuals were lead-

fell to the malaise of “westoxication.” Cited in Lila Abu-Lughod, “Feminist Longings and Postcolonial Conditions,” in Remaking Women, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, pp. –, at p. . 77 See Khal¯ıl H¯ . aw¯ı, Kahlil Gibran, His Background, Character and Works (Beirut: AlMarkaz al-#Arab¯ı li-al-thaq¯afah, ). See also Muhammad Y¯usuf Najm, Al-qis. s. ah f¯ı . al-adab al-#Arab¯ı al-h. ad¯ıth f¯ı Lubn¯an (Beirut: D¯ar al-Thaq¯afah, ), pp. –. 78 Albert Hourani describes the Anglo-French agreement of  as follows: “while accepting the principle of Arab independence laid down in the correspondence with the sharif Husayn, [the agreement] divided the area into zones of permanent influ. ence.” A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, ), p. . 79 France invaded Algeria in , and Tunisia, in . It planned with Spain the division of Morocco in , and in  Morocco became a French protectorate. The Treaty of Versailles issued the provisions for the mandates. See Hourani, ibid.

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ers and participants in uprisings and revolts.80 The renowned Iraqi poet Muhammad Sa#¯ıd al-Hab¯ . . ub¯ı (–), for instance, led the popular army in al-Shu#aybah south of Baghdad against the invading British army in , to be wounded in the battle and die a few months later. Many who suffered from French or British persecution made their escape to a safe haven. The Iraqi poet al-Rus¯af¯ı settled temporarily in Turkey, and the Tunisian writer and national thinker al-Tha#¯alib¯ı settled as a teacher in Iraq. These exiles offered literature of great potency for postcolonial discourse. As a dominant scriptory stance in postcolonial writing, exile, as theme, assumes some powerful presence, not only against the colonizer, but also, at a later stage, against the arbitrary nature of the post-independence state.81 Its bearing on memory and recollection is not its only mark, for its complexity arises from the predicament of exile as a challenge to selfhood, identity and commitment to national issues. Its culminating hybridity is fraught with anxiety, repression and anger. The problematic arises from the “contradictory topoi of exile and nation” whereby the writer is to proclaim “his identity with a country whose artificiality and exclusiveness have driven him into a kind of exile,” in Timothy Brennan’s words.82 Exile has its own register, languages and inhibitions, too, and the many narratives since the Nahd. ah tell us as much. But the list of exiles, émigrés and escapees during the first decades of the twentieth century is outside the purview of this book. The Problematic of Anti-Colonial Discourse Making use of thought and criticism, poetics and politics, cultural and literary canons and margins, along with East-West intersectional encounters, narratives since the Arab Awakening may well speak for a very complex, albeit exciting and rich, phase of Arab culture This culture simultaneously entertains and challenges many current issues of identity, hybridity, ambivalence and commitment. Certainly, different attitudes and techniques may well set apart novels of the early twentieth century, with their symbolic or direct pronouncements of identity 80

Especially in application to Egypt, see M.M. Badawi, “Introduction: The Background,” in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M.M. Badawi, pp. – (Cambridge: The Univ. Press, ), at pp. –. 81 On this arbitrary nature, see Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam (New York: Pantheom, ), p. . 82 Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing,” in PCSR, pp. –, at p. .

    

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like Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s #Awdat al-r¯uh. ,83 from these of later periods, but there are also strategies and issues common to a whole cultural spectrum. Especially at the present postcolonial moment, with its distinctive epistemological framework, we can look back anew on the writings of early and later periods to engage and debate manners and matters of writing in their own referentiality as colonial and post-colonial texts, with rich offerings in issues of gender, race, class, and nation. While these cut across periodization and belie its classifications, they also uncover resilient habits and ways of thinking that are neopatriarchal in the main.84 Colonizing and mandate powers had their interests in patriarchal systems, as the history of the French and the British in North Africa and the Middle East demonstrates, but the emerging nation state came out of the struggle against the colonizer with many contaminations, traces and scars, too. Its discourse as much as the very nationalist counter-discourse of other political platforms such as organized parties recycles the liberal, the Marxist and nationalist registers of the metropolis while imbibing them with references, in the case of the nationalist, to a glorious past.85 It is in this respect that one agrees with Kwame Anthony Appiah that any “postulation of unitary” discourse “over against a monolithic West” within the binaries of opposition, is “the last of the shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without.”86 Narrative engagements that betray signs of contamination are in abundance, and we can cite Sal¯amah M¯us¯a’s autobiography to see the many-sidedness of the issue. He is against the British for their stand against education and industry in Egypt (p. ), and he cites this engagement against them as equal to his fight against the fossilized part of “our history” including the hijab or the veil (pp. , ), but he is for English literary and cultural contributions, especially their “attachment to facts” (Ibid., pp. –). 83

There will be more on this point later in the book. See Hisham Sharabi, Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, ), esp. pp. –, for the Bakhitian discussion of this discourse as monological, discouraging dialogue by affirmation of its truth and righteousness. 85 As noticed by Sharabi, there develops a “schizophrenic duality” in the discourse of the petty bourgeoisie, which manifests its crisis in a large number of narratives since the Nahd. ah. Ibid., pp. –. 86 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post-in Postmodernism the Post-in Postcolonial?” PCSR, pp. –, at p. . Reprinted from the Critical Inquiry, p. , n.  (Winter ). 84

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Imperial discourse is no less attracted to its object. The French occupation of Egypt is a case in point. Napoleon’s expedition of  was an invasion and occupation. Its contemporary the Egyptian chronicler #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an al-Jabart¯ı (–), who recognized its contributions to knowledge, inscribed in his #Aj¯a"ib al-¯ath¯ar f¯ı al-tar¯ajim wa-alakhb¯ar eyewitness accounts of the brutality and violence of the occupation army during the period between June-December .87 The massacres and killings outweigh other offerings, and demonstrate a colonialist mind that shared nothing with the pronounced principles of the French Revolution. Napoleon himself set a pattern for neopatriarchy, as he addressed the “inhabitants of Egypt” merely to tell them: “Indeed the sensible man knows that our acts are His (God’s) will and divine decree, and he who doubts this is stupid and devoid of perception” (p. ). After the French evacuation of Egypt, Muhammad #Al¯ı, . an Ottoman officer of Albanian origin who took over as ruler (– ), was to make use of this mixed discourse to ensure hegemony. The French were to practice a more devastating policy in their invasion and occupation of Algeria, –, and Tunisia, –, along with their domination of Morocco, and Syria and Lebanon in the aftermath of the First World War. The British seized the port of Aden in , and took over Sudan and Egypt in  and controlled Palestine, Jordan and Iraq as Ottoman dominions. When the Mahd¯ı revolt 88 in Sudan in the s, founded and headed by Muhammad Ahmad, . . led to the death of the British army leader General Gordon in , the new British General Lord Kitchener was to use every method, no matter how brutal and violent, not only to subdue Sudan, but also to claim it as his own. The British and the French were to suffer dearly in Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Syria and North Africa, but both their impact and damage were structural, moral and political, to use Frantz Fanon’s articulations. In this respect, anti-colonial literature is enormous, and even a cursory reading of this output is bound to lead us to a better understanding of its appeal and concomitant omissions of social and gender issues. But its very opposition is never free from contamination,

87 See #Abd al-Rahm¯ an Al-Jabart¯ı, Napoleon in Egypt, trans. Shmuel Moreh (Princeton: Markus Wiener, ), pp. –, –, . Citations from this part of the chronicle are in the text. 88 He was regarded as the Mahd¯ı by his followers, “the one guided by God to restore the reign of justice in the world” (Hourani, ibid., p. ).

    

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for its “referent in the real world,” to use Stephen Slemon’s words, “is a form of political, economic, and discursive oppression whose name, first and last, is colonialism.”89 The Reductionist in the Postcolonial There are many reasons that impel and inbreed a multiple critique. The stupendous growth of revolutionary rhetoric and its subsequent use of leftist politics led to conflictual positions of great relevance to postcolonial register and discourse. On the one hand, this rhetoric upholds the ideal of freedom and equality, for instance, but its total commitment to the issues of nationhood or statehood against mandate and colonizing powers trapped it in a master narrative mechanism, which is, at times, reductionist to the core. It overlooks specific problems and bypasses the marginalization of women, peasants, laborers and ethnic groups. It distorts by design, and claims moral authority to justify its war against opposition, as the narratives of al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, especially his topographical historiography in Khi.ta.t, demonstrate. The colonizer also helped in the process, for, leaning on oligarchy and establishing additional strata of landowners and community leaders from among the native elite, the colonizer set the pattern for further exploitation while creating explosive issues and schisms behind, too, especially in Palestine, Iraq and Sudan. These, along with the contaminated minds of aspiring leaders and ideologues, like al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Ust¯adh in Khi.ta.t, and the Founder in Hik¯ . ay¯at () and al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Im¯am and Ruler in Suq¯ut al-Im¯am, and the deity of Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (; English translation: The Innocence of the Devil, ),90 involve the whole legacy in great complexity, social, political and cultural. As the anti-colonial struggle produced a rich register to cope with national and political issues and needs, its post-independence rhetoric suffers fossilization. While relying heavily on a past struggle, its emerging state or leadership uses this past to justify totalitarian practices. Hence, colonial referentiality occupies a large space in postcolonial Arabic narrative. Women writers interrogate this very revolutionary rhetoric at the very moment when memory leads the narrators back

Stephen Slemon, “The Scramble for Post-Colonialism,” PCSR, pp. –, at p. . ¯ ab, ); English translation: Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ The Innocence of the Devil, trans. Sherif Hetata (Berkeley: Univ. of California, ). 89

90

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to the idealism of the liberating movement, its images and symbols,91 which, paradoxically, echoes the colonialist discourse in its feminization of the land. Even beyond the specifically political agenda as endorsed in Al-S. ubb¯ar (; English translation: Wild Thorns, ) by the Palestinian Sahar . Khal¯ıfah,92 women writers offer readings against both national “romantic idealism of [for instance] Palestinian cultural symbolism and its reified fetishization of land and peasant” and the encroaching “Zionist program of Israel” as Barbara Harlow argues.93 Internal and external challenge is not a passing encounter, and the ramifications are so many and the stakes so high that writers try to cope with this complexity in ways and narrative strategies that question the validity of strict application of literary technicalities in critical assessments. Feminist offerings in their national context are not alone, however. Male feminists are relentless, too, in uncovering the make-up of master rhetoric, which also seeks to legitimize itself through affiliation with ancient h. am¯asah war poetry and some sacred accentuations. Women writers make use of the discourse of madness, while, in the main, male writers resort to the esoteric, the magical or even the mythical, along with the languages of the intoxicated and the drunk. As revolutionary rhetoric is manipulated and ransacked to meet the desire of the neopatriarch of the post-independence state, the counter-discourse has to defamiliarize the scene, for it has to offer its negative against the original mark, to offset this trace in a language that, to use Foucault, “breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear in its separated state, only as literature.”94 In this “frontier situation” lies also the great potential where “words unceasingly renew the power of their strangeness and the strength of their contestation” (Ibid., p. ). Indeed, in a reversal order, pointedly against totalitarian and unitary visions, the ensuing moment focuses on the ruptured in culture, its divisions, differences and identities, fraught as they are with questions of gender, class, history, nation, tradition, Aida A. Bamia. “The North African Novel: Achievements and Prospects,” in The Arabic Novel since : Mundus Arabicus, , ed. Issa J. Boullata, pp. –, at pp. –. 92 Sahar Khal¯ıfah, Al-Subb¯ar (Jerusalem: Mansh¯ ur¯at Galileo, ); English transla. . tion: Wild Thorns, trans. by Trevor Le Gassick and Elizabeth Fernea (London: Saqi, ). 93 Barbara Harlow, “Readings of National Identity in the Palestinian Novel,” in The Arabic Novel since , pp. –, at p. . 94 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. . Further citations are in the text. 91

    



and also globalization. Even cities are no longer as easily chartered as in the bourgeois novel. Mirage cities, and cities of jouissance, are there along with Constantine, Beirut, Cairo and Baghdad to generate defiance, will, life, love, and also corruption, oppression, and war. They are seen and unseen according to the voyeur. In times of war or repression they undergo madness that blurs issues and classifications. Al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Cairo, for instance, writes itself in his Khi.ta.t, as a prison house with a panopticon of surveillance. Beirut of the civil war has a different panopticon, for it is a free zone, presided over ironically by snipers. Nevertheless, those who are deprived of attention and recognition or those who suffer patriarchal alienating discourse, like the Lebanese Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Zahrah in the novel so entitled (), find in this moment of disruption enough space to regain identity and selfhood. As narrative of the tragic coming of age of a dysfunctional adolescent female during the Lebanese civil war, –[?], the search for meaning and identity offers narrative density that debates every other position and rhetoric, including that of silence and silencing. The case applies to women writers of war; too, for it is only when male writers vacated their monopoly on discursivity that women’s contributions made their full presence felt. In this respect, a pioneering feminist contribution to the postcolonial pursuit is miriam cooke’s War’s Other Voices () where she rightly argues that in war times “reality monopolizes the place that ideology soon comes to occupy.”95 She argues that the perseverance and stay of women writers of Lebanon during the war should be recognized not only as a fight for survival but also as a fight for female identity that “coincided with the disintegration of the country’s identity” (Ibid.). The implications of wartime realities are many, including the conspicuous male writers’ abdication of responsibility and their exodus, which cooke cites among signs of identity-disintegration. The newly vacated space called for the female society to take over, with a counter self-assertiveness that burgeoned in feminist texts, which she analyzed in War’s Other Voices. Iraqi feminist texts take a different direction, for both male and female writers share agendas of suffering, war calamities and an overwhelming sense of guilt over finding themselves in such a situation in the first place.96 cooke, miriam. War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), p. . 96 For some examples from this Iraqi war literature, see miriam cooke, “Death and Desire in Iraqi War Literature,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. 95

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Fighting a neighboring state weighed heavy on their conscience, as they share with Iran many beliefs and ties. As they could not openly dissent, they developed strategies of evasion and indirection. Women writers make loneliness and sexual frustration their venues to highlight the cruelty and inhumanity of war. Written against a background of laudatory and heroic discourse, as initiated and perpetuated by the neopatriarch, this writing bears significance as the next chapters hope to demonstrate. Discursive Alliances against Neopatriarchy No matter how hard authoritarianism strives to impose and inscribe its triumphs, marginalized narratives have a way of populating their peripheral space with dissent. These take various narrative tracks, including sarcastic narratives, others of indigenous sincerity and humor, intellectual veiled autobiographies, Kurdish sagas, and desert and Am¯az¯ıgh¯ı narratives. In the first case, one may cite Sun#all¯ ah Ibr¯ah¯ım’s Al. Lajnah (The Committee), as the protagonist goes on elaborating how the Coca-Cola bottle stands for this civilization: “We will not find, your honors, among all that I have mentioned, anything that embodies the civilization of this century or its accomplishments, let alone its future, like this svelte little bottle, which is just the right size to fit up anyone’s ass,” he says, insinuating how the bottle is used to torture prisoners of conscience (pp. –). Sarcasm could grow into hilarity had not the author brought it under control within intertextual parameters of newspaper articles, which increase the amount of satire and poke fun at president S¯ad¯at of Egypt (–) and his Infit¯ah. , open door economy or market economy. Using the bottle and its connotations further, he hints at the implications of monopolized economies: “If Coca-Cola has been so influential in the greatest and richest country in the world, you can imagine how dominant it is in third world countries, especially in our poor little country” (p. ).97 Humor could grow into a pleasant articulation of a political stance, as in the Egyptian Bah¯a" T¯ . ahir’s (b. ) Al-Kh¯alah S. afiyyah (; English translation: Aunt Safiyyah and the Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor, pp. – (London: Saqi, ); and also the present writer’s Adab al-h. arb al-qas. as.¯ı f¯ı al-#Ir¯aq,  vols (Baghdad: al Thaq¯afiyyah, ). 97 See Robert Erwin’s review, “The Committee” in The New York Times Book Review (Dec. , ), p. .

    



Monastery, ).98 The novel centers on the narrator’s cousin S. afiyyah, until she gets married to their uncle the wealthy Bey. Under stress for not getting married to the relative she has in mind, she grows into an arrogant lady, impersonating the character of the husband after his death, and becoming vengeful. The author locates the story into socioreligious and political contexts, to target corruption in the formation of the nation-state. His criticism is tempered by humor, which the reader traces in the life of local people, their faith, and trust in both Christ and the Egyptian President #Abd al-N¯asir’s fight for Palestine: “May God grant victory to Nasser and drive them from Jerusalem, as he drove them from Egypt,” says miqaddis Bishai (p. ). Yet, this association between powers of occupation flows into the miqaddis Bishai’s [a Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem] local discourse smoothly while he is patting the donkey’s neck, “speaking to it gently and indulgently, and all but kissing it” (p. ). Surprised at the narrator’s question and shock at so much affection for the animal, the miqaddis answers with assurance: “How can you ask me that, my boy, and you a student at the school? Didn’t our Savior enter Jerusalem mounted on a donkey like this one, while the people cheered him?” (ibid.) Indigenous culture offers the other side of life, which the elite may fail to trace. Other narrative strategies are no less effectively engaged. Fanon’s “honest intellectuals” dominate narrative space, with its representational concerns.99 Protagonists appear in veiled autobiographies to speak for their authors. As it is risky to write down the author’s views or experience in plain prose, writers find in narrative an outlet that enables them to distance themselves while simultaneously criticizing party politics in its patriarchal formation. Such are the writings of the Iraqi prisoner of conscience Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim (–?).100 No less undermining of authoritarian discourse with its nationalist claims or post-capitalist significations are Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s Syrian Kurdish sagas,

See Bah¯a" T¯ . ahir, Al-Kh¯alah S. afiyyah (); English translation: Aunt Safiyyah, trans. Barbara Romaine (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). Citations in the text are from this translation. 99 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched, p. . Hereafter citations from this book are included in the text. 100 It may be worth mentioning, that even in non-Arab press, writers tend to hide their full identity when writing about prisoners of conscience. Thus, Said appears as the author of a short article on the Iraqi prisoner of conscience, but no full name is appended. See Said, “Aziz al-Syed Jasim,” Literatur und Kritik (LuK), –, Salzburg, Austria (March ), p. . 98

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with their themes of exile and indigenous practices and rites, as well as the Libyan Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı’s (b. ) desert and Am¯az¯ıgh¯ı narratives.101 Both bring the real and the magical together, not in an attempt to fantasize, but in order to fathom the indigenous, its rites and practices that fight back erosion and destructive intrusions. Magical realism becomes another marker in identity formation. In these novels it is the locus of a narrative, which sustains and preserves identity against destruction. Ethnicity, Kurdish or Am¯az¯ıgh¯ı, sustains itself through a mosaic of identifications and significations in a discursive space that grows in density and meaning. Classical Arabic, in able hands, accommodates a large polyphonic canvas beyond the strictures of monologist discourse. In al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), for example, the mouflon that is consumed to extinction due to the greed and brutality of the native Cain and the obsessed with longevity and transcendental vision the American John Parker, establishes itself as a symbol of love and life, charm and identity in the mind of the nomad As¯uf. “In this beast was the magic of a woman and the innocence of a child, the resolution of a man and the nobility of a horseman, the shyness of a maiden, the gracefulness of a bird, and the secret of the broad expanses” (p. ). In other words, narrative challenges loss by further inscription and focalization of desert life and its landmarks. No less subversive are Shi#ite rituals, which tend also to decenter the logicality and linearity of urban time, as in #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose) and the writings of the Iraqi J¯asim al-H¯ashim¯ı (–). They contribute strategies and visions of selfhood, identity and difference as distinctive as Latin American magical realism. Like Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (; English translation: Arabian Nights and Days, ),102 these narratives resort to the esoteric, the magical, the mythical and the mad to account for a real of shocking and unsettling proportions. As the resemblances and signs of this real become disproportionate, and as they “have dissolved their former

101 On Barak¯ at, see Mon Zaki, “Saleem Barakat’s Mezmerising World of Language and Metaphor,” Banipal,  (Autumn, ), p. . On al-K¯un¯ı, see Roger Allen, “A Different Voice: The Novels of Ibrahim al-Kawni,” in Tradition and Modernity in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Issa J. Boullata and Terri DeYoung, pp. – (Fayetteville, AR: Univ. of Arkansas Press, ); and Ewa Machut Mendecka, “The Visionary Art of Ibrahim al-Kawni,” Research in African Literatures, ,  (Fall ), pp. –. 102 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ; ); English translation: Arabian Nights and Days. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (New York: Doubleday, ); also (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ).

    

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alliance,” in Foucault’s terms (The Order of Things, p. ) novelists have had recourse to intensive defamiliarization, which also functions in discursive strategies of evasion to escape censorship and persecution. Arabic narrative is densely populated, at times, with words and thoughts of other texts and contexts. Among its many postcolonial intersections is its manipulation of Sufi language and medieval dissent. On many occasions, protagonists are not at home with orthodoxy, its official discourses and historical reconstructions, nor are they pleased with the nationalist rhetoric since its glaring  defeat. In these narratives female and male writers share an agenda against the postindependence police state, like the Bahraini Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd, in her Tah. awwul¯at al-F¯aris (Transformations of the knight, ),103 and Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Khi.ta.t or, more significantly, in his Tajall¯ıyy¯at (Epiphanies).104 But even in novels of desert and nomadic accounts, like al-K¯un¯ı’s The Bleeding of the Stone, for instance, Sufism is recalled and inscribed to challenge the greed of the officer John Parker. Anointing Parker’s helicopter mission to slaughter gazelles and mouflons “with curses,” the Sufi Shaykh Jallouli murmured: “How can you claim … to belong to the religion of Christ?” (p. ). Conversely, there is enough space for faith, which resurfaces as feeling and thought that hold a promise in virgin lands and deserts untrodden or reviled by the Masters and their reporters. In this respect, many protagonists of postcolonial narratives grow as a counter-force to the representatives of the corrupt system. Even the existentialist stance of the novels of the s seems to enjoy a revival as if in reaction against the loss of freedom with the advent of the police state. Indecision and ambivalence, usually characteristic of Camus’s protagonists who were popular in Arabic culture of the s, may not entail lack of awareness of individuality and existentialist freedom. But such a stance, which surprisingly shows forth again in Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s latest novel al-Masarr¯at wa-al-awj¯a# () after his early stories of existentialist bent, obliquely debates the whole mechanism of state bureaucracy, its shallow mind and fear of its citizens. The novel is a narrative of the protagonist’s life as an official in Baghdad during the s and the s. Tawf¯ıq L¯am, the protagonist, is a non-political being, strongly conscious of his freedom, and desperately hungry for women, but his encounters, in politics 103 Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd, Tahawwul¯at al-F¯aris al-Ghar¯ıb f¯ı al-Ard al-#Aribah ¯ (The Strange . . Knight’s transformations in the Arabized lands) (Beirut: MADN, ). 104 Jam¯ al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Kit¯ab al-tajall¯ıyy¯at (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mustaqbal al-#Arab¯ı, ).

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or with women, are not as smooth as he would like them to be. Another existentialist voice may be traced in Tafr¯ıgh al-k¯a"in (Emptying of being, ) by the Syrian émigré in Paris, the physician Khal¯ıl al-Nu#aym¯ı.105 This novel centers on the speaker, whose presence in Paris only provokes memories of his homeland, his disappointments, and desires. But the narrative focuses on the relationship with his female partner, whose sense of freedom provokes the whole narrative, and drives the narrator to delineate his identity as a male in search for an impossible patriarchal role. There is a major difference between the two novelists, the Iraqi al-Takarl¯ı and the Syrian al-Nu#aym¯ı, however. The protagonist in the latter’s narrative gives way to a woman’s voice, a partner who resents textual monopoly and rejects assumptions of shared agendas concomitant with a shared life or bed. The protagonist enlists even his female partner’s expressions of joy in Paris due to the relatively large margin of freedom in comparison with her homeland. But these are related as dismissals of a native culture, which the protagonist does not seriously debate. Self-assertiveness in this novel, much as it does in the Egyptian Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s novels, dislodges monopoly and retains for the text some multiplicity and balance. As the next chapters argue, the tendency for a multiple critique assumes a larger role in these narratives than the existentialist preoccupations of the s, for writers of the s are more conscious of the damage suffered under repression and coercion. While verbal virtuosity in al-Kharr¯at.’s narratives draws attention away, at times, from his engagement with issues of gender, religion and nation, its counterbalance resides in conversational narratives with their journalistic ease and underlying humor, as in the writings of the Jordanian Mu"nis al-Razz¯az (d. ). Politics of Discontent: Postmodernism and Postcoloniality Texts by Mu"nis al-Razz¯az negotiate some convergence of postmodernist and postcolonial poetics and politics.106 They inscribe political engagement to undermine neo-patriarchy, the evils of the modern police state, along with the New World Order and its globalization strategies. His narrators use every method of indirection to voice their views. Khal¯ıl Al-Nu#aym¯ı, Tafr¯ıgh al-k¯a"in (Cairo: Sharqiyy¯at, ). For a discussion of Mu"nis al-Razz¯az’s novels, see the present writer’s Tha"r¯at ¯ ab, ), pp. –; and Infir¯a.t Shahraz¯ad: fann al-sard al-#Arab¯ı al-h. ad¯ıth (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ al-#aqd al-muqaddas, pp. –. 105

106

    

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Making extensive use of parodic stylization, irony, and rhetorical inversion, he, among a number of writers, develops, nevertheless, oblique strategies to elude censorship or escape imprisonment. This combination of poetics is among the main characteristics of postcolonial writing and its recurrence testifies to a post-Mahf¯ . uz. phase in Arabic narrative. In view of the extensive use of other texts, genres and venues of expression, I find it imperative to argue for this convergence as a postcolonial stance, and not as a mere stylistic experimentation. Intertextuality and discursive experimentation signify a contested place, not a settlement, especially when mapped in terms of transgressive or subversive postcolonial strategies with emphasis on identity, difference, and transculturation. Indeed, I find myself in agreement with Diana Brydon that the “the name ‘post-modernism’ suggests the aestheticizing of the political while the name ‘post-colonialism’ foregrounds the political as inevitably contaminating the aesthetic, but remaining distinguishable from it.”107 To read the matter in view of the narratives at hand, the amalgam of the two serves a purpose and responds to a complex reality of exploitation, repression, censorship, and also neocolonialist aggression. In other words, postcolonial poetics joins forces with the postmodern for a purpose. In novels by al-Razz¯az, like his Mudhakkir¯at Dainasur (Memoirs of dinosaur, ), a voice is given to Zahrah, his female partner, to destabilize a nationalist discourse of grand rhetoric, which idealizes the beloved as it idealizes the nation and the homeland. Zahrah offers a deconstructionist rebuff that undermines the original and empties it of its essentialist claims. But Zahrah may well speak for women writers who vie for a voice of their own to uncover the veneer and delve into the very makings of that grand narrative. Situating their protagonists in the most ordinary positions, in a madhouse or a kitchen, on a roof or in a truck, in a family gathering or in a street, they shock us with the amount of suffering and neglect undergone by women in societies where they offer a lot to make them worth living in. Especially in Hik¯ . an al-Shaykh and Jann¯at wa. ayat Zahrah (The Story of Zahra) by Han¯ Ibl¯ıs (; The Innocence of the Devil, ) by Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, there is a daringly feminist drive, which is central to postcolonial politics. In these as in a number of writings by the Egyptian Lat.¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at (–)

107

Diana Brydon, “The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy,” in PCSR, pp. –, at p. .

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 

and the Iraqi Lut.fiyyah al-Dulaym¯ı (b. ) and others,108 a woman voice makes itself heard, even when its cry is one of distress, a yahou in The Innocence of the Devil that gathers in its reverberations a historical archive, not only of the Biblical Deity of earth-quakes and volcanoes,109 but also of discrimination, oppression and misuse. In these focused and detailed narratives, there are no grand issues, but life stories, which nevertheless demonstrate a great commitment to one’s home, land, and country. Women narratives are more spatial, and their tropes of liminality, indoor and outdoors, chronotopes, voyeurs and actants resurrect narrative from its long-time indulgence in temporality and sequential elucidation and unfolding of middle class historical reconstructions. Again, here, and outside the collapsing of lands and women bodies, history is regained, freed from its colonial and patriarchal authority, and reclaimed by the native intellectual as his/her own. By the same token, it is retrieved from the neo-patriarch, the post-independence thief of the liberation struggle at large who is more enthusiastic for a grand rhetoric of victory against external enemies and their fifth columns. Such is the appearance of the Father of the nation, the Only Ruler in Naw¯al alSa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs. But, the same character is available in abundance, and miriam cooke allies with her Arab women counterparts to use his speeches to delineate the usurpation rhetoric, its hijacking of the legacy of the past and the present in her Hayati, My Life ().110 Neo-Patriarchy and Neo-Colonialism The postcolonial takes issue with a present that has a past, but whose formation indicates perpetual becoming, too. If it limits itself to coloniality and a dead empire, without commitment to current issues, which are closely related to multinational capitalism, it will forsake its claim to postcoloniality, for neo-colonialism takes new and more devastating forms. Both neo-patriarchies and multi-national capitalism play havoc with nations, identities, and individuals. The complexity of the challenge, and the manipulation of media, espionage and massive power against individuals and identities impel new narrative techniques and alert consciousness to cope with the emerging situation. Narratives respond in a variety of ways that constitute an additional chapter in 108 109 110

See miriam cooke, “Death and Desire.” See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women, and God(s), p. . miriam cooke, Hayati: My Life (New York: Syracuse Univ. Press, ).

    



postcolonial narratology. In the first place, the history of modern narrative offers enormous contribution to the postcolonial issue, for every tale fights for survival, and each aspires to endure in memory against oblivion. The double commitment towards change and the challenge of colonialism and neo-imperialism, along with the need to cope with the new, involves narrative in enormous experimentation. The intensity of the experience is the more so in view of the deeply rooted belief in the role of the intellectual in Arab culture. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, for . ˘ one, took it for granted that narrative as a literary endeavor has a role to play, a force beyond the reach of coercion,111 and the Nahd. ah writers all over the Arab world believed in the power of the word to attain transformation and fight back colonialism. The fight is not limited to taking positions and allowing characters to voice a stand. The art is broad enough to valorize consciousness through accumulation of significations. Even the early act of naming characters, especially women, for instance, signals a right start in the fight for identity on the individual and communal levels, which the enlightened and the learned recognized even in the nineteenth century. The Lebanese Sal¯ım al-Bust¯an¯ı (d. ), for instance, may well be “regarded as one of the pioneer writers of fiction” not only for his recourse to history, but mainly for his opposition to “outworn tradition” and his emphasis on “human freedom, dignity and equality,” which he also manifests in the choice of female names for the titles of his novels, like Salm¯a, S¯amiyah, and F¯atinah.112 Deconstructionists and postcolonial theorists share beliefs in the power of naming. As “the proper name was never possible,” in Derrida’s comments on Levi-Strauss, “except through its functioning within a classification and therefore within a system of differences,”113 Sal¯ım al-Bust¯an¯ı’s endeavor indicates a sustained effort of affirmation that also involves a sublimation of positions against denial, negation and subordination of women. Other writers were to follow suit soon, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab () should be acclaimed . . as significant for its social consciousness and subversion of patriarchal structures.114 111 See Israel Gershoni and James P. Janowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, – (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, ), pp. –. 112 Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington: Three Continents, ), pp. –. 113 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), p. . 114 Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Zaynab (Cairo: Matba#at al-Jar¯ıdah, ). . . .



  The Fight for Narrative Space

Texts fight back erosion, censorship and repression at large. In times of war, defeat, imprisonment, dislocation and exile, these texts offer a homeland of some sort. Texts offer longing and belonging.115 But they are not safe havens, for they are also fiercely targeted by despots and dictators, not only through censorship, but also through counternarratives that enlist the efforts of no less than the dictators themselves who have decided to embark on writing narratives. It is one of the most bewildering signs of dictatorial dissatisfaction, perhaps, with commissioned or enforced writings that they intrude into the field of narrative as writers of fiction. Conversely, this very involvement in narrative writing attests to the power of the word. Duplication of the colonial desire is endless, and narrative is no less tempting for despots and neopatriarchs than it was for the travelers and colonials of the empire. The will to extend power and control to writing and speech is no less ferocious than the desire to dominate citizens and lands.116 The fight for narrative space is not an ordinary one, for both empire and neopatriarchs are keen on securing this terrain, not merely to displace competitors, but to include it within a historical property that bespeaks for their achievement and grandeur. The act has its double bind, to be sure, for the empowered gains ground by the displacement of another. Edward Said is certainly right in this respect, for the “power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”117 But narrative is an inclusive term. The Sudanese al-Tayyib S¯ . . alih. allows his protagonist in Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (; English translation: Season of Migration to the North, )118 to fight for an iden-

115 See the present writer’s “Writing in Exile: Which Sense of Be-Longing?” English Studies in Canada, . (Dec ), pp. –. 116 Specifically related to neopatriarchy, Sharabi’s description of the system is worth quoting: “A two-state system prevails in all neopatriarchal regimes, a military-bureaucratic structure alongside a secret police structure, and the latter dominates everyday life, serving as the ultimate regulator of civil and political existence.” See Neopatriarchy, p. . 117 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, ), p. xiii. 118 Al-Tayyib S¯ . . Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (Beirut: D¯ar al-#Awdah, ); En. alih, glish trans.: Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heineman, ). Citations in the text are from this English translation.

    



tity against erosion. The novel follows up the journey of the protagonist Must.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, not only in space and time, but also within the self, as the protagonist “wanted history to immortalize him” (p. ), a desire which Mrs. Robinson supports to expose the sufferings of “Moozie’s” people “under our colonial mandate” (p. ). The whole incentive behind both desires is to counteract another narrative which imprints itself on Kitchener’s, the British Army General, mind, among others. When he addressed the Sudanese fighter Mahm¯ . ud Wad Ahmed, . Kitchener negates the fighter’s identity and rights in his land. He thinks of him as the outsider, the non-native of his own country Sudan, “Why have you come to my country to lay waste and plunder?” (p. ; emphasis mine). Echoing Frantz Fanon, the narrator draws attention to a colonial desire, not only to conquer and plunder, but also to establish the incidental as a permanent fact, in spatial and historical terms. In Fanon’s words: “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country” (The Wretched, p. ). Kitchener repeated, then, what he was taught and what he was made to believe. Writers are aware of these markers of colonial historiography, for as Hab . ¯ıb¯ı’s teacher in The Secret life of Saeed says, “conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they have themselves fabricated” (p. ). When Macaulay was the Governor-General of India, , he took it for granted that the “great object of the British Government ought to be the penetration of European literature and science among the nations of India,”119 for enforced acculturation is the way to establish a native elite that can sustain the empire while upholding its own inventory of the native’s non-being prior to history proper as marked by the “civilizational” touch of the plundering “mother.” History Revisited: Against Imperial Readings It should not be surprising that dissident politicians and intellectuals were drawn to challenge the imperial reading of history. Such a latecomer among these counter-narratives is perhaps Ahdaf Soueif ’s The Map of Love (). Although addressing the English-speaking audi-

Qtd. in Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, – (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, ), p. . 119



 

ence in the first place, The Map of Love is an Arab woman writer’s sequel to Arab men’s narratives. It asks to be mapped out on its own terms, as it brings the “trunk” of scrolls, cuttings and drawings from New York to Cairo, as if to mediate a discursive transnational stance, which is already forced on the reader through intercultural and transgeographical marriages. But, the most significant aspect of the novel is its manipulation of historical material and detail to vindicate the Egyptian and, somewhat, the Arab national cause against colonialist legacy, which is still actively surging in times of trouble to serve the interests of the neo-imperial order. History demands such revisits, as the pioneers noticed. Both Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım (d. ) in #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq (; English translation: A Bird from the East, )) and T¯ in . ah¯a Husayn . Al-Ayy¯am (Stream of Days), for example, made mention of the Versailles Peace Conference in Paris,120 which ratified its treaty and brought it into effect on January ,  (Al-Ayy¯am, p. ; Bird from the East, p. ). Both focused on what Antonius terms its “most discredited and dangerous features.”121 While Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım draws attention in this respect to Anatole France’s introduction to Victor Margueritte’s Voice of Egypt (pp. –), T¯ enlists Sa#d Zaghl¯ul’s (–) . ah¯a Husayn . dismay at the conference.122 Toynbee calls the phrasing, formula and content of the treaty a “diplomatic fiction,”123 for its historical accentuations and terms for independence betray the amount of indifference, verging on overt derision, which the empire holds for other countries. T¯ narrator reports Sa#d Zaghl¯ul’s description of the “thick . ah¯a Husayn’s . veils” of separation between Egypt and representatives of the West who inscribe their own view of history on other nations. Al-Ayy¯am reports the dialogue between T¯ a student in Paris then, and Zaghlu¯ l, . ah¯a Husayn, . a dialogue, which should have given Husayn an occasion for a counter. reading, had he not been preoccupied with his own personal differences with Zaghl¯ul. The dialogue runs as follows: “What do you study in Paris?” “I study history.” The Al-Ahr¯am Arabic text of Al-Ayy¯am, Cairo, , is used, and citations are within the text. As for #Usf¯ur min al-sharq, the translation is used and quotations are within the text. 121 George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, p. . 122 On Zaghl¯ ul, see Hisham Sharabi, Governments and Politics of the Middle East in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: D.V. Nostrad, ), p. ; and Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, p. . 123 Qtd. in Sharabi, ibid., p. . 120

    



“Do you believe in any truthfulness of history?” “Yes, if well-researched, carefully investigated and released from pitfalls.”

Sa#d says: “For me, it is enough to notice this falsification and these lies circulated everywhere in the newspapers and people accepting them at face value, to affirm that it is impossible to resurrect history from fabrications. I can further affirm that no truthful account can be ridden of these. Look at what is being circulated about Egypt in Paris, and tell me how it is possible to come out with a truthful history?” (pp. –)

It needs no great stretch of the imagination to see that Zaghlu¯ l, as Egypt’s representative for the Peace Conference, knew full well that history is written by the empowered and the privileged. He shares with other Nahd. ah national leaders the understanding that culture and media are in the hands of the British and the French. In fact the Iraqi poet and Shaykh Muhammad B¯aqir al-Shib¯ıb¯ı (–) edited a revo. lutionary newspaper in Najaf, Iraq in , to fight back the British invaders explaining that peaceful action no longer works for “there is no response to our just opposition among political platforms because the British have a monopoly all over the media.”124 The colonial power “has no fear of posterity” says the Shaykh in the editorial for the fifth issue. While exhausting every natural and human resource in Iraq, argues the Shaykh in the same editorial, the British also distort facts to meet their own policy. The other implication of colonial historiography lies in the premise that Orientals “were ignorant of self-government” and deserve therefore to “be kept that way for their own good,” as Edward Said notes.125 Arnold Nelson, Macaulay, Cromer and Kitchener, among other high ranking British officials in the Arab world and Asia (see Sal¯amah M¯us¯a on Cromer and Kitchener in Egypt, p. – ), drew on a shared register, which was the empire’s, regardless of the individual in charge. European powers share a legacy of rhetoric, too, informed by the desire to contain and control. Bonaparte launched his imperial discourse to “free Egypt from her present state.”126 But, while Bonaparte was articulate enough to dupe the #ulama", using a well informed but opportunist Orientalist discourse, the British were implicated in an Orientalist discourse of mixed interests and predilections. Even Sir William Jones’s legacy is a combination of love and revulsion 124 125 126

Muhammad B¯aqir al-Shib¯ıb¯ı, editorial, Al-Fur¯at, Najaf, Iraq,  Aug. . . Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vantage, ), p. . Qtd. from al-Jabart¯ı in Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, p. .



 

towards the East.127 But, imperial powers derived a register of power from “the cultural ideology of race,” which, in Robert Young’s succinct statement, took over “with its attendant virtue of civilization … even from economic gain or Christian missionary work as the presiding, justifying idea of the empire.”128 This colonial referentiality exists in the minds of Arab fiction writers, not only in Egypt, but also in Sudan, Iraq, North African, and much of the Middle East. Al-Tayyib S¯ . . Maxwell repeats the same imperial . alih’s view that colonies are still under age, unprepared for self-rule (see Season of Migration to the North, p. ). Colonial historiography never acknowledges the culture or the people of the colonized, for such recognition implies and enlists the failure of colonialism. There are other narratives written as early as , which are no less engaged in postcolonial politics. The Iraqi Dh¯u al-N¯un Ayy¯ub’s (–) AlDukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım () offers an articulate reading of colonial politics in Iraq.129 The novel follows up the career of Ibr¯ah¯ım, from a village in the north of Iraq to England where he receives his education, and returns with an English wife to Baghdad. Anticipating Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon, the author presents the petit bourgeois intellectual who assimilates in the European culture and returns with a belief in his privileged position to lead his countrymen and society at large. The senior British officer, who takes Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım as one of the Iraqi native elite whom they trust, comments on the army revolt against the British with a smile, as if intimating that it cannot last long: The Iraqis prove that they do not deserve the independence offered to them. They were offered the utmost independence and self-rule, but they went on plundering what they were entrusted with, killing each other for profits and rewards (p. ).

Such narratives are entangled in a wide-ranging postcoloniality, which is worth analysis. Indeed, the native elite, mostly men empowered by position, wealth or knowledge, take it for granted that they are privileged to rule, modeling themselves therefore on their counterparts in Europe. Ayy¯ub’s Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım believes that it is due to people like 127 See the present writer’s Anglo-Orient (Tunis: Univ. Publications Center, Ministry of Higher Education, ), p. . 128 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, ), p. . 129 Dh¯ u al-N¯un Ayy¯ub, Al-Dukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım (Baghdad, ). Reprint. Al-A#m¯al al-K¯amilah (Baghdad: Mansh¯ur¯at Wiz¯arat al-Thaq¯afah, ). Citations in the text are from this narrative.

    



his father-in-law, the British missionary and colonial agent Mr. Westfield, that the British made their successful conquests. But, as Hourani notes on a different occasion, there was E. Demolins’s book, too, A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, which explains that “individual initiative,” and “individual welfare” were behind the imperial achievement.130 Ibr¯ah¯ım’s father-in-law, Mr. Westfield, is the embodiment of achievement, but he is also among its figures that use every opportunity to serve themselves and England at the expense of other nations. “I think it is for these people like him that this small nation has reached this important position in the world,” says Ibr¯ah¯ım (p. ). Accepting British hegemony and subscribing to the ideology of the colonizer, Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım could be cited among Fanon’s native elites who exhaust their energy and resourcefulness to fuse, assimilate and, ultimately, give up their native skin. His future wife Jeanie is not disturbed by his zeal for assimilation. Her father shouts with glee, upon listening to his spoken English, “Oh, whoever sees you thinks that you are born and grown in this land [England]. But for your brown skin I would never have thought of you as an Arab” (p. ). Had he been a Fanon or a C¯esaire (see Black Skin, pp. –), Ayy¯ub’s fictional construct could have reacted differently. But being a prototype for Fanon’s native elites, he directs his anger at his own family, society, culture and tradition at large. The assimilationist native elite yearns to exchange skin: Curses on my father, he is the reason for my being born in Arab lands, to be called an Arab. To hell with my mother and my tribe. God damns them all. How I would like to forsake this skin, exchange it for a white one, like that of the English, so I could be one of them! How I would like to be adopted by one of them; but this is impossible. (p. )

Implicated in mimicry, Ayy¯ub’s protagonist represents the extreme case of Fanon’s native intellectuals. Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım is never keen on “an objective examination” of color and ethnic characteristics (see Black Skin, p. ). In this sense, he is the prototype for many male constructs in women’s writings. The Lebanese Usaymah Darw¯ısh, for instance, puts this mimicry in psychoanalytic terms in her novel Shajarat al-Hubb . ().131 Her Y¯usuf develops a hero-of-romance complex, less impressive than Heathcliff, to gain a fortune that can enable him to undergo a surgery to change his skin. Revolting against his father Hasan Zahr¯an, . Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, p. . Usaymah Darw¯ısh. Shajarat al-Hubb gh¯abat al-ah. z¯an (The Love tree, the forest of . ¯ ab, ). sadness; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ 130

131



 

the brown-skinned Syrian, he develops a complex whereby he rejects everything of brown color (Shajarat al-Hubb, pp. –). But rather than . setting this within an East-West dichotomy, Darw¯ısh suggests that the English, too, have their own bigotry, narrow-mindedness and unwarranted pride (p. ). To change skin is not so arbitrary an act as it unfolds in Darw¯ısh’s novel, and the novel requires more political consciousness to problematize its issues. In comparison, Ayy¯ub is worth citing for his pioneering engagement with the East-West encounter, which is among the markers of postcolonial discourse. Keenly aware of the formations of native intellectuals, especially in their male tradition, Ayy¯ub offers Sa#¯ıd’s opposite, a London University graduate who carries his diploma with him to insure recognition and prestige among the English. Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım is not after Orientalizations to dupe women, for he strives to belong to that society. Anticipating S¯ . train . alih’s ¯ scene where the priest congratulates Sa#ıd for his fluency in English, Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım is in a similar situation with two English passengers in a railroad coach. The dialogue runs as follows: “The gentleman is a stranger to England, I think; perhaps a tourist?” I answered with courtesy despite my annoyance at the phrase “stranger to England.” “As for being non-English, yes.” His companion interrupted me, “I think you are a Moroccan.” But the first one objected, “I bet he is a Raja, a son of these Rajas, with their lineage, gems and harem.” I laughed loudly, rejoining, “You are mistaken, gentlemen, I am neither. I have just completed my studies at London University, and have no harem but one respectable English wife. Perhaps my color deceived you; here is my diploma.” (p. ) I have quoted this dialogue because of its dense contestation. It goes beyond its spatial emanation to engage and interrogate a whole spectrum of coloniality. Despite all his mimicry signified by the diploma and the one “respectable English wife,” Ayyu¯ b’s protagonist understands that he is an alien. No matter how hard he tries to change skin, it is there carrying all the associations and connotations of color and race. The dichotomy is drawn carefully, and stereotyping and exoticizing invade the railroad coach, driving the mimic to search for refuge in a diploma and a wife as signs of belonging in the face of the hegemony of a race that he has accepted as superior. But the mimic is not an idiot, for he is an opportunist first. Being so, he strives to outwit the colonizer, represented by his father-in-law and the railroad coach com-

    



panions. Throughout his debates and meetings with them, he acts with deliberation and tact, a trait that is to be noticed by the agents of the empire. At the back of the mimic’s mind, there is a common ground, too, between his father-in-law, a parish priest in England, where he manipulates religion for political advancement, and his own father, the fake Mullah in Mosul (Iraq). Both manipulate religion for a purpose, for “is there a difference between the green turban and the higher diploma, when each proposes to plunder and cheat?” (p. ). But the mimic knows facts, too, though he is reluctant to offer clear-cut answers that could jeopardize his position. Quoting Kipling, but rhetorically asking the question, he says: “Who can get me the person who says ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’? I would like to ask him whether he means a difference like the one between wolves and lambs?” (p. ) Ayy¯ub’s Dukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım has never received its due recognition in postcolonial readings. Written in an epistolary form, with Ibr¯ah¯ım writing back to the author to vindicate and justify a worldview and a career, the text achieves an aesthetic distance that enables the protagonist to voice his views as a self-styled mimic. The author concludes with a letter to Ibr¯ah¯ım, which amounts to a scathing criticism of the emerging bourgeois intelligentsia, its aspirations and achievements. The author has some people in mind. He feels they could never rise to the challenge, a fact that explains the chaotic situation, its sham politics and servitude to the British (p. ). The concluding letter does not detract from the parodic nature of the text, which was published in . Impersonating the mimic and deflating expectations for assimilation in the host culture, Ayyu¯ b implies that post-independence states like Iraq might continue to be run by the British and their associates, or by their rivals, the Germans, if things take a different direction in the wake of the Second World War. Opportunists are sensitive to these precarious war situations, and his protagonist is no less so. Ayy¯ub’s ideological register does not spare its enemies, but there is room enough to let them act out their ideologies. Other writers may allow wider space for difference, as if in accord with Bakhtin’s “differentiated socio-political position of the author amid the heteroglossia of the epoch” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Indeed, Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı, in his Al-Masarr¯at wa al-awj¯a#, lets the official language of the mandated Iraqi authority execute the wood-cutter Sayf al-D¯ın, as “a lesson for these who can benefit” (p. ), for an alleged assault on



 

the wife of a Polish soldier among the allied forces there. The phrasing of the statement is laden with authority and power, which are directed against the muted and the underprivileged. The historical post-colonial, in its hyphenated inscription, does not necessarily contradict the postcolonial, but the latter assumes a greater potential beyond the historical, which it also decenters. Its use of Foucauldian discourse analysis and cultural theory should be seen as means towards widening prospects. Indeed, such terms as “discontinuity,” and “difference,” along with the Foucauldian “notions of the threshold, rupture and transformation, [and] the description of series and limits” (Archeology of Knowledge, p. ) are means to decenter unitary discourse, uncover its mechanism, and undermine its claims to truth. Contemporary Arabic narrative, especially in its convergence of sites and languages, invites sustained efforts with a thorough awareness of the growth in the social sciences in order to relate issues, practices and strategies, and also to see through these towards a better understanding of an exuberant culture, held, lived and practiced by millions in the Arab land and its many sprawling peripheries and exiles. This narrative enforces its own markers and theoretical principles, too, to account for its distinctive features and shared norms. In its traditional grounding since Scheherazade’s times, as well as in its encounter with the West and the rise of urban sensibility, there is a rich corpus, which has to be assessed and understood, not as a dormant legacy, but as one of great diversity and challenge. Its spatial images of lands, cities, deserts, stones, seas, ships, newspaper buildings, and prisons, and its concrete significations of birds, gazelles, roses, guns, and doors, among many others, work in tandem with strategies of dissent and evasion, as if to keep the gate open for further discussion. “The open door,” says the Egyptian intellectual and novelist Lat.¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at, “is the door of commitment to the whole community, in action, speech and living.”132 Yet, it is a door, nevertheless, with all the implications of narrative thresholds. With the symbolic and the semiotic connotations collapsed, liminality emerges as the pertinent metaphor for postcolonial Arabic fiction, not as a marker of indecision, but as an invitation for further engagement within and beyond the early narrative offers of Scheherazade. It is concerned with identity, migration, change of location, tradition and modernity, to be sure, but the emerging consciousness since, perQtd. in Fawziyyah Mahr¯an, Awr¯aq La.t¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at (Cairo: Qus.u¯ r al-Thaq¯afah, ), p. . 132

    



haps, the  defeat and failure of nationalist ideology alerts writers to new ways and methods of looking upon the present in its past and burgeoning future. The narrative effort since its sustained recognition of the Thousand and One Nights manifests this Arab wide consciousness, as the next chapter argues. The whole argument here and thereafter is to demonstrate how postcolonial narratives engage and debate ambivalence in a manner that shows that the postcolonial actually matters in contemporary Arabic literature.


  WRITING SCHEHERAZADE NOW: THE GROWTH OF MODERN ARABIC FICTION

It may sound surprising to contend that the growth of modern Arabic fiction in its postcolonial stamp coincides with the increasing interest in The Thousand and One Nights after centuries of disregard and neglect. In , the Iraqi well-known quarterly Al-Tur¯ath al-Sha#b¯ı issued a special volume devoted to The Thousand and One Nights;1 and in , the Egyptian quarterly Fus. ¯ul devoted three issues to the study of the tales,2 significantly dedicated to Suhayr Qalam¯aw¯ı, “the pioneering scholar in the study of The Thousand and One Nights,” in reference to her doctoral thesis in . But, no matter how indicative these efforts are of the growing recognition, they came so late as to raise more questions regarding the history and status of the tales in elitist Arabic literature and culture. The process of recognition in elite Arabic culture has not been a smooth one, and mainstream criticism has never been very enthusiastic in respect to The Thousand and One Nights, despite the fact that such a leading intellectual as T¯ supervised Suhayr al-Qalam¯aw¯ı’s . ah¯a Husayn . doctoral thesis on Alf Laylah wa-laylah (Cairo Univ. ) and prefaced it in book form.3 Even the publication of the B¯ul¯aq edition in  should be seen in contexts of expediency and acquiescence to the prevailing European enthusiasm for the tales. When established by Muhammad #Al¯ı in , the B¯ul¯aq Press was more concerned with sci. entific, technological, and military manuals and books, before embarking on Arabic classics.4 The publication of the collection could be seen as catering to the European interest in the tales, while simultaneously appropriating them to the growing revivalist tendency.5 As I menAl-Tur¯ath al-Sha#b¯ı, no. , . Fus. u¯ l,  vols. –, . 3 The thesis was in book form in ; the known edition is (Cairo: D¯ ar al-Ma#¯arif, ). 4 See M.M. Badawi, “Introduction: I. The Background.” Modern Arabic Literature, p. . 5 Another print appeared in  from the same press; another in  (Misr: . 1

2



 

tioned in Scheherazade in England (), the English Orientalist Edward William Lane reported with approval how the Egyptian Shaykh #Abd al Rahm¯ . an al-Jabart¯ı (–) tried to rewrite the tales. According to Lane, the native Egyptian “was so delighted in their perusal that he took the trouble of refining the language of a copy of them which he possessed, expurgating or altering whatever grossly offensive to morality without the somewhat redeeming quality of wit, and adding many facetiae of his own, and of other literati.”6 The involvement of the literati should be seen in this context of appropriation in view of the vogue of the tales in the West. Moreover, the fact that Shaykh Muhammad Qat.t.ah al-#Adaw¯ı put his name on the title page as the . one who carried out the editorial work of double checking and proofreading, “muq¯abalah wa-tas.h. ¯ıh,” . could well indicate the desire of the Press to render the edition acceptable to the rising elite.7 On the other hand, the founding of B¯ul¯aq as the Government Press took place within a tendency to make use of the technological and educational achievements of Europe.8 But, the emulation of Europe entailed also attention to its other interests, its need for information on the East, and its many-sided attraction to a life, resources, and culture that seemed so authentic and alien at the same time. Perhaps, there is no trope that can accommodate the colonial desire better than the enormous taste for The Thousand and One Nights as signified in the title given to the tales by the anonymous Grub Street translator, Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.9

¯ı) and in . There is an edition that takes as title Alf Mus.t.af¯a al-B¯ab¯ı al-Halab . Laylah wa-laylah: hiya al-riw¯ayah al-sharqiyyah al-shah¯ırah tashrah. ¯u ah. w¯al al-#us. ¯ur al-Is¯almiyyah al-wus. .t¯a (Cairo: Mat.ba#at al-Hil¯al bi-a-Fajj¯alah, , ). Obviously, this was inspired by Edward William Lane’s annotations to his three-volume edition of the Arabian Nights, which were collected in An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. The Catholic Publishing House of the Jesuit Fathers, Beirut, issued an edition in , , and . In Cairo another edition appeared in , , and  (Al-Mat.ba#ah ¯ al-#Amirah al-#Uthm¯aniyyah. 6 See Edward William Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, ed. Edward Stanley Poole (London: Bickers, ), chap. , n. , . See also Scheherazade in England, pp. –, and n. . Also Stanley Lane-Poole’s edition of the notes, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages. 7 Alf Laylah wa-laylah, muq¯ abalat wa-tas.h. ¯ıh. Shaykh Muhammad Qat.t.ah al-#Adaw¯ı. . Facsimile edition (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthann¯a, ?) The Shaykh’s name also appears as Shaykh Muhammad Qit.t.ah Qut.t.ah/ al-#Adaw¯ı. . 8 For a survey of printing in the Arab world, see Fawzi M. Tadrus, Printing in the Arab World with emphasis on Bulaq Press (Duha: University of Qatar, ). 9 See the present writer’s Scheherazade in England: Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ).

  



In Arabic classical literature, the recognition of the tales in their own right as popular literature came late, with the increasing awareness of the limitations of institutionalized culture and its accentuations of elitism. We may well argue that the early controversy on the place of the tales in the thought of the Arab awakening, Nahd. ah, and the nature of emasculated editions signify a tendency to appropriate them into an elitist discourse. Even at a later stage, with the increasing interest of T¯ in . ah¯a Husayn . the tales, for instance, the attention was primarily focused on the frame tale for a definite aesthetic purpose, the prioritization of art. It is only at a later period, mainly the s, and with the increasing awareness of popular literature in its many beauties and discontents, that the tales have begun to draw some critical attention.10 It was as late as , in a conference on Arabic fiction held in Fez, Morocco, that some participants first dwelt on The Thousand and One Nights “within the context ¯ ab issue of of modern fiction,” says Roger Allen, in reference to the Ad¯ 11 Feb.-March, . Since then the collection has become increasingly popular with the literati, offering them means and methods for further experimentation in vision and technique. My book on its reception in the West, Scheherazade in England (English edition, ),12 first appeared in Arabic in , too, to pass through a number of prints and editions in Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo. The history of the collection since the B¯ul¯aq edition demonstrates changes in taste among the literati and the reading publics. The collection has undergone emendations, additions and revisions, but the story in the framing tale, not the residue, and for reasons that meet different perspectives and attitudes, and the skeleton of many others remain intact, as if defying the erosion of time and signifying the presence of women creativity despite ages of marginal10 For the change of sensibility in the s, see the present writer’s, “The Rebel, the Ascetic and the Rogue: Other Patterns of Characterization in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Al-#Arabiyya: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic,  (), pp. –. 11 See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, ), p. . 12 See the present writer’s Scheherazade in England: Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights. For reviews in English, see, among many others, D.P. Varma, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature,  (), pp. –; and Mahmoud Manzalaoui, Yearbook of English Studies,  (), pp. –. Fedwa Malti-Douglas describes the book as “excellent source for the period in question,” meaning nineteenth-century Europe. See “Shahraz¯ad Feminist,” in The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society, eds. Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, pp. – (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ).



 

ization and neglect. The Scheherazade trope has become indeed one of the salient markers of feminism in its centrality to postcolonial theory and poetics.13 The figure of the defiant and daring young woman, with great resourcefulness and manipulation of her womanhood, is to cut across nation and narration, postcoloniality and postmodernity, and culture and imperialism. The Scheherazade Trope The relevance of the Scheherazade trope to “nation and narration,” to use Homi Bhabha’s title,14 is as real as it is applicable to imperial conquest. As it served once colonial desires and exotic yearnings, and offered metaphors of feminine habitats to explorers and adventurers, the trope assumes new meanings in its intertexualized underpinnings, its postmodernist offerings of ambivalence, abundance, resistance to form, and sheer pleasure. Postmodernist pronouncements meet contextualizing globalism, too, and the world at large is a site for an imperial take-over in culture, as it is in politics and military conquest. We need to read John Barth’s Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,15 in its The Thousand and One Nights subtext, with its topicality in the aftermath of the American-led alliance against Iraq to understand not only the globality of the trope, but its intricacy and vulnerability, too. Barth plays on the trope of the sailor, its Sindbad’s voyages and their corresponding commercial and marine presence in the Gulf of Basrah, to cut across time and place, without actual questioning of power structures and massive military presence. Posited between power and weakness, life and death, the cultural connotations of the narrative easily lend themselves to the manipulator. Global powers can assume some unredeemed Shahrayar’s role, so can dictators and neopatriarchs, to enforce presence and control, whereas the Scheherazades are the defiant communities and individuals who fight for a place of their own. But the case is not so in Barth’s postmodenist text. Scheherazade’s sisters are Barth’s Yasmins, after all, and the whole discussion is one of sexuality that takes virginity as a start to initiate a discussion or a speech, as significations of life in

13

See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Shahraz¯ad Feminist.” Homi Bhabha, ed. Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, ). 15 John Barth, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (Boston: Little, Brown, ). Citations are within the text. 14

  



Todorov’s terms.16 Like the land and the sand beach of the novel, the female body invites a dominating and thrusting presence for being so lush and charming. No wonder the penis and the vagina are the recurrent tropes in Barth’s Voyage. Conversely, Arab women’s revisionist readings of the Scheherazade frame tale in the last few years demonstrate a tendency to see her as the prototypical feminist. The Egyptian H¯alah Kam¯al and her women colleagues rewrote Scheherazade in their Q¯alat al-R¯awiyah (The Narrator says, ). Positing their revisionist readings against the originals, they want to prove that the available texts are the ones propagated by Shahrayar “after learning from me [Scheherazade] the art of narrative and reportage,” as H¯alah Kam¯al puts it (p. ). Regardless of the nature of the effort, its neglect of the readings of the tales as “favoring the unfortunate in general,” as Muhsin Mahdi argues,17 the revisionist mode is of some significance as a marker of gender and social consciousness. Mahdi thinks of the frame tale with its gender crossing and collaboration between the blacks and women of the palace as a site of rebellion against “the conventions that had established their inferior position” (ibid.). This view can be contained within the feminist premise that Scheherazade herself sustains a feminist presence of wit, resourcefulness and charm, which proves to be disarming and challenging to patriarchal practices and assumptions. In her Ins. ¯af al-Mar"ah (Doing women justice, ) the Syrian feminist writer Wid¯ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı emphasizes feminity and narrativity as Scheherazade’s web to contain patriarchy and power.18 In the West, Scheherazade has already established herself in the feminist canon.19 Understandably, the tales are at the core of popular culture, its dichotomous universalism and regionalism, locality and magic, which contest, like magical realism in Latin American writing, “centrality” and “claims of universality,” a contestation that Linda Hutcheon takes as a sign of convergence between the

16 Todorov’s view, in a chapter on “narrative men,” of character as narrative builds on the loquacious barbers of The Thousand and One Nights, as they ensure life through story telling, while offering us as readers their ethnic and cultural profiles. See The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ). 17 Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources (Leiden: Brill, ), p. . 18 Wid¯ ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı, Ins. ¯af al-Mar"ah (Cairo, ; Damascus: Tl¯ . as, ), p. . Further citations are within the text. 19 Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Shahraz¯ ad Feminist,” pp. –.



 

postcolonial and the postmodern.20 But the story of Scheherazade carries within its very historiography the story of Arabic culture, its richness and variety, its symmetry and divisions and its conformity and dissent. Between Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . recreation, in his Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (), of the textual matrix of the tale to enhance his line of oblique criticism of the police state, and Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s demystification of its aura to challenge patriarchal understanding of heritage in her Suq¯u.t al-Im¯am (Fall of the Imam) there are differences in perspectives and techniques that make the postcolonial Arabic novel worth reading and studying. As I hope to demonstrate, The Thousand and One Nights in its Western vogue—along with some adaptations or translations from Western and Russian fictional literature—21 has enabled the Arabic novel to attain its conspicuous presence in late modern Arabic culture. In more than one sense, its historical record and cultural place since the Nahd. ah are in correspondence with the growth and transgeneric deviations of the modern Arabic novel in its postcolonial diffusion. Elitism and Populism A brief historical survey of the ups and downs in the reception of The Thousand and One Nights is needed, not only to understand its place in modern Arabic narrative, but also to assess the status of the novel as a genre in modern Arabic literature.22 Looked down upon with distaste, fiction throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth was relegated, among the Arab elite, to a worthless position in comparison with standard or classical literature, including elite prose. The popularity of translated fiction with the reading public was never seen as a positive sign.23 Long-time association with coffeehouse and street storytellers or grandmothers’ tales, kept fiction, and The Thousand and One Nights for that matter, away from the attention of scholars and littérateurs. Feminized among genres and deemed 20

Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire: Postcolonialism and Postmodernism,” reprinted in PCSR, –, at p. . 21 Jack al-T¯ ajir, Harakat al-tarjamah bi-Mis. r f¯ı al-qarn al-t¯asi# #ashar (The movement . of translation in Egypt in the nineteenth century) (Mis.r: D¯ar al-Ma#¯arif, ); Lat.¯ıf Zayt¯un¯ı, Harakat al-tarjamah f¯ı #as. r al-Nahd. ah (The Translation movement in the awaken. ing period) (Beirut: D¯ar al-Nah¯ar, ). 22 See the present writer’s chapter on the novel as genre, in Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah: ¯ ab, ). al-nash"ah wa-al-tah. awwul (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ 23 See Matti Moosa for a survey of attitudes, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ), p. .

  



as below the Adab, belles lettres, proper, the novel at large is equated with the female body, to be secretly searched for, but veiled from the public eye or openly disdained and ostracized as a paradigm of evil. Its otherness in hegemonic discourse is strangely fraught with a mixture of need and rejection, celebration and mortification as if this hegemonic undertaking were in duplication of the colonial discourse with its Manichean epithets. But upon attaining so much popularity in the West, The Thousand and One Nights, and fiction for that matter, was soon to work out its way, not only through cultural mimicry of the West, which is there, but also in response to the needs of the rising middle classes. Scheherazade’s tales were to advance later with rapid strides amid debated space and zones of difference to help create enough recognition for modern Arabic fiction. Like the very encounter with the West that has been holding Arabic culture in tension and suspense, the process of rehabilitating Scheherazade is imbued with contradiction. Yet, this very process is central to any reading of postcolonial Arabic fiction not only because of the viability of the Scheherazade trope itself, but also because its history and mechanism reflect and correspond to the encounter with both modernity and tradition. Hence, the history of the reputation and vogue of The Thousand and One Nights is bound to prove helpful in this assessment of postcolonial Arabic fiction; for it is the thesis of this chapter that the reclamation of Scheherazade is indicative not only of the change in outlook towards the novel in its generic and transgeneric formations, along with the new awareness of the popular element in tradition, but also of the achievement of women writers and the advocates of liberal and democratic thought. The post-independence state has subscribed to this awareness to meet its political expediency and pragmatic need for a body politic, too. On the other hand, the process of recognition implies a re-reading of Arabic culture in keeping with the spirit of democracy and change that should ostensibly give voice to the marginalized and the muted. It should not be surprising that women writers find in Scheherazade the trope to regain and assert identity as valorized and forwarded in the very encounter between Scheherazade and Shahrayar. In a reading of Scheherazade in Arabic culture, the Syrian feminist Wid¯ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı takes her for a cultural and literary trope, a woman’s presence throughout the history of Arabic literature as women prove their mastery in poetry and narrative against heavy odds (Ins. ¯af alMar"ah, p. ). She reads this framing tale against a background of fric-



 

tion, conflict and challenge. It signifies to her a popular tradition that defies elitist and hegemonic restrictions and constraints. Despite the possible vogue of storytelling in medieval Islamic society, as Hik¯ . ayat Ab¯u al-Q¯asim al-Baghd¯ad¯ı testifies,24 Arabic scholarship throughout the past tends to look down upon such stories as insipid and worthless, much below the standards of adab or literary discourse. Their coarse language and unrestrained compositions alienated them from the literati. On the other hand, the above-mentioned tale of Muhammad Ibn . ¯ Ahmad Ab¯ u al-Mu t ahhar al-Azd ı is strongly rooted in the culture of . . a mercantile society, as its characters are mostly merchants and businessmen, who are defied and tested throughout by women who are adept in the intrigues of sex and writing, like the Abu¯ #Ali Bin Jamh¯ur Z¯admhar’s concubine in the same tale.25 Written in a middle language that relapses into colloquialism, the tale has many affinities with Scheherazade’s. Being at variance with acceptable canons of sound composition, storytelling of this nature was met with dislike among the literati of the classical period; for popularity with the common public is no guarantee of the approval of the educated literary elite. As documentary evidence indicates, tenth-century Arab historians and scholars like al-Mas#¯ud¯ı (d. ), in Mur¯uj al-Dhahab wa-ma#¯adin al-jawhar, and Muhammad Ibn Ish¯ . . aq al-Nad¯ım (d. ), in al-Fihrist, were among many who mentioned the tales with disdain, whereas others with some taste for storytelling like Ab¯u Hayy¯ an al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı (d. ) maintained . 26 different views. Ironically enough such conservative attitudes among the learned could well anticipate the position of many neo-classicists in Europe who were shocked by the “wilderness” of the tales.27 Regardless

24 Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ab¯ u al-Mut.ahhar al-Azd¯ı, Hik¯ . . . ayat Ab¯u al-Q¯asim al-Baghd¯ad¯ı (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthann¯a, ?). 25 See the present writer’s survey and analysis of this tale in Mujtama# alf laylah walaylah (Tunis: Markaz al-Nashr al-J¯am#¯ı, ), pp. –. Adam Mez suggests / – as date of composition. On the other hand, there are some suggestions that Ab¯u Hayy¯ an al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı could be the author. For a review of these views, see Shmuel . Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature in the Medieval Arabic World (New York: New York Univ. Press, ), pp. –. For a review of this literature, on woman’s ruse, craftiness, and also eloquence, see Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in Arabo-Islamic Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, ), pp. –. 26 See the present writer’s Mujtama# alf laylah, pp. –, and “The Growth of Scholarly Interest in the Arabian Nights,” Muslim World, LXX (), pp. –. 27 See the present writer’s Scheherazade in England, pp. –.

  



of their different orientations and outlooks, both were to resist such a challenge to acceptable canons of composition and conduct. But the tales should have been popular enough, as they were to become later in Europe, to migrate, accumulate and gain in matter and manner. Due to this vogue, some contemporaries modeled their own entertaining anecdotes on The Thousand and One Nights. In the last decades of the tenth century, the essayist and historian Ab¯u Hayy¯ an . al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı, in an act of gender crossing, went so far as to undertake Scheherazade’s role, entertaining his friend the waz¯ır (minister) Ab¯u #Abdull¯ah al-Husayn Ibn Sa#d¯an for  nights.28 The latter figures in . these “nights” as Shahrayar’s double, asking for more entertainment in some instructive narrative! The variety of anecdotes, gleanings and borrowings from popular fiction indicates that he was not totally opposed to “cheap” literature or “dirty” jokes. While pertaining then to a mode of writing in Arabian Nightism, Ab¯u Hayy¯ an al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı’s entertaining . narratives could have sought to appease the desire of the privileged and the learned without affronting their concern for both validity and tradition, for the very title of his al-Imt¯a# wa -al-mu’¯anasah means to “enjoy, to entertain.” Wid¯ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı draws a comparison between Ab¯u Hayy¯ an . al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı and Scheherazade, for both find in narrative a way out of an ordeal (p. ). Indeed, Ab¯u Hayy¯ an al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı tried his hand . at some popular anecdotes in the language of the rabble, too, and included in the same book some Hik¯ . ay¯at that occurred also in Hik¯ . ayat Ab¯ı al-Q¯asim al-Baghd¯ad¯ı. But, as the rest is dressed into proper Arabic, it fits well into acceptable literature like the maq¯am¯ah, which enjoyed sustained revival in the nineteenth century until some time in the twentieth century.29 The latter, as a medieval narrative technique centered on the adventures and tricks of a marginalized intellectual, a trickster, was perfected by the “wonder of the age” Bad¯ı# al-Zam¯an al-Hamadh¯an¯ı (–) and polished further by Ab¯u al-Q¯asim al-Har . ¯ır¯ı of Basrah (–). While the maq¯am¯at made use of some narrative and dramatic poetic forms, to forward a picaro’s adventures and craft, the S¯ırah as the Prophet’s biography, or as an art that was to grow stupendously in ency28 For a detailed study of the art, see the present writer’s Sardiyy¯at al-#asr al-#Arab¯ı . al-Isl¯am¯ı al-was.¯ıt (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaq¯afi al-#Arab¯ı, ). 29 Among its writers were the Lebanese Nas¯ıf al-Y¯ azij¯ı (–), and Ahmad F¯aris . . ¯ us¯ı (–), and the Egyptian al-Shidy¯aq (–), the Iraqi Ab¯u al-Than¯a" al-Al¯ Muhammad Ibr¯ah¯ım al-Muwaylih. ¯ı (–). .



 

clopedic works and compendiums, offered another narrative pattern, with emphasis on successive identified historical narrators whose mention is to ensure the validity and dependability of their narrative. Both appealed as such to some conventions and traditions, whereas The Thousand and One Nights came into being first through translations, which provided urban story-tellers with a framing tale along with some exemplary ones, parables and stories of various length and achievement that encouraged these either to bring into the collection their own material or to accommodate the available to new conditions.30 The urban society itself provoked story-tellers to invent some or adapt historical anecdotes to fit into that pattern of perpetual narrative where rotating symmetry shows forth as the most marked feature of embedding, diffusion and enframing, as some scholars have remarked.31 But no matter how successful such attempts were the product itself could never develop into a mode of writing that would fit into traditional conventions. Meant as entertainments for coffeehouse and domestic audiences, such tales were available to be told as they were, unfolding in full orality while sustaining a story of many motivations, regardless of rules of composition or acceptable taste.32 The audience and the storyteller enjoy a narrative space where they share interests and desires that are otherwise unattainable. It is beside the point to assume the possibility of expurgation or domestication in these sessions for to do so is to lead to the death of the tales and the bankruptcy of the storytellers, whether they are men or women. The assumptions that there was basically a patriarchal male society, which left no space for women’s participation in cultural life, tend to forget that no less than a third of Kit¯ab al-agh¯an¯ı (the Book of songs) by Ab¯u al-Faraj al-Is.bah¯an¯ı (/–/), speaks of domestic sessions run by women poets and slave singers.33 While this cultural terrain manifests freedom of expresMuhsin Mahdi, “Exemplary Tales,” in The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla waLayla) from the Earliest Known Sources, pp. –, at p. . 31 Ferial Ghazoul, The Arabian Nights: A Structural Analysis (Cairo: Cairo Associated Institution, ), p. . 32 Andre Miquel argues that there are three reasons for the tales not to be “scholarly literature.” These relate to their teachings, for “what they teach might not always have complied with official moral standards.” Another reason, “the tales weighed strongly in favor of pleasure.” A third reason relates to the nature of the tales, as they are “unconcerned with social hierarchy.” See “The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society,” in The Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and Society. Eds. Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, pp. –, at p. . 33 See also in this regard, Ilse Lichtenstadter, Women in the Aiy¯am al-#Arab. Royal 30

  



sion and cross-gender exchange, there is some line of demarcation between entertaining exchange and writing as legacy. Although narrative proper demands sustained presence, participation and involvement in common life, there is no reason to assume that women of the classical and pre-modern periods were less involved in the art than their male counterparts. Women sessions and gatherings were and are a feature of life in Arab-Islamic societies. Their anecdotal outcome crept anonymously for this reason into the most elitist compendiums, despite the fact that women of reputation or connection were also mentioned by name.34 On the other hand, there existed no great body of recognizable narrative, other than the anecdotal or the maq¯am¯at, to support this new genre or to account for its genetic presence. Hence were the disdain of the learned and the reluctance of the rest to call for its acceptance. While it is possible that some tales of greater narrative skill were written by the learned, the latter showed no enthusiasm “to let them (the stories) appear under their own name,” as Mia Gerhardt suggests.35 On the other hand such contemporary tales as Ab¯u al-Q¯asim al-Baghd¯ad¯ı show so much frivolity, playfulness and oblique political and social criticism as to substantiate the suspicions of the ruling taste against this subversive literature. Unless we keep in mind the torture, suffering and persecution attending writers throughout the period in question down to modern times, we cannot understand the implications of attitudes, the disappearance of genres and people and the overwhelming presence of descriptive discourse at the expense of the polemical or the philosophical.36

Asiatic Society, Prize Publications, XIV (London, ). 34 See Ilse Lichtenstadter’s note on Hind bint #Uqbah and the mar¯ ath¯ı genre, dirges, in Introduction to Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Schocken Books, ). The reader may read this viewpoint against Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s reading of the matter as a sign of exclusion, for it “is the relative absence of personhood of the everyday or common woman that must be signaled.” See her Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, pp. –. On the other hand there were circles of Sufi women mentioned and known by their full names, a fact that can apply to other circles and raise questions about our assumptions of women cultural exclusion. 35 Mia Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –; and Mah. m¯ud Taym¯ur, “Al-Qis.s.as. f¯ı Adab al-#Arab,” Al-Ad¯ıb (), pp. –. 36 See Roger Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), p. . On modern Arabic culture, see the present writer’s Al-Nukhbah al-fikriyyah ¯ ab, ). wa-al-inshiq¯aq (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯



  Canons in Arabic

While aspiring to promote scientism as a way of thinking and to enhance Arabic classical language and thought against a background of repression, degeneration and colonialist opposition to Islam and Arabic as language and culture, the advocates of some Arab “renaissance” or “awakening” were holding out firmly to canons of established genres, an attitude that simultaneously means their rejection of fiction. Thus, the well-known Egyptian poet and essayist Ibr¯ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı (d. ) was strongly advised by a friend not to put his name to fictional texts, and not to involve himself in fiction writing, as he mentioned to AlSiy¯asah al-Usb¯u#iyyah ( May , ).37 Other writers were reluctant to put their names to fictional texts in the early twentieth century.38 On the other hand, Mahm¯ . ud Taym¯ur writes “one of the prominent journals then [the first decades of the th century] used to devote a section to translated stories under the broad heading ‘Anecdotes.’”39 As for the well-established arbiter of taste, the Egyptian periodical Al-Muqta.taf,40 it once expressed its admiration for the Jesuit expurgated edition of The Thousand and One Nights (Beirut) and for the editor Khal¯ıl Sarkis (vol. , –, ). But it voiced its dislike for the vogue of the tales, nonetheless, calling instead for a better acquaintance with science and moral edification. One of its editors, Hab¯ıb Ban¯ut (vol. . , ) went so far as to criticize story-writing as an undertaking and as a genre, finding it worthless at the time, merely involved with love affairs of meetings and separations, explaining therefore that he would be for the genre had it grown as “art” and had its writers enhanced “their inclination towards its accomplishment, to cultivate manners, good taste and conduct.” As late as  this periodical would still think of The Thousand and One Nights as akin to useless fables unfit for an age of science and facts. Even such critics as #Abdall¯ah #An¯an continued to place the so-called “entertainment” outside the domain of the acceptAl-Siy¯asah al-Usb¯u#iyyah, May , ; see al-Musawi, Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah, p. . Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zainab is a case in point. Although al-Jar¯ıdah staff, . . where it was serialized, knew the author, its Mis. r¯ı fallah. authorship until  tells us about this reluctance. See Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and its Main Trends from  to  (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). 39 Mahm¯ . ud Taym¯ur, Dir¯as¯at fi al-Qis. s. ah wa-al-masrah. (Cairo, n. p., n. d), p. . 40 First issued in Beirut in  before moving to Cairo in , as part of the exodus. See Mounah Khouri, Poetry in the Making of Modern Egypt (Leiden: Brill, ), p. . 37

38

  



able in literature. “Although attaining a high imaginative quality,” he wrote for Al-Siy¯asah al-Usb¯u#iyyah (March , , p. ) The Thousand and One Nights “goes beyond probability in its events and pictures, it also goes beyond acceptable morals and rules of conduct.” In other words, the attitude against The Thousand and One Nights throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth still partakes of the nature of conservative criticism with its canons of sound composition, probability and decency. Ironically, these Arab Nahd. ah views echo much of eighteenth-century English neo-classicism. Under the impact of the West, and due to the priority principle in so far as the national discourse is concerned, there is in this Nahd. ah discourse a mixture of recognition and rejection, the attention to the vogue of narrative and the subscription to the conservative attitude to literature, which continued supreme among European literati, too. Here as there “the category of genre” designates the traditionally acceptable, an attitude that isolates the rest by undertaking the role “of social control,” in the words of some readers of literature as discourse.41 The complexity of this attitude may well show in retrospective autobiographies, recollections of the past and apprenticeships. Writing on his childhood experience and apprenticeship before , the date of his brother’s death, the Egyptian writer Mahm¯ . ud Taym¯ur writes about his father’s present to him of Alf laylah wa-laylah in terms of childhood fascination, not only “its similarity to naïve tales of heroism, for we were attracted to its vast imagination, beauty of events, newness of images, the charming Oriental scene which is closely related to us, its richness with adventures which we desire to practice, to join heroes in their roles, and their involvement in adventures.” Citing examples of these adventures which conclude at times with gold and emeralds, he adds: “Needless to say, Alf laylah wa-laylah stimulates in the reader the imaginative talent.” He cites a saying by Voltaire to the effect that he read the book many times before trying his hand at narrative. But this fascination signals a stage in his apprenticeship, to be outgrown and superseded by realistic novels, including Zaynab () by Muhammad Husayn Haykal. He designates . . this awareness as one of attachment to a realistic vein in national literature, as represented in Zaynab.42 The pertinence of this situation to our reading lies in its complexity, for the literati still think in terms of gradaSee Robert Hodge, Literature as Discourse (Cambridge: Polity Press, ), p. . Mahm¯ . ud Taym¯ur, Ittij¯ah¯at al-adab al-#Arab¯ı f¯ı al-sin¯ın al-m¯a"ah al-akh¯ırah (Cairo: ¯ ab, ), pp. –. Maktabat al-Ad¯ 41

42



 

tion of people, writers and genres while they opt for transformation and change. Their selective use of Western achievements and ideals, as indicated in the same writer’s mention of foreign novelists in his third stage of growth, prevents them, too, of fighting for a full-scale recognition of the tales. But, whenever assessing the cultural scene, we have to be careful lest we confuse the literary with the cultural. Although there are many shared agendas between the two perspectives, especially in their upholders’ moral touchstones, there are differences, too, especially in Iraq and Syria. The drive for non-Western culture was very strong in Iraq throughout the first decades of the twentieth-century. Translations were done from Turkish and Indian literatures. A great emphasis was laid, too, on Marxist and scientific thought. In an article for the Al-#Ir¯aq daily (no. , ,  August, ), Mahm¯ al-Sayyid (d. ) . ud Ahmad . argues against the vogue of The Thousand and One Nights. “While presses and publishing houses in Europe are trying hard to issue millions of copies of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, Einstein’s theories and The Origin of the Species, our presses are busy with new prints of the Agh¯an¯ı and The Thousand and One Nights.” He qualifies his objections by intimating, “We don’t intend to detract from the nobility of this Eastern nation, but we would like to highlight truths for people to notice, no matter how painful and harsh they may be.”43 Although a leftist novelist who wrote a veiled autobiographical novel of great postcolonial resonance,44 Mahm¯ al-Sayyid discusses literature, nevertheless, in terms . ud Ahmad . of utility and need. In the first decades of the last century, the attitude against The Thousand and One Nights applied with equal force to story-writing at large. No less than such eminent writers in Egypt as #Abb¯as Mahm¯ . ud al-#Aqq¯ad (d. ), Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım (d. ) and Mus.t.af¯a S¯ . adiq alR¯afi#¯ı (d. ) wrote against storytelling and the novel in particular. Shocked by the sensational or surprised at the vogue of light writing, these writers wrote extensively against fiction as such. Subordinated still to classical legacy, they were not sensitive yet either to the needs of minorities or to literature as a shared practice that cuts across class, gender and race. Very much attuned to a widely circulated notion, also Qtd. in Y¯usuf #Izz al-D¯ın, Al-Riw¯ayah f¯ı al-#Ir¯aq: Ta.tawwuruh¯a wa-athar al-fikr f¯ıh¯a (Cairo: Ma#had al-buh¯ . uth wa-al-dir¯as¯at al-#Arabiyyah, ), p. . 44 Mahm¯ al-Sayyid, Jal¯al Kh¯alid (), in Al-¯a#m¯al al-k¯amilah (Baghdad: . ud Ahmad . D¯ar al-Hurriyyah, ). . 43

  



pronounced long ago by Muhammad Ibn M¯us¯a al-Dam¯ır¯ı (–), . that “al-adab dhakar,” (literature is male), as cited in his encyclopedia of animal life,45 a number of renowned figures of the early twentieth century take it for granted that women are good only for the light and the superficial. It should not be surprising, however, that such great literary figures like al-#Aqq¯ad, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım, and Zak¯ı Mub¯arak in Egypt, and Muammad Kurd #Al¯ı in Syria, were also among the “enemies of women’s writing” as Wid¯ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı stipulates (pp. – ). Al- Hak . ¯ım thinks that women cannot write drama, or al-qas. as. al-tamth¯ıl¯ı, and al-#Aqq¯ad “claims that women can be good at fiction writing only, as if this art in his view is nothing more than a joke easy for every writer,” she argues (p. ). This collapsing of fiction and women partakes of the conservative in the Nahd. ah discourse, to be sure, but its far-reaching implications relate to a hegemonic bent that denies women writers a role while relegating narrative to the background in the ongoing battle of prioritization among genres. As late as  the formidable critic and essayist Mus.t.af¯a S¯ . adiq al-R¯afi#¯ı attacked fiction as worthless. In an article on storytelling and “Why shouldn’t I contribute to it?” al-R¯afi#¯ı argues that the East has already suffered too much frivolity and carelessness to be fed by more insipidity. Indeed, he argues as follows: “A novel if written by a reprobate from among writers, it is not a novel, for it is a work punishable by law as an act of prostitution (al-Ris¯alah, No. ,  June ; ). He recalls the classical theory of composition to support his own argument, for sound composition is only an expression of good manners. As storytelling does not fit these, he is “against it, against its language and emotions.” By September, , the reader might still come across writings by critics and poets, like al-#Aqq¯ad, who embarked later on writing their own “autobiographical novels” as the only outlet to elaborate on their own grounding and career. But to al-#Aqq¯ad, poetry is nevertheless a better genre, preferable for being inclusive!! When faced with the popularity of the novel the same writer would argue, “novels get popular for being entertaining and close to coffee house audiences, but not for any refinement in composition or a higher gradation among the arts” (alRis¯alah, No. , –). Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım, the dramatist and thinker, would even go further in associating the novel with the less refined, for the difference K¯amil al-D¯ın Muhammad Ibn M¯us¯a al-Dam¯ır¯ı [al-Dumayri], Hay¯ . . at al-h. ayaw¯an al-kubr¯a.  vols (Cairo, n. d.). 45



 

between literature and storytelling according to him is like “the difference between the upper part of the human body and the lower part.” In an article in Akhb¯ar al-Yawm ( March ), he argues: “If the story pictures man’s personal life, it is literature that demonstrates the role of thought in a person’s life, for man [sic] is not a mere creature moving in some materialistic environment which novelists used to designate as realistic. Man is above all a brain that moves among words and thoughts.” Read in association with his early disparagement of women, both fiction and narrative lack in thoughtfulness and brains. But against these views there appeared a number of others that carried no less weight. The brilliant Egyptian critic of the same era Sayyid Qut.b (executed in , as ring leader of the Muslim Brotherhood) wrote for al-Ris¯alah (No. , Aug. , , –) against one of the many criticisms of fiction, its lack of compression. To him, the novel as genre provides some thing different from daily life and behavior. More impressive was Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . rejoinder (al-Ris¯alah, No. , Aug. , , –), for “All the arts have some similar purpose and some equal station, according to their own concerns,” he argues. Thus standards of the best and the worst as propounded by al-#Aqq¯ad could well apply to every art. But, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. continues, “the rise of the novel should not surprise the advocates of poetry, for this rise is related to the advance of science.” He further contends “due to philosophy there had been some concentration on the general for a long time, but due to science there is the belief now that each particle down to the atom has its own life and significance.” The phrasing runs against neo-classical theories that care for the general rather than the particular; but Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. criticizes the advocates of poetry as alien voices in an age of discovery and change. To him “the consequences of the scientific spirit show forth in the attention of the novel to details.” The argument is not a passing one, for its scientific and realistic bent is also attuned to Scheherazade’s art. Women are prone to inwardness in an inter-related response to the detailed inside of their lives and their domestic interiors as no male writer can. Wid¯ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı challenges male writers to write a novel or a story under, for example, the title hamm¯am al-nis¯a" (Women’s bath) (p .).46 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . articulation of narrativity and detail is also in tune with the postcolonial urge, for aside from the awareness of science; there is the democratic spirit, which It is worth noting that Sala am¯at . . h. l-D¯ın al-Munajjid wrote a study of Hamm¯ Dimashq in . 46

  



entails a de-centering of patriarchy, and a concomitant belief in the human right for freedom. His attitude coincides only with one specific ideal of the advocates of the Nahd. ah, namely the emphasis on science as needful. The democratic urge is new, and it takes Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. sometime to develop it with non-categorical patterns in the novel as a bourgeois epic. But rather than limiting the argument to the sphere of knowledge, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. anticipates the modernist concern with the rise and fall of genres. To him there are reasons behind the rise and vogue of certain modes of writing. The Bourgeois Epic Summoning the authority of the rising classes as well as the spirit of the age, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. argues it is “the spirit of the age” which lies behind this popularity. Obviously in line with T¯ earlier . ah¯a Husayn’s . comment on Ahmad Hasan al-Zayy¯at’s translation of Goethe’s Werther . . (Cairo, ) as revealing the anxieties of the Arab intellectual then, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . phrasing was common among Arab writers. This age is different from ancient times, for formerly poetry was dominant as an expression of the “legendary” and “spontaneous.” But in “an age of science, industry and facts, there ought to be some other art that could manage as much as possible between the human taste for facts and the old longing for the fanciful. The age came upon the novel as its own poetry.”47 But the argument for narrative is also couched in postcolonial referentialtiy. Poetry has a lot of the allegorical, for, as Foucault argues, “beneath the language of signs and beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions, he [the poet] strains his ears to catch that ‘other language’, the language, without words or discourse, of resemblance. The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak.”48 In other words, poetry cannot be representational, nor can it be polyphonic. In its non-dramatic utterance it is the language of the few, whereas fiction plays on multiplicity and deploys its strategies to account for contestation and difference. Although not necessarily tied to a one language of truth, poetry oscillates between the classical and the lyrical, the Cartesian and the expressive and confessional. The novel in its Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ ascendance incorporates the languages and social behaviors . uzian . of the lower classes and communities, allowing, to use Bakhtin’s words 47 48

Qtd. in Musawi, Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah, p. , n. . Michel Foucault, Order of Things, p. .



 

in the Dialogic Imagination, the “centripetal forces” to operate “in the midst of heteroglossia” (p. ). The implications of this socio-political awareness of the new forces are not casual, and the understanding of the novel in its broad narrative canvas would help a lot in understanding narrative beyond the limitations of the pure literary practice. This awareness of social forces, their culture, folktales, songs, anecdotes and narrative bring new stratifications, new accentuations, and heteroglossia that parody the poetics of the classicists and dislodge the official language of the ruling and dominating discourse of its times. With this understanding, Arabic fiction, in its polyphonic growth assumes a great postcolonial potential. Post-Nahdah . Popular Narrative Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . emphasis on the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, was a given among Arab intellectuals at large, especially in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria where the narrative art was gaining in popularity and vogue. Especially suited to preoccupations that cannot be expressed otherwise, narratives were to gain more ground in a relatively short time. Even early opponents subscribed to the art soon, as was the case with al-Hak . ¯ım and al-#Aqq¯ad, for instance. The former went so far in the early s as to approve of writers’ use of The Thousand and One Nights beyond his early aesthetic preoccupations, finding it attuned to the spirit of the age when writers “no longer discriminate between the elitist source and the populist,” for “the dam between official men of letters and the popular breaks down.”49 Taking cognizance of the social implies openness to generic crossing beyond hierarchy. It also signifies full recognition of the mass audience. In terms of identity formation or self-assertion, narratives act as outlets against colonialization, as Ayy¯ub’s Dukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım () signifies. In this respect, Edward Said’s proposal, that storytelling is a counter-effort to what “explorers and novelists say about strange regions,”50 is worth citing. He suggests, stories “also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.” As I will explain in chapter four, there is no better representation of this contestation than the narrative encounter with Western style, life, and culture and its 49 Tawf¯ıq al- al-Hak¯ım, “Athw¯ ab al-Adab al-#Arab¯ı,” Garbs of Arabic Literature, in . ¯ ab, ), p. . Fann al-Adab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Ad¯ 50 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii.

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

informing colonialist legacy. Testing selfhood against another complex situation where people and cultural manifestations inside are not necessarily subservient to the goals and means of empire outside, protagonists feel impelled not only to inscribe findings and release conscience of some conflict, but also to vindicate their culture against distortion. In this context, fictional narrative, in its rooted storytelling, is also an act of affirmation, a will to reclaim an eroded selfhood. Such recognition of the novel culminates many preceding, though comparably marginal, attempts to attain some publicity for fiction writing against the overwhelming elitist traditional rejection. One could even go as far back as , the date of the first publication of the B¯ul¯aq two-volume edition of The Thousand and One Nights in Cairo. Seen against the background of European interest in the tales and the many translations from extant manuscripts or oral sessions in Aleppo of the late seventeenth century, the event of the B¯ul¯aq edition may well be cited as an intersectional contact. It can be read as a sign of cultural consciousness, albeit with some prudish accentuations like the Anglicized, but thoroughly documented, translation of Edward William Lane (–). But it can be cited, too, as an imprint of subordination to the overruling European taste that was brought about by the French expedition in  and Muhammad #Al¯ı’s pragmatic effort to acculturate . Egypt. The editor of that edition, the Shaykh Muhammad Qat.t.ah al. #Adaw¯ı, was no minor figure,51 and his commitment should be cited as a landmark of cultural consciousness. No less important, however, were Ahmad F¯aris al-Shidy¯aq’s (–) pioneering fictional narra. tives, especially Al-S¯aq #al¯a al-s¯aq f¯ım¯a huwa al-f¯ary¯aq (). These were unable then to make a substantial impact on literature, for the formidable concerns of the learned were rather bent upon the revival of classical language and literature in the face of some overriding degeneration, which was brought about by Ottoman domination and its aftermath. In this context, Muhammad Ibr¯ah¯ım al-Muwaylih. ¯ı (–) . wrote his pioneering Had¯ıth #Is¯a ibn Hish¯am () to combine both: the response to a changing urban life, and the concern with a standard Arabic.52 Indeed, Henri Pér˙es goes so far as to see this text as a “shining

51 The Shaykh was a known scholar, and has a number of books on Arabic language and grammar. 52 See Roger Allen, “Had¯ıth #Isa ibn Hish¯ am by Muhammad Ibr¯ah¯ım al-Muwaylih. ¯ı: . A Reconsideration,” Journal of Arabic Literature (), pp. –. See also, The Arabic Novel, pp. –.



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minaret” guiding others towards rich and fertile prospects.53 Situating it among other efforts of cultural engagement in Egypt like the writings of Tal#at Harb (–), Q¯asim Am¯ın (–) and #Al¯ı B¯ash¯a . . Mub¯arak (–), Pér˙es considers al-Muwaylih. ¯ı one of the notables in the whole “awakening” drive against traditional attitudes. It was only at a later stage, when some achievement was made in the field of education, that the conservative attitude relaxed, leaving space enough for the appearance of such journals as al-Hil¯al, K.M. Karam’s Alf laylah wa-laylah (The Thousand and One Nights, ), and M. al-Mars.af¯ı’s Scheherazade (–). While Scheherazade catered for the reader’s taste for “the enjoyable and the new” (editorial,  September ), alHil¯al was rather keen on promoting new ideas and genres. Accordingly, Gibran Khalil Gibran (–) wrote to the editor in  suggesting an award for the best tale in this monthly, simultaneously expressing his readiness to pay for such a reward: People are bored with essays and poems… The Oriental is bent on storytelling, for he is the one who created this art. But nowadays [he/she] is ready to overlook his best qualifications in preference for essays and poems. Tales and novels are behind social and political change in the United States and Europe. To me there should be some endeavor to awaken this positive bent in the East as the best way to invoke latent natural inclination for creation. It is impossible for national life to evolve unless there is some artistic creation. It is the tale that could demonstrate such creativity54

This understanding of story writing should be seen, however, not only in view of Gibran’s own readings in the socio-aesthetic grounding of the novel in its Western genealogy, but also in its positive response to indigenous popular culture as worth revival and rejuvenation. Aware of the presence and vogue of narrative in America during his expatriation there, Gibran was keen on communicating the validity of his discovery to his native audiences. The native past is, after all, not all “hoariness,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term,55 whenever it is there as pleasant identification, a marker of character, and not a mere set-up to celebrate 53 Henri Pér˙ es, “Les Origines d’un roman célébre de la littérature Arabe moderne: Hadit Isa ibn Hisam de Muhammad al-Muwaylihi,” Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales T.X (Beyrouth, ), pp. –. 54 Qtd. in Muhammad Y¯ usuf Najm, Al-qis. s. ah f¯ı al-adab al-#Arab¯ı al-had¯ıth f¯ı Lubn¯an, . p. . 55 Qtd. in Homi Bhabha, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in PCSR, pp. –, at p. .

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

patriarchal ancestry. This attitude is worth pursuing, however, for there had developed some sociological interest in the initiation and growth of the genre in its postcolonial ramifications, especially in respect to women’s issues. Even #Abdall¯ah #An¯an who had already voiced his own rejection of The Thousand and One Nights could not resist the comparison with the West whenever the comparative approach would support his view that woman’s participation in social life stood behind the growth of the novel in the West. Others would carry the comparison to the very beginnings, for the Europeans have their Boccaccio while the Arabs have their The Thousand and One Nights, according to Ibr¯ah¯ım al-Mis.r¯ı (Akhb¯ar al-Yawm,  December :). Some five years later () Fakhr¯ı Ab¯u al-Sa#¯ud carried the approach further, focusing on characterization, which he thought of as central to the growth of the genre, making some mention of Addison and Steele as forerunners in their character sketches. He cites the Arab picaro of the Maq¯am¯at as the right beginning for characterization in fiction (al-Ris¯alah, April , ). Characterization should not be cited as merely another aspect of novel writing, in due acknowledgement of E.M. Forster, but as recognition of fiction as multi-voiced. Hence its democracy and sites of difference. As late as  an Arab lecturer in English literature drew a comparison between the eighteenthcentury European novel and The Thousand and One Nights, concluding that there are many similarities to suggest that the European novel then had not gone well beyond the achievements of Scheherazade.56 There are things, which are left out in such comparisons, however, and the recourse to the Scheherazade trope was not fully mapped out. As early as the mid nineteenth century, writers in Arabic came also under the influence of writers from the West. As many scholars have already remarked, such writers as But.rus al-Bust¯an¯ı (–), Nas.¯ıf al-Y¯azij¯ı (–), M¯ar¯un al-Naqq¯ash (–) and Ahmad F¯aris al. Shidy¯aq (–) came under the impact of a number of Western works and authors, developing thereby a whole tradition with significant acculturating processes, which brought something new in modern Arabic literature in matters of style and attitude. Under the impact of the new influx, Arabic culture was no longer the same.57 Along with Jabr¯a I. Jabr¯a, “Al-Dhurwah f¯ı al-Adab,” Al-Ad¯ıb (February ), pp. –. See Roger Allen on translation and adaptation, The Arabic Novel, pp. –; and Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington: Three Continents, ), pp. –. Citations from both books are thereafter within the text. 56

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mistranslations, plagiarism and translations, some counter narratives, from the periphery to the metropolitan center, such as Takhl¯ıs. al-ibr¯ız f¯ı talkh¯ıs. Bar¯ız () of the renowned Egyptian intellectual Rif¯a#¯ah R¯afi# al-Tah . t.a¯ w¯ı (–), set the tone for a whole tradition of the journey to the center, serving, as Allen notes regarding Takhl¯ıs al-ibr¯ız, “as the framework for a series of novels which have appeared during the course of the twentieth century” (p. ). Writing in this vein, or imitating and translating other writings, a large number of Arab authors made use of available techniques and linguistic codes “well enough to create domestic fiction,” as Moosa argues (p. ). The increasing interest in translation throughout the first decades of the twentieth century was very much in line with this comparative approach. Ahmad Hasan al-Zayy¯at, the owner and editor of the . . influential Egyptian journal al-Ris¯alah (–), argued strongly for translations that “will soon become part of our scientific and literary structure, which we shall cherish, preserve, and then add to, as did our ancestors, who translated the sciences of the Greeks, Indians, Jews, Syrians and Persians into their language,” he writes (qtd. in Moosa, p. ). In his introduction to al-Zayy¯at’s translation of Goethe’s Werther, the eminent writer and thinker T¯ writes that the transla. ah¯a Husayn . tion was done at the right time (), for the novel represents “an age of transition, like ours, an age bored with the old, searching for the new.” Each person was to let feelings and emotions have their free play, he continues, exposed to the outside world “regardless of the pretentious, the imitative and the restrictive.” This voicing of the personal and the individualist beckons to the democratic urge, which simultaneously means a naturalization of narrative proper with its characters, scenes, sentiments, action and life. Narrative as such deepens “language dynamics,” as Bakhtin argues in the Dialogic Imagination, achieving decentralization and disunification as the ultimate intersections for heteroglossia (p. ). Addressed as a decentring act, narrative is a decolonizing process, too. In its context as a comment on Goethe, the very dissolver of old habits, T¯ argument sets the tone for . ah¯a Husayn’s . autobiographies, including his Ayy¯am, as journeys of the self in a postcolonial space where negotiation of identity takes place in the delicate intersection, with its violent confrontation too, between the Arabs and the West. Along with autobiographical narratives, translations proper are also indicative of cultural and personal choice and sensitivity. As expressive of some romantic restlessness on the brink of change, translations

  



were in vogue throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Although the Lebanese Karam Milhim . Karam was critical of the tendency to manipulate the vogue by massive productions of the sensational as Tanius #Abduh (d. ) was doing,58 there was another effort to provide literature in translation. It was this latter effort, according to Ily¯as Ab¯u Shabakah, which helped to promote the growth of the novel as a genre; for due to such awareness there emerged a periodical named, al-Riw¯ayah, the Novel, (Feb. ) to encourage translations as well as Arab creative contributions.59 Meeting the demand for the new and fulfilling the expectations of the learned along with the rising classes, translations were taken for granted as the most needed, leaving little or no space for the supposedly competitive indigenous writ¯ı writes in his ing. The distinguished Egyptian story writer Yahy¯ . a Haqq . own autobiographical account of , “We never thought then of writing Egyptian stories. We believed in translation, for European (foreign) story writing was so much ahead of us that it was useless to compete with it.” At a later stage some change in outlook drove him to take another stand. “Upon second thought we hoped that we could come up with good literature. Why should such an honor be left to others?”60 ¯ı knows the implications of contacts with the West, their Yahy¯ . a Haqq . positive and negative aspects. But he also subscribes to the dynamic role of the native elite in the post-independence state. The word “honor,” as he uses it, runs counter not only to the view of fictional literature as morally reprehensible, but also to its specific and restricted reference to woman’s body or social behavior at large. It is certainly discharged of its hegemonic connotations as usually manipulated by patriarchy to deny access to human emotions and feelings. Honor writes itself as narrative. Writing takes on the moral epithet, and Scheherazade is to regain repute and recognition in this exchange of trace and sign. Thus, no wonder that al-Riw¯ayah, the Novel, as a new journal, was soon to attain publicity and vogue. It won on its side some of the best names among the intellectuals of the s and s. Following it similar periodicals began to appear throughout the Arab world such as the influential 58 On this and the whole issue of translation at that time, see Moosa, p. ; for K.M. Karam, see Najm, Al-qis. s. ah f¯ı al-adab al-#Arab¯ı al-had¯ıth f¯ı Lubn¯an, pp. –; and Ily¯as Ab¯u Shabakah, Raw¯abi.t al-Fikr bayna al-#Arab wa al-Franjah (Intellectual contacts between the Arabs and the West) (Beirut: al-Makshu¯ f, ), pp. –. 59 See Ily¯ as Ab¯u Shabaka, Raw¯abi.t al-Fikr bayna al-#Arab wa-al-Franjah, pp. –. 60 Yahy¯ ¯ı, Fajr al-qis. s. ah al-Mis. riyyah (Dawn of the Egyptian story; Cairo: . a Haqq . GEBO, ), pp. , also pp. , .

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al-Ad¯ıb (man of letters) and al-Ad¯ab (belles lettres), the Iraqi al-Bay¯an (statement), along with T¯ already existing journal al-K¯atib . ah¯a Husayn’s . al-Mis. r¯ı . But this recognition of the novel, as well as the enthusiasm for its growth, was mainly promoted through other contacts with the West, including the acculturated bent for veiled autobiographical writing. Indeed, after being a space for social discontents and representations, the novel soon became a medium to impose one’s own experience on the reading public. Writings such as T¯ Al-Ayy¯am (Stream . ah¯a Husayn’s . of Days) and Ibr¯ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı’s Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯atib (Ibrahim the Writer) assume some significance in their writers’ experience which fits well into the enlightenment discourse of the period. Both writers take pride in their cultural contact with the West, and both feel that they can offer their life story to their readers as worth emulating and studying. The autobiographical as such becomes a trajectory for further mediation. While T¯ susceptibility to French culture is well. ah¯a Husayn’s . known, it is good to note, too, that al-#Aqq¯ad is quoted as saying that “he knows no one in Eastern or Western literature with a ‘translation genius’ comparable to that of al-M¯azin¯ı,” a bent leading to converting “translation into a true literary art” (qtd. in Moosa, p. ). Apart from direct translations, autobiographies lead us into channels of contact and acculturation. Such contacts varied then, assuming numerous forms and manifestations, ranging from direct mediations to receptivity to Orientalists’ views on the Arab cultural scene throughout the s. Here, it is worth noting that The Thousand and One Nights still gained at that time some attention from among Arabists and Orientalists. Scheherazade’s Appeal: Stages and Attitudes This interest in the framing tale and in specific themes and motifs should not be confused with later preoccupations with the “literariness” of the text. The interest of the s was only a continuation of a preceding one that was intimately intertwined with a larger concern with the literature of the Arabs. Throughout the period in question, Orientalists participated quite actively in the very societies of the learned such as the Al-Majma# al-#Ilm¯ı f¯ı Dimashq (Damascus Learned Society) and the University of Cairo. Their articles began to appear regularly in the best periodicals of the period, especially al-Ris¯alah and al-Hil¯al. In these articles Orientalists provided their analyses of the cultural climate in the

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Arab world under the impact of impending change, calling for some better understanding of literary genres. Among the prominent Orientalists contributing to periodicals in Arabic were H.A.R. Gibb, Agnaz Kratschkowsky, and Ism¯a#¯ıl Adham. Kratchowsky embarked on a series of assessments of storytelling and the short story proper, demonstrating a good knowledge of names and titles along with keen suggestions towards the growth of the genre (al-Ris¯ala, , Nos. –, , : –, –, –, –, respectively). Gibb approached the case from a rather socio-cultural angle, for Arab society was then on the threshold of change whereby its growing urban population was developing different needs, aspirations and expectations. Hence, there ought to be some literature of representational nature in the domain of fiction and short story writing. Otherwise, its absence would drive people to translations (al-Ris¯ala, , Nos. –, –, –, –, respectively). Other Orientalists were no less enthusiastic to attend for such needs, but their enquiries followed another line that would also call for the growth of the genre. Adham was rather involved, however, in the neo-classical bias of some Orientalists like the late von Grunebaum. He feels therefore that it is “atomism” that characterizes the Oriental mind, including the Arab, alienating him from the representational and the dialogical while benefiting him in the lyrical.61 Such views could not have passed without shaking writers out of their conventional attention to established modes and genres. As The Thousand and One Nights is present in the minds of Arabists and Orientalists whenever there is a discussion of narrative at large, the interplay between the two and the association between Scheherazade and the novel are to gain in momentum. While it is true that many Orientalists have failed to trace the intricate art of Scheherazade, some of their scholarly endeavors helped towards the growth and evolution of the novel. More importantly they are largely responsible for the diversified interest in The Thousand and One Nights. A well-known Arab critic and translator, Jabr¯a I. Jabr¯a, was so aware of their contributions that he wrote about their impact on the literary understanding of The Thousand and One Nights. In “al-Riw¯ayah wa-al-ins¯aniyyah,”62 he notices that “while our ancestors did not consider The Thousand and One Nights literIsm¯a#¯ıl Adham, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak¯ . ım, ed. Sam¯ı al-Kayy¯al¯ı (; Alexandria, ). Jabr¯a I. Jabr¯a, “Al-Riw¯ayah wa-al-ins¯aniyyah,” (The novel and humanity) Al-Ad¯ıb (Jan. ), pp. –, at p. . 61

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ature proper,” Western critics have dealt at length with its “search for happiness” and its combination of the “imaginary and the representational.” That article is worth considering, however, for its many-sided contextual relevance; for while siding with the rather Orientalist approach regarding the composite nature of The Thousand and One Nights, Jabr¯a I. Jabr¯a, also hints at the literary aspect of the work, its structure rather than value. In this respect he only readdresses a point of view already tackled in his essay on “Al-Dharwah f¯ı al-riw¯ayah,” the climax in the novel.63 In this article the writer recalls the assessments of writers and critics rather than Orientalists. Having De La Mare, E.M. Forster and G.K. Chesterton in the back of his mind, Jabr¯a writes, “it is rare to find in The Thousand and One Nights any climax as we understand it now, for events and actions follow each other in succession without any structural growth. Each event grows not so organically as to let its threads meet in the conclusion or the denouement, for the narrator is like the listener, rather concerned with the hero,” with the adventures and hardships he has to “overcome for the sake of the beloved.” Not all the tales are of this nature, to be sure, but this reading is obviously colored by some acquaintance with Western, especially English, criticism of The Thousand and One Nights. It certainly misses the presence of Schehrazade as trope and woman. Although drawing the attention to the genealogy of the tales, their composite nature and richness, Orientalists are no less of mediators for the genre than literary historians or critics. Both have participated in undermining the Arab conservatist disregard for Scheherazade, leading instead to the reclamation of the tales as worth emulation, investigation and study, proposing thereby ways for the growth of modern narrative literature in Arabic. The implications of this joint mediation between the novel and the tales, and between Western selectivity and that of native intellectuals touch on issues of encounter, response, national heritage, popular literature, and minority representations. The Thousand and One Nights is after all a complex growth that defies demarcations, as much as it defies conformity as culture, and offers therefore some perennial challenge to essentialist discourse. In other words, such mediations for modern Arabic narrative are not a passing event. In line with the dynamic contact between Western narJabr¯a I. Jabr¯a, “Al-Dharwah f¯ı al-riw¯ayah,” (The climax in the onovel) Al-Ad¯ıb (Feb. ), pp. –. 63

  



ratives of enlightenment and the Arab awakening, there was an effort to make use of these to promote national issues (see Sal¯amah M¯us¯a, on his readings, pp. –). Muhammad #Abduh tried his best at an earlier time to prove that Islam is “compatible with the supposed requirements of the modern mind.”64 But subsequent efforts were more entangled in a liberal exchange, which led to the approval of the novel as a genre in both its indigenous framing tale and urban context. The effort bears a contaminating stamp, and the East-West nexus undergoes specific negotiations only when colonization is at issue. Between the endeavor for aesthetics of fiction and affirmation of a middle class selfhood or a wider nationhood, there is a ground for a lot of experimentation, too. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the earliest attention to The Thousand and One Nights focused on the framing tale, its implications and possible utilizations in some new narratives. Hence, the Egyptian writer Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım wrote his play Shahraz¯ad () with a bent for enlightenment edification, for Shahrayar comes out later as a rather enlightened individual searching for truth. The vizier’s remark to Scheherazade is not a passing one. He asks: “Didn’t the stories of Shahrazad do to this barbarian what the books of the prophets did for the first generations of mankind?”65 Rather than the innocent man of the pre-adultery scene in the garden of his palace, represented as passing into maturity and sophistication subsequently, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s Shahrayar leaves psychology behind, and the Sultan is divested of the perennial fear of loss of virility or virtual castration which is leveled in the original frame tale on the double, the slave who, in patriarchal discourse, is usually castrated before being let in the household. On the other hand, the fear of women sexuality is there, and at the back of al- Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s rewriting of the frame tale there is the attempt to purge the original of its feminine connotations, as if subscribing to what Robert Scholes describes as “a widespread process of censorship,” or “a semiotic coding that operates to purge both texts and language of things that are unwelcome to the men who have had both texts and language in their keeping for so many centuries” (p. ). T¯ and Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ah¯a Husayn . . ¯ım jointly wrote Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The enchanted palace, ). In  T¯ published Ah. l¯am . ah¯a Husayn’s . See Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought, p. . Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım, Shahrazad, in Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim, trans. William M. Hutchins (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ), vol. , pp. –, at p. . 64

65



 

Scheherazade (Scheherazade’s dreams), representing the narrator’s daydreams in the ninth night after the thousand. In  he published a story under the title, “Bayn akhw¯at” (between sisters), in which Scheherazade’s sister commits suicide after falling in love with Shahrayar. Another writer, Zaki Tulaym¯ at, published a story in  called “Qult¯u . ¯ l¯ı-Scheherazade fadarabatn ı (I said to Scheherazade and she hit me). . In the s #Al¯ı Ahmad B¯akath¯ır wrote his Sirr Scheherazade (Schehera. zade’s secret, ), whereas Ad¯ıb Murruwah came up with Scheherazade tandam (Scheherazade repents, ). In other words, most of the interest in The Thousand and One Nights throughout the s and s was rather concerned with the framing tale, for Arab writers had not “digested” yet the composite nature of the work. The framing tale is denied Scheherazade’s imprint as a woman, and what Wid¯ad Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı insists on delineating (p. ), as a combination of feminine attraction and thoughtfulness, escapes many among the enlightened. A case in point is Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The enchanted palace, ), the joint project of T¯ and Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ah¯a Husayn . . ¯ım. The novel ¯ takes as a referent Tawf¯ıq al-Hak ı m’s play Shahraz¯ a d of , which . in turn uses The Thousand and One Nights framing tale as both referent and context. But here Scheherazade is no longer a narrator, however, nor are Shahrayar and his minister, for they are merely metafictional characters taken out of Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s play to avenge themselves on the author for intentional falsification and distortion. Kidnapped and consequently detained in a large palace, both authors are surprised to discover that Scheherazade herself is behind the trap. Upon seeing her, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım is at loss, What a surprise! Is it you who inspired me with the very idea of the book! You, my own creation! Still, you dare to kidnap me, detain me within the walls of this huge palace? But she rejoins quietly, Haven’t you kidnapped me too? Imprisoning me between the covers of so heavy book!

Shahrayar is no less annoyed for being distorted in the play as partaking of the unreal. Asking the author about his own identity in the play, Shahrayar would like to make sure that no more distortion would occur. But the author is no less at loss for being asked about Shahrayar’s kingdom: Asking me about his kingdom! How could I know? All I know is that he is a king. But I have no idea of the whereabouts of his kingdom or its place on the map of this world (p. ).

  



The framing tale in Scheherazade’s narratives provides both authors with this distanced metafictional text. Such an interest is obviously provoked by the European aesthetic concern with the view of art as autonomous, a view that was strongly upheld in the late nineteenth century, as it is metaphorically worked out in The Thousand and One Nights. The metafictional has an anticipatory postmodenist touch, which is far removed from the postcolonial, but its engagement with the indigenous retains a national heritage stamp. Even later Forster, Walter De la Mare and, especially, Chesterton dwelt on this equation of art and life, narrative and survival, a point which is to draw later the attention of many a structuralist. As early as , E.M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel recognizes Scheherazade’s merits as an accomplished storyteller with exquisite descriptions, ingenious incidents, vivid delineations of characters and expert knowledge of life and manners. More to Forster’s purpose is the narrator’s capacity to “wield the weapon of suspense” in order to “keep the king wondering what would happen next” in a wellsustained narrative that can alone ensure her survival.66 G.K. Chesterton comes with no minor contribution in his Spice of Life and Other Essays. To him the central idea behind the tales is the “enduring richness of life” which finds its representation not only in gold, silver and jewels, but also in the “preciousness of stones, dust, and dogs running in the streets.” Emerald and amethyst and sandalwood are parabolic in this sense, for the tyrant has in the end “to wait, almost to fawn upon a wretched slave, for the fag-end of an old tale.” Accordingly, Chesterton comes to a conclusion, which should have sounded quite impressive to Arab intellectuals searching for some grounding of substantial worth in their traditional narrative. He concludes, “Never in any other book, perhaps, has such a splendid tribute been offered to the pride and omnipotence of art.”67 It may not be of the utmost significance to check on possible contacts and influences here, but it is good to notice that in the Arab world there has emerged some interest in the framing tale since the s, especially in its symbolic and aesthetic nature, as I mentioned above. The interest has not abated either among the Arabs or in the West, but it could very well evolve in a referential intertext presided over by Scheherazade for both postmodernists and feminists. As late as , the American E.M. Forester, Aspects of the Novel (; rpt. London: Penguin, ). G.K. Chesterton, “The Everlasting Nights,” in The Spice of Life and Other Essays, ed. Dorothy Collins (; rpt. Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, ), pp. –. 66

67

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 

novelist John Barth would reiterate his view regarding Scheherazade as the image of art striving to improve upon life: “everybody knows the image of Scheherazade yearning through the night to save her neck. Scheherazade speaks to me mainly as an image of the storyteller’s condition. Every one of us in this business is only as good as our next story. And there is a sense in which narrating equals living” (U.S. News & World Report, Aug , , p. ). This is a postmodernist posture in the main, but its recognition of the power of narrative and the need to improvise may well situate it within the postcolonial engagement with narrative space. Feminists found in Scheherazade a prototype for their effort to counteract patriarchal beliefs and practices. Moreover, she is the mother whose daughters develop another line of anxiety, one of authorship that deviates from Freudian anxieties of influence towards another genealogy, which has been overshadowed for so long by patriarchal practice. Scheherazade is taken as a trope and prototype in the double fight of female writers, not only against inferiorization, but also in the search for female precursors, as both Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue.68 The interest in the framing tale entails no overall recognition of the full text despite the fact that nineteenth-century European interest in The Thousand and One Nights was rather varied and stimulating. Insofar as the framing tale is concerned, however, it is the aesthetic concern with art as omnipotent that fascinates many, provoking similar preoccupations in the Arab world and consequently urging some involvement in Scheherazade’s artistry. Aside from Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s manipulation of the framing tale, there has been no consistent effort to read into the poetics of The Thousand and One Nights before the s. Contacts with the West have drawn attention to The Thousand and One Nights as worth studying by itself and for itself. But they also valorize an interest in one’s own culture. Both contacts and political consciousness have directed attention not only to heritage in its many-sidedness but also to its use and misuse by the empowered groups. The Thousand and One Nights itself is read from different perspectives, and indeed feminists from diverse positions find their traces there, as both al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı and Fedwa Malti-Douglas demonstrate in their readings.69 The whole inter68

Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” in Feminisms, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, , pp. –. 69 See, in this relation, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Shahraz¯ ad Feminist.”

  



est is to yield some indigenous contributions in the newly developing climate or awareness, with its attention to a number of issues including the legacy of colonization and the emergency of the nation-state in its many facets. The Thousand and One Nights is to offer itself easily to this awareness, according to each writer’s positionality, as the following examples demonstrate. In Suq¯ut al-Im¯am (The Fall of the Imam), the Egyptian feminist writer and activist Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı re-enacts The Thousand and One Nights in context of her own allegories to expose the postcolonial state, its head figures, who are duplicates of historical patriarchs. The Im¯am is, after all, “The Only and Only Ruler (p. ) who governs in the name of God and manipulates all State apparatus, machinery and resources to insure his own survival. But in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s revisionist reading, the Only Ruler undermines his own control by his many suspicions and fears. His Body Guard “resembles” him so closely that, says the wife, “sometimes I cannot tell the original man from the copy” (p. ). Playing on the original text’s scene in the garden of the palace, the narrator levels the blame for probable sexual intercourse on this resemblance. The double is the virile slave Mas#¯ud of the original, the embodiment of both virility and fear of its loss against presumed women’s voluptuousness. Politically, the implications are serious, too. If we accept the argument that the scene is equal to a carnivalesque upside-down exchange, a kind of narrative deviation from conventions, as Muhsin Mahdi suggests,70 the fears of the patriarch could well stand for the latent desire for perpetual possession of women along with other domains and sites of domination and control. The double is the subconscious, but it is also the Other who is needed and feared. Authority builds its presence on this dual attraction and revulsion, a duality that could also lead to its failure and consequent demise. As Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel takes The Thousand and One Nights as subtext, as Fedwa Malti-Douglas rightly notes,71 she acts as the revisionist who is selective to the extreme to prove a point. Whatever that can be recalled from the past has more than one face, and Scheherazade’s tales are no exception. Their popularity with the public, their populist side is put aside in order to target the printed text, as a marker of appropriation and elitism. Every recollection in the novel signifies hegemony, 70 See Muhsin Mahdi’s discussion of religion and politics, in The Thousand and One Nights, pp. –. 71 See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Shahraz¯ ad Feminist,” p. .



 

for the past is fraught with patriarchal desire. The very implication of the double and of resemblance, cited above, brings back to the Im¯am’s mind in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel a “cultural heritage” (p. ), in a version that serves patriarchy. Hence the author is keen on deconstructing this version so as to see through its tropes and paradigms. “I am afraid that one day I will come back from one of my trips like Shahrayar to find you in bed with my Body Guard” (p. ). Delving into patriarchy and its possessive nature, the novel lets the patriarch speak out his fears of loss as predicated on the body as text. It is the woman’s body here that is targeted by these enunciations of fear despite the fact that the body is already restricted and contained within the palace as prison. The original frame story is paralleled and parodied in a postmodernist fashion. But Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s women are not always in touch with “our cultural heritage” (p. ), for the implication throughout this narrative is that “cultural heritage,” including the printed text of The Thousand and One Nights, is a privileged monopoly of the elite male tradition, a point which some of Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s counterparts in Egypt may accept. H¯alah Kam¯al and Sumayyah Ramad¯ . an see the frame tale as a patriarchal and male property. Women are looked upon as sex objects, and are narrated conversely only to level the blame against them for arguing against conventions (Q¯alat al-R¯awiyah, pp. , ). In Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel the Only Ruler states that the wife “should make up for that [deficiency in heritage] by reading.” Walking up to the library and reading “the titles of the books with difficulty,” he comes back holding The Thousand and One Nights “book in his arms as one would hold the woman he loves” (p. ). But to hold the book as a favorite woman implicates the narrative in its many signposts: the Ruler wields power as viceroy of God to practice it, especially on women. Texts turn into bodies, too, and The Thousand and One Nights arouses his lust for the other woman whom he loves. “In the dark,” and after handing her the Scheherazade book, “he stole out of bed and went to her, and from where I hid I could see him clasp her in a warm embrace.” The wife adds, “and although to see her in his arms was painful to my heart, yet it was better than my not seeing what was going on” (p. ). More important here is the exchange of roles. It is no longer the frame tale of the original, which enables the ruler to detect adultery, for the wife in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel is the voyeur who detects the man’s sexual intrigues. In other words, it is the patriarch who is lustful and not Scheherazade. But patriarchy never assumes

  



a frailty in its structural patterns of behavior, nor does it admit faults or deficiencies. The Im¯am’s reading of “Our Cultural Heritage” is also revisionist, for the Only Ruler is another impersonation of Shahrayar. Indeed “cultural heritage” is reduced to texts and interpretations that serve the status quo, undermine and annihilate opposition, and idolize the King, the Only Ruler and President. Ironically, Rulers, and Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Im¯am is no exception, are desperate to get their Great Writers writing down their own version of biographical history. If there is no text to their very satisfaction, they write it down themselves as narrative, for without a narrative, dictators suffer pangs of emptiness. Patriarchs read, too, but their readings are informed by their sense of sheer power. Although putting on “my spectacles” may well entail a change in perspective, some penetrative gaze into one’s career, the case is not so with the Im¯am, the Only Ruler of Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s in (pp. –). Exchanging roles with Shahrayar occurs as refraction, for the Only Ruler who assumes the worldly authority of an infallible imam has already been enjoying Shahrayar’s privileges. The only disturbing notion, which The Thousand and One Nights imparts, is a wife’s adulterous relationship, which Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı exchanges for voyeurism, watching rather than practicing. Adultery takes place in the ruler’s mind, the patriarch’s, before materializing into a scene in the novel. Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s retelling of the frame story is not a straightforward narrative. It plays on the original in a postmodernist fashion to accommodate interpretive multiplication through a process of diffusion, modification, and deferral. Conjoining portions from the original and others from science fiction, her ruler and test-tube man vie for the same female. The spouse impersonates only partially the adulterous wife of the original, and the emerging girl picked up for the ruler by the Security Chief becomes a source for generational tension. The construction of the ruler is fragmentary as if to perpetuate narrative diffusion. The act of impersonation, for instance, is ironic, for it stylizes and parodies the original. It divides Shahrayar into the pre-discovery stage, when he is “innocent” and “faithful,” and a post-discovery initiation into love in its physical ramifications. But, this is part of the postmodernist stance that converges with the postcolonial whenever it operates on power politics. The theory behind initiation in male literature in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel, with its erotica and delineation of female craftiness, ruse, and eloquence and beauty goes back to many works in tradition, as surveyed in



 

part by Fedwa Malti-Douglas,72 including al-J¯ahi . z’s . (d. /) Ris¯alt al-qiy¯an (Epistle on singing girls), Ibn Qutaybah’s (d. /) #Uy¯un alakhb¯ar (The Fountains of stories), Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s (d. / ) Akhb¯ar al-nis¯a" (Women’s anecdotes), Ibn al-Jawz¯ı’s (d. /) anecdotal survey of playful dilettantes, Akhb¯ar al-zir¯ . af wa-al-mutam¯ajin¯ın, and Ab¯u Bakr Muhammad Ibn Daw¯ u d al-Isfah¯ an¯ı"s (/–/) . Kit¯ab al-zahrah. Ab¯u al-Faraj al-Isbah¯an¯ı [Isfah¯an¯ı] cites many examples in this regard, too, in his Kit¯ab al-agh¯an¯ı. Ab¯u #Abd All¯ah Muhammad . Ibn Hazm (d. ), with his male perspective into love, life and women . in Tawq alh am¯ a mah (The ring of the dove), is in the mind of Naw¯ al al. . ¯ Sa#d¯awı’s male characters, too, along, perhaps, with manuals of specific care for sexual intercourse, like the works of al-Tif¯ash¯ı (d. /) and al-Nafz¯aw¯ı, author of Al-Rawd. al-¯at.ir (The Perfumed garden). The females are deliberately shown as beyond this tradition, although they may practice extramarital sexual relationships. The Great Writer’s “vast culture and his knowledge of the cultural patrimony” (p. ) in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel, which incites the Ruler’s admiration, draws 73 Although it should have on these, including, perhaps, Ibn Hazm’s. . existed along with others as subtext, Ibn Hazm’s love in Tawq al. . h. am¯amah is underplayed, for the author admits being educated by women teachers and tutors. The love he forwards is ennobling, albeit the blend of the physical and the spiritual. It stresses a single devotion, but it never negates a number of love affairs in one’s own life. It is carried out in secrecy, and it has a great emotional effect on the lover, usually manifested in brooding looks, anxieties and yearning for exclusion with the beloved. But, Ibn Hazm himself was for the blonde. The . Im¯am’s theory deviates, however, from the original narrative, which he presumably read. His model lies somewhere else, as it should square with the writer’s unconciliatory stance against tradition as forwarded through hegemonic discourse. Her Im¯am, in exchanging roles with Shahrayar, has a heart “white and pure, imbued with a great love for black slave women” (p. ), yet, his register of women and love draws also on a “cultural heritage” that undergoes great reduction under his selective and scrutinizing eye. The author offers no competing texts to

See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, pp. –. A standard survey of the books on women and love is Lois Anita Giffen, Theory of Profane Love among the Arabs: The Development of the Genre (New York: New York University Press, ). 72

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

subvert generalizations for a “cultural heritage,” and the reader has to find out gaps and contradictions for herself/himself. In impersonating Shahrayar, the Ruler projects his desires as ultimatums and orders to be carried out. They are to be exercised, for an empowered desire is already an achievement, especially when acted upon a body, described and delineated with exactitude to be contained and controlled: “… to make sure that what I wanted was clear I read out a set of qualities I desired in this maiden, taken straight from the cultural heritage which I had always held in high esteem” (p. ). As there are many registers of woman beauty in view of each writer’s agenda and in relation to the nature of the age, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s selects a specific one to answer to the patriarch’s whims and desires. Certainly, such prescriptions belong to the privileged as much as they belong to the State, especially in the heyday of slave trade until the very end of the Mamluk period (i.e., ). What involves Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel in poetics and politics of subversion is the underlying cyclical pattern, which divides the world into exploiters and exploited. The Ruler passes through stages and cycles, to appear again as a formation from the past, empowered by the very machinery and relations that sustain power in every age. His past record, when he had a prostitute as mistress, resurfaces now against his wish in tokens, symbols, remains, along with the dog and the illegitimate daughter who frightens him with her presence. The writer deploys these as part of the underlying irony that holds the novel together. Her Im¯am, Put on a pair of new trousers hastily and watched her walk in, her back straight as a spear, her head upright in the air, with her dog Marzouk close behind her. The dog looked him in the face just once and recognized him despite the many years which had gone by, for dogs neither forget the heritage of the past nor what happened in history (p. ).

Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s feminist poetics follows a paradigmatic pattern whereby patriarchy repeats itself in generative practices whose object is the female body as defined and offered to meet patriarchal desires to ravish, control and dismiss. The Scheherazade frame tale serves her purpose in part: “Meanwhile, the Imam had taken her into his arms, holding her in a close embrace, leaving her with one remaining night in which to live” (p. ). Naming is distorted, however, and the author implicates the paradigmatic stance in contradiction in order to escape censorship and repression. Her Im¯am appears through history and out-



 

side it; a textual construct and a contemporary figure whose likes are everywhere. But, the author is more direct when her Shahrayars act as governors, rulers, directors, presidents and kings. In their capacity to rule and control, they manipulate and practice every act, no matter how seemingly transgressive otherwise. On the other hand, her women are the oppressed, subdued and violated. But, they are also, quite often, spirited and resourceful. The image of the daring young woman, “her back straight as a spear” (p. ), duplicates Scheherazade’s courageous and self-assured females. She is the woman who is aware of the mechanism of patriarchy, no matter how it changes skin in postcolonial states. The woman exists to meet a desire, which is no less greedy, ravishing and lustful than the colonial. It partakes of the motivations for the Feast, without further mythical shades. There is no joy here, and festivities are turned upside down to sustain a Shahrayar control (p. ). Yet, Scheherazade has her daughters, and a variety of them, too. Indeed, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Security Chief is there in the celebration of the Big Feast, when he detects the slender whore who arouses the patriarch’s desire: “When I looked at him his pupils were aflame with desire.” He adds, musing to himself: “This girl and no one else will be your death, for in history many a great king has met his end at the hands of a whoring woman” (p. ). Women from the past and the present are many in the patriarch’s life, but what Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı is keen on developing in her paradigms to balance the repressed is the woman, with defiant eyes, whom the Security Chief tracks as “conspiring with outlawed movements and secret parties” (p. ). This girl who knows that she is the patriarch’s daughter, and who is manipulating some political dissent could have become an appealing protagonist with great potential for action had not been for the writer’s preoccupation with binary pairing.74 This girl, like others who come from the periphery, remains a mystery for authority. Possessing the “secrets of magic and sorcery like her sisters mentioned in the old books,” she lies beyond his immediate control. She is here, nevertheless, to be watched and detected.

74

For a discussion of the narrative, or its failure, insofar as the wrong woman motive is concerned, see Sabry Hafez, “Women’s Narrative in Modern Arabic Literature: A Typology,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Roger Allen, et al., pp. –, pp. –.

  



The Chief of Security recognizes a genealogy and lineage that relates females to each other and possibly challenges his authoritarian presence. The whole notion of this interconnected presence, which bewilders the state machinery as represented by the Chief of Security, fits well into the theory of authorship as drawn by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The daring woman whom he is targeting has the daring attributes of Scheherazade, but she has also the common sense of the people, who, to his suspicious mind, seem adepts in magic. But, to enable her narrative to carry the mythical and the real, Naw¯al alSa#d¯aw¯ı inscribes her Bint All¯ah, the illegitimate daughter of the patriarch whose name means “the daughter of God,” as a site of significations rather than a character in a novel, a collective self, and the epitome of all women in the tales. Unless we go this far, we have no other choice but ending up with Fedwa Malti-Douglas in accepting the “cannibalistic interlude” of mutual annihilation as tenable within a structure that makes more allowance for the real.75 Similar scenes abound in the original, especially in the fisherman’s tale. Females with mastery of magic are either in the line of the king’s adulterous wife or like the young women who detect cruelty and redress suffering. But, Naw¯al alSa#d¯aw¯ı’s female character is more textual. The narrative dubitation is made for by the activity of the Chief of Security, who understands this genealogy in life as much as he knows about it in books, and resorts accordingly to meticulous surveillance, for to watch Bint All¯ah through a “keyhole” implies power, too. Bint All¯ah, or the slave girl, recognizes her limits, we are told, and the scenes of magical transformation should be understood against these limits. Perhaps, these scenes are no more than imaginary offshoots, produced by the amount of suspicion in the mind of the Chief of Security, his distrust of women, and his belief that their charm and beauty would bring down the whole patriarchal system. She knows that she is another chain in the history of the oppressed. What Scheherazade offers here is the resourcefulness of the wretched to outwit tyrants, a motif which was widely used in early European texts including Jane Eyre. Storytelling is only one of many means to challenge and undermine authoritarianism: It was the night of the Big Feast when the moon becomes a full moon once again. She lay on the ground, her naked body bathed in light just as it had been when she was born. She could see her mother’s face

75

See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women, and God(s), p. .



  looking tired and pale and white, and as she lay there on the ground she whispered to herself, I must either save my life or I must die for my sisters. I must deliver them from the tyrant for all time (my emphasis, p. ).

The framing tale is reconstructed in line with feminist politics, or specifically in view of the writer’s paradigms of male and female antagonism. The illegitimate offspring Bint All¯ah carries the burden of the past and expects the worst repercussions from the present. Her use as narrative stratagem enables Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı to enhance her critique of patriarchy while expanding the narrative canvas beyond the original frame tale. But this appropriation has its own poetics, too. In her accommodation of the original, she also brings the man from the West, the testtube man, under the rubric of male hegemony. The male is male, no matter where he exists, and he looks upon his reflection as another Shahrayar in a genealogy of authority, with the same potential and desire. His reading of the tales endows him with this tyrannical frame of mind, whereas the females are deprived of textual acquaintance with their mother. In other words, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı releases them from the text as appropriated by male elitism, and puts them within a collective memory, as forwarded spontaneously by grandmothers. The test-tube man is witness to a similar appropriation in the West. Whether Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s reading is brought about through contacts with other cultures is not crucial here, for the novelist has come up with a problematic reading. Other writers and poets admit their use of Western mediations to unravel such an ancient tradition of great bearing on the present. Although speaking mainly of his own approach to medieval Arabic poetry through Western eyes, #Al¯ı Ahmad Sa#¯ıd—otherwise Ad¯un¯ıs— . succinctly explains the process of discovery through contact: I find no paradox in declaring that it was recent Western Modernity, which led me to discover our own older modernity outside our own “modern” politico-cultural system established on a Western model.76

Different from this system and its pragmatic bent for the combination of the “traditionalist” heritage and the new in Western civilization, Ad¯un¯ıs’ endeavor is identical with the intellectual fervor to recover the “modernist” element in that heritage regardless of socio-political structures and taboos:

#Al¯ı Ahmad Sa#¯ıd, Ad¯un¯ıs, Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham . (London: Saqi Books, ), p. . 76

  



I did not discover this modernity in Arabic poetry from within the prevailing Arab cult and its systems of knowledge. It was reading Baudelaire, which changed my understanding of Abu Nawwas [sic] and revealed his particular poetical quality and modernity, and Mallarm¯e’s work, which explained to me the mysteries of Abu Tammam’s poetic language and the modern dimension in it.77

While such recognition points to some awareness of “modern” poetics as advanced and enhanced through some immediate contact with the West, it also includes a tenable recognition of the “modern” in the “medieval” Arabic text. The approach is not new, to be sure, but it is Ad¯un¯ıs’ involvement, which is worth notice. His personal response to the medieval text through the channel of Western models of modernity has led to his creative contributions to Arabic poetry and criticism. No less so is Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s reading. Coming to The Thousand and One Nights in retrospect, in Turabuh¯a Za#far¯an (; English translation: City of Saffron, ),78 the writer passes through an experience of recollection similar to those of Coleridge and De Quincey. In childhood, he also descends “into the land of The Thousand and One Nights; and I have not left it to this day” (p. ). What is in tune with his emerging text is the response to the illustrated cover of that edition, with its old men and erotic details (ibid.). From there he identifies with other people and scenes in The Thousand and One Nights, while projecting into these contemporary details of hard life in Egypt. Moreover, Idw¯ar alKharr¯at.’s writing follows The Thousand and One Nights in resisting a centric narrativity, for there are only motifs, images, narrative circles, that defy Aristotelian rules of composition. Without making similar announcements, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . culminating response to The Thousand and One Nights in his creative Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (; English translation: Arabian Nights and Days, ) could not have evolved without due knowledge of modern poetics as applicable to The Thousand and One Nights as narrative. Without losing sight of the semantic shades that also sustain the popularity of the original, Mahf¯ . uz. makes use of modern poetics in writing the best emulation, so far, of Sheherazade’s tales. The oblique narrative is no less intriguing than Scheherazade’s, for it is hers after all, assimilated, compressed and reproduced for incredulous audiences. Ibid. ¯ ab, ); English translaIdw¯ar al-Kharr¯at., Turabuh¯a Za#far¯an (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ tion: City of Saffron, trans. Frances Liardet (London: Quartet, . Citations in the text are from this translation. 77

78



 

In this work Mahf¯ . uz. is mainly concerned with the narrative itself, with action that unfolds in order to ensure the flow of incident, detail and suggestion. While loquacity, as represented by #Ujar the barber as narrator par excellence, is one form of narrative, the supernatural is an ingredient of disequilibrium as structuralist poetics demonstrates. Being afraid of the dominance of goodness as leading to peace and stability that amounts to the death of narrative, evil #Ifrits need disorder as their proper medium of meddling. To keep action well polarized, Mahf¯ . uz. borrows his good Jinn from Scheherazade’s galaxy of characters, supporting them with his own alter ego the Sufi Shaykh who has been keeping him company since his first appearance in The Thief and the Dogs (). Bringing motifs together and collating characters and motivations Mahf¯ . uz’s . binary structure does not work on semantic, rhetoric and narrative levels only, for there is also a narrative drive emanating form Shahrayar’s restlessness which the original text associates with the Caliph Har¯un al-Rash¯ıd. Endowing him with al-Rash¯ıd’s love for adventure or with insomnia, Shahrayar is no longer the bloodthirsty angry tyrant. In fact, Mahf¯ . uz. liberates him from one characteristic in order to reproduce him as the culmination of all sultans, a medley of motifs that are scattered or repeated in the original, thus releasing the text from stagnation towards motion. With keen understanding of the workings of the poetics of The Thousand and One Nights, Mahf¯ . uz. lets opposition, contrast and duplication work on all levels, unleashing numerous characters and powers into conflicting action. The supernatural is at hand to provide for any lack of causality, whereas the Sultan’s insomnia or his attendance to business will insure some interference as expressive of some Providential will to set things right. Mahf¯ . uz. makes good use of the narrative dialectics of the original, advancing the binary system of life-death, sex-love, rupture-amendment, goodevil, man-woman, stability-disorder and natural-supernatural, through pairing, oppositing and fusing. While Scheherazade escapes defloration and death to pass through an experience extended and sustained by her narrative, her guardian the Sufi Shaykh is targeted by #Ifrits who make many attempts to kill him. The medley of motives and visions belongs to the medieval, and its recapitulation broadens the view of tradition and heritage as process rather than as immutable texts. In his attempt to collate motifs and characters, the author takes from the original some of its core and subtle concerns, especially in matters of social corruption. In its broader context such an issue may get lost against a background of adventure, greed and love, but it is always

  



there, beginning with the first scene of suspicion and deceit. Despite the intervention of the Jinn, deterioration continues. No less than acceleration of change or reform, deterioration is there to provoke action and perpetuate the narrative. At each corner, in every place or at any time, there is a possibility of duplication, metamorphosis and enchantment. Mahf¯ as a supernatural agent, could take the shape of . uz’s . Zirmb¯ahah, . an enchantress entangling king and all, leaving them naked and exposing them as the most worthless. Here, too, the night is the time for nocturnal adventures. But instead of al-Jaw¯ahr¯ı, the wealthy person of the original, whose misfortune leads him to an affair with one of the ruling class, we have in Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı a water carrier who comes upon some money to sustain himself for a while as a pseudo-Caliph. Here Mahf¯ . uz. collates in order to focus, and compresses in order to provide some oblique criticism. Thus, his pseudo-court is a doubling on a larger scale, a reenactment of court and kingdom, a mirror to shake the Sultan out of his complacency and self-centeredness. By seeing himself mirrored in the pseudo-Caliph who searches for means to rid people of corruption, Shahrayar undergoes some change, embarking therefore on some reform, accelerating action and driving the narrative forward. Mahf¯ . uz’s . awareness of the very structure of the original has led him to play on dichotomy and synthesis, opposition and resolution, silence and speech and life and death. Thus, when his Sultan meditates on the next step regarding Scheherazade, he lets the reader listen to the following ambiguous enunciation, “Let the darkness be so as to watch for the emergence of light.” This state of indecision is in keeping with the irony that permeates action and speech throughout the tales. While the Sultan decides to let Sheherazade survive, she informs her father that the Sultan smells of blood. When he thinks of being physically close to her, she decides to move psychologically closer to the Sufi Shaykh. When reaching a decision to save her from death, people listen to that with joy, yet the Shaykh muses with caution. At the very moment when the book opens with this decision, disorder erupts, driving Shahrayar to roam incognito, to find out the discrepancy between appearance and reality, speech and action. Although calling her tales “licit magic” in the first pages, later experience in the real drives him to see into the sordid and the appalling as actuality for which the tales stand merely as a foretaste. On many occasions and in line with Todorov’s “narrative men,” Mahf¯ . uz. places them in their actual narrative role as both functions and



 

events. Hence Dunyazad is no longer a companion for the older sister, for Mahf¯ . uz’s . novel commences at the very conclusion of the original: unaware one night, Dunyazad finds herself deflowered in bed, driving Shahrayar to search for the rapist, his unseen double. Here as elsewhere, Mahf¯ . uz. reworks some portions and motifs, deepening rotation and retailoring, to attain succession and intensity. Even Shahrayar is no more than a number of doubles in one; thus he is al-Rash¯ıd once and the third calendar another time, passing through adventures like others to be divested of that titanic stature, reduced as it were to a human station and size, suffering and wailing for loss as the rest. The original has its Sufi color in some tales, to be sure, but Mahf¯ . uz’s . maxims against expectations and earthly aspirations are meant to fuse into truths and riddles in a world which has something of enigma in its final shape. Hence, even his Shahrayar is no more than other kings and sultans, liable to loss and despair. The last wailing scene in which he appears is a duplication of the third calendar’s, but Mahf¯ . uz. has it intentionally as a conclusion in line with his view of “poetic justice.” On the other hand, this very wailing at the secret door for the heavenly bliss perpetuates longing and anticipates action; for in Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı the natural and the fantastic, the earthly and the mystical work together in an operational structure, conflicting or joining forces, but surely gaining in momentum to give vent to some latent attitude in the original against repression. Marginalized, dislocated and opposed, the tales prove no less vengeful for being entertaining. Mahf¯ . uz’s . Sufism halts action to allow space for meditation and slows narrative in a web of riddles. Nevertheless, his text is in the end suspended between syntheses and parentheses. While filling up gaps in the narrative sequence by causality (sense of injustice) or by a supernatural bent for action, the text appears with sutures for ruptures but it simultaneously comes with openings awaiting remedies. While leaning on the original, it nevertheless stands on its own as well, for it rotates by similar patterns of repetition, embedding, correlation and inversion that leave events on the verge of explosion. Its seeming postmodernity lies in stylization, but its postcolonialty emanates from its indirection. The post-independence state invites no less than a supernatural power to draw its attention to its failures, whereas people await for some power to set things right! This fantastic recreation of Mahf¯ . uz. is of significance to postcolonial fiction, especially in its oblique manipulation of postmodernist poetics, its stylization and parody, to develop the underlying ironic

  



structure. It is this ironic frame that calls into question the modern post-independence state, its police-structure, lack of constitutions, and arbitrariness. In Michael Gilsenan’s words: “As the forces of liberation became the forces of power, they frequently degenerated into forms of government with an arbitrary character.”79 Regardless of any possible relevance or connection, Mahf¯ . uz’s . Nights recalls such readings of The Thousand and One Nights as Todorov’s and John Barth’s, for rather than an exercise in imitation or manipulation, Mahf¯ . uz. lets narrative unfold through successive or rotative potential action. In this work, Mahf¯ . uz. has come upon the most representative of narratives and structural patterns in the original, including the supernatural and the loquacious which have drawn Todorov’s attention for a time in both the Fantastic and the Poetics of Prose (pp. –). Both patterns ensure action and speech, fusing into each other at times to involve life in a greater disorder. According to Todorov The Thousand and One Nights is a marvelous story-machine due to its equation of narrative and life. By suppressing psychology and involving everything in immediate causality, Scheherazade’s narrative flows perpetually, assuming its supreme consecration. To permit somebody to tell a story is to insure her/his life, to deny this signifies death. Hence, the appearance and presence of the barber and his brothers indicate a variation on the role of the narrator. Each one of them has a story to tell, and each proves the equation between art and life, for without that they cannot survive to acquaint us with their adventures. Such a reading of loquacity is merely an insight into the available text, to be sure, but its value lies in its findings of patterns in an otherwise confusing account. Todorov’s contributions to the study of the supernatural in The Thousand and One Nights are applicable to Mahf¯ . uz’s . work as well; the pragmatic role could well relate to the #Ifrits’ initiation of disorder that involves a number of people in action against their social and moral station or position. It is semantically there, too, acceptable to all despite its controversial or debatable role. In fact, neither the Sultan nor the people in the coffee house are surprised to hear of the supernatural involvement in their urban society. Such a presence leads to what Todorov calls the syntactic role, for the narrative may well unfold under its impact, affording as it were “a modification of the preceding situa-

79

Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam (New York: Pantheom, ), p. .



 

tion and to break the established equilibrium or disequilibrium.”80 Running against stability the supernatural instigates action or disorder that mobilizes the narrative. As the fantastic works in Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı according to the patterns of the original, it is tenable to assess the applicability of such roles in view of structuralist poetics. Even Mahf¯ . uz’s . explicit reference to the sociopolitical role of the supernatural, seemingly imposed on the original to remedy things and set them right, finds its explanation in Todorov’s assessment of the social role of the supernatural in the original text. Both roles work together, “in both cases, we are concerned with a transgression of the law. Whether it is in social life or in narrative, the intervention of the supernatural element always constitutes a break in the system of pre-established rules, and in doing so finds its justifications.”81 It is the text that provokes the search for its poetics, but poetics, as generic tradition, may well lead to some better understanding of a text. In the case of the Arabian Nights, Todorov’s contributions are of no minor significance. In fact, they could well signify a break-through into the very interest in Scheherazade’s narrative, especially the supernatural. On the other hand, Mahf¯ . uz’s . work attests to its author’s literary achievement and daring integrity, as it does demonstrate the evertantalizing richness of the original. By recreating a text out of the original with its composite nature and diversity, Mahf¯ . uz’s . text claims to Scheherazade what has been denied her: a prominent place in Arabic literature. Both endeavors, the one in poetics and the other in imaginative recreation, are almost the best in reclaiming Scheherazade from neglect. While mediations such as Todorov’s pave the way for further intensive and extensive interest in the poetics of The Thousand and One Nights, such a recreation as Mahf¯ . uz’s . accounts for story writing as a combination and fusion of genres in modern Arabic literature, stimulating the fictional element to evolve beyond the limitations imposed by either tradition or the thin acquaintance with the modern. Postcolonial Arabic fiction has recourse to these tales not only as stage in mirroring the images of modernity as produced in the West, but also to restore their validity and vibrancy after years of marginalization and neglect. The effort is part of a revisionist reading of heritage as the product of a whole society, not the privileged few. In fiction, it also 80 T. Todorov, The Fantastic, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, ), pp. –. 81 Ibid.

  



brings into the urban context a variety of characters, perspectives, and identity and power manifestations in a medieval element, which runs smoothly in storytelling practices by the Libyan Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı, for example. It decenters the compact structure of the “bourgeois epic,” too, its middle class concerns and bourgeois aspirations and quest for worldly success. The frame tale gives way to further readings, beyond the aesthetic preoccupations of the first decades of the twentieth century. Dunyazad of the original is given voice to debate her sister’s version and to question obliquely the markers of the hegemonic discourse. Dunyazad, in a novel by the Algerian W¯as¯ın¯ı al-A#raj,82 for instance, takes over the narrative. In a variety of anecdotes and preoccupations, the past and the present unfold in a disturbing manner, with many details of brutality and cruelty, to the dismay of the listener, the Sultan. These indirectly tell on the practices of the post-independence state, or the “Jumlikiyyah” as the combination of the republican and the royal, as he calls it in his “seventh” night after a thousand. The engagement with the tales may well lead to a greater embedding in al-Kharr¯at.’s novels which he manipulates for political and feminist reviews, but, as the chapter on women’s writing shows, this engagement can be a subtext for feminist politics whereby Schehrazade is regained as poetics, trope, and repository of resourcefulness in a heritage which is freed from hegemonic strictures. The medieval element is recalled to join force with new historicism, too, to reassess the past and use it to criticize the present. Like magical realism in Latin American writing, the medieval intensifies narrativity, the practice of narrative, while paving the way for oblique criticism. It certainly rejuvenates urban narrative and resurrects it from its impasse. In conclusion, Scheherazade’s mediations materialized, and still materialize, in a postcolonial narrative corpus. This corpus contains in order to oppose and appropriates to revolt. Throughout, it follows a line of interrogation whose dawn settlement is tactical for another round, and another tale, as the narratives of sociopolitical engagements demonstrate.

W¯as¯ın¯ı al-A#raj, F¯aj#at al-laylah al-s¯abi#ah: Raml al-m¯ayah. (Algeria: Al-Mu"ssasah alWat.aniyyah lil-Kit¯ab ). 82


  DEBATING AMBIVALENCE: SOCIO-POLITICAL ENGAGEMENTS

Although rooted in the medieval urban tale and relevant narrative modes like the maq¯am¯at, Arabic narrative has only recently flourished in printed form beyond the anecdotal concerns of medieval art. Developing steadily for the last sixty years, the modern novel in this part of the world has grown in pace with social, cultural challenge and political upheaval, passing thereupon through a number of models that derive their existence from the very expectations and fears of the reading publics in the post-colonial states. It is the concern of this chapter to analyze the modes and techniques of this fiction, in so far as these are brought about or colored by socio-cultural and political aspiration, struggle and change, with their marked bearings on issues of identity, power and tradition, which we usually associate with the postcolonial drive. Three significant features may be traced in the best-known novels between the s and the s: a nationalist search for identity and independence (that also applies to desert narratives and minority identities), a sharp awareness of social and political change in the Arab world and an urban susceptibility to foreign influences. These three aspects are fused into each other to form the postcolonial narrative terrain, but the presentational drive varies according to the amount of problematization involved, not only regarding foreign occupation, the national discourse, traditions and public opinion, but also in respect to minority issues, class struggle and micro-politics at large. Each of these features has its own prospects, preoccupations and engagements. Perspectives also undergo change, and the master narratives of early periods, their bearings on the writings of the colonial period and early postindependence stage give way to a new historicism which debates issues of continuity, tradition and patriarchy. Concomitant with political and social change, the novel has passed through a number of conventions and modes, though the urban novel “with a purpose” has continued to dominate until the early s. Exceptions to the urban context are many. They can be allegories, scenes of house arrests, or village narra-



 

tives. Authors may turn their back to the city and relocate the narrative in deserts and mountains. Narratives in the latter mode have the indigenous storytelling to fall on, as we shall see, while the challenge of the modern and its aftermath involves writing in intricate experimental tracks. The Experimental and the Indigenous The allegorical novella of the Jordanian Tays¯ır Sub¯ul, entitled Anta mundh¯u al-yawm (You as of today, ) can be cited for instance as an allegorical practice within the postmodernist drive that also interacts and converges with postcolonial poetics. Taking the title from a popular national song that addresses homeland, “you belong to me as of today, my homeland,” this novella uses fragmented narrative scenes to question patriarchy and paternalism. The son #Arab¯ı is the one who assesses all and meditates every now and then to stress the underlying irony, for he is a stranger in his homeland. Some writers took it for granted that the author Tays¯ır Sub¯ul identifies with his young protagonist.1 As I noted in the chapter on experimentation in Tha"r¯at Scheherazade (), fragmented narrative might lead beyond identification to tackle issues of nation, patriarchy and foreign occupation. In that same chapter, I argued that the Jordanian novelist the late Mu"nis al-Razz¯az (d. ) manipulates other experimental techniques to come to grip with a reality that has its immediate repercussions on him, his parents and sister. To account for a bitter personal experience in I#tir¯af¯at k¯atim s. awt (Confessions of a hit man or a silencer, ), the writer manipulates the real situation, the house in Baghdad where his family was held under arrest, supervised by guards, surveillance cameras, and an officer who communicates with the father to check further on his intentions and thoughts. Using a number of voices, including the father’s, the mother’s, the young sister’s and Y¯usuf ’s, as the hit man, al-Razz¯az comes up with a narrative that utilizes the polyphonic and the spatial to provide a record of his own father’s house arrest and death in Baghdad. It also captures the anxieties of the parents, their fears and anxious attempts to warn their son back in Beirut against the hit man who is ordered to get rid of him in due time. Mun¯ıf al-Razz¯az, the father in the novel, is not mentioned by name, but he was among the people in Iraq who sufSee, for instance, M¯ayiz Mahm¯ . ud, Tays¯ır Sub¯ul: al-#Arab¯ı al-ghar¯ıb (Amman: D¯ar al-Karmal, ). 1

 



fered punishment for sympathizing with the dissenters of . The son has this in the back of his mind as he narrates the ordeal as both a personal and human tragedy. Polyphony and spatial images conjoin to perpetuate the narrative flow. The site of the bugged house implies more voicing and listening as every motion and whisper implicate people in further trouble. The house loses its connotations of comfort and grows into a prison, which the novel develops into an extended metaphor, a conceit, to apply to a whole nation. The father’s act of writing down his memoirs in secrecy could be as real as the house arrest itself, but its narrative value lies also in its critique of censorship and its concomitant valorization of the role of intellectuals against hegemony and surveillance.2 Different in focus and interest, but no less subversive and challenging to hegemonic discourse, and its unitary nationalist overtones, are the Syrian Kurd Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s novels, especially in Al-R¯ısh (Feath3 ers, ) and Fuqah¯a" al-zal¯ . am (Jurists/Sages of darkness, ). Both take the mountainous areas near Q¯amashl¯ı on the Syrian border with Turkey as sites for narrative. Both use myth to account for a reality of war, strife and challenge. The fantastic attending the lives of the Kurdish family upon the birth of Bik¯as in Fuqah¯a" al-zal¯ . am overwhelms all, as the child grows up in a matter of hours into adulthood and manhood to end up in a ghostly form.4 But Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s use of the fantastic is couched in realistic detail and dialogic interventions that make it a locus for the real itself. It inhabits Kurdish life and memory and redirects attention to a culture of great richness. Written in flowing classical Arabic, and capturing the shades of meaning whenever the magical and the real integrate, the author brings new life into narrative. His experimentation lies in his manipulation of the fantastic in its existence as belief among people. Whenever the fantastic challenges the probable and verges on the impossible, the author gives it the sense of the real through the implications of secrecy attending such happenings. The family acts in total secrecy to escape further curiosity from among the community. Such techniques only consolidate the fantastic as another face of the real, while they defamiliarize the real to draw For further views, see Stefan G. Meyer, The Experimental Arabic Novel (New York: State Univ. of New York Press, ), p. . 3 Sal¯ım Barak¯ at, Al-R¯ısh (Cyprus: B¯ıs¯an, ); and Fuqah¯a" al-zal¯ . am (Cyprus: B¯ıs¯an, ). 4 For an adequate synopsis, see Issa Boullata, qtd. in Meyer, The Experimental Novel, p. . 2



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attention to the nature of life and suffering brought about by imperial powers and their subordinates from among the Kurds. No less so are the novels of the Libyan Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı. His concerns with life in ancient valleys and deserts, the rites of passage in the communal, the impinging modernity, and the challenge of colonial and post-colonial interests involve his narratives in rich engagements and preoccupations, which question the premise of the novel as solely urban. The movement between the community and the wilderness is not a patterned one in al-K¯un¯ı’s narratives, but it occurs in his novel W¯aw al-S. ughr¯a (W¯aw the smallest, ) as one impelled by the dichotomy of patriarchy and dissent.5 This novel delves in the inner sentiments of the new chosen chief as the next of kin to the one who has died. As a poet, he finds it impossible to carry on a responsibility of leadership, deciding thereupon, and with great suffering and pangs of remorse, to wander in the desert, beyond the reach of the tribe. The inwardness and the amount of delicate feelings amid aridity and dryness find their objective correlatives in the rare flow of water from springs or newly dug wells. Water assumes great significance, and its real and symbolic ramifications offer new narrative dimensions which cannot be couched in the urban novel’s applications and terms. Endowing life, it acts as the bride, while the digger, who must be knowledgeable and loving, takes the role of the bridegroom, who should be ready to die under the immediate and strong burst of the flowing water. Aridity and dryness are made for by the attention to detail. The narrator’s eye gathers a different power, panoramic, penetrating and covering every stone, plant and bird in a wilderness or khal¯a", which entails such meticulous attention to landscape, animal life and desert customs and ways of belief which have been beyond the concern and preoccupations of the intellectuals of the urban center for a long time. To restore life and traditions to a neglected space in these verbal constructs is not a passing matter, for identity formation is not limited to the preoccupations of the urban individual. Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı involves this life, with its human and animal dimensions, in other postcolonial issues. Especially in Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (; English translation; Bleeding of the Stone, ),6 al-K¯un¯ı relates endangered life and species to foreign occupation as represented by the Italian captain Bordello (p. ) and the American John Parker (p. , ), with his extensive knowledge of Sufi orders, and his para5 6

Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı, W¯aw al-S. ughr¯a (Beirut: MADN, ). Citations in the text are from this translation.

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doxical interest in the meat of gazelles and antelopes which impel him to provide the mythical native Q¯ab¯ıl (Cain) with helicopters and guns to search for these and to lead to their migration and extinction in Libyan arid lands. The Real and the Allegorical of the Land Readers of Arabic fiction may argue that within the broad context of the last sixty years, modern Arabic fiction has nonetheless an urban stamp on the whole, focusing on city life and its manifestations in the sphere of ideas and political conflicts. Building on the available novelistic tradition, especially in its European repository, narrative strategies work smoothly in this urban discursive space to account for issues, attitudes and human concerns. Against this argument, other readers may cite the Egyptian #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an al-Sharq¯aw¯ı’s (d. ) two novels, Al-Ard. (; English translation: Egyptian Earth, ),7 and Al-Fall¯ah. (The peasant, ), with their emphasis on peasant life and language.8 These have to unfold within an ideological understanding of the struggle against exploitation, with the smallholders as the most endowed with class-consciousness against exploitation. Ideology informs the narrative, and the author’s extensive use of the languages and practices of peasants give the novel its distinctive color, without dispelling the informing urban stratagem to account for conflicting camps. The first novel deals with the plight of peasants before the Egyptian revolution of , in the face of the unholy alliance between opportunists, bureaucrats and landowners. Here, the novelist manipulates characters’ actions and motivations so as to expose their evils in a way that might eventually bring about social reform. This serious note that underlies much of contemporary Arabic fiction serves to relate the problem novel to the narratives of ideas, in particular to those which give voice to a purposeful commitment to the cause of liberation and freedom. The love for the land is not necessarily limited to problems of exploitation, as the subject has its many sides and attractions. The postcolonial novel takes the land as trope and subject because the whole 7 #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an al-Sharq¯aw¯ı, Ard. (Cairo, ); English translation: Egyptian Earth, trans. Desmond Stewart (London: Heinemann, ). 8 See Hilary Kilpatrick, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to ,” in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M.M. Badawi, pp. – (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), at pp. –.

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scope of the struggle revolves around the human and the land. Such is the case with the Saudi-born novelist #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s Al9 Nih¯ay¯at (; English translation: Endings, ), and the Palestinian Ghass¯an Kanaf¯an¯ı’s (assassinated in ) Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the sun, ?).10 In these, as in a number of other novels dealing—allegorically or otherwise—with the plight of the Arab in his own land, the agonized tone as well as the prophetic note of fertility and future growth link the genre with legendary lore and ritualistic traditions, being the writer’s defense mechanism against uprootedness and cruel annihilation. The land, which the human fights for, may turn into a mother, a womb, or a purgatory. Ghass¯an Kanaf¯an¯ı’s downtrodden Palestinians who suffer the aftermath of Israeli occupation are in desperate need for survival. In Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the Sun), these people leave their families behind to find jobs and to sustain others back in refugee camps and occupied lands. “The huge lorry was carrying them along the road, together with their dreams, their families, their hopes and ambitions, their misery and despair, their strength and weakness, their past and future, as if it were pushing against the immense door to a new, unknown…” (p. ). The lorry is functional as it is allegorical. They try every possible way to survive, settling to an arrangement to be smuggled “in a closed water-tank” (p. ), to Kuwait to work there, only to end up suffocated and dead. Using the three exiles as narrators along with the driver Ab¯u al-Khayzar¯an, the writer manipulates the past and the present in their lives so as to account for their present misery and misfortune. The underlying and subtle implication is his critique of any settlement other than struggle against occupation, as Hilary Kilpatrick notes,11 but the human tragedy, their suffocation and death amid their dreams and aspirations and pains make the novella “among the best in Arabic literature,” as she persuasively argues.12 While reviving the ritualistic and parodying the rite of passage, Ghass¯an Kanaf¯an¯ı prophetically sums up the Palestinian ordeal in its ¯ ab, ); English transla9 #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, Al-Nih¯ay¯at (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ tion: Endings, trans. Roger Allen (London: Quartets, ). 10 Ghass¯ ¯ ar al-k¯amilah an Kanaf¯an¯ı, Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the Sun, ?); in Al-Ath¯ (Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal . ¯ı#ah, ); English translation: Men in the Sun, trans. by Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Heinemann, ; Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). 11 See her “Introduction” to the translation, Men in the Sun, pp. –, at pp. –. 12 Ibid., p. . See also, “The Theme of Alienation in the Novel of Palestine,” by Bassam K. Frangieh, Dissertation Abstracts, Ann Arbor, ,  (), A. Unpublished Thesis, Georgetown University, .

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postcolonial ramifications, beginning with the British domination, the Israeli occupation and manipulation and lip service of the Arab governments.13 Its problematic lives in Ab¯u al-Khayzar¯an’s self-addressed startling question in Men in the Sun: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” (p. ). The question assumes ritualistic significance in the desert echoes, endowing it with new and prophetic connotations. The water-tank turns into hell, but their deaths raise more questions that defy the driver’s nihilism, his sense of futility and despair due to an earlier wound in the struggle for liberation, which he cannot articulate or admit except in rhetorical questions: “To confess quite simply that he had lost his manhood while fighting for his country? And what good had it done? He had lost his manhood and his country, and damn everything in this bloody world” (p. ). Against this sense, their deaths awaken another consciousness that subsumes his nihilism, while propelling questioning. Suggesting that passivity is no longer tenable, especially at a time when Arab governments were participants in the conspiracy to annihilate the Palestinians, the question rhetorically suggests a call for purposeful resistance that brings life in death. The purgatory denounces a reality, but it also draws attention to its complications. No less suggestive is Mun¯ıf ’s Al-Nih¯ay¯at (Endings).14 The novel eludes simple classification in view of its use of a number of narrative strategies and styles. Its subject matter is the land, and specifically life in and around the village, Al-T. ¯ıbah, where hunting becomes an occupation endangering life and leading to possible extinction of animals and birds. Yet, it is there, too, that tradition survives in the form of indigenous ways of life, including story telling. Transmission of narratives is a practice, and we may hear versions of stories, which are already told by medieval Arab writers. The practice is one of survival, and it is also one way of holding to communal customs. In this novel, the taciturn loner, vagabond and hunter #Ass¯af increasingly gains in holiness in the villagers’ eyes, as they watch closely his sincere commitment to life in the village. The man whom we first meet as a strange figure of fun proves too prophetic to be comprehended in such a cynical age. Upon asked against his wish to join a group of city hunters in a stormy day, his saintly attributes shine through in the last scenes of encounter See C.F. Audebert, “Choice and Responsibility in Rijal fi al-shams,” JAL,  (), pp. –. 14 See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, pp. –; and Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel, vol. , pp. –. 13

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 

and death, so as to impress all with a new consciousness, a heightened awareness of life and struggle; and the message is clear. The subject of land, ways of life, customs, and tradition at large may well relate to the emerging nation-state, with its double discourse of nationalism and authenticity on the one hand and rapid transformation, with possible degeneration and corruption, on the other. The subject invites careful tackling, and a variant on the maq¯amah genre could provide a way out. The land, under despotic rule, can turn into rocks and stones, and allegorical writings play on names to multiply meanings. The Iraqi writer N¯aj¯ı al-Tikr¯ıt¯ı, a professor of philosophy at Baghdad University, in his allegorical fantasy Ab¯u Zayd al-Qahram¯an¯ı,15 modeled after medieval Cairene tales of roguery, presents two travelers, coming back to their country after a long absence. Nobody recognized them, whereas social manners seem to have undergone basic changes. The King of Stone, the ruler of the Kingdom of Stone, issues orders and regulations that involve more labor and taxation. Both travelers oppose these measures and distribute literature that leads to mutiny. Ab¯u Zayd al-Qahram¯an¯ı assumes a leading position in the new government only to become a despot himself in a short while, which leads to the inevitable opposition of his colleague, al-Hus¯ . am al-Jurj¯an¯ı. The allegory succeeds not only because the story of political aspiration and disenchantment as a comment on the Iraqi government of the s is placed in a medieval setting, but also because symbols, rites, ceremonies and speeches are closely related to a general frame of reference, the underlying trope for the country as a Kingdom of Stone. As an oblique comment on the postcolonial nation-state, the novel directs attention to opportunism, sham ideology and corruption. The early aspirations of the elite degenerate into mediocre political machinery, and despots emerge in the old clothes of the patriarch with their newly phrased narratives to insure a climate of hegemony. Allegorical writings target the post-independence state, its revolutionary jargon and corrupt politics. Few as such writings are, compared to the large body of variants upon the urban theme, they nevertheless indicate some widening prospects of growth for modern Arabic fiction.

15

N¯aj¯ı al-Tikr¯ıt¯ı, Ab¯u Zayd al-Qahram¯an¯ı (Beirut: D¯ar al-Andalus, ).

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

The Urban Complex It is when dealing with the large body of available works, however, that critics need to be on their guard lest they confuse the particular with the general, the conventional with the realistic, and the eddy with the main current. Popular writers such as Ihs¯ . an #Abd-al-Qudd¯us, Y¯usuf al-Sib¯a#¯ı and Muhammad #Abd al-Hal . . ¯ım #Abdall¯ah represent a minor stream in the post-war Egyptian novel. Their main interest is in the intrigues and depravities of the bourgeois society in Egypt where sex and money are the dazzling attraction. Even when studying single authors, one must resist platitudes and generalizations. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . for example, professes that there is a thematic and technical shift of focus and interest in his own post-revolution novels.16 But to use this as a basis for classifying Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . works into romantic, realistic and symbolist involves some misrepresentation of the basic ideas underlying the sub-structure of his universe His contribution to the urban novel does not solely lie in his preoccupation with the plight of the lower classes, and his clear sympathy for individuals driven to alienation. It mainly lies in his depiction of a godless universe where rationalism, materialism and spiritual dislocation seem to dominate.17 This developing philosophy runs throughout Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . novels, regardless of their changing subject-matter,18 which is given expression in the musings and quaint cynicism of his alter-ego, the omniscient journalist, whom we come across every now and then, as in the character of both

16 See a review of these views in the present writer’s “The Socio-Aesthetics of Contemporary Arabic Fiction: An Introduction,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –. See also Gamal al-Ghitani, “From ‘Naguib Mahfuz Remembers’,” trans. Mona Mihkail, in Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition, eds. Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, pp. – (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, ); and #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Ab¯u #Auf, interview with Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Qad. ¯ay¯a #Arabiyyah,  (), pp. –. 17 On these and relevant issues, see Mary Anne Weaver, “The Novelist and the Sheikh,” New Yorker (Jan. , ), pp. –; Rasheed el-Enany, “The Dichotomy of Islam and Modernity in the Fiction of Naguib Mahfouz,” in The Postcolonial Crescent: Islam’s Impact on Contemporary Literature, ed. John C. Hawley, pp. – (New York: Peter Lang, ); Sabry Hafez, “The Transformation of Reality and the Arabic Novel’s Aesthetic Response,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, , n.  (), pp. –; the present writer’s, “The Socio-Aesthetics of Contemporary Arabic Fiction: An Introduction,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –; and Halim Barakat’s Visions of Social Reality. 18 See Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm, for more; and Fatma Moosa-Mahmoud, The Arabic Novel in Egypt (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, GEBO, ).

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 

¯ Ahmad Bidayr in Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Modern Cairo, ) and #Amir . Wajd¯ı in M¯ıram¯ar (; English translation: Miramar, ).19 Writings about other Arab novelists fare no better. It is customary, for instance, to describe the novels of the Syrian writer Hannah M¯ınah . (b. ) as exercises in socialist realism,20 yet they are only so on the basis of the novelist’s own authorial intrusions and inserted comments which tend, at times, to govern the structure of his novels. In Al-Shir¯a# wa-al-#¯as. ifah (The Sail and the storm),21 the novelist develops the theme of conflict between the sailors and their intellectual associates against domination and control as represented by the mandate power and its lackeys from among the locals. The dramatic action works against the main ideas, which his protagonist al-Tur¯ . us¯ı as well as Kam¯al seem to advocate. Indeed, this sailor is similar to Hemingway’s hero in The Old Man and the Sea, for he also strives to prove that man cannot be defeated despite obstacles and hardships. In another novel, Al-Shams f¯ı yawm gh¯a"im (; English translation: Sun on a Cloudy Day, ),22 Hannah . M¯ınah also tackles the issue of conflict in its social and economic implications. But the allegorical pattern of the young narrator-protagonist growing under the influence of the tailor as artist seems too contrived for the novel to fit into the general framework of class and social conflict. The young narrator, who is attracted to the tailor and his art of music and dance with the dagger, gains so much political consciousness as to turn into a restrained rebel against his background and parents. The novelist is at pains to work out an allegorical dichotomy between the tango and the indigenous dance with its accompanying music and dexterity in motion, between the tailor, his poor people and the privileged. The dance is to awaken the earth, and to provoke consciousness against erosion. Against this dance and its subversive politics are the people in the castles. Allied with the French, they, in his words, “live in the stomach of others, causing them problems, inciting their anger and disgust” (p. ). While the novelist tries to account for the role of Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); and in M¯ıram¯ar (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Miramar, trans. Fatma MoussaMahmoud (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). 20 See, among the latest, Mur¯ ad Kasuhah, Al-Manf¯a al-siy¯as¯ı fi al-riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah: . Haydar Haydar, Hannah M¯ınah (Damascus: D¯ar al-Ha . s.a¯ d, ). . . . 21 Hannah M¯ınah, Al-Shir¯a# wa-al-#¯asifah (The Sail and the storm) (Beirut: Maktabat . . Raymond al-Jad¯ıdah, ). 22 Hannah M¯ınah, Al-Shams f¯ı yawm gh¯a"im (Damascus: Mansh¯ ur¯at Wiz¯arat al-Tha. q¯afah, ); English translation: Sun on a Cloudy Day, trans. Bassam Frangieh and Clementina Brown (Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiata Press, ). 19

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intellectuals as national bourgeoisie capable of transcending class root and privilege, the lines of conflict that rest on the division between the palace and the hut remain the most formidable within the structure of his novels. “Hatred for France appeared on the faces of all people except those who lived in castles like ours and except in the casinos, where the Consul and the lords of these castles met to play bridge and to dance the tango as if nothing had happened and nothing ever would” (p. ). Whenever he allegorizes and uses art and beauty as means to transgress division, the novelist escapes the strictures of ideology, without giving up the main Marxist thrust of class conflict as subsumed within the national struggle against the French domination. Aside from such problems, the modern Arabic novel develops or degenerates as an urban genre, governed by the very rules of change, which influence and control the lives of individuals and societies. The repercussions of politics, science and technology on the structural patterns followed by each novelist are too evident to pass without some adequate explanation, especially as these influences project themselves in a number of methods and conventions which make up the Arab novelist’s concept of fiction. Thus, the striking dominance, during the past sixty years, of such themes as individual sterility, prostitution and unrequited love, which are social problems, caused by certain evils to which the novelist attempts to direct our attention, also indicates some contemporary social disease, which is closely linked with a growing materialistic consciousness. Although artists look with misgivings on the materialistic and the mundane, they are too realistic, on many occasions, to distort facts. Normatively, the human is gradually sacrificed to the economic, a fact which many a novelist unwillingly admits in both the increasing attention to concrete characters and the emphasis on machinery and plot. Hence is the tendency towards causal sequences and the eventual disregard for the supernatural. Whereas the medieval Arab story-teller’s vision strays into the world of fairies, jinn and other supernatural agents, the modern Arab novelist makes no allowances for such elements, working out his own plots according to a stringent cause and effect dialectic. The Palestinian, living in Iraq, Jabr¯a I. Jabr¯a’s (d. ) Al-Bah. th #an Wal¯ıd Mas#¯ud (; English translation: In Search of Walid Masoud, )23 is a brilliant example of this attempt to emulate ¯ ab, ); English 23 Jabr¯ a I. Jabr¯a, Al Bah. th #an Wal¯ıd Mas#¯ud (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ translation: In Search of Walid Masoud, Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, ).

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 

the machine in its compact organization and studied effect, an attempt that overshadows his otherwise overt sexual and erotic overtures.24 The novel builds on a recorded tape left by the protagonist upon deciding to disappear. Everybody is entangled in the narrative, which nevertheless comes back full circle to the narrator himself, as if he were the epitome of aesthetic experience. Although the novel is like Jabr¯a’s narratives of a refined upper class life, it elevates art, represented in the tape, beyond the mundane of the real. Individualism and Democracy Scientism entails also the disappearance of coincidence in fiction, whereas democratic principles impel the novelist to recognize the uniqueness of each individual, internalizing action therefore and presenting personalities rather than types. Individuals from the petite bourgeoisie and prostitutes appear in abundance, although the emphasis, in the case of prostitution, is laid on the motivations behind the choice rather than the practice of sex.25 Social organization, on the other hand, suggests faith in collective endeavor and a disregard for eccentricities. And aside from the idiosyncratic, the fool and the mad, heroism dwindles. One may come across characters like Si Mokhtar in K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma as the man of many attributes,26 the illegitimate father of many, including Kamel and Nedjma, and probably the murderer of Rash¯ıd’s father in the novel (p. ). But, everybody in Constantine has to live with the “specter of Si Mokhtar” (p. ). One character tells us that “every one knew what he said about war, about religion, about death, about women, about alcohol, about politics, about everyone and every one, what Si Mokhtar had done or not done, the people he fought with, those he heaped with bounty. How could a man like that attach himself to anyone?” The question denies him heroism, despite the other side of the character, his capacity to win the hearts 24

On this other side, see “Sexuality in Jabra’s Novel: The Search for Walid Mas#ud,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor, pp. – (London: Saqi, ). 25 For other views on prostitution, see Evelyne Accad, “The Prostitute in Arab and North African Fiction,” in L. Pierre Horn and Beth Mary Pringle, eds. The Image of the Prostitute in Modern Literature, pp. – (New York: Ungar, ). 26 For other views on characterization in K¯ ateb Yac¯ıne’s novel, see Patricia Frederick, “The Triad and the Sacrifice in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma,” Romanic Review, ,  (March ), pp. –; and also John D. Erickson, “Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma,” SubStance, , n.  (), pp. –.

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

of many: “With his disciples, he could have made up a small army” (p. ). But, it is out of character to be a leader, with serious commitment to action. The eclipse of the hero is in line with the increasing ideological commitment since the s, which requires self-effacement for the benefit of a community, whereas distrust of governments and institutions involves some resignation, or defiance, which is usually stifled by imprisonment or even murder. The changes and problems experienced by Arab society are reflected in the novels produced. As an emulation of the machine, as well as an indication of the novelist’s initiation into scientific knowledge and openness to democracy and faith in life and people, the novel has been consistently aspiring towards exactitude in detail, tidiness in style, and motivational mechanism in plot. All these indicate this multiple awareness. In Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . novels of the s and early s there are ample examples to substantiate this. Likewise, the works of the Iraqi writers Gh¯anim al-Dabb¯agh’s Dajjah f¯ı al-zuq¯aq (Din in the alley, ),27 . Farm¯an’s Al-Nakhlah wa al-j¯ır¯an (The Date-Palm and the neighbors, ), the late Palestinian writer Kanaf¯an¯ı #s Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the Sun, ) and #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an al-Sharq¯aw¯ı’s Al-Fall¯ah. (The peasant). In both Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . New Cairo and Kanaf¯an¯ı’s Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the Sun), there is a logical, sequential arrangement of cause and effect which holds the action together. Coincidence may disturb this arrangement, in the shape of sudden deaths and recognition scenes as in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah () and Zuq¯aq al-Midaqq (; English translation: Midaq Alley, ),28 but writers have strived to minimize coincidence, replacing it with reasonable action as in Farm¯an’s novel (The Date-Palm and the neighbors). The novel deals with the impact of colonization on the middle and lower classes in Iraq, especially during the postwar years of the s. Individuals are preoccupied with their daily concerns, but parasitism evolves as a way of life, too. Urban quarters are scenes and sites for fights and murders. These occasions of hostility are also scenes of love, as feelings unfold against a background of occupation, international misuse and local opportunism. Husayn kills . Mahm¯ u d for insulting him and for assassinating S¯ a hib who stands for . . lower class sentiments of solidarity. No less tightly motivated is the Gh¯anim al-Dabb¯agh’s Dajjah f¯ı al-zuq¯aq (Baghdad, ). . Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Modern Cairo; ); and Zuq¯aq al-Midaqq (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Midaq Alley, trans. Trevor Le Gassick (London: Heinemann, ; and Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). 27

28



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death scene in Kanaf¯an¯ı’s Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the Sun). Delayed at the border police station on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border where immigration officials tease the driver Ab¯u al-Khayzar¯an for his amours (ironically unaware of his war-inflicted castration), the latter forgets about the Palestinians he is smuggling to find jobs in Kuwait. Consequently, he finds them smothered to death inside his water-tanker. But motivations are there even in narratives of avowed disruptions like civil war novels, for instance. Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (; The Story of Zahra) uses the spatial trope to account for the woman’s body. The movement from Lebanon to Africa and back to Lebanon is a trope for adaptation, appropriation and initiation in a wider guilt, nationwide rather than personal. Characters are caught in a web of accountability, which explodes in a civil war. “Dishonor” as a personal or familial stigma no longer holds, and the body is there willingly thrown on the roof to be penetrated, swollen and shot.29 To accept the charge of guilt is to pay for it, and the outcome is no less motivated than the child’s exposure to extramarital and adulterous love when joining the mother. Every act implicates another. Along with this causal motivation, there is a developing awareness of the unique personality of each character in line with each writer’s familiarity with behaviorist psychology as well as with the political ramifications of democracy and freedom. Evidence of this awareness is not hard to find, especially as the genre itself is associated with the growth of class conflict and the rise of individualism. The expansion of urban life and subsequent political transformations entail different styles and interests in writings. Such changes reduce the romantic hero (whether a knight of noble birth or a Shahrayar-like character of virile pursuits and caliber) to a normal size, placing him among many other individuals who may ascend or descend according to character and circumstance. It should not be surprising that men, not women, draw writers’ attention, for, still subservient to a resilient patriarchal code and under the impact of some hegemonic architext within the hierarchy of the generic tradition in Gerard Genette’s terms,30 the heroic is reserved to men, albeit within the limitations of bourgeois prospects. Even when women novelists like Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd depicts her Jullan¯ar with some heroic potential in Tah. awwulat al-f¯aris al-ghar¯ıb (Transformation of the 29 For more on this side, see Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: New York Univ. Press, ), esp. pp. –. 30 See Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation, p. .

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

strange knight) the focus is centered on her male characters. It is, perhaps, due to women’s awareness of a non-heroic age as well as their latent understanding of oppression that limit their narratives to detailed readings of actual or allegorical scenes. Political and social consciousness in the postwar years, since the s, imprints itself strongly in the amount of attention and care for characterization.31 The historical novels in Egypt as well as the sensational post-war writings there of Ihs¯ . an #Abd al-Qudd¯us and others, give way to Mahf¯ u z’s individuals. Ham . . . ¯ıdah, Z. ¯ıt.ah and Dr. B¯ush¯ı of Mahf¯ u z’s Zuq¯ a q al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley) are delineated with metic. . ulous care as lower class individuals whose feelings and actions are no less complicated, problematic and interesting. The same is true of Hannah M¯ınah’s F¯aris in Al-Mas. ¯ab¯ıh. al-zurq (Blue lamps, ),32 . Farm¯an’s Mus.taf¯a al-Dall¯al in Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an (The Date-Palm and the neighbors), Zak¯ı al-Nadd¯aw¯ı in Mun¯ıf ’s H¯ . ına tarakn¯a al-jisr (When we left the bridge), and Ily¯as in the same author’s Al-Ashj¯ar waightiy¯al Marz¯uq (The trees and the assassination of Marz¯uq, ).33 No less indicative of this uniqueness, however, is the use of multiple points of view, the stream of consciousness, and the interior monologue. Such techniques demonstrate that the writer no longer poses as the omniscient authority, nor does he/she feel contented to let a first or a third person narrator pose as such. To recognize each individual’s right to his/her own feelings and beliefs entails freedom of expression. Hence, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . M¯ıram¯ar () is a monumental work, manifesting its own author’s ardent faith in democracy and freedom of expression. In the often-cited interview for Qad. ¯ay¯a #Arabiyyah () Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. maintains, “his belief in the right of the human being for personal freedom is quite ardent.”34 Qualifying the statement, he adds that the reference here is to each person’s conscience, expression and behavior rather than to “possessing whatever he wants and spending it however he likes.” The statement is applicable to the very plan

31 See the present writer’s, “Hawla mafhumay al-shakhsiyyah wa-al-butu . . . ¯ lah f¯ı alriw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah al-mu#¯as.irah,” Al-Mawqif al-adab¯ı (Dec. –Jan. ), pp. – . 32 Hannah M¯ınah, Al-Mas¯ab¯ıh al-zurq (Blue lamps; Beirut: D¯ ar al-Fikr al-Jad¯ıd, ). . . . 33 #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, H¯ . ına tarakn¯a al-jisr (When we left the bridge; Beirut: MADN, ); and Al-Ashj¯ar wa-ightiy¯al Marz¯uq (The trees and the assassination of Marz¯uq; Beirut: D¯ar al-#Awdah, ). 34 #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Ab¯u #Auf, Interview with Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Qad. ¯ay¯a #Arabiyyah,  (), pp. –.



 

of his novel M¯ıram¯ar (). At the M¯ıram¯ar pension, there assemble seven individuals. They represent the conflict between past and present, virtue and vice, faith and atheism, opportunism and sincerity, social justice and oppression. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. chooses two or three points of focal interest, concentrating on Zahrah, the attractive villager who works at the pension, and Sarh¯ . an al-Buhayr . ¯ı, the opportunist and social climber whose greed drives him to theft and suicide. It is the wise, old jour¯ nalist #Amir Wajd¯ı who begins and ends the novel, whereas the three young men, with their conflicting attitudes and views, have a chance to express these individually, revealing a great deal about themselves as well as about the nature of conflict and change in the Egyptian society since the  revolution. While rural life has its own beauties, it is never paradisal, as Zahrah’s experience indicates when set against ¯ı #All¯am’s past, along with present manners Tulba Marz¯uq and Husn . . and expectations. The post-revolutionary period in Egypt also has its own parasites, opportunists and climbers. Sarh¯ . an al-Buhayr . ¯ı represents such individuals, at a time when leftists are persecuted, imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. Those who attempt to conform to the dominating political ideology and life may do so at the expense of their inner feelings. Such is Mans.u¯ r B¯ah¯ı’s miserable life. Above all this panorama ¯ of struggle, pain and conflict presides the omniscient sage, #Amir Wajd¯ı, the journalist who sees and knows all, finding ease and comfort in reciting verses from the Qur’¯an. These multiple points of view give the reader some access to the feelings and minds of different characters that happen to represent social segments as well. In its broad canvas and deployment of the realistic and the allegorical, the novel has strong postcolonial overtones. Discourses and different platforms compete and ascendancy is a matter of power relations, whereas the symbolism of the revolutionary rhetoric with its equation of the female with nation is ¯ parodied and undermined by the recitations of #Amir Wajd¯ı with their different heavenly promise away from the nation state. While indicative of Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . growing recognition of each character’s individuality (manifested in his gradual disregard for stereotypes in fiction), this application of multiple points of view reveals as well some uneasiness regarding that God-like pose of the third person narrator in earlier writings. The increasing belief in freedom is bound to work aesthetically, against the despotism of the omniscient narrator. But faced with radical changes that sap the very foundations of tradition and belief, writers also find in multiple voices a way out, leaving it to the reader to formulate his/her own personal conclusions and views.

 



Multi-voiced narrative directs its potential against unitary discourse in religion and politics, after all, while, by the same token, it protects its author behind a number of shreds. Revealing in this sense is the Iraqi writer Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s al-Raj# al-ba#¯ıd (; English translation: The Long Way Back, ).35 In an old house in a typical district in Baghdad lives a family comprising three generations (grandparents, parents and nephews). Focusing on the aspirations and distresses of this family during the last days of Q¯asim’s reign in Iraq, –, the novelist delves into their very private lives and manners. While placing the action in a solid frame of logical motivation and time sequence, the narrator achieves access not only to the three principal characters’ accounts, but also to each character’s levels of consciousness through a series of flashbacks and double-shots, in addition to the stream-of-consciousness technique. But whether working through monologues, multiple voices, or other channels of expression and action, the writer’s purpose is to capture every moment of rapture, distress, and lapses of memory, enveloping the whole paradoxical life of aspiration and frustration in a thick, and at times stifling, atmosphere. The chattering of the old, the shrieks of children, the unpredictable outbreaks of the drunk, religious sermons, political speeches, recollections from the past and expressions of love blend with the noise of heavy bombardment and furious outbreaks of rowdyism. Although al-Takarl¯ı’s novel is based on the love that the two brothers Kar¯ım and Midhat . feel for their cousin Mun¯ırah, the writer is realistic enough to doubt the possibility of a love affair thriving in an uncongenial milieu. Social malaise brings about sterility and death rather than love. It is in such an atmosphere that the nephew #Adn¯an, the National Guard from among the Ba#thites of , rapes his aunt Mun¯ırah (pp. –), a development that provokes more disequilibrium in an already explosive scene of internal strife, disintegration and civil war. The scene unfolds as though out of control. The “events happened rapidly,” despite the fact that she tried to free herself from his control: “He was pushing up her skirt, and she clenched her legs together, then she aimed her fist at his head which was buried in her neck” (p. ). 35 See the present writer’s, “Al-Ins¯ an wa-al-zaman f¯ı al-Raj# al-ba#¯ıd,” in Al-Fikr al#Arab¯ı al-Mu#¯as. ir, ; reprinted in my Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah: al-nash"ah wa-al-tah. awwul, pp. –. See also Wiebke Walther, “Distant Echoes in the Narrative of Fuad alTikirli,” in Roger Allen, et al, eds. Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, pp. – .



 

The omniscient narrator has no role in a novel of this complexity and richness, for authorial intrusions are out of the question, as the narrative makes use of other devices to account for desires, aspirations, failures and pains. He employed multiple voices, interior monologues and cinematic techniques, which belie the panoramic view. Although strongly realistic, the novel has existentialist overtones. “For a split second she had a profound sense of what was happening to her: she was on the edge of the abyss, contemplating her end” (p. ). Characters practice some sense of freedom in an otherwise absurd universe. As the author is not concerned with an agenda, he lets his characters, including the rapist, have their whims, agonies and troubles. The victim is given voice to articulate, in a moment of disarray, her pain as she feels it now, amid perplexity, tradition, will and anticipation: “I was not a victim, as tradition required, nor an anonymous corpse lying butchered on the side of the road, nor a feather in the wind, as they say. I was a bit of each of these, lost in the midst of misery and vile acts which were not meant to be divulged” (p. ). These accentuations may not offer great positionality, as some theorists may require or expect, but the power to penetrate the very interior of the character in a moment of such density brings us face to face with issues that relate to tradition, religion and human psychology. On the other hand it debates idealistic thought, which insists on the power of amateurish ideology to cultivate the mind and to control desires. The incest motif targets the youth, whose ideological affiliation cannot restrain his desires, even regarding his aunt. The rapist is the product of shallow politics, emotionalism, and amateurish petite bourgeois thought which is responsible for the ordeal of many post-independence failures. The postcoloniality of the novel lies in its very escape from the constrains of some traditional codes, its emphasis on a body politic that also takes cognizance of desire, and its multiplicity of voices. Narrating the Postcolonial There are many strategies and methods in narrative unfolding that displays and reveals postcolonial consciousness. But one distinctive technique is the recourse to polyphonic styles and strategies, including multiple viewpoint and epistolary form. Narratives of the late s share social and political awareness. This active climate informs narrative strategies, and intensifies a sense of immediacy, without lapsing in rhetoric. Whether dealing with a family scene or a national one,

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urgency operates on the writer’s mind to deploy effective means to account for complexity. The Egyptian Yu¯ suf al-Qa #¯ıd’s Al-Harb f¯ı barr . Mis. r (; English translation: War in the Land of Egypt, ) makes use of the narrative techniques of journalism, the reportage, to tackle serious issues of immediate political relevance to the Egyptian political life during the reign of Anwar al-S¯ad¯at (–). However, as an allegory, with an oblique postcolonial critique of the post-independence state, this novel is of great poignancy despite its journalistic vein. Its main concerns are identity and erosion, power relations and distortions of national rhetoric. The issues entail challenge to the status quo, and they also demonstrate a daring endeavor against sham politics. Its events are set in the s, and specifically during and after the October  war with Israel. Enjoying a revival during the counterrevolution in Egyptian politics, landowners feel free not only to rob peasants of their lands, but also to compel them to abandon their very identity as human beings. The landowner, who also happens to be the #Umdah, the headman, begins the narrative, explaining with rapture how he regains both land and prestige. In the narrative space, which is allocated to him in a novel of multi-voiced narration, he explains with gusto why his son should not be drafted (as a soldier) in the war front. To go around the rules, he compels the night watchman to send his own son as substitute, but under the name of the headman’s son. The complications involve the narrative in density, as soon as the watchman’s son dies as martyr in the war, for the headman would like to take credit for the soldier’s martyrdom, too! Bearing the name “Mis.r¯ı,” the soldier is meant to stand for Egypt. With subtle irony, the writer thus not only exposes the corrupt nature of the ruling classes, but also suggests how these classes undeservedly take credit for certain national triumphs and victories, such as the  war. The other five participants tell the story from their own perspectives. But while remaining in the background, the author’s voice blends with that of the investigator who, as the last speaker, sums up the whole, bringing the details together so as to produce a neat conclusion to the novel. Whether facing exposure, undergoing stress or searching for truth, characters, within this polyphonic and multi-voicing technique, reveal a great deal not only about themselves and their sociopolitical milieu, but also about basic human issues relating to the conflict between evil and good, despotism and justice, and treachery and love. The scene itself is recaptured differently in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (; English translation: The Innocence of the Devil, ),



 

for Nef¯ısah’s brother is also drafted. The Head Guard pulled him away “from the mother,” for the “words national service made the women wind their arms around their sons and hide them in their folded bodies as though they were trying to draw them back into their bellies” (p. ). Targeting the downtrodden, the underprivileged and peasant youths, national service is synonymous with death. In this, as in many other narratives, national service is given different accentuations according to the user, hence its dense presence with meanings and implications. In Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novel its equivalence is loss of honor, for from both there is “no return.” In al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s politics, which strongly informs her narrative structuration, loss of virginity also ends in death and madness. The Return of Epistolary Form There are other narrative means for multiplication of meaning and voicing. Crude as it certainly is, the epistolary form in fiction may serve, at times, to display multiple points of view and cope with complex situations and perspectives. As we have already noticed, the Iraqi Dh¯u al-N¯un Ayy¯ub used the form and manipulated it in a metafictional form that anticipates postmodernist techniques. The Iraqi novelist Muhammad Sh¯akir al-Sab# makes use of this technique in Al-Qabr . (The grave, ). The protagonist M¯ul¯a, an elementary school principal, is haunted by a gloomy past of social dislocation, uprootedness and alienation. Urban change spared him nothing; even his parents’ grave was swept away! The post-independence state is obsessed with transformation and change, no matter how damaging the process might be. Roads, new construction projects, urban expansion and industrialization lead to total physical change of whole areas and locations. Even the act of targeting opposition may entail erosion, destruction, and elimination of physical traces of opponents and their locations. The choice of a grave ahead of time is an ironic twist to the futurist expectations of nationalism. The grave evolves as a site for disappointment and frustration. Instead of the promises of a golden future, there is the unforeseeable death. It is fear of the fate attending his parents’ graves, which provokes the protagonist to correspond with Shaykh Muhammad Hasan . . to insure him a grave of his own. This correspondence certainly reveals much about the protagonist, but the writer fails to modernize the epistolary form, and resorts instead to digressions and interior monologues to bring about a change of heart, in accordance with traditional conventions in fiction writing. Through a series of interior monologues,

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M¯ul¯a realizes that a grave of his own brings him no real comfort, for his real suffering emanates from a sick mind, a “grave” of passivity and fear which he carries within him. The epistolary form as narrative technique may well help in enriching the narrative art, nevertheless. Whenever there is a prospect for growth in intimations, this interpolated genre could broaden prospects, increase the multi-voiced potential, and involve fiction in a greater heteroglossia. As a word and a message, the epistle invites an answer. In Bakhtin’s articulation, “every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Women writers have made use of the form, especially to perpetuate a narrative of cultural encounters in terms of love. Making use of the colonial subtext of Western travelers in love with women from the East, Usaymah Darw¯ısh, for example, delineates her protagonist Mad¯a as a charming Syrian lady whose early marriage to the wealthy #Abdall¯ah from the Gulf ends in separation because of differences in cultural perspectives. She falls in love with the English Collin, who is also in love with her. Both exchange letters of love, which also make up the novel entitled Shajarat al-h. ubb gh¯abat al-ah. z¯an (The Love tree, the forest of sadness, ).36 Although meant to be an encounter with a West that is conducive to the practice of a woman’s potential for freedom, the novel duplicates Western travelers’ accounts of virile pursuits in the East. The effort is different from Ahdaf Soueif ’s novel in English, The Map of Love (). This narrative which comes to the reader in the form of newspaper cuttings, letters, comments, drawings, artifacts and signs unfolds through sharing with the reader the findings in a trunk, which is sent to Amal by her brother Omar, a resident of New York, through his girl-friend the American Isabel (pp. –). The letters, which make up the substance of the narrative, are the English Anna Winterbourne’s, who, in her sojourn in Egypt during Lord Cromer’s virtual rule of the country during a good span of the British occupation of Egypt (– ), gets married to Sharif al-Baroudi (–). The novel makes use of historical documents and facts to open up history and challenge, not only colonialist readings, but also hearsay and platitudes in respect to the national question, pan-Arabism, Islamic movements, and the history of women’s life and culture under the caliphate. Substituting the Usaymah Darw¯ısh, Shajarat al-h. ubb gh¯abat al-ah. z¯an (The Love tree, the forest of ¯ ab, ). Sadness) (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ 36



 

writer, Amal is keen not only on filling gaps, but also on shedding light on documents, while simultaneously addressing history from a contemporary angle. Historiography assumes new meaning as neo-historicism propels analysis in context. The empire is not only a broad political apparatus, with machinery, power, and intrigues. It is also a network of personal interventions to keep people apart, as the detail regarding Cromer’s intervention against Anna Winterbourne’s marriage to Sharif al-Baroudi indicates (p. ). On the other hand, the national question is addressed in these letters in relation to Islam, pan-Arabism (pp. , –, ), the question of Palestine (pp. –), the Zionist project for an empire (pp. , –), and women’s participation in political life and anti-colonial struggle (pp. , ). The epistolary form and the documentary corpus work in harmony despite the fact that the amount of information and the scope may prove too much for such a “map.” Its trope of mapping love, the convergence between east and west (pp. –), in the form of the main story of marriage and love between the Egyptian dignitary and public figure and the British lady, is behind the unity of the narrative. Another variation upon epistolary art as narrative technique is #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s handling of his protagonist’s experience of political belief, imprisonment and torture, escape and exile, and eventual return, imprisonment and death in Sharq al-Mutawassi.t (East of the Mediterranean, ).37 The novel is a postcolonial text par excellence,38 for it deploys every technique to portray the post-independence police state, its machinery of surveillance, and its cruel repression of political dissent. It highlights the role of women in political opposition despite its emphasis on one protagonist. It bridges the spatial and the cultural under the rubric of political commitment. The doctor in Paris, Fali, is like Rajab the Arab, for both share an agenda against evil powers. Both fight for liberty. Space beyond the prison walls is large enough to accommodate a human race, but there is no ambivalence regarding commitments and political agendas. As the title indicates, no specific country in the region is identified; ironically, however, it may well apply to all countries passing through political conflicts or falling under totalitarian governments and despotic rulers. In this novel, Mun¯ıf places his protagonist Rajab in very trying circumstances, which are, nevertheless, not surprising to 37 #Abd Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, Sharq al- Mutawassi.t (East of the Mediterranean; Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal . ¯ı#ah, ; Baghdad edition, ). 38 For a synopsis, see Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel, vol. , pp. –.

 



those acquainted with the sufferings of intellectuals and political groups in Third World countries. After initial reluctance, Rajab thinks of writing about the experience he has just undergone, despite his feeling that “words, seem at certain moments, and quite often, like leaves in early winter: yellow and pale, blown by the wind, to be trodden later by feet. The written word is no longer a living thing, capable of doing something” (pp. –). To present a many-sided view of his own experience, Rajab asks his sister to co-operate in depicting her own fears and expectations, including as well her own husband’s and children’s reactions, describing thereby the nature of the sufferings undergone by many, “East of the Mediterranean.” Mun¯ıf significantly begins his novel with a quotation from the Declaration of Human Rights, which calls for the treatment of individuals as human beings entitled to freedom and respect.39 Public Intellectuals: Types and Characters While Mun¯ıf is more concerned with describing human suffering, pleading throughout for democracy and freedom, the Jordanian novelist Gh¯alib Halas¯a (d. ) in Al-Su’¯al (The Question) develops a sadistic bent to punish antagonists.40 The protagonist here is called Mus.t.af¯a, an intellectual who is involved in party politics. Recently freed from prison, Mus.t.af¯a spends most of the time either with women or colleagues. His readings arouse only feelings of repugnance and distrust. Insofar as the structure of the novel is concerned, however, such readings are the writer’s channel to develop a “detective story” convention of mystery and detection. A flood of satirical comments on the socalled affluence of Egypt accompanies Mus.t.af¯a’s reading about bizarre murders in “respectable” districts. There are also recurrent allusions to Muhammad, the police officer, who enjoys torturing political prisoners. . Many among Mus.t.af¯a’s colleagues have undergone kinds of torture that reveal Muhammad’s own mental and sexual perversion. Faithful to the . detective story pattern, Halas¯a’s novel concludes with the discovery that the officer himself, who commits suicide, is the murderer. This suicide is obviously too contrived for such a realistic strain. For a reading of #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s vision in relation to other writers’, see Muhammad Siddiq, “The Contemporary Arabic Novel in Perspective,” World Literature Today, , no.  (Spring ), pp. –. 40 Gh¯ alib Halas¯a, Al-Su’¯al (The Question; Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ). 39



 

In Al-Su’¯al (The Question) the writer’s concern with atmospheric devices and details tends to overshadow characterization. With its vigorous description of scenes of brutality and perversion and its racy satire, the work, nevertheless, accords with the trend of realism in contemporary Arabic writings. It is worth noting in this regard that the belief in moral responsibility and ideological commitment works at times against the presentation of individuals and personalities and may drive the writer to impose the theory he/she holds on machinery and characterization. In Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Modern Cairo), for instance, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. presents #Al¯ı T¯ . ah¯a as the stereotype of the young socialist who believes in social reform or in revolutionary change that may lead to an earthly paradise.41 Ma"m¯un Radw¯ . an, on the other hand, is typical of Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ u z’s mystics who are professedly concerned with . . man’s soul and spirit. He reappears in Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab as Shaykh #A¯ı al-Junayd¯ı. Finally, Ahmad Bidayr is, probably, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . . uz’s . first wise, omniscient journalist whose musings and wisdom are typical of ¯ the writer himself and, for this reason, of his alter ego, #Amir Wajd¯ı in M¯ıram¯ar. Types vary, however, according to the circumstances existing in Arab countries. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. often presents uninvolved characters, like Kam¯al and even Fahm¯ı in Al-Thul¯athiyyah (The trilogy).42 In their fear, hesitation and inadequate motivation, such characters court ambivalence, resist total involvement, preferring to stand aside without forsaking the patriotic sense of national commitment and duty. They may grow into characters of full delineation like Mans.u¯ r B¯ah¯ı or Sarh¯ . an al¯ Buhayr ı of M¯ ı ram¯ a r. In the Iraqi Gh¯ a nim al-Dabb¯ a gh’s Dajjah f¯ ı al-zuq¯ aq . . (Din in the alley, ), this same (marginal) type appears as a protagonist. Khal¯ıl Husayn is torn between patriotism and reluctance to par. ticipate in organized action. Through the use of interior monologues and the stream-of-consciousness Khal¯ıl’s inner thoughts are exposed to 41 See also Caroline Williams, “Place and Time in Mahfouz’s al-Qahira,” in Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition, eds. Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, pp. –. 42 The trilogy comprises Bayn al-qasrayn, Qasr al-shawq, and Al-Sukkariyyah (street . . names in the old quarters of Cairo). They appeared as follows: Bayn al-Qas. rayn (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English trans.: Palace Walk, trans. William M. Hutchins and Olive Kenny (New York: Doubleday, ); Qas. r al-shawq (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Palace of Desire, trans. William M. Hutchins, Lorine Kenny, and Olive Kenny (New York: Doubleday, ); Al-Sukkariyyah (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Sugar Street, trans. William M. Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan (New York: Doubleday, ).

 



reveal an agonized soul whose ambition is to move to the center of life, away from hesitation and fear. Like Mans.u¯ r B¯ah¯ı of M¯ıram¯ar and Kar¯ım al-N¯as.ir¯ı in the Iraqi #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Maj¯ıd al-Rubay#¯ı’s AlWashm (The brand/the tattoo),43 Khal¯ıl is typical of many intellectuals who are too scared to face degradation and torture at prison camps and secret police stations. Unlike Mun¯ıf ’s Rajab, such characters succumb to temptations, sacrificing their colleagues and comrades under pressure, only to realize at the end that their agonized conscience makes it impossible for them to relax or even to enjoy the pleasurable life they are promised. This anti-hero is vividly portrayed with a career ending on a note of defeat that fits well into the general framework to which the writer adheres. In Al-Washm, al-Rubay#¯ı’s anti-hero passes through similar circumstances that lead eventually to despising himself, migrating to another place and writing under a pseudonym. To him, this is a time of purgation, which may continue indeterminately. Throughout he hopes to regain some self-respect by transcending a shameful past of weakness and defeat. Compared, however, with such characters as B¯abil in the Iraqi #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Mun¯ad. il (The militant) and Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . opportunist in Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Modern Cairo) these stereotyped characters are hardly impressive.44 B¯abil’s eventual disillusionment with organized party politics demonstrates a basic distrust of organized action, especially when ideology is so institutionalized as to leave no space for individual dissent or growth. It is this inner maturation, this growing thoughtfulness, however, which makes B¯abil so convincing as a disenchanted protagonist. A different character is Mahj¯ . ub #Abd al-D¯ayim in Mahf¯ u z’s Al-Q¯ a hirah al-jad¯ ı dah (Modern Cairo, ). He sees the world . . as a “darkling plain”, where a fierce struggle for survival goes on, driving him to use every means (in a Becky Sharp fashion as in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair) to achieve material prosperity and comfort. Politics and morals signify nothing to him, unless they help promote his own aspirations and ambitions. His eventual fall is in accordance with Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . conventional distribution of poetic justice at that stage in his career as a novelist.

43 44

#Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Maj¯ıd al-Rubay#¯ı, Al-Washm (Beirut: D¯ar al-#Awdah, ). #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim, Al-Mun¯ad. il (The militant; Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal . ¯ı#ah, ).



  Outsiders or Heroes

Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . villain poses also as an outsider. Standing outside the main circle of prosperity and pleasure, he aspires to become part of it, thinking always of himself as a talented individual whom nobody can resist. In conformity with the fashionable laissez-faire philosophy, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . villain believes in free competition and liberal democracy as long as these help him to realize his inner selfhood. His flaws are the flaws of materialism, for compromising or sacrificing morals and feelings entail— according to Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . universe, at least— a defiance of the divine moral plan, as well as a disruption of the innate human bent for harmonious growth. Stripped of his indifference and immoralism, Mahj¯ . ub of Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah is the predecessor ¯ of #Umar al-Hamz¯ a w ı . In Al-Shah. h. ¯adh (; English translation: The . 45 aw¯ı has attained the prosperity and Beggar, ), #Umar al-Hamz¯ . material comfort to which Mahj¯ . ub aspires. Suddenly, he begins to feel an overwhelming ennui, an enormous fatigue, which, according to the physician whom he consults, is “a bourgeois disease” brought about by the style of life #Umar al-Hamz¯ aw¯ı leads. “Let me describe . your life to you,” the physician says to him, “you are a successful and prosperous person, who has forgotten, or is about to forget, all about walking, having always the best meals and drinks, exhausting yourself in work, and your mind always preoccupied with your own possessions and people’s affairs. You are worried about your business and money.” #Umar al-Hamz¯ aw¯ı approves of this explanation, but he . qualifies this, mentioning to the physician that he no longer cares for business and money. Driven to ennui, he simultaneously develops a certain resistance to work, prosperity and material comfort, and retreats into a private world where he lives with his own hallucinations, ecstasies and illusions. Such a retreat provides no guarantee, however, that the external world will leave him alone. Born in an organic universe of mutual commitments and interrelated dealings, #Umar al-Hamz¯ aw¯ı’s . private search for an isolated spot invites thwarting. Thus, he wakes up one day to find his retreat surrounded by police searching for his son-in-law. Shocked by this development and imagining himself the one sought by the police, he flees in terror. After being struck by 45 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al- Shah. h. ¯adh (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The Beggar, trans. Kristin Walker Henry and Narriman Warraki (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ).

 



a bullet in the police chase, #Umar al-Hamz¯ aw¯ı undergoes a certain . transformation in a deathbed scene. Penetrating deep beneath the skin, the shot, allegorically, awakens his benumbed soul, reopening his vital springs of life, which are also the very springs of poetry. As far as our topic is concerned, #Umar al-Hamz¯ aw¯ı’s career presents the fall . and death of the “bourgeois protagonist,” after passing through stages of anti-heroism, villainy and consequent deadlock. Here, as in many other novels, such protagonists, dead to poetry and feeling, can no longer pose as heroic, unless released from “bourgeois” entanglements by a shock such as the bullet that has awakened #Umar al-Hamz¯ aw¯ı’s . benumbed soul, bringing about some overflowing feeling of freedom and harmony. His whispers to himself show at this stage some selfdiscovery, and a sense of freedom. It is this moment of illumination, clarity and unclouded joy, which brings about poetry. Hence, poetry flows back into his own mind with “surprising clarity”: “if you actually want me, why have you forsaken me?” he asks the “angel of poesy.” Such life in death is only “a spark of heaven,” a glimmering light, which is inaccessible to many. Born in corruption and crass materialism, dead to morals and feelings, S¯ . uz’s . Al-Tar¯ıq (The way, ; English transla. abir in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ tion: The Search, ) commences a search for a father who—as his mother thinks—is still alive,46 ready to acknowledge S¯ . abir as a son, despite the fact that she has not seen him for thirty years. In such circumstances S¯ . abir is doomed to fail. He only begins to think of love and law at the point when he realizes that he is going to be hanged. Underlying the whole novel is Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . distrust of a materialistic society, in which deceit, corruption and vice are rampant. In such a universe it is hardly possible to expect commitment and love, for disintegration reaches the very soul of society, the family itself. During the s, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. comes to believe that the traditional form of fiction to which he has adhered throughout the early novels is no longer appropriate. “The traditional novel classifies society, whereas an unstable society drives the writer to meditate rather than to describe it” (Qad. ¯ay¯a, pp. –).47 The central characters now drift in a nebulous world of pursuit, disillusion and incomprehensible retriNaj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al-Tar¯ıq (The way; Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The Search, trans. Mohamed Islam (Cairo, ). 47 Of some use is Don Meredith, “Looking for Sugar Street,” as Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . nostalgic memoir, Texas Review, , nos. – (Winter ), pp. –. 46



 

bution. It is this same instability and flux, which the protagonist #Is¯a al-Dabb¯agh attempts to resist in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-Summ¯an wa-al-khar¯ıf 48 (; English translation: Autumn Quail, ). Throughout his career of first solid responsibility, and then disillusionment subsequent to his ˇ a is egodismissal, and snobbery when thinking of his cousin Hasan, #Is¯ . istic enough to think of himself as a pillar and a center. However, while Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. has implied throughout the novel that passivity, defensiveness and resistance to change betray an unhealthy attitude and a sick mind, he ends the novel with a contrived symbolic gesture. Disillusioned and distressed, the protagonist sits in a square presided over by the statue of the late Egyptian national hero, Sa#d Zaghl¯ul. There a ˇ a to follow him. young man appears carrying a red rose and beckons #Is¯ While intimating throughout that passivity, defensiveness and resistance to change betray block-headedness and a sick mind, the writer contrives the last scene to suggest a way out of such an impasse. Affiliation with a cause and a promise to find solace in a past of anti-colonial struggle bring the protagonist into the orbit of postcolonial concerns, for, as Fanon notes, the native intelligentsia is not one and the same, and the post-colonial stance assumes its epistemology through incessant interaction with the impending, the real and the past. Although he sympathizes with the alienated, the humiliated old paˇ a as a tragic triots, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. is not in a position to present #Is¯ ˇ a’s career is only a variant on the same “bourgeois hero. In fact, #Is¯ protagonism,” with its psychological, social and cultural complications. ˇ a is While alienated by the new powers of revolution and change, #Is¯ no less responsible for this alienating situation. Indeed, his cousin has ˇ a’s snobbery and already suggested a way out of this impasse, but #Is¯ ˇ egoism drive him to reject the offer. Here, too, #Is¯a suffers from the same “bourgeois” antagonism to poetry and culture. Throughout his career, his mind has been preoccupied with political maneuvering and social climbing, utterly devoid of that spiritual “spark from heaven” which obviously means a great deal to Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . antithetical pattern of conformity and alienation. However, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . popular heroes are those like #Uthm¯an Khal¯ıl in Al-Shah. h. adh (The Beggar) and Sa#¯ıd Mahr¯an in Al-Lis. s. waal-kil¯ab (The Thief and the Dogs). Alienated, antagonized and hounded 48 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al-Summ¯an wa-al-khar¯ıf (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Autumn Quail, trans. Roger Allen (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ).

 



out of the society, their overwhelming sense of betrayal, intensified by their affection and love for others, redeems them from all accidental errors throughout a life of challenge, defiance and pursuit. Fahm¯ı in the Trilogy dies too young to grow into somebody like #Uthm¯an Khal¯ıl, whereas #Abb¯as al-Hilw in Midaqq Alley is too limited by his passion . ¯ ¯ for Ham ı dah to be Sa# ı d Mahr¯an’s predecessor.49 Set against new post. revolution circumstances, both may either degenerate into opportunists like Sarh¯ . an of M¯ıram¯ar (or his later growth, Ra’¯uf #Alw¯an in the Thief and the Dogs) or remain faithful, as they actually do, to a belief in social equality, and moral responsibility. Both are unselfish, accessible to ideas and susceptible to human feeling. Both are too virtuous to be accepted in a society that becomes too institutionalized and materialistic to allow dissent. Set against collective conformity, it is this dissent, however, which becomes the artist’s outlet. This same dissent brings characters back to the foreground of dialogue and action, restoring their heroic role in a way, which is of rare occurrence in modern fiction. But dissent becomes both a modern equivalent to heroism and a reproof to an anti-heroic bourgeois age. Rather than retreating to a private world of seclusion and self-effacement, both characters attempt to associate with the new society after a long period of imprisonment, only to find that affection dwindles to mere passion, ideas and ideology degenerate into slogans, and decent criticism provokes anger, persecution and death. Post-modernity Discontents The tenets of modernity, with their faith in a rationale that holds things together in a linear sequence and a logic where the human agency presides, are to suffer greatly, not only because of the collapse of the ideals cherished by the early advocates of the nation state like T¯ in Egypt and al-Rus¯af¯ı and Sulayman Fayd. ¯ı in Iraq, for . ah¯a Husayn . example, but also because of the disintegration of ideals on worldwide scale. East and West participate in the feast to exploit people and nations alike. Scientific discovery only adds to this sense of confusion. No wonder that post-modernity evolves in fragmented narrative, discontinued time, and ambivalence. Modernism has its heyday, and peo49

Other readings see heredity and naturalism, with their determinist principles, as holding in the novel, influencing and controlling characterization. See Linda Beane Katner, “Homage to Zola: The Question of Heredity in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy and Midaq Alley,” Excavatio,  (), pp. –.



 

ple are left with a sense of bewilderment at the death of master narratives. Perhaps, the Algerian Rash¯ıd Ab¯u Jadrah (b. ) [Boujedra] in Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq ()50 may offer an example of postmodernist stance, its hesitation and rupture, indecision and oblique criticism, in a narrative that sides with history to undermine its claim to truth, and makes use of its linearity to raise questions about its accuracy, authenticity and exactitude. While offering many glimpses on the Algerian Revolution, –, the narrative is more concerned with the intersectional nexus of past and present, as the post-modernity discontent involves memory in a retrospective journey, whereby the mind deconstructs a past which carries a heroic stamp that is also rife with frustration and pain. Memory travels backwards to focus on the protagonist’s truncated tie between the patriarchal model set for him and the harsh reality that defies it. The father styled him, in name and attitude, on the heroic Berber T¯ariq Ibn Ziy¯ad who led the conquest of Spain (), but the boy ends fat and meek, radically different from the heroic namesake. The father fights hard to make the son the duplicate of the hero, but the fat son has been suffering beating and mockery at school. The father insists nevertheless on placing him within a heroic past, for if he is no T¯ariq Ibn Ziy¯ad, then in fatness he looks like the other hero in the second stage of the conquest (), M¯us¯a Ibn Nus.ayr, who was rumored to be jealous of the achievements of the Berber Ibn Ziy¯ad. The present itself is unheroic, and the boy has to suffer an acute sense of discrepancy between history and mundane reality, as the disenchanting facts about life and mothers demonstrate to him. Narrative as such is a discursive space of collision, rupture, discontinuity, and fracture. Memory itself is a site of these. Here figures and characters are out of place, like the aliens of the existentialist novel. But aliens are not types, for to be an alien is to resist typology. For instance, Kanaf¯an¯ı’s passive aliens in Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the Sun) are unlike Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . aliens, who are set within a historical understanding of wit, foolery, eccentricity and roguery. They may have some resemblance to Mun¯ıf ’s later creations like #Ass¯af in Al-Nih¯ay¯at (Endings), for it is as an eccentric that this legendary figure assumes a distinguished identity of his own, which is the more attractive for his non-conformity and dissent. In this novel as in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab, non-conformity becomes one effective form of pro-

50

Rash¯ıd Ab¯u Jadrah [Boujedra], Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits; ).

 



test not only against despotism and repression, but also against selfcomplacency, middle-class smugness and narrow-mindedness. It is this dissent, which gives Arabic fiction a new thematic context of encounter and challenge, producing characters that think and act as personalities rather than as types. Creativity and Dissent The literary significance of dissent in the novel is, indeed, worth stressing. Many critics have attempted to investigate the reasons for the absence of well-delineated characters in Arabic fiction, especially in its medieval urban beginnings. The Victorian Walter Bagehot argues that social, religious and cultural conformity, coupled with some fatalism, has worked upon the medieval storyteller’s frame of mind, thwarting this innate bent for individualism. Hence, according to Bagehot, the storyteller’s dramatis personae exercise no self-restraint and demonstrate no heroic action, because of an absolute faith in providence and conformity to socio-religious obligations and ordinances.51 But, Walter Bagehot theorizes under the auspices of the neoclassical frame of mind, which takes no account either of orality or religion in its monotheistic underpinnings. Outside the immediate application, the view is applicable to urban fiction, for it is only through difference that diversity manifests itself in specific character traits. It is only when deviating, dissenting and rebelling that the writer entertains and nurtures some faith in his characters, investing them with some understanding and a determination to exercise their will in expression and action. Patriarchy, as much as its outgrowths, may smother action and individual will, but it also provokes dissent, which finds expression in a number of discursive strategies, including satire, irony, dramatic indirection and historical revisionism. The post-independence patriarch has been attracting greater narratological attention since the late s. Patriarchy repeats itself as a shell that holds and engenders individuals. In Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil),52 the figure of The Fall of the Imam reappears again to offer Narjis (i.e. Narcissus) a medal (p. ). He “would Walter Bagehot, “The People of the Arabian Nights,” The National Review,  (July ), pp. –. For identification, see the present writer’s Scheherazade in England, p. , n. . 52 References are to the English translation. 51



 

be standing inside the clothes of His Majesty or His Excellency, or His Honor” (p. ). But the “Medal of Honor for exemplary fulfillment of duty and for bringing happiness to others” (p. ) is no more than another initiation in servitude, subordination and deceit. The girl, who undergoes a process of sustained defamation and whose memory is occupied by the wailing “yahou,”53 is offered position and respect when her body is continually violated and raped by the director. Against this scream of helplessness there is, however, a welling-up potential for resistance. Sites can grow into a Tower of Babel, a heteroglot, whenever a human will gathers itself against humiliating circumstances. Obviously, some political consciousness can empower the self to react, whereas its lack prolongs submission. In Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil) both Jann¯at and Nef¯ısah offer opposite examples. The “yahou” of the latter is one of misery, whereas its hold on the inner mind of the former perpetuates acts of defiance, which are accentuated differently according to stage and circumstance. Accused by patriarchy of being a “whore” who has already lost her virginity (p. ), she acts swiftly in response, driving her car whose “four wheels seemed like wings flying over the ground,” amid other sounds of bells, calls, entreaties, cries, music and the roar of tanks rolling through the streets. But “above all she could hear the sound of the engine rising higher than any sound she had ever heard before” (p. ). It is no less than the historical genealogy of the very cry leveled against her now as it has been leveled against women since eternity, “fall” and “whore.” But the heteroglot is nevertheless there, a celebration of life against repression that makes up her age. No wonder she feels the “glee of a child set free” (p. ). A scene of a similar rebirth like Jann¯at’s refusal to take “the injection” at the madhouse (p. ) sets her free for the second time. Even when such acts of defiance terminate for both Jann¯at and Narjis with death, the act of revolt proves how willful and morally empowered a woman can be against institutional patriarchy. Unable to subdue Jann¯at’s body, the male nurses “shouted out in one voice, ‘The Devil has taken her body’” (pp. –). Narjis herself will respond positively to this act of 53

The writer adds qualifications to the cry, saying that women cry this way as if calling out “the Yahweh of the Old Testament”, or a Deity “whose name is Ya Huh,” or the “Yahwih” whom they “read about …in the Bible. The god of earthquakes and volcanoes.” Qtd. in Fedwa Malt-Douglas, Men, Women, and God(s), p. . The cry may have all these historical connotations and lineage, but it is in many Arab societies women’s bewailing of loss and distress.

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defiance on the part of Jann¯at. Rejecting her “thirty years” as Head Nurse, “with bent head” and “downcast look, unable to lift her eyes,” to the director, Narjis affirms her name: She lifted her head and gazed into his eyes. They were bulging like those of her dead grandfather. —What’s the matter with you girl? Why are you standing like a statue? —My name is Narjis, not girl. —Since when? He lifted his hand and brought his cane down on her breast. —Since when, you girl? —From now onwards. —Prepare the beer and the snacks. I’m coming to see you tonight. —I’m leaving, leaving everything. —Where are you going? To another man? —I hate you. I hate all men. —You love women now, eh? —Yes. —You’ll go to Hellfire with Lot’s mother. —No, sir, I won’t. —To be a lesbian is a sin, don’t you know that? —No, sir. It is not mentioned in God’s book. —You fallen woman. You whore. (pp. –)

The scene is meant to be one of affirmation against a history of denial. As the male tradition in its patriarchal pattern (represented here by her grandfather and the director) has held her in suspicion or subjugation, Narjis’s other self recognizes its genuine nature upon a recovery of a subdued past. Jann¯at’s act of defiance ignites a fire that has been smothered by fears, accusations, constraints and manipulations, which make up the very machinery of patriarchy in al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s narrative. Yet, dissent is not one attitude. It may grow into a disavowal of a bourgeois bent of mind, a rejection of a position, and a revolt against state body politic, partisan views, or current patriarchy. Indeed, tradition itself is interrogated despite the fact that poets of the late forties have already begun their revisionist reading of tradition when novelists were still after representations of a stable middle class society. Many were trapped then between what Saree Makdisi rightly refers to as “residual cultural formations” from the past and “appeals to modernity.”54 But to find a trope for this intersection is not an easy task. 54

Saree S. Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Ara-

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There are, for instance, functional spatial images that have the potential to accelerate or contain action. Spatial images (like the Lebanese Far¯uq al-Buqayl¯ı’s stairs in Al-H¯ulah (The She-monster, ),55 the Egyptian Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s foundation in Hik¯ . ay¯at al- mu"assasah (),56 the Lebanese Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s roof in Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (The Story of Zahra), the Palestinian Jabr¯a’s ship in Al-Saf¯ınah (; English translation: The Ship, ),57 the Iraqi Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s alleys in Al-Raj# al-ba#¯ıd (The Long Way Back) and al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r’s#Urs baghl (A Mule’s wedding, )58 might offer potential meanings for encounter, conflict and change. But they cannot account for the other side of the coin, the anxiety and fear, the oppression and the sacrifice, the complacency and the revolt, that show forth in these narratives. With some revisionism, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s madhouse serves the tropics of discourse in Arabic fiction. Although Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s narrators are after the roots of evil, the manipulation of the biology of the body in theological and social, including family, discourses as in Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil, pp. –, ), there is also an underlying political pattern that fuses with the rest to account for feminist politics. Inexperienced and unacquainted with urban life and manners, Nef¯ısah, for example, cannot cope with her madhouse experience. She may have missed the man’s point when he says, “Only fools go to prison. Intelligent people go to the Palace with us,” meaning the madhouse (p. ). The selfstyled God with a “thin nervous cough” knows the ways and byways of life outside the madhouse, but he cannot rid himself, too, of the vicious circle of exploitation, domination and misuse. Like “the King or the President” (p. ), there is a General, a High Shaykh and a Director. Power is sustained through relations and hierarchy (p. ). Power exists in signs, too. Narjis watches the President, whose “arm was stuck to the chest,” which was “encased in an iron shield,” and upon which rested “shining medals, and decorations.” But even a quick touch from his fingers, “like a flash of lightning, or an electric shock,” is “sufficient … for

bic Culture and the End of Modernity,” Boundary, , (Spring ), pp. –, at p. . See also Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp. , , . 55 Far¯ uq al-Buqayl¯ı, Al-H¯ulah (The She-monster; Cairo: D¯ar al-Nad¯ım, ). 56 Jam¯ al al- Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Hik¯ . ay¯at al- mu"assasah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Intish¯ar, ). 57 Jabr¯ a I. Jabr¯a, Al-Saf¯ınah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Nah¯ar, ); English translation: The Ship, trans. Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). 58 Al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r, #Urs baghl (Mule wedding; Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ).

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her to become a Head Nurse” or, for a man, to “become a Director or a Cabinet Minister” (p. ). Power relations apply with force to any human contact, especially when it entails subordination. Narjis sustains a position at the madhouse through submission to the director’s lovemaking, which she emotionally rejects. On the other hand, the underlying moral that holds both Narjis and Jann¯at together is one of opposition and dissent. Politically, both belong to radical sentiments. But both are trapped in a hegemonic order. Jann¯at’s early youth is one of fervent love for her Mis. r (Egypt) against colonization (p. ). But, the emerging patriarch, the freak of post-independence, also appalls her. Her mother’s inscribed notes offer another perspective on life and religion, which encourages her to be free from a theology of fear and oppression (p. ). Tracing her own genealogy in her mother’s own inscription she is assured of identity and belonging. Working within an anxiety of authorship, she develops another lineage, free from the grandparents’ imitative reading, through a revisionist understanding that allows a growth of will which is not hard to trace in her madhouse revolt (p. ). Such a show of will and power, a continuation of another in her early life, is bound to impart resistance to her early partner, no matter how that resistance ends. “The two butterflies dropped to the ground” (p. ), but the effort is as defiant as ever. Although this sense of opposition and revolt has informed not a few works in the last decades, it cannot be seen apart from a general social and national search for identity that has shaped and colored the Arabic novel, ever since the attention attending the publication of the Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab in .59 As the articles written . . upon its first appearance indicate, the novel was taken as another sign of enlightened discourse.60 Its choice of a female name for a title and its rural background tend to deviate from the dominating elitism. The Arab novelist often resorts to his/her own individual experience as the substance of reality in fictional constructs, recreating it within certain conventions that make it intelligible and coherent. Although the historical novel seemed once a convenient vehicle for expressing some writers’ search for identity and meaning, it soon appeared too English translation: Zaynab, trans. John Mohammed Grinsted (London: Darf, ). 60 See Hamdi Sakkut, The Arabic Novel: Bibliography and Critical Introduction, –, vol. , pp. –. 59



 

limited and out-dated a form to cope either with the ever-growing challenge of urban life and politics, or with each writer’s own personal views and feelings. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. himself considered the historical novel inadequate as a model despite his original plan to write more novels in this vein. “Suddenly the desire to write historical romance died within me, and I found myself turning to realism in Al-Q¯ahirah aljad¯ıdah without any preliminaries, I remained absorbed in this until I finished the Trilogy in April .”61 Undermining Unitary Discourse What Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. specifies as a post-independence era of shifting loyalty and change is not a uniform circumstance. The postcolonial state, its drive for independence is real, to be sure. But its god-like figures have a unitary discourse, too. To apply this discourse means the negation of other voices. Narratives have to develop oblique viewpoints, ironic or parodic discursive strategies, and revisionist readings of history and tradition. The existentialist perspective continues as viable among its upholders. As late as , Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s protagonist follows his author in finding it burdensome to cope with the post-independence state, its machinery of control, surveillance and patriarchy. Tawf¯ıq L¯am, the protagonist in Al-Masarr¯at (Gladnesses) understands life as a personal pursuit: “I have no beneficial connections… I and the friends I have are in a dark corner, powerless to influence the process of public affairs” (p. ). Hence, the conclusion to relax “as long as you cannot manage a response,” for “the world of nowadays is not ours, nor is it for what we stand for” (p. ). The novel inscribes its micro politics therefore which sets the protagonist aside, leaving the unfolding narrative to exhaust itself. But, ironically, unfolding means action, fights, troubles and communication. These are to involve every body, including the protagonist despite his most relaxed and indifferent moods. Existentialist fiction is an ironic outgrowth in the late s, and its reappearance is merely a foretaste for micro politics in feminist applications. Micro politics is a post-existentialist fruition in Arabic fiction. It is found in women writings, especially when the drive is towards a focused reading of a situation, a position or a character. With some minute care for details to uncover emotions and feelings in a household, writ-

61

Qtd. Hamdi Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and its Main Trends, p. .

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ings by Han¯ . an al-Shaykh, Usaymah Darw¯ısh and Sahar . Khal¯ıfah, for instance, dwell on their characters’ life in a detailed fashion. Especially in war narratives, a focused look on one’s life entails a resurrection of residual detail, which, narratively, captures life in an otherwise transitory and fleeting moment. Miriam Cooke thinks rightly that the “war had opened up a new arena of expression,” given them [Beirut women writers] a voice in what had until then been a male-dominated field.”62 Men are to follow suit, and the Egyptian Ibr¯ah¯ım #Abd al Maj¯ıd writes in a similar vein in his L¯a Ah. ad yan¯am fi al-Iskandariyyah (; English trans. No One Sleeps in Alexandria, ).63 War reports, daily speech, train encounters, street fights, and marriages and religious strife are meticulously pursued as if to escape bourgeois novelistic patterns and constructs. Psychological internalization occurs in women writing to depict loneliness. But their male counterpart is to be found in such novels as Al-H¯ulah (She-monster, ) by Far¯uq al-Buqayl¯ı, for instance. The trend cannot be appreciated in full unless compared to male narratives of social ills, with their uniform structuration of effect and response. In the novels of Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah Farm¯an and Hann¯ah M¯ınah, which . I have already mentioned, a great deal of emphasis is laid on the sufferings of the lower classes, a topic which has drawn many critics’ attention. What saves these works from the most obvious drawbacks of the thesis novel is their writers’ avoidance of explicit intrusions and authorial comments. Their authors’ concern is to expose the social conditions of the lower classes, thus opening people’s eyes to certain evils prevalent especially during the Second World War and the period of colonial occupation. They believe in the organic unity of the society, in its interrelatedness despite class exploitation or selfish pursuits, showing how those who search for happiness at the expense of a social or national cause are doomed to suffer in the end. Characters such as Mahj¯ . ub in ¯ Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Modern Cairo) or Ham ı dah in Zuq¯ a q al-Midaqq, . F¯aris in M¯ın¯a’s Al-Mas. ¯ab¯ıh al-zurq (Blue lamps) and Mus.t.af¯a in Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah Farm¯an’s Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an (The Date-Palm and the neigh. bors) attempt to seek personal solutions for social evils, thereby inviting their creators’ punishment according to a precise distribution of poetic justice. Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. . Ibr¯ah¯ım #Abd al Maj¯ıd, L¯a Ah. ad yan¯am fi al-Iskandariyyah (Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ); English translation: No One Sleeps in Alexandria, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). 62

63

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  Debating Novels of Apprenticeship

This same system of retribution informs the political novel, especially that of the Bildungsroman type. While the political issue in the social novel is limited to involvement in demonstrations, like Fahm¯ı in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Trilogy (Bayn al-Qas. rayn) or #Al¯ı T¯ . ah¯a’s discourses on politics in Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah or even like S¯ Farm¯an’s . in Gh¯a"ib Tu"mah . . ahib ¯ı in M¯ın¯a’s Al-Mas. ¯ab¯ıh Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an and Muhammad al-Halab . . al-zurq, the political novel is often concerned with the career of a central character. Such is the case with Gh¯anim al-Dabb¯agh’s Dajjah f¯ı al. ¯ zuq¯aq or #Azız Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Mund. il and #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Maj¯ıd al-Rubay#¯ı’s Al-Washm. Like M¯ın¯a’s Al-Thalj ya"t¯ı min al-n¯afidhah (Snow coming through the windows), these novels deal with problematic characters whose anticipations and disappointments in organized political action are of primary importance for their own authors. Thus #Az¯ız Sayyid J¯asim’s protagonist B¯abil in Al-Mun¯ad. il revolts against the limitations of dogmatic thought, developing instead a new ideology, whereas Fayy¯ad. in M¯ın¯a’s Al-Thalj ya"t¯ı min al-n¯afidhah decides to return to his city, after a period of self-imposed exile consequent to political pressure at home. In both al-Dabb¯agh’s Dajjah f¯ı al-zuq¯aq and #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an . Maj¯ıd al-Rubay#¯ı’s Al-Washm, the writers follow up the career of a hesitant but ever restless soul, who aspires for ideological commitment while succumbing to pressure to betray comrades and colleagues. In these novels, one may detect a veiled autobiographical element. The novels themselves are confessional, with an obvious masochistic desire on their writers’ part to punish themselves. Consequently it is not surprising that the last two novels end on a note of self-reproach, disillusionment and shame. The distribution of punishments works more directly and precisely in novels modeled after the Bildungsroman, dealing with the initiation of young protagonists into a situation of wide ranging social and ideological significance. Such is #Umar’s experience in the Algerian Muham. mad D¯ıb’s Thul¯athiyyah (Trilogy). Here, there is more emphasis on the education of the young hero, #Umar, whom the novelist has brought into contact with a number of people and circumstances, in order to present him as a protagonist morally and materially committed to the liberation of Algeria. As a Bildungsroman, this novel must inevitably show #Umar as gradually and consistently gaining in political and social knowledge, developing consequently into a protagonist invested with heroic qualities. Those who oppose him must perish according to natu-

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ral laws that happen to meet the requirements of poetic justice. Yet the form itself may also entail further complications that resist closure. The social ladder that works as the backbone for linear narrative can fall apart whenever there is an underlying ironic structure that partakes of the complexity of the Algerian experience, for example. The repeated scenario which cuts across linearity in the Algerian Rash¯ıd Ab¯u Jadrah’s (b. ) Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (), for instance, plays on the trope of the strait, in order to problematize, not only the impact of history on people, their present, and their prospects, but also the implications of this history as a past. The father who raises his son to be like the hero who crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in  traps the son in an impasse where there is no way out. The son cannot be another person, and the age itself allows no heroic prospects even within the Algerian communal fight against the colonizer. Between the model and the real, there is a gulf, a strait, and the means to cross are not available. Family education faces the discrepancy between the attainable and the ideal, and the novel of education is undermined as a viable means to account for the complexity of life. An imposed vision may endow novels of apprenticeship with a structure. Whenever the writer recognizes the difficulty of settling for some materialization of efforts and dreams, ideology can be summoned to offer an endless idealist prospect. The Lebanese Tawf¯ıq Y¯usuf #Aww¯ad’s (d. ) Taw¯ . ah¯ın Bayr¯ut (; English translation: Death in Beirut, ) is a case in point.64 His protagonist, the young girl from the south of Lebanon Tam¯ımah, leaves her village to settle in Beirut. Like many, she is attracted to al-Hamr¯ a Street where vice is rampant and debauchery . is evident everywhere. Meant as an initiation into metropolitan life, this experience is the opposite of the purgatorial journey, for her innocence is gradually lost in this corrupt urban milieu. She is targeted by male desire, and watched and agonized by her relatives.65 #Aww¯ad follows her career through conflicting circumstances, as she succumbs to, or resists, temptation, focusing throughout on his protagonist’s inner feelings and social manners. After series of setbacks and disenchantments, Tam¯ımah becomes wiser, realizing that her own freedom makes no sense apart from the freedom of others. Instead of searching for personal solutions to social problems, she joins the forces of revolution and change, pro¯ ab, ); English trans64 Tawf¯ıq Y¯ usuf #Aww¯ad, Taw¯ . ah¯ın Bayr¯ut (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ lation: Death in Beirut, trans. Leslie McLoughlin (London: Heinemann, ). 65 See Evelyne Accad on desire as violence, Sexuality and War, especially pp. –.



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jected on a mysterious figure that she calls “the man.” “As soon as I walk along with him,” she concludes, “I shall no longer speak of myself as Tam¯ımah Nas.s.u¯ r” (p. ). This decision, rather than indicative of ideological maturity, seems too contrived to suit the general structural and thematic pattern of #Aww¯ad’s novel. On a different level, it also asserts submersion into an ideology, which is also a male monopoly. As a dissenter, #Aww¯ad’s Tam¯ımah has demonstrated some emotional and intellectual growth brought about by a determined effort to see through falsification and deceit. But in accordance with the prevailing conventions of ideological commitment, #Aww¯ad decides to end Tam¯ımah’s career on a note of self-effacement, which is inconsistent with her intellectual growth. Her final alliance with “forces of revolution and change” is similar to Wal¯ıd Mas#¯ud’s decision to join Palestinian guerrillas in Jabr¯a’s Al-Bah. th #an Wal¯ıd Mas #¯ud (English translation: In search of Walid Masoud, ). At first sight, Jabr¯a’s work would appear to be a novel of ideas, dealing with Wal¯ıd’s disenchantment with social and cultural life and his consequent participation in armed struggle against the division and occupation of Palestine. But a careful study of this work shows that Jabr¯a is playing on the enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause. Wal¯ıd’s mysterious disappearance is treated as in a detective novel but the search soon becomes a search for meaning in a complicated social and cultural bourgeois experience. The discovery of Wal¯ıd’s taped farewell provokes conjectures, explanations and further problems, leading in a very intricate manner to each participant’s past and present, expectations and attainments being revealed, along with the views and actions of others as seen, mostly, through Wal¯ıd’s eyes, which happen also to be the author’s eyes. The search for Wal¯ıd leads to such revelations as his love affairs, his distrust of institutionalized culture and ideology, and his disillusionment with bourgeois egoism and selfishness at a time so disastrous for the Palestinians. But instead of evoking some philosophy of action and resistance, this search leads to an artistic creation, similar to Scheherazade’s involuted work, which is the novel itself. Indeed, the studied nature of the language of the taped farewell reveals a meticulous concern with diction that aspires to attain the effectiveness of ritual, enchantment and magic. In this, Jabr¯a’s work invites comparison not only to Tennyson’s island of Shalott and palace of art, but also with Oscar Wilde’s escape into a private world of aesthetic poignancy. Indeed, the reader feels at times that Jabr¯a’s work uses the national issue only as a convention that is identical with marriages and recognition scenes in traditional novels.

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Apprenticeship as Identity Affirmation For all this Jabr¯a’s novel substantiates the thesis that the modern Arab novelist is searching for an identity of his/her own, which surely corresponds to a general rational search for a philosophy of life that restores the Arab’s pride in himself/herself and his past to counterbalance the predominance of western culture. In fact, this search can be traced in both al-Tayyib S¯ . . alih’s Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (; English translation: Season of Migration to the North, ) and #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s Sib¯aq al-mas¯af¯at al-Taw¯ ı lah (Long distance race, ). In a al. Tayyib S¯ . . alih’s novel, the young Sudanese protagonist Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd is rewarded for his intelligence with a scholarship to study in England. There his achievements, publications and academic record draw attention to him. His charm, eloquence and self-orientalization, to meet the expectations of some young females, involve him in series of troubles which become the focus of the narrative as an encounter between the empire and its reneged dependents, as the spokesman for the empire says. The novel is this writing-back discourse. Al-Tayyib S¯ . . alih himself admits that he always feels the urge to “present something of our own.” “We are like a bubble of air trapped in a shell of our own making, within a rock of Western European culture. We need an explosion to blow away both shell and rock.” His protagonist, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, determines to stand by himself against an overpowering culture. It is, however, through a vigorous initiation into his own national culture, symbolized by a baptism in the Nile, that the narrator is reborn, free from the destructive sense of inferiority and “retaliatory violence.”66 A similar concern with national self-assertion is to be found in #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s Sib¯aq al-mas¯af¯at al-Taw¯ . ılah (Long distance race, 67 ). Modeled after Western travel accounts and Orientalists’ autobiographies, this novel deals with a British agent’s career in Iran during the early fifties. Peter Macdonald starts his career with the Foreign Office with the platitudes and assumptions that make up the traditional Western image of the East. Throughout his career, however, he suffers a series of disappointments and frustrations that run counter to this image, driving him to confess at the end that the British Empire can no longer survive, and that he can longer take pride in being a Nadia Hijab, “Interview with Tayyib Salih,” Middle East (June, ), pp. –. #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, Sib¯aq al-mas¯af¯at al-Taw¯ . ılah (Long-distance race; Beirut: MADN, ). 66

67

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 

representative of this Empire. In very postcolonial terms, MacDonald discerns the death of empire, and with it the disintegration of a British Orientalist corpus. Alienated and defeated, he ends his career sadly resigned to recognizing that the East is a complex reality, and that international politics and affairs have become a game of nations which must be played well, but always with due respect to other people. Other writings may propose a reading of this complex reality through concentration on micro-politics in their relational context, like Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s foundation in Hik¯ . ay¯at al- mu"assasah (). The dealings, double dealings, correspondence, clandestine literature and coffee-house chats make up some heteroglossia that directs attention to interests, obsessions, transformations and careers that cut across every sector. While the “President” looms large in allusions, gossip, pictures, and behind closed doors, he is a version of a postcolonial baptized growth. These tales amount to daily chats and writings as manifesting power relations, interests, conflicts, intrigues, wiles and madness. Micro-politics, in its Foucauldian sense, is a recovery of meaning for the national, the regional and the global. Every detail begins from the residual to the substantial, the peripheral to the central, and from self to community in an ever- changing play of effect and response. Narrative is no longer a designed imaginary, a structural worldview or a contrived ideological panopticon forwarded through an omniscient eye, but a matter of speech and life. The Colonial Referent Such an overview of engagements in their socio-aesthetic and political manifestations may lead the reader into the interrelatedness between form and content, for form takes shape to account artistically for the nature of narrative at hand. While these engagements direct attention to the local, the national and the indigenous, they also provide the other dimension of the postcolonial, namely coloniality as its referent. To be more specific, it may be worthwhile to provide a number of narrative examples, within a chronological order to map out this referential frame. As there is a colonial stage, post-colonial maturation, and a post-independence state, we may cite examples of the nature of the encounter with the Other, in its ramifications, to demonstrate the trajectory of love and rejection between the native and its Others. Insofar as the colonial stage is concerned, we may cite the Syrian Hannah M¯ın¯a’s Al-Shams f¯ı yawm gh¯a"im (Sun on a cloudy day), .

 



K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma, and Ahdaf Soueif ’s A Map of Love. In these three novels, the presence of the Other goes beyond individuals, despite the fact that this presence leaves its scars and traces on human beings who appear as characters in these narratives. As the power occupying Algeria since  (until ), France has left its stamp there. We have every reason to suppose that the contaminated contact between the colonized and the colonizer should have been very diversified, though damaging. The writer K¯ateb Yac¯ıne can come with no better trope than the name of the protagonist, Nedjma, or star, to reverse the Orientalized picture of an Arab East, penetrated by the colonizer. He makes her the center and the catalyst for the narrative. Nedjma turns out to be a French woman’s daughter (p. ). She could be the daughter of Si Mokhtar or Rachid’s father, as both spent the night with her in a cave, with one of them, Rachid’s father, found dead there the next day. With this enigmatic background, Nedjma is given so much attraction as to draw the attention of the young: “Nedjma matured quickly, like any Mediterranean girl; the sea air produced a bloom on her skin combining dark tint with the brilliance of metallic reflections, mottled like some animal;” says one of the young suitors. He adds: “[H]er throat has the white gleams of a foundry, where the sun hammers down to her throat, and the blood under the downy cheeks, speaks loud and fast, betraying the enigmas of her gaze” (pp. –). Along with attraction, she is given ultra dimensions of inaccessibility and independence. She indicates a colonial connection, but emerges as a catalyst for a nation, too. She defies stories of pure genealogical ancestry, while she offers new images of self-sufficiency and independence. The Algerian novelist manipulates the trope to implicate symbolism within a network of historical detail. The French referent appears, too, in Hannah M¯ınah’s Al-Shams f¯ı . yawm gh¯a"im (Sun on a cloudy day). Using the historical background of the French mandate for Syria in , which ended in , and with enough reference to national revolts, especially the one of , the novelist is after the ramifications of the French presence in Syria during that period. The division between the exploiters, including the narrator’s family, and the poor is carefully demarcated, despite the author’s attempt to leave the narrator in-between: “Motivated by the romanticism of youth, I decided to be in the tailor’s camp along with the woman, the tambourine player, and the others who demonstrated against the Mandate and who demanded a national government” (pp. –). This early declaration is saturated, however, with French



 

sentiments and culture, too, for the narrator is romantically affiliated as such under the impact of the French Revolution and its ideals of freedom and equality, which are betrayed by the French empire: “The French revolution gave me such heroes. I felt closer to those who rushed to destroy the Bastille than to those who were inside it, trying to defend it. The life of the Jacobeans was warm, bright and colorful” (p. ). When faced with the complications of choice, there is a way out, still immature, but available nevertheless through the mother’s suggestion to see him going to France to study, where he can get married to a French woman: “You will be married to a Parisian girl. We will be proud of you then. Ah, I wish this would happen” (p. ). The marriage package is persistently present, as we shall notice in the next chapter, and it assumes the connotations of a symbiotic trajectory whereby change takes place and some incarnation leads to new life, beyond the impasse of conflict as augmented during the Mandate. Ahdaf Soueif ’s Map of Love is even more concerned with offering her map of reading, beyond imperial politics. There is a map of love that is drawn by people, regardless of color, race, and nationality, she obviously suggests. The narrative unfolds mainly as letters written by Anna Winterbourne (–), to cover her stay in Egypt, in full sympathy with the Egyptian aspirations for independence. Of more relevance to this chapter is the use of the colonial referent. Marriage underlies the narrative, its map of love, against another map of misuse, enmity and exploitation. The imperial map has an Orientalist discourse, which is replete with discrimination, arrogance, and hearsay. The map of love has as markers aspirations for progress, change, freedom, equality, women’s rights, and national independence for the Arab nation. On the other hand, Cromer, who was the British governor, was appalled by British ladies who converted to Islam, and by those like Lady Anna who got married to Muslims and Arabs (p. ). He was so impudent as to ask the Egyptian public figure to sign a guarantee not to marry another, insinuating that polygamy is the norm there: “I want you to sign an undertaking that you will not take another wife while you remain married to lady Anna” (p. ), he said to the Egyptian husband. The narrative has British occupation of Egypt, and the defeat of #Ur¯ab¯ı in , as background. It follows up the British presence in Egypt, the resignation of Cromer in  after the massacre of Egyptian peasants in Dinshaway, the declaration of Egypt as a British Protectorate in , the Sa#d Zaghl¯ul’s revolt as the leader of the Wafd party against the British in , reaching to the treaty of independence

 



in . The narrative uncovers the machinery of the empire, its apparatus and interventions even in the personal life of others, including its own citizens. The outcome is an overview of potential human love that defies imperialism. But, this love trajectory is meager in context, as the encounter is rather fraught with difficulty than one successful story of love. This encounter is even more complex as the national elite, whom Frantz Fanon has already singled as possible advocates of the colonialist legacy, takes over. As narrative proper is not a duplication of a reportage for the press, it has to make up its tropes and markers, so as to focus its nucleus. Such is the use of the Coca-Cola in Sun#all¯ah Ibr¯ah¯ım’s Al-Lajnah (; English translation: The Committee, ). The Anwar al-S¯ad¯at’s (President of Egypt –) open-door policy led many intellectuals to suspect another track of corruption, especially when criticism was brutally censored and silenced. The narrative as forwarded by the protagonist is bare, free from the metaphorical. It parodies the idea of open-door policy, as he finds himself in front of the committee, which interrogates him, accuses him of impotency, asks him to undress so they can see and examine him. The members of the committee repeat to him that it is only his free choice which has brought him in front of them for investigation, yet they send one of them to his apartment, to share his bed, watch every single gesture, follow him to the washroom while keeping a gun with him carefully hidden between his legs. The narrator develops a sardonic tone throughout, but using Coca-Cola, as the symbol for monopoly and penetration, implicating the very committee and its apparatus in its business. “Coca-Cola went through two world wars and emerged victorious,” he explains to them, as part of his answer to their question regarding the most momentous event in this age (p. ). He uses it to go over American foreign policy and wars, and to suggest that it stands for “indigenous nationalism” (p. ). Throughout the system is subtly targeted, as totally subordinate to the United States. Here, the conflict with Western powers is no longer an issue, for the post-independence state passes through a stage of corruption. It distorts information, confiscates freedom of expression, and sells the whole country to imperial corporations. Novels devote a great deal of attention to these encounters with the West, as we shall see in the next chapter, but new engagements with the post-capitalist legacy culminate the narrative corpus. In other words, narratives get more tuned to the emerging consciousness with its awareness of the com-



 

plexity of the new situation, with its fierce competitiveness, use of massive power, manipulation of media, distortion of the democratic ideal, misuse of codes of honor, and exploitation of natural resources and human power. More often than not, the encounter with the Other is no longer a travel account, but a site of complexity, which is deeply intertwined with national issues and human life. Narratives may build on conflict, such as class struggle or national liberation struggle, but their basic patterns are ironic, not representational. The post-independence state develops a discourse of lying and fabrication, which writers have to cope with through parody, irony, travesty and humor. With these narratives that span a period of great transformation and challenge, postcolonial Arabic fiction has a great variety of discursive strategies, which manifest a rich experience and multifarious tradition. Every narrative, and there are hundreds of others, has a specific perspective and a narratological viewpoint to participate in an art that has been growing all over the Arab world, including peripheries of exile and expatriation ironically located in metropolitan centers.

  ARABS AND THE WEST: COUNTERNARRATIVES AND NARRATIVE ENCOUNTERS

A substantial portion of modern Arabic narrative uses the encounter with the West as its trajectory towards self-knowledge. While the French expedition in Egypt in  led to many other encounters on larger and smaller levels, the nature of subsequent invasions and wars involve the encounter with the West with more complexity, which surfaces even in narratives of cultural and personal stamp. Building on a past that is also complicated, the emerging consciousness is so fraught with intensity and contradiction as to implicate narratives in desperate search for discursive strategies to account for the gravity of the encounter. This search also entails a better acquaintance with the growth and development of colonized cultures and their narrative variants elsewhere. While admittedly belonging to a rich heritage, Arabic culture under occupation emerged as minority literature, too. Indeed, the issue of minority literature may lead us to a reading of Arabic culture in its relation to the imperial legacy at large. Under virtual occupation or passing through mandate arrangements since ,1 the Arab countries, during these respective periods, were not living a cultural growth. Arabic itself suffered deterioration on its classical level, and intellectuals were at pain, throughout that period and until the revivalism of the late nineteenth century, to hold to the classical tradition to halt further deterioration. Although hegemonic discourse makes use of the classical as a venue for its political and cultural penetration, this manipulation should be seen in context, for Arabic culture at large was a 1

The Ottoman Turks conquered Syria and Algeria in , Egypt in , Tripoli in , Tunis in . They were in full control of Iraq in , expanding their rule to Yemen and Hijaz. See M.M. Badawi, “Introduction: The background,” p. . The French occupied Algeria in , and Tunisia in , and the British occupied Aden in , and Egypt in . The British were attacking Sudan in , and Kitchener defeated the Mahdists of Sudan in . In – Italy occupied Libya. Egypt was a British Protectorate in , and they took over Iraq and Palestine in . The Balfour Declaration by the British to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine took place in , and in  there were French mandates for Syria and Lebanon; and British mandates for Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan.



 

minority culture in relation to that of the colonizer. Napoleon manipulated classical discourse and made use of the native literati, but this should be seen in terms of political expediency that would soon give way to imperial cultural encroachments that targeted native language and culture, as the Algerian experience demonstrates. Notwithstanding the actual needs of the rising reading public in the Arab lands, massive translations from the metropolitan culture fall within the same manipulative design. On the other hand, the rising elite throughout periods of occupation and foreign rule was not of one mind and stand. Postcolonial narratives draw attention to these factions. We are told in Ahdaf Soueif ’s Map of Love, for instance, that the British in Egypt think of “Faris Nimr, the Editor of al-Muqattam,” as a “ ‘true gentleman and anglophile’ ” (p. ). The nationals looked upon the journal as proBritish, trapping intellectuals and leaders in interviews, which were damaging to the national cause of the Egyptian revolution against the British (p. ). The sense of anxiety, suspicion, and politicization of issues distinguishes national literature and stamps it with the modes and scars of minority writing. As long as occupation entails another prioritization, whereby metropolitan culture assumes ascendance and hegemony, the national develops its fight as minority. One may agree with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that minority literature manifests more engagement with the political even in delineations of personal and individual dramas, instead of the Oedipal concerns of the competing other. This very concern gives way to emphasis on collective and communal values, which distinguish this literature as “revolutionary.”2 No less significant is writing in the language of the colonizer. In K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma, for instance, the effort of writing is directed, not only to “to explode the formal limits that strangle literature,” through experimentation with discursive strategies and creative modes, but also through its “creative violence to the language it uses.”3 This experimentation of the minor in the language of the major is the more violating and transgressive for its effective and deliberate deterritorialization which strips the language of its markers and the genre of its distinctive features as nourished in the French cultural tradition, for writing takes as text the colonized land, its topography and population in a specific time of its 2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), and p. –. 3 See Bernard Aresu, “Introduction,” Nedjma, pp. xxxviii, and xlivi.

   



history under colonization. These intersectional encounters indicate the widening scope of inquiry, but they may also demonstrate the need for further methodological research to account for the richness and variety of narrative techniques. One of the salient features of contemporary cultural studies, and of the comparatist pursuit at large, is the increasing attention to power relations as the very dynamics of encounter and contact. Instead of the outdated placid concern with influence, or the tendency to categorize colonized and subaltern cultures as passive recipients of an overflowing legacy of universal values nurtured and cherished in a Western canon of master narratives, there is now something more than opposition, or the “quarrel with history” as forwarded by Françoise Lionnet,4 in her otherwise brilliant reading of Francophone fiction. We are currently experiencing an increasing interest in subsumed texts and marginalized narratives, along with the ongoing endeavor to assess and map a whole spectrum of subjugation and containment. However, these subsumed and marginalized texts must not be relegated to the status of mere challenges to supremacy and subversions of authoritarianism or totalitarianism. To do so denies these endeavors their subtext of sociopolitical and cultural knowledge, and their response to national and global transformations. Comparativity may lose a significant component of its project whenever it denies these formative elements. After all, these relationships between colonized or subaltern literatures and the cultural networks of their origins are largely responsible for postcolonial studies’ ascendancy over the monolithic discourses and narratives of essentialism. Even such terms as “assimilation” and “acculturation,” regardless of their historicity, have come under attack for being confused with permanent subjugation (Lionnet, p. ). Again, the fight over discourse and its register is only a sign of current consciousness. It is not to be confused with issues of certain gravity in the real situation at hand. To disapprove of certain terms of literary approaches does not necessarily entail mitigation of suffering or redress of some past historical processes. Nor does it deny the relevance of class, race, and regional interests in shaping encounters and contacts. In the arena of power relations, for instance, the colonialist enter4

Françoise Lionnet, “Logiques métisse: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Representation,” in Postcolonial Subjects: Francophone Women Writers, ed. Mary Jean Green, et al. (London/Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), pp. –, at p. . References are hereafter within the text.



 

prise and its ramifications have left, indisputably, strong marks on the lives and cultures of other nations. Insofar as Arabic fiction is concerned, responses to this contact vary according to specific platforms, as analyzed by Salih Altoma.5 By being brought together under a paradigm of “attraction and repulsion” in Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a’s words,6 or “alteration and affinity,” as Jacques Berque’s articulation intimates,7 these responses have served to rejuvenate and incite contesting discourses among Arab intellectuals, including fiction writers. It is easy to accept Berque’s argument that difference is central for national identity, even though it is the very core of the Western sense of supremacy. Even when a national bourgeoisie aspires to model itself after certain Western standards, it remains entangled in the very nexus of difference unable to change its skin but creeping nevertheless into the “magic vault of distance,” to use Fanon’s phrase (Black Skin, p. ), implicitly postulating, however, that others exist “as rivals” (Berque, p. ). Thus, on the level of the individual, the assimilationist finds it difficult to fit into another context, not only because the colonialist continues to disapprove of this, but also because to take a white mask “makes him a laughing stock for not being himself,” driving, for instance, the French wife in Fanon’s Black Skin to feel that “she is marrying a joke” (p. ). What applies to individuals also applies to theories of wholesale assimilation, such as the “regionalism” of the s and s in Arabic Islamic culture, including the well-articulated, but controversial, pronouncement of T¯ Mediterraneanism in his Mus. ah¯a Husayn’s . taqbal al-thaq¯afah f¯ı Mis. r (; English translation: The Future of Culture in Egypt, ),8 his emphasis on the fusion of cultures and the immediate relevance of the Mediterranean basin and its cultures. The very search for regionally oriented culturalism is contaminated by its innate defensiveness, which paradoxically associates it with postmodernist anxieties that belie sustained theorizations. 5 Salih J. Altoma, “Westernization and Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Yearbook of Contemporary and General Studies,  (), pp. –. Further citations are within the text. 6 Jabr¯ a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a, “Modern Arabic Literature and the West,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –, at p. . Further citations are within the text. 7 Jacques Berque, Cultural Expression in Arab Society Today. Trans. Robert W. Stookey (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, ), p. . Citations from this book are within the text. 8 T¯ Mustaqbal al-thaq¯afah f¯ı Mis. r (; Cairo: Mat.ba#at al-Ma#¯arif, . ah¯a Husayn, . ); English translation: The Future of Culture in Egypt (Washington: The American Council of Learned Sciences, ). Another print, trans. Sidney Glazer (New York: Octagon, ).

   

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The case is even more complicated when applied to nation states in the Arab world: here, the set standard is the West,9 but Arab revolutionary rhetoric simultaneously deplores everything Western, including the liberal tradition. An earlier paradoxical situation, argues Jabr¯a, took place following World War II and the “Palestine disaster of ,” when the “Arabs became more and more politically alienated from the West” (“Modern Arabic Literature and the West,” p. ). Aside from the intellectual search for some interaction between tradition and modernity, usually met within T.S. Eliot’s dynamic understanding of the old and the new, there were symbols, images, and “deliberate misquotations” to resurrect writing from a standstill toward some larger interchange already erupting onto a Western “extra-national” culture with many “tributary sources,” that may be seen as back-grounding present multiculturalism (Ibid, pp. –). Intertextual negotiation beyond ideology, according to Jabr¯a, was the way out in the s. Yet, despite its lucid presentation of inevitable influences on Arabic culture since the late s, Jabr¯a’s reading only touches upon tributaries—such as Marxism, Existentialism, and Humanism (Ibid, pp. –)—in order to justify more dominating concerns like “social justice, political struggle, and moral evaluation of the human condition” (p. ). It falls short, though, of accounting for the multifaceted reception of, say, Shelley, Sartre, and T.S. Eliot among Arab intellectuals—a response, which resulted in the very conspicuous, albeit controversial, presence of these Western authors in Arabic culture throughout the s and s. Eliot’s perceived yearning for regeneration and his notion of tradition have met with both disagreement and approval, as I have argued in another place.10 On the other hand, the intellectual elite of Arab urban centers has shown greater diversity than has been previously acknowledged. Whereas some intellectuals “internalize a vision of themselves projected by the colonizer,” in Lionnet’s paraphrase of Fanon (p. ), others have developed decolonizing strategies that partake of subversion, contestation, irony, and codified parody to challenge the two major narratives of supremacy—the authoritarian narrative of the West and the dictatorial national narrative. Cer-

9 See Hourani’s views, qtd. in Saree S. Makdisi, “Postcolonial Literature in a Neocolonial World: Modern Arabic Culture and the End of Modernity,” Boundary-. (Spring ), pp. –, at p. . 10 See “Engaging Tradition in Modern Arab Poetics,” Journal of Arabic Literature, , n.  (), pp. –.

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 

tainly, these writers aptly belong to George N. Sfeir’s neat categorization of Arab intellectuals who are well read in Western cultures with no attending agenda, for they “were more sophisticated in their approach to the social problems of their time and broader in their interests.”11 Moreover, “these writers lacked a common cause and did not form a single group or school,” for they “scattered in pursuit of the many and varied problems of modernization.” To account for their varied perspectives, Sfeir finds that “their immediate experience” only partly explains their concerns, for these preoccupations also “stemmed from their readings of such modern masters as Gorki, Dostoevski, Joyce, Kafka, Sartre, Camus, Mann, Silone, Hemingway, and Faulkner.” But Sfeir omits André Gide, Anatole France, Alan Baton, and, among other things, the non-fiction narrative of Frantz Fanon which has been made available through such translators as the Syrian Sam¯ı al-Dur¯ub¯ı. Although Sfeir’s lucid analysis undeniably accounts for the background informing a substantial portion of contemporary narrative since the s, it may nevertheless lead to the sort of prioritization that in retrospect minimizes nativity. Writers of the late s and s were undeniably drawn to Western literatures, but, on many occasions, their readings also intensify their sense of locality, as the poetic tradition and social narratives demonstrate. The emphasis on one-track response may fail to account for narrative heteroglossia. Hence, while correctly accepting John W. Aldridge’s description of the novelistic tradition as one “of the single consciousness” through which the writer “seeks to impress his own assumptions upon his audience” in restless mood “typical during renascence,” Sfeir finds in H¯an¯ı al-R¯ahib’s AlMahz¯um¯un (The Routed or the Defeated, ), for instance, an attempt “to create characters who fit certain existentialist ideas developed in European literature” (p. ). In other words, the earlier premise of a balanced combination between native experience and grounding in French thought gives way to another that relegates nativity to the background, a standpoint which Altoma approaches differently, as an existentialist outlook in search of change.12

George N. Sfeir, “The Contemporary Arabic Novel,” Daesalus,  (), pp. – , at p. . 12 For more, see Salih J. Altoma, “Westernization and Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” p. . 11

   

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Arabs’ Others Nevertheless, some of Sfeir’s stipulations prove quite valid upon close reading of a number of intellectualized texts as distinguished from the popular and the socio-historical, as I will show below. As a start, it is worth understanding that reading Western and Russian literatures was one of the serious pursuits of Arab intellectuals throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The liberal tradition that distinguishes Jabr¯a and many other intellectuals is strongly informed by these readings. Some, who were more engaged in political life, made use of these readings in their political discourse as it shows forth in their narratives. On different levels are the writings that are more attuned to the Western novelistic tradition, its representational underpinnings or neo-historical constructions. Especially in the s, one may come across writings of existentialist color, or Marxist ideology, or nationalist bent, liberal visions, or simply noncommittal. Enjoying the relatively liberal climate following the Nahd. ah exuberance, writings were more pronounced in the s and early s, for example, than in the post-revolution periods (i. e.  in Egypt;  and  in Iraq). Having begun with full translations and appropriations of Western texts,13 Arabic fiction needed to pass later through a difficult stage, eluding censorship,14 in order to meet the increasing demand of the rising readership and, simultaneously,15 to escape the constraints against such writing.16 In so doing it has developed strategies of transgression that include patterns of acculturation and “transculturation” as “a process of cultural intercourse and exchange” (Lionnet, p. ).17 These necessities, as much as the driving desire to communicate, involve Arabic fiction in a larger

13 M.M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature and the West (London: Ithaca Univ. Press, ), p. . 14 Salih J. Altoma, “Sociopolitical Themes in the Contemporary Arabic Novel: –,” in The Cry of Home: Cultural Nationalism and the Modern Writer, ed. Ernest Lewald (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, ), pp. –, at p. . 15 Trevor LeGassick, From Naïve Simplicity to Sophisticated Obscurity—Arabic fiction in a Century of Change,” Mundus Artium, . (), pp. –, at p. ; and Muhsin J. AlMusawi, “The Rebel, the Ascetic and the Rogue: Other Patterns of Characterization in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Al-Arabiyya,  (), pp. –. 16 Muhsin J. Al-Musawi, “Metafiction as a Theoretic Discourse in Contemporary Arabic Writing,” Gilgamesh,  (), pp. –. 17 See also Muhsin J¯ asim al-M¯usaw¯ı, Tha"r¯at Scheherazade (Scheherazade revenged) . (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ab, ).

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domain of contextual and intertextual occupations and concerns. Thus we encounter a growing need to fathom, map and outgrow the strategies of analysis advanced by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, among others, before we can grasp intertextuality as an additionally fitting methodology. Postcolonial theory has to cope with this need through analysis of patterns of narrative, discursive strategies and informing visions. As part of the effort, let us re-address the seemingly old issues in cultural studies of literature. Although many writers and scholars recognize the concept of contamination—already forwarded by Césaire as early as his rejoinder to Mannoni, and with its intrinsic dynamics subsequently reworked in Une Tempête as counter play to Shakespeare’s The Tempest 18—very little attention has been paid to Césaire’s impact on Fanon or to Fanon’s three-stage analysis of the encounter between the dominating and the dominated.19 Set within the context of the French colonization of Algeria and a large portion of Africa, Fanon’s narrative discourse tends to account for the pre-colonial, colonial and immediate postcolonial contacts and separations implicit in this encounter. This analysis of the period of “unqualified assimilation” (Fanon, Wretched, p. ) may well apply to the early appropriation by Arabic narratives of Western, and especially French, works of sentiment and romance.20 These works constitute the substantial production of the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Viewed in these terms, even the historical novel throughout the period in question, especially in its themes of glorious past and national identity, is inscribed under the opposing presence of others; for the native wakes up “disturbed,” deciding “to remember what he is” (Fanon, Wretched, p. ) in order to forge or fabricate a sense of belonging. These historical reenactments betray a

Aimé Césaire, Tempête, Tempest: based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest: adaptation for a Black Theatre, trans. Richard Miller (New York: G. Borchardt, ). 19 See for further discussion, Gregson Davis, Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), pp. –; Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge,” Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, ), pp. –, at p. ; and Laurence M. Porter, “Aimé Césaire’s Reworking Shakespeare: Anti-Colonialist Discourse in Une Tempête,” Comparative Literature Studies, , n.  (), pp. –, at pp. –. 20 M.M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature and the West, p. . See also the present writer’s al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah. See also Muhammad Nasser Shoukany, “Orientalism and the Arab Literary Responses,” Unpublished Diss., University of Texas at Austin, . 18

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great deal of cultural indeterminacy, not only because of their contrived sense of some “static” tradition, but also because, according to Fanon, native writers suffer from a self-imposed isolation which they betray in their “exterior relations with people” and which they tend to compensate for by relying on a memory of “bygone days of … childhood” to be inscribed along with “old legends,” but only “in the light of a borrowed estheticism” and according to a “conception of the world which was discovered under other skies” (Ibid., p. ). Applicable to a significant portion of early historical novels and subsequent veiled autobiographical narratives, this notion has the power to put us face to face with a number of protagonist-narrators whose view of native life and culture is no less blurred or confused than that of their Other. A significant portion that accords with George Sfeir’s thesis of subordination to Western schools of thought may fit here into Fanon’s stipulation, whenever novels tend to superimpose their vision on a reality that is actually lived by their people. In Fanon’s words, “the native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner” (Ibid., p. ). Rather than adopting a complacent perspective, Fanon’s advocacy opts for a determined effort to see oneself and one’s culture as they really are, with all their troubles and needs. Thus, he suggests, in the third stage of his analysis, that the native writer has to escape being “hypnotized by … mummified fragments” or “static” notions and images of custom and tradition, for the “desire to attach oneself to tradition or to bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people” (Ibid., p. ). These writers, who usually arrive as “latecomers” with no deep commitment to belie fabrication, have to escape “the risk of being out of date” by finding “the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge” (p. ). The seething pot is no less significant than the search for the dynamic in modernity and tradition so as to lead the historical process, and also to halt further deterioration. Obviously disconcerting to many practitioners of pseudo-authenticity, and of the “self-pleasuring” side of postmodernism, as decried by Aijaz Ahmad in his book In Theory, Fanon’s argument can very well explain stages of assimilation and acculturation in narrative. It falls short, however, of accounting for that engagement in cultural zones which involves intellectuals in a dialogue that partakes of crossfertilization rather than subordination. The Lebanese Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s Al-

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Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter, ),21 for instance, demonstrates . the hesitation and indecision that follow passive assimilation. On the other hand, it precedes the stage whereby occurs a show of practical commitment, even in the form of intellectual release of the mind as manifested in publications and literary platforms. It is at a later stage in the author’s career that some commitment takes place, as renarrated in Idr¯ıs’s veiled autobiographical novel As. ¯abi#un¯a allat¯ı tah. tariq (Our burning fingers. ),22 a sequel to the uncompleted career of the anonymous narrator of Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin . Quarter, ). In both narratives, Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s endeavor stands both as a culmination of the sort of intellectual engagement advocated by Sartre and as the very application of Fanon’s “literature of combat,” which “assumes responsibility” as “the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space” (Wretched, p. ). Fanon’s analysis proves quite valid whenever intellectual protagonists are brought into contact with cultural sites and climates. In Issa ¯ il¯a al-Quds (Returning to Jerusalem, ),23 for instance, Boullata’s #A"id the multi-voiced narrative reminds us of Faulkner as much as it draws attention to its antecedents in Mahf¯ . uz’s . Miram¯ar and Jabr¯a’s Al-Saf¯ınah (The ship). In this novel, the writer also resorts to many voices, and the narrative is a multiplication of viewpoints. As a novel of nostalgia, it needs this multiple narrative to account for the protagonist’s recollections of Jerusalem, his sense of loss, and possible retrieval and regain through will. But instead of being concerned with enlisting these voices to reach a solution or settle a problem, Boullata’s novel is preoccupied first with selfhood; it constantly reappraises the past and present in an effort to escape hybridity. While acknowledging American academic freedom, the university Professor Fu’¯ad Sirh¯ . an, whose voice begins and concludes the novel, still resists assimilation, searching instead for a form of return that might reorient roots, feelings and love. It is here that Sirh¯ . an sounds as if inscribed with the politics of engagement, which arose as a response to the so-called hybridity of Third World intellectuals in the metropolis. The novel tends to view even the expa21 Suhayl Idr¯ıs, Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter; Beirut: D¯ ar al-#Ilm lil-Mal¯ay¯ın, . ). Also Suhayl Idr¯ıs, As. ¯abi#un¯a allat¯ı tah. tariq (Our burning fingers; Beirut: D¯ar al¯ ab, ). Ad¯ 22 See on this point, Salih Altoma, “Sociopolitical Themes,” pp. –; and Allen, The Arabic Novel, p. . ¯ Il¯a al-Quds (Returning to Jerusalem; Beirut: al-Ittih¯ad Press, 23 Boullata, Issa J. #A"id ).

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triate scene, with its variety of people and discourses, as metonymic of conflicts and difficulties back home, only set this time within another aggravating frame of Western manipulation and intrigue. Through its many voices, the novel establishes a connection between national and expatriate scenes, and the love affair of the past between the Professor and his Jerusalem beloved resurfaces upon meeting her in London, as if to renew that past and with it the will to return. The death of Wid¯ad, as an early love in Fu’¯ad Sirh¯ . an’s life, may belie Fu’¯ad Sirh¯ . an’s dream of return; but the whole textual trajectory of the novel heads for a homecoming, in which the traveler arrives not as a foreigner but as an intellectual of authentic nativity. As an issue, homecoming is central to our reading of both the intellectual journey of the mind and delineated travelogue.24 In both cases, homecoming gains significance only after one has experienced a disorienting contact. Even Rajab Ism¯a#¯ıl of #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s Sharq al-Mutawassi.t (East of the Mediterranean, ) cannot survive an overwhelming sense of guilt over his submission and resignation in the face of coercion and torture in a postcolonial state. However, after meeting Dr. Fali, the anti-Nazi resistance fighter and physician, in Paris, Rajab regains his confidence. He says of Dr. Fali “Holding up until the very end. His sharp face, his quiet eyes say as much. They have resisted and won” (p. ). Self-critical and afraid of being seen by students who know about his disavowal and denial of political commitment under pressure by prison authorities, Rajab suspects that Dr. Fali may refuse to receive him or shake hands with him (p. ). However, the lesson, which Dr. Fali offers, amounts to violence: “Have hatred when fighting, it is the best of teachers” (p. ). It is this kind of advice that accords well with the precepts of Fanon’s “literature of combat.”This contact, after all, sends Rajab to Amnesty International meetings and similar conferences which publicize the misery and suffering in his land. In taking this action, Rajab overcomes fear: he takes a ship for home, although return means accepting sacrifice and death. Rajab, like other fictional constructs, is a representation of the “small number of honest intellectuals” who, in Fanon’s words, have to suffer the torture and oppression of the “anti-democratic regime depending on force and intimidation” (Wretched, p. ).

See the present writer’s “Writing in Exile: Which Sense of Be-Longing?” English Studies in Canada,  (), pp. –. 24

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Homecoming and returns can take on numerous discursive structures, as we will see later. Worth noticing, however, are the non-intellectualized narratives of this encounter between tradition and the West. Writers with less acumen for the intellectual experience, but with more interest in common life, may handle the issues of expatriation and homecoming differently. With more attention to love encounters and social and religious conflicts of interest, they can offer an antidote to other patterns of intellectual or literary narrative. These writings are less concerned with the ramifications and complexity of the encounter, and they may even lapse into the sensational. Such is the case with the Egyptian writer of popular fiction Muhammad Jal¯al in Hubb f¯ı Copen. . hagen (Love in Copenhagen).25 At the outset, the novel naïvely contrasts traditional education, learning, and ethics against the seductive life of Copenhagen. Everything that happens to the village chief guard’s son Shar¯ıf and his fiancée Kar¯ımah, Shaykh Radw¯ . an’s daughter, is a challenge to some facet of the traditional code of ethics. They live together in Copenhagen, but they sleep in separate beds, keeping passion under control, despite their mutual sexual desire. As need drives them to look for jobs, Kar¯ımah, ends up in a sex shop, thereby becoming a subject of gossip among Egyptians there. Anger blinds Shar¯ıf and makes him easy prey for a blonde woman searching for somebody to provoke her husband’s jealousy and anger. “I know this Danish woman,” says the owner of the sex shop, “she yearns for this absent-minded type; she exhausts him to the end, eating up his bones” (p. ). This speech, which only increases Kar¯ımah’s fear and anger, functions as a leitmotif to blur distinctions between cultures. It indicates the involvement of all without distinction in a life of desire and repulsion. Kar¯ımah also resists the owner’s advances, while Shar¯ıf runs away to the shore again, afraid of the jealous husband. Both are kept in suspense, in a disconcerting atmosphere of intrigue, enchantment and deceit. The song, which drives Kar¯ımah into frustration and despair, repeats: “Love’s flood drowns the city, don’t go to the mountain, you won’t survive” (p. ). Acting as a refrain, the song intensifies a sense of loss and love, fear and anticipation, driving Kar¯ımah to run towards the sea, where Shar¯ıf usually retreats to attain a renewal of love. This simplistic reunion, ostensibly signifying a triumph of traditional ethics, is actually undermined by a number of discursive strategies, Muhammad Jal¯al, Hubb f¯ı Copenhagen (Love in Copenhagen), in vol. , Mukht¯ar¯at . . (Selections; Cairo: GEBO, ). 25

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which underscore both the song and the owner’s speech. These involve the narrative in a subtext of media flow, daily speech, and the mundane reality of intrigue, passion, and frustration. What remains in one’s mind is the song, overflowing the text as the deluge, while both actors cannot rid memory of that poison or rupture which has already contaminated their code of ethics. They are no longer the same. Meant as popular fiction, this novel raises no serious questions in respect to inward journeying, which distinguishes postcolonial fiction. It falls, nevertheless, within narratives of encounter. Albeit in a different fashion and with a more focused contested terrain, Césaire’s Une Tempête of  cares for this in-between zone; for neither Caliban nor Prospero is the same in that representational encounter of two cultures, where, in Davis’s words, Prospero’s “will-to-power” is met with resistance as the “figure of Caliban… incarnates the irrepressible will of the colonized to be his own master.”26 In this line, it is perhaps tenable to propose that novels at large, and from both popular fiction and literary narrative, work within two paradigms: assimilation and resistance and man-woman exchangeability, as metonymic of East-West relations. In both cases, narrative assumes the density of its site, with its heteroglossia, cultural trafficking and human desire and love. It brings back to the reader’s attention the possible density of what Roland Barthes calls the “stereographic space” where intertextual enchainment involves fragments, bits, details and slices from every terrain of writing, speech and performance. The implications of the encounter go beyond the inward conflict, or its conspicuous racial manifestations. Fanon’s “seething pot” invites rephrasing to fit into expanding methodologies of reading to account for encounters and conflicts through intertextualities and significations. Especially in reading texts, issues that are addressed elsewhere, in political science or anthropology, in terms of binary opposition and conflict gain by opening up to include these methodologies that are bound to make the interdisciplinary nature of comparison wider and more rewarding. I agree here with what Sabry Hafez suggests as a way to go beyond the old story of origins and influences. Appropriating Goldmann, Bakhtin, and Foucault, among others, Sabry Hafez concludes that “a construction of a certain discourse into a discursive field is controlled by an elaborate process of selection, foregrounding and backGregson Davis, Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ), pp. , –. 26

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grounding,”27 acknowledging the ultimate emergence of the literary text as an “intersection of textual surfaces” (p. ), along the lines already set by both Barthes and Kristeva. Intertextuality is a contested space mapped in terms of transgressive or initiative strategies of identity, difference, and transculturation. Hence is the pertinence of the premise to literary postcoloniality. While it remains a tenable marker of patterns of assimilation, acculturation, or transculturation, intertextuality, insofar as it involves recollection, classification, and choice, is never innocent. As long as there is an agent, there is a choice, which is overtly or implicitly informed by some site or other. Both Fanon and Sartre (Wretched, p. ) point out that there is a tendency to implant in the minds of the native elite some kind of separation between “essential qualities” and values and the actual conduct of the colonizer (p. ). In other words, without some total identification with native issues, the elite may remain, in Fanon’s words, “a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal” (p. ). Rather than an accusation, this premise should be seen in the ramifications of education, acculturation and modernity at large as a fact of life. Especially in narratives of intellectualized pursuits and visions, images of the West, such as the pleasant offerings in music, painting, thought, and writing, along with achievements in science and technology resurface in narrative as markers of cultural distinction. Jabr¯a’s narratives are among the most distinguished in this respect for their acculturated subtext. As critics, however, we are nonetheless involved in or contaminated by this grounding. Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad’s criticism of Edward Said’s writing as a combination of discourses that coalesces Auerbach with Gramsci could apply as well to this present writing of mine. The great achievements of the human mind are in abundance, and they constitute a legacy of their own which is unmistakably different from imperial politics. The manipulation of knowledge to create subordination is also as real; but the way out is to create a better political consciousness and an active mind. We should remember that the British Council programs in literature, as compared to their counterparts in language, suffered serious cutbacks, not only due to the death of the old empire, but also in recognition of the counter discourse developed in literature against the imperial legacy.

Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi Books, ), p. . Citations are hereafter within the text. 27

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The question that may arise in the reader’s mind is how to get around the problem of grounding with its intricate trajectories to resist subordination to elitism. Unless we put aside, for instance, our innate solidarity with the smooth and lucid liberal-minded Leavisite discourse of the native elite, we cannot map writings according to standards of non-Westernized value or merit, nor can we draw a line of demarcation between, say, Jabr¯a I. Jabr¯a and Hal . ¯ım Barak¯at, or between al-Hak . ¯ım and Suhayl Idr¯ıs or #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim and Naw¯al al-Sa"d¯aw¯ı. Even their allusions, references to figures and writings, quotations and misreadings are bound to escape our attention. In fact, one of the pitfalls of academic criticism is its recycling of authority between the classroom and writing. There is always a tendency, for instance, to confuse Jabr¯a’s magnificent discursivity with a mere concern for issues of topical interest. The linkages between the fedayeen and the intellectual circles,28 as contrived in Jabr¯a’s al-Bah. th #an Wal¯ıd Mas#ud (In Search of Walid Masoud), as well as the alienation of the elite in al-Saf¯ınah (The Ship) sound removed from the actual lives of native societies. In narratives of great artistry, the reader may unwittingly give credit to style at the expense of issues that usually touch the surface of things, not their painful depth as depicted in Ghass¯an Kanaf¯an¯ı’s novels for instance. In fact, the deluge of allusion to Western figures and sources dislocates Jabr¯a’s texts from native grounding. Set in elitist contexts, their local color pales in comparison to their protagonists’ assimilative outlook. Textual discussions of European authors as Anatole France, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Camus, Kafka, and others, along with artists and painters tend to alienate Jabr¯a’s narrative.29 Certainly, Jabr¯a is no Fanon, but the latter’s words also ring true; for the intellectual “who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner” (Wretched, p. ). In comparison, Hal . ¯ım Barak¯at’s allusions and references to “Western voices” are drawn “to express [the protagonist, Ramz¯ı’s] anger against the West,” argues Altoma (“Sociopolitical Themes,” p. ). He further adds that Hal . ¯ım Barak¯at redirects the encounter so as to draw a line between the colonizer and the human, as if “to suggest that his people are not basically anti-Western, that once the causes of tension are removed, mutually beneficial Arab-Western relationship will be restored” (Ibid.). On the other hand, Hal . ¯ım Barak¯at is at pain to develop the thesis in narrative, resorting therefore to a 28 29

Noticed by Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, p. –. Ibid., p. .

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positive woman-man relationship, between Pamela and Ramz¯ı, so as to create another universe of love and understanding, which remains a contrivance, nevertheless.30 Existentialist Thought in Arabic Narrative Intertextuality can prove an effective decolonizing discursive strategy. Especially when woven within a subtext of contest, it may undermine a whole native elitist tradition of assimilation into a European culture. Such is the case in the Egyptian Ibr¯ah¯ım As.l¯an’s M¯alik al-Haz¯ . ın (The 31 Heron). The reader of this novel comes upon Master Qadr¯ı, a survivor of the Marconi Company, to be acquainted with the musings, recollections and soliloquies of a person whose heyday has passed with the era of colonial authority, and who now finds himself among the habitués of a coffee-house, “ruffians, sons of dogs” (p. ). Conversely, through his association with the English, he has learned their “morals and manners”: reading, loving dogs, and a refined style (p. ). Those were happy days. Did not Macmillan offer him the complete works of William Shakespeare, which he read until he had learnt them by heart, impersonating their characters, “repeating these to himself whenever on his bicycle to circulate telegrams” (p. ). Moreover, he has been invited to parties to act out scenes from Shakespeare, especially Othello, with Emilia and Desdemona, “under the very supervision of the English producer” (ibid.). Qadr¯ı has performed the role, waiting every year for Magi to act out Desdemona’s, and to beg, while dying, for mercy. The whole scene brings back to the reader’s mind Fanon’s suspicion of the sort of people who lose their identity in the act of assimilation. Yet, the irony lies elsewhere. Qadr¯ı’s impersonation of Othello now impinges on his real-life feelings as he begins to suspect that his old wife, Umm #Abduh, is engaged in an extramarital relationship with Zaghl¯ul, the food-truck owner. She is Desdemona and he is Othello, brought down this time into a mundane though groundless situation. Confusing Macbeth’s farewells to sleep with Othello’s farewells to glory and certitude, Master Qadr¯ı turns into a comic figure, which relies on a missing ear and a calf head as evidence of adultery (pp. –). These speeches, enactments, and soliloquies, along with Qadr¯ı’s furious mood while farting, deprive the subtext of gravity and undermine its Eurocen30 31

See Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War, p. . ¯ ab, ). Ibr¯ah¯ım As.l¯an, M¯alik al-Haz¯ . ın (The Heron; ; Beirut: al-Ad¯

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trism and refusal of others. Set within a stereographic space, this section of As.l¯an’s M¯alik al-Haz¯ . ın subverts the racist discourse of the original while gathering different perspectives towards some postmodernist stance of oblique criticism of the nation-state. The whole scene competes with an authoritarian discourse of threat directed against the demonstrating students by the gray-haired man, who reiterates that the nation is challenged by foreign powers, implying that students have to comply with the government’s decrees and laws. Through the protagonist Y¯usuf al-Najj¯ar’s fragmented utterance and bits of non-sequential narrative, we become acquainted with scattered discourses in what sounds like a Bakhtinian heterglossia. However, Y¯usuf al-Najj¯ar himself appears from these fragments like Jean Baptiste Clamence, Camus’s protagonist in La Chute (The Fall), caught in indecision, hesitation, and self-identified selfishness, a free individual whose very consciousness involves him in an anguish from which he attains only partial release upon learning more about state politics. The ultimate conclusion, if there is any, only reiterates Clamence’s confession, for, like Clamence, Y¯usuf al-Najj¯ar and his age also “could [not] help themselves” out of what sounds like “an inevitable impasse,” in Hanna’s reading of Camus’s protagonists.32 Arabic fiction, with its long exposure to existentialism by way of such exponents as Camus, is full of Y¯usuf al-Najj¯ar’s prototypes.33 For example, Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s autobiographical constructs in Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The . Latin Quarter) take after Camus’s protagonists. Later, we see Sartre’s committed protagonists in Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s As. ¯abi#un¯a allat¯ı tah. tariq (Our burning fingers, ). The novel traces the author’s intellectual trajectory, which culminates in his publication in  of one of the most influential literary and cultural journals in the Arab world.34 And then there are Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s hesitant characters in al-Wajh al-#akhar (The Other side, ),35 and Gh¯anim al-Dabb¯agh’s Husayn al-Qulach¯ı in . Dajjah f¯ ı al-Zuqaq (Din in the alley, ). They are as reluctant to act . as Clamence, and they undergo great anguish, the very sign of conThomas Hanna, The Thought and Art of Albert Camus (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., Gateway Ed., ), p. . 33 Needless to say that Mahf¯ . uz. has also come under the same impact. See Haim Gordon, Naguib Mahfouz’s Egypt: Existentialist Themes in his Writings (New York: Greenwood, ). 34 See Altoma, “Sociopolitical Themes,” p. ; Badawi, Arabic Literature and the West, p. . 35 Fu’¯ ad al-Takarl¯ı, al-Wajh al-#akhar (The Other side, Baghdad, ). 32

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sciousness and its signification of freedom from everything, including morality. Hence surface guilt only contests another, deeper one already grounded in the self. In comparison, As.l¯an’s narrative achieves its existentialist validity through fragments that make up strategies of irony, travesty and parody, which nevertheless undermine and subvert master narratives of nationalism and colonialism while empowering the text over an otherwise demeaning context of authoritarianism and hegemony. Camus’s existentialism has found great receptivity in the s, especially among the liberal left with its bourgeois occupations. Such is Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s fiction since his Other Side (). As late as Masarr¯at (Gladnesses) of , the protagonist Tawf¯ıq L¯am divides his readings between T¯ popular autobiography Al-Ayy¯am, a work . ah¯a Husayn’s . of “noble verbal and humanist caliber” (pp. –), and the Russian Artisbashev’s Sanine in Ibr¯ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı’s translation (p. ). The translation was in vogue (Moosa, p. ), especially in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, al-Takarl¯ı’s protagonist elaborates on this translation, its “well-deserved” reputation. Due to its impact, he is less attuned to familial or societal commitments and values, thinking at times of putting an end to his life (pp. –). It is so imprinted in his “soul” (p. ) that he is developing a sense of indifference to the “train” of life, its schedules, discipline and stations. Even the young wealthy Ghass¯an, his disciple for some time, is another Sanine, who welcomes the idea of sharing one woman. When Ghass¯an gets killed in the war, L¯am only thinks of his death as another possible culmination in an absurd universe. Sanine is only an early landmark in existentialist thought, especially in its anticipatory manifestations of Camus’s tone, which al-Takarl¯ı and Gh¯anim al-Dabb¯agh took to heart. It is at this instance of self-criticism and initial action that something meaningful is given to the endeavor of the petit bourgeois intellectuel, who otherwise remains much below the standards as set by Sartre. As for Third Worldism, this intellectual remains far beyond the proposed version of, say, Frantz Fanon. #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s reading of this version, and vocation, sets his writings apart, however. Although ¯ı’s novels in their comparable to the Syrian intellectual Mut.a¯ # Safad . restless contention against institutionalization and party machinery,36 #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s narratives take as subtext his own prose writ¯ı, J¯ıl al-qadar (Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal Mut.a¯ # Safad . ¯ı#ah, ); and Th¯a"ir Muh. tarif (Bei. rut: D¯ar al-Tal . ¯ı#ah, ). 36

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ings, which in turn maintain a dialectic dialogue with their deeper subtexts (of readings, experienced communications and actual political and social action). What Fanon specifies as applicable to “honest intellectuals” (Wretched, p. ) whose claims “are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent program” (p. ), may specifically pertain to him. Privileged by engagement in a national struggle, such a native intellectual is empowered to delve critically, not complacently, into the very life and culture of his own people. “The native intellectual who takes up arms, to defend his nation’s legitimacy,” Fanon argues, “and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of this people” (p. ). In a similar vein, #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim develops a view of the native intellectual as searching out a way for the nation’s thought lying between tradition on the one hand and existentialism and Marxism on the other. #Abdall¯ah al-#Arw¯ı (Laroui) singles this out as the most distinctive characteristic of al-Sayyid J¯asim’s endeavor to retain freedom as the true aim of Marxism in the face of the materialistic phase that “turns men into men-objects for the convenience of the future dictators.”37 According to Laroui, #Aziz al-Sayyid J¯asim emphasizes freedom while opting for Marxism as pertinent to historical interpretation.38 In fact, Laroui views #Aziz al-Sayyid J¯asim’s sympathies as lying more with the Sartre of the fifties. But Salvan’s reading of freedom as originally the “true aim of Marxism” (p. ) could be listed on #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s side to contest Laroui, for even Sartre’s endeavor fits in with that understanding of freedom. #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim Al-Hurriyah wa al-thawrah al-n¯aqis. ah (Freedom and the imperfect . revolution, ) draws Laroui’s attention as combining the search for freedom with social equality, a point which J¯asim also re-narrates in his two novels, Al-Mun¯ad. il (The Militant, ) and Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (The Suffering primrose, ). These rely on the writer’s actual experience with politics, imprisonment, and revolt against authoritarianism. In AlMun¯ad. il the protagonist B¯abil passes through a complicated endeavor to resist and undermine the authoritarian discourse of the party, ending up in an open conflict that entails estrangement and conflict. In 37 Jacques L. Salvan, The Scandalous Ghost: Sartre’s Existentialism as Related to Vitalism, Humanism, Mystecism, Marxism (Detroit: Wayne State UP, ), p. . Further references to this book are within the text. 38 Abdallah Laroui, Mafh¯um al-Hurriyah (The Concept of liberty; Beirut: Al-Markaz . al-Thaq¯af¯ı al-#Arab¯ı, th ed., ), p. .

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Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, the protagonist is already an existentialist, away from the party, but authority targets him, nevertheless, for his integrity and resistance to coercion. However, the protagonists also embody the author’s commitment to philosophical writing, in an alternative dialogue that has left its imprint on a discourse that carries more than a mere reminder of Camus’s La Chute, Les Justes, L’Étranger, and L’Homme révolté, along with Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté. Camus’s presence in #Aziz al-Sayyid J¯asim’s narrative, and especially in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, The Suffering primrose, is not without opposition. Through a series of confessions, round-table discussions, and agendas of political and social action, the novel brings into focus a number of issues that revolve around the interchange between the mystical, the Marxist, and the existentialist. These affiliations are usually mediated through a sort of innate Shi#ism, as we see in the torture scene (pp. –), when the protagonist’s impulse to pray surprises the guards, who beat him with their sticks. The trance which he passes through due to this torture acts also to subvert the rational order of things, empowering the protagonist with the sort of trans-knowledge that can, as Salvan argues regarding the interaction between the mystical and the existentialist, influence “the operation of life” within others (p. ). Salvan’s view is that as duality no longer obtains in moments of transcendence, logicality is diffused, while a unifying vision unfolds “in which subject and object, unity and multiplicity fuse into One True Being” (p. ). Set against authoritarian arrogance and evil, this moment amounts to a form of divine intervention, which momentarily inverts the entire scene, causing it to attain a sort of Bakhtinian carnivalesque. It is not surprising that #Aziz al-Sayyid J¯asim uses the word “carnival” to describe the non-earthly, transcending journey, which also involves and transforms the immediate and the real (p. ). Upon waking up from the trance, the powerless prisoner finds himself surrounded by a large number of people, who, inverting the established order of things, have taken the police as their prisoners. However, the narrative is engaged with series of details that signify a stress in one’s life similar to that which provokes the impulse to narrative confession in Camus’s Clamence. As Clamence chooses himself against morality or value by doing nothing to save the drowning girl, W¯a"il (the protagonist of Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u) cannot subdue his desire for the young girl who has stolen drugs to commit suicide. In another scene, desire also gains full control while the vague premise of faithfulness disappears. These scenes are not as neutralizing as Clamence’s

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self-relaxation after a fulfilling erotic encounter; instead they leave a sense of anguish, a sign of personal consciousness which is no more than an inventory of disengagement from any referentiality, moral or political. Free choice here occurs at a certain moment as the protagonist leaves party politics behind. Describing this temporal intersection, the protagonist says after reaching forty, I have less warmth on many occasions … there are neither expectations nor desires to propel me forward. Hence, Mu#izz’s [another Marxist revolutionary in love with the female participant Mun¯a] seems the only seafarer among us in his revolutionary leftism, speaking of the working classes, the armed struggle, the proletariat of the West, and the horizons of world revolutions, like any formidable brilliant Marxist (p. ).

The above scene includes four characters whose views and reviews (pp. –) closely relate to the formation of leftist ideologies in the Arab East, especially in Iraq, where Camus and Marx are collapsed in a version of Sartre and appropriated in an outlook that finds no contradiction in conjoining Shi#ism with nationalism and current ideological thought. The young female intellectual Mun¯a brings subtexts into discussion in the form of questions and comments on books and figures. “Have you ever read Camus?” She asks W¯a"il. “What do you specifically remember? Don’t think that I am testing you” (p. ). W¯a"il responds that he remembers Camus’s words, “what prevents me from thinking of death is the enormous amount of life in me.” These words work as a motto for the novel, bringing action and argument together. However, it also casts an ironic perspective on the novel’s discursive strategies, for it is Mun¯a, the ardent believer in life, who commits suicide in prison upon being deceived by the jealous comrade Mu#izz. Trying to draw her attention away from the protagonist by fabricating a story of the latter’s presumed betrayal and fall; he has led to her disappointment and death. More important to this reading of encounters, however, is their discussion of Jean Baptiste Clamence, Camus’s protagonist in La Chute, whose indecision as he witnesses a girl drowning signifies the beginning of his fall. Mu#izz argues that this is a typical character for Camus, whose thought, veering away from “any social conditionality,” involves each individual in “nightmares, or futile and meaningless practices.” #Aziz al-Sayyid J¯asim’s protagonist-narrator, W¯a"il, responds equivocally as he differentiates between Marx and Camus. First he concedes, “In politicized social belonging, the individual tends to be realistic, cal-

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culating, active, never reflecting beyond the limits of his socio-political function.” He goes on to say that “the human being, as individual, meditates, reflects and thinks, and could be preoccupied with serious issues concerning life and death. I can see the futility of life when I am non-committed… [But] political commitment keeps me away from these reflections, for I become then metonymic of my social community” (p. ). What the protagonist-narrator specifies, then, is that existentialism, in Camus’s version, is also “the only concrete approach to reality,” because, in the words of Salvan, “it starts and stays with the actual situation of individual consciousness in the here and now” (Salvan, p. ). On the other hand, Marxism as a “philosophy of life” is “often the expression of class culture” (Ibid., p. ), as Salvan argues, tying each consciousness to some social conditionality. Yet, Mu#izz’s annoyance with Camus is closely related to the Marxist critique of existentialism as an expression of alienation and estrangement emanating, to use Salvan again, from the “forlorn position of the individual in the capitalist society” (p. ). These arguments must be seen as existing within an ongoing debate among political ideologists and intellectuals alike, especially the activist type who has been central to the formation of thought in the Arab world. It is this type after all, that has suffered detention, exile, imprisonment, torture, and death. Dictatorships, like reactionary institutions, regard the members of this group as their immediate enemies. Yet, the grounding of these intellectuals—blending as it does three Western attitudes along with traditional upbringing (Jabra, “Modern Arabic Literature and the West,” pp. –; Altoma, “Westernization,” )—is not as smooth as it may seem at the outset. The “militant” of #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim and his Sartrean W¯a"il al-J¯abir¯ı in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u outgrow Jal¯al Kh¯alid, Mahm¯ al-Sayyid’s protagonist in the . ud Ahmad . latter’s veiled autobiographical novel under the same title () only through the adoption of socialist views that stand as the culmination of a quest for some form of engagement beyond tradition and nationalism (Altoma, “Westernization,” p. ). W¯a"il al-J¯abir¯ı also outgrows Idr¯ıs’s anonymous protagonist-narrator in Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı whose mission (re. narrated later in Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s second novel As. ¯abi#un¯a allat¯ı tah. tariq, Our burning fingers) is to find some fulfillment in an intellectual pursuit (Badawi, pp. –). However, partial as this endeavor is, even by late Sartrean standards, it nevertheless lays the foundation for fur¯ ab ther grounding. The author Idr¯ıs initiated his monthly journal Al-Ad¯ in  to specifically proclaim it as a forum for engaged and commit-

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ted writing. Significantly, #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim wrote in Al-Aql¯am that both the journal and Idr¯ıs deserve the highest tribute.39 It is important to understand the weight carried by this recognition, coming as it does from a writer whose protagonist-narrators bypass Idr¯ıs’s identical narrators, and whose anguish accompanies the very practice of freedom from every bond. Latecomers such as #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s protagonists typically encounter Fanon early on, building on his thought to develop in time a Gramscian stand beyond the reach of Idr¯ıs’s intellectuals. Image-Making Idr¯ıs’s Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter) deserves some attention for . its existentialist temper. If it has not been widely acclaimed as narrative, it is because criticism has tended to dwell on matters of technique. Wherever “summary narrative” and “editorial omniscience” dominate, argues al-Nagar, we as readers tend to lose interest and develop an “aversion” to the protagonist, whose main concern in Paris is to “entice women to his bed as mere objects of sex.”40 Idr¯ıs’s protagonist, in alNagar’s view, is driven by an amateurish rejection of “traditional values” which lies behind his “quest to sexually liberate himself from the shackles of restrictive traditions and then to attain emotional growth and stability.”41 Read along these lines, al-Nagar’s assessment (which is in tune with earlier criticism of this novel)42 provides some worthwhile illumination of the text’s pronounced thematic patterns. It tends, however, to overlook an overall narrative design that is modeled on a large number of existentialist works, including Sartre’s La Nausée () and his play La Putain respectueuse (), along with Camus’s L’Étranger (). Many of Sartre and Camus’s works are mentioned in Al-Hayy . al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter), and their presence in Idr¯ıs’s novel is not meant to be casual.43 #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim, “A Special Issue on His Writings,” Al-Aql¯am, July , no. : . 40 Hassan Abdel Razig Al-Nagar, “The Theme of Encounter Between East and West: A Study of Six Novels from Africa and the Middle East,” Diss. Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, , p. . 41 Ibid., pp. –. 42 See, for example, Issa Boullata, “Encounter between East and West,” pp. –. 43 It is worth noting, that an approach to Idr¯ıs similar to Sfeir’s (p. ) or along the lines of Altoma’s references in “Westernization,” p. , to Han¯ı al-R¯ahib’s Al-Mahz¯um¯un () might, however, lead to different conclusions. 39

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Influenced by Sartre, the horizontal narrative design of Al-Hayy al. Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter) incorporates diary details and trivial occurrences—isolated, disconnected and insignificant—in order to get hold of the protagonist-narrator’s mood as it is, with its “serial arrangement of diary,” in the words of Pollmann on Sartre.44 While the horizontal narrative design serves to create an atmosphere of ennui, boredom, and isolation, it tends also to foreground, in a late Sartrean fashion, the vertical narrative, which concerns the protagonist’s progress from anguish to commitment. We might refer this foregrounding technique to, for instance, Pollmann’s reading of Sartre’s La Nausée, in which the vertical structure with its syntactical sequentiality is seen to outweigh the horizontal, so as to allow a predominance of “deductive thought” (p. ). The horizontal in the Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter) acts . as a sort of prowler, gathering bits and fragments into a large stereographic zone, which offers in the end some “essence” against nothingness. The nature of diary-like narrative, in Idr¯ıs’s Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı . (The Latin Quarter), underscores a state of non-being, for the narrator’s being unfolds in bits and fragments: “He himself, this empty shell, this straw, isn’t he more at loss, more strayed in spirit?” (Al-Hayy al. Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ). Conveying a Sartrean ontological concern, Idr¯ıs’s reflections cut through the narrative every now and then before any transformation takes place, for he is a “ ‘thing,’ empty in need of density and fulfillment, an empty shell thrown on seashore sand, an empty straw thrown relentlessly by the waters of a furious river” (Ibid., p. ). Yet this diary-like discursivity is pitted directly against one of intentionality and purposefulness: “Let him begin from the beginning, a new person,” for even “if the new road ahead is dark and gloomy, he has to go through.” In other words, this self-perpetuated endeavor takes place inside, to empower him with “distinctive dimensions, clearly marked.” Along with their self-admonishment, desires halt this irritability, to make a new beginning, a “bohemian” one that escapes inner reasoning, the dialogue of the mind with itself (Ibid., p. ), to fashion oneself after the French, who have “ridden themselves of the burden of seriousness” (Ibid., p. ). However, we must realize that these oppositions are launched in basic subservience to the task of working out an existentialist paradigm whereby no predetermined system of values or ethics 44 Leo Pollman, Sartre and Camus: Literature and Existence, trans. Helen and Gregor Sebba (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, ), p. . Hereafter citations are within the text.

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imposes its own supremacy on a subordinate individual. Narrative as reflection takes this confessional-like stream as perpetual questioning to escape nothingness. Read against its spatial referentiality to home and Paris, this reflection indicates a moment of indeterminacy and hesitation signified by the ship, a threshold which, in spatial and temporal terms, stands for a departure from tradition and restrictions towards freedom, and from sleep into awakening: “No you are not dreaming, it is time to believe what you see. Don’t you feel the reverberations of the ship passing through these waves, away from the shore, towards that city which has always been in your mind, a vague shadow, as if it were beyond reach?” (Ibid., p. ). In these reflections, the past is an “unbearable burden” (p. ) with its “heavy ties” that hold him back (Ibid., p. ). However, to escape this past is not an easy task, for “you ought to suffer” in order to “make your new life meaningful … or else why settle here?” (Ibid., p. ). In other words, the horizontal narrative spreads across a large canvas, which is not limited to binaries or oppositions between this “East of yours” (Ibid., p. ) and Paris, for the individual’s effort is to make sense of this whole experience. A basic parameter here is the protagonist’s questioning of custom as tradition, for it is only through better understanding of the constant and the fugitive in tradition that he can initiate a new start in life. Aside from numerous encounters that demonstrate the protagonist’s naïveté, such as the one with Lillian and the one with the young lady at the cinema, every scene is set to test his understanding. The young lady at the cinema may feel that “the young man on her right is an hungry Easterner wasting so much of his life in repression and deprivation, and hence yearning for the touch of a woman’s skin, to enjoy the warmth of her closeness and her breath” (Ibid., p. ). The Lillian incident is not less important to his inner reading of himself as narrative. It attests to his casual, shallow acquaintance with the culture to which he is supposedly attracted. More significant, however, is the nature of that encounter, for here the poem “Déjeuner du matin” from Jacques Prévert’s Paroles, is prototypical of the narrator’s own discursivity: simplicity, familiar scenes and disorder of ideas. Also witnesses to the protagonist’s endeavor to dislodge from his mind the burden of the past, these encounters are seen as part of a wider subtext, which involves him in rediscovery, or reassessment of selfhood. Attending Camus’s Les Justes with his friend Fu’¯ad (Ibid., pp. –), the narrator admits that he cannot make a lot of sense of the play and cannot determine its

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relevance or validity to his “own self and the nature of his situation.” In fact, “had not his friend set his thought into its very action, revealing a characteristic that relates its heroes to young Arabs living in their own latently repressed rebellion, had this not been the case, he could have forgotten these just rebels.” Fu"ad even specifies that Arabic writing lacks such “heroic fedayeen,” and suggests the necessity of translating these revolutionary drives into Arabic, a mission which Idr¯ıs himself was to undertake throughout the s and s. Moreover, Fu’¯ad argues for a “bond” to bring the young together, and for a message of some “attractive power” capable of enlisting “love and respect.” There is certainly some revolutionary idealism in Camus’s play, but there is also that deft act of courage that highlights human life against adversity. Moreover, the play resists subordination to decrees and mere regulations, for there is in that work a basic understanding that “a revolution which ignores the rules of humanity contradicts itself ” (Pollmann, p. ). The protagonist-narrator passes through a process of self-analysis in dialogue with this subtext. Against his life of naïveté, misunderstanding, and confusion, the play drives him to reflection: “You ought to suffer a lot before your consciousness is awakened, for ahead of you are so many preoccupations and concerns to test yourself with before reaching maturity and perfection” (Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ). In this contact, . trifling is outgrown, including that gaze of repression and sexual need directed towards the “two shadows … hugging each other” in the corner of the main door (Ibid., p. ), which were central to his new life at one stage. Replete with sexual symbolism, this gaze reveals a great deal about frustration and disappointment. However, narratologically, its significance lies in its importance to the narrative’s overall design. Between vertical and horizontal structures, sexually symbolic gazes like this one punctuate the horizontal structures, helping shape a Bildungsroman amid a larger space of acculturation and dialogue. The narrator’s survey of Jeanine Montreaux’s (or Janine’s) readings can be discussed within this framework. Rather than passively subservient to readings, the narrator responds to reading in a dynamic way, recognizing throughout that reading imprints images and attitudes, which make up the cultural identification of self and other. Jeanine Montreaux’s readings, as he argues, define her understanding or misreading of him. Indeed, Roger Allen’s brief remark on Idr¯ıs’s novel is apt in this regard. The narrator approaches the whole issue from the context of the East-West nexus where there is “the apparently inex-

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orable need to misunderstand that was symptomatic of the attitude of both cultures towards each other during these decades of uneasy adjustment to new realities” (The Arabic Novel, p. ). Jeanine’s readings include Lamartine (perhaps his Voyage en Orient), whom Edward Said describes as the “incorrigible maker of an imaginary Orient,” (Orientalism, p. ); Theophile Gautier (Émaux et camées, ); and Flaubert, whose writings especially make her long “to see the East with its camels, palm trees and desert” (Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ). Flaubert’s recreations . of “exact detail” (Said, Orientalism, p. ), along with his impression of the Orient “with its decrepitude” (Ibid., p. ), may have an influence on the narrator’s mind as well, for his sense of self-distrust and shame towards his “own East” (Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ) impels him to wonder . whether she actually thinks of him in view of such readings of “the evils of the Arab.” He further reflects: Can’t you see that the Westerner is always afraid of the Easterner? This Arab, coming from desert sands, living in medieval civilizations? Flaubert himself, under whose influence Jeanine yearns for the East, isn’t he quite keen on representing scenes of backwardness and bestiality in the life of the people of the East? (Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ) .

Beyond foregrounding the theme of the acculturation process, Jeanine Montreaux’s presence is also central to the vertical design of Al-Hayy al. Lat¯ın¯ı, The Latin Quarter. She is deliberately constructed to fit into his existentialist mapping. Contrived to attest to the protagonist-narrator’s existentialist grounding, her offers of love and sacrifice, not distrust and fear, dislodge the narrator from dichotomous positions, which do not fit into existentialist hesitancy. She places him in a situation that recalls both Camus’s Clamence and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, along with Sartre’s characters in such works as Les mouches (The Flies). Unable to match her sincerity, “he feels that he is getting smaller and smaller, to become an insect, a dirty fly. But he is unable to say anything. Later he has deceived himself into thinking that she hasn’t allowed him to say as much because her lips have closed on his” (Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ). As Jeanine is the one who has explained to . him the implications of Sartre’s The Flies (Ibid., p. ) and other works, her presence deepens the novel’s existentialist commitment. Even the protagonist’s reluctance to get married and his indecision preceding a belated attempt at rapprochement are structurally contrived to express this existentialist growth. The whole narrative’s sequentiality intensifies the sense of sin, for, in the words of Maja J. Goth regarding Kafka’s Joseph K., “the pos-

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sibility of existence depends entirely on man’s ability to reconcile the self with its propensity to sin” (p. ). This is even more the case as the narrator’s Clamence-like indecision regarding Jeanine simultaneously involves inevitable rupture with traditional values on one hand and commitment to some cause on the other. Such verticality, structurally designed through the figure of Jeanine, leads this Bildungsroman towards a species of homecoming that is ultimately incompatible with the mother-tradition-past triangle. In fact, the mother, ill and paralyzed, soon disappears from the scene, whereas N¯ahidah undergoes change to fit the emerging frame of mind. Hence, the narrator offers her Sartre’s La Putain respectueuse to read. Afraid of her father and surprised at this initiation, N¯ahidah rejects the book, asking for “another” as a present, whereas the protagonist maintains a sullen and sulky mood, “grinding his teeth” at this initial failure to acculturate (Al-Hayy . al-Lat¯ın¯ı, p. ). Thresholds for East-West Encounters To parallel this acculturation that occurs on the familial level (for charity begins at home), Idr¯ıs makes Jeanine disappear from the scene, leaving behind a letter that drives the protagonist to go forward in his “struggle.” Well acquainted with Sartre’s existentialism, to the extent of joining his friends in criticizing many carefree young people and vagabonds for misunderstanding Sartre (Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, pp. –), . the narrator lets Jeanine choose withdrawal and retreat, which allows him to begin his initiation in the Sartrean sense of commitment (Ibid., p. ). Only through Sartrean acculturation does apprenticeship materialize. Jeanine’s pivotal pronouncement on struggle back home pre¯ ab (January )—the pares us for the first-volume editorial of Al-Ad¯ same year as Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, The Latin Quarter, which reads as fol. lows: It is the conviction of this Review that literature is an intellectual activity directed to a great and noble end, which is that of effective literature that interacts with society: it influences society just as much as it is influenced by it. The present situation of Arab countries makes it imperative for every citizen, each in his [sic] own field, to mobilize all his efforts for the express object of liberating the homeland, raising its political, social and intellectual level. In order that literature may be truthful it is essential that it should not be isolated from the society in which it exists. The main aim of the Review is to provide a platform for those fully conscious writers who live the experience of their age and who can

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be regarded as its witness. In reflecting the needs of Arab society and in expressing its preoccupations they pave the way for reformers to put things right with all the effective means available. Consequently, the kind of literature, which this Review calls for and encourages, is the literature of commitment… that issues from Arab society and pours back into it.45

Although different in many respects from the Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı, The . ¯ ¯ Latin Quarter, Tawfıq al-Hak . ım’s #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq (; English translation: A Bird from the East, ) shares some common attitudes and techniques with Idr¯ıs’s narrative.46 But when read against its author’s avowed pronouncements, A Bird from the East is often perceived as an autobiographical narration of disappointments with women, as in the brief thwarted affair with Suzy Dupont. Moreover, this unrequited love, according to many, tends “to provide [the protagonist Muhsin] (and the author) with a convenient weapon for attacking the . 47 West.” Set alongside the deathbed scene, where the self-exiled Russian Ivanovich expresses his disillusionment with the West, Muhsin’s disap. pointment in love has become, in the view of many critics, central to a text that nevertheless works horizontally as narrative. However, texts such as this can offer a rewarding reading when assessed in view of their own significations, textual and figurative. Especially in matters of literary postcoloniality, these may prove structurally less centered on one specific issue, for the very discarded portions of the text could have no less significance. Muhsin’s narrative of his father’s . predicament, for instance, as well as the Anatole France encounter, could be as significant to the novel as the threshold scene in front of the statue of Alfred de Musset. This opening scene should carry a weight as great as, if not greater than, the deathbed scene. Although the quotation from de Musset on the pedestal drives Muhsin, the pro. tagonist, to reflect on the common ground among cultures, there is more in the threshold to initiate the reader into that narrative of personal encounter with Parisian life and culture. More than a mere statue, Alfred de Musset is a central presence in this narrative, one that could very well explain the dramatic point in Muhsin’s emotional change, . which is taken by many to be the pivotal structuring incident. After all, the French writer’s disastrous love affair with George Sand permeates Qtd. in M.M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature and the West, pp. –. Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım, #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq (Cairo: Lajnat al-ta"l¯ıf, ); English trans.: A Bird from the East, trans. R. Bayly Winder (Beirut: Khayat, ). 47 See al-Nagar, “The Theme of Encounter Between East and West,” p. . 45

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his plays, poems, and prose writings. Unless we understand this opening encounter in its formative nature, we are bound to miss a significant aspect of Muhsin’s whole career: his faith in love, youth, and endeavor, . along with an amount of wit, restraint and achievement—a profile usually taken as distinctive of de Musset. Although Sfeir, like many other writers,48 correctly reads Tawf¯ıq alHak . ¯ım’s #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq as a dramatization of “the experience of a new generation of Arabs who confronted European ways and concepts for the first time with a freshness and youthfulness all their own” (p. –), his preoccupation with its so-called technical failure draws attention away from those imprints, registers, and significations which involve the text in a stereographic dialogue worthy of analysis insofar as literary postcoloniality is concerned. Aside from cross-references to Voltaire and Wagner, among others, there is the specific mention of Anatole France, with whom Muhsin’s colleague maintains some com. panionship. The “amusing anecdote” (p. ) related to the protagonist deals with their daily meeting in the Luxemburg Gardens, which provides them with a view of Parisian ladies. The “lecherous cleric,” Muhsin’s colleague, has no idea who old Anatole is until an Egyptian . delegation arrives in Paris, seeking French support for Egyptian independence. One member of that delegation, having recognized Anatole France upon seeing him with the Egyptian theology student, intimates to the latter that a word from Anatole France would ensure the success of their mission. Not only is Anatole France’s support won, but also a change in the writer’s whole attitude in the direction of a more active role in politics, beginning with writing an introduction to Victor Margueritte’s La Voix de l’Égypte (p. ). In other words, this mention of the French writer fits into a wider register, which informs the whole subtext of Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq (Bird from the East). In more than one instance, the reader comes across portions of Anatole France’s campaign against dogma and for human sympathy and love reworked in a way that spills into Muhsin’s own outlook. . Anatole France’s presence enriches the horizontal structure of the novel, to be sure; for if we assume that the Suzy Dupont affair is central to the verticality of its design, a synthetic dramatization of personal disappointment and counter-response, then the Anatole France intervention spreads the canvas in wider zones of postcoloniality. The 48

See Altoma, “Westernization,” p. ; Boullata, “Encounter between East and West,” p. ; and Al-Nagar, pp. –.

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protagonist’s encounter with issues of coloniality suffers no equivocation, for he remains against colonialism throughout, especially as his father suffers at the hands of the British colonizer for resisting pressure to indict certain Egyptian administrators of an independent and selfassured national cast. Asked to fabricate a story against the Egyptian mayor, Muhsin’s father rejects coercion as a judge, knowing well that . he is to suffer dire consequences (p. ). Even this mayor or administrator has undergone a transformation as a result of the colonizer’s arrogance, disrespect and abuse. We are told that the Egyptian administrators almost had a “white mask” once. Descended from a “wealthy family” and “receiving his education at Oxford,” he has become so easily and willingly assimilated, or so he believes, that he thinks of England as “his own country” (p. ). When he comes back, he cannot sustain the white mask, because in Egypt the colonizer has, as Fanon argues, forced the native elite to see that assimilation ensures no equality in their own land. The colonizer assimilates the native elite to itself through a certain amount of rejection, for the colonial is there to “grow rich quickly” (Fanon, Black Skin, p. ), even while lacking any “awareness of the world of Others, a world in which Others have to be respected,” as Mannoni stipulates (qtd. in Black Skin, p. ). Misunderstanding what Césaire describes as “the old courtly civilizations” (qtd. in Black Skin, p. ), the English, like other colonizers, accept this within a myth fostered and promoted by many racist anthropologists regarding what they call the unconscious welcome for “the awaited master,” to use Fanon’s idiom (p. ). Hence the arrogance of the colonizer, who is no longer “the same gentleman [the Egyptian administrator] has known in England” (Bird from the East, p. ). “Enslaved by his superiority” (Black Skin, p. ), the colonizer tends to demonstrate the will-to-power against the very assimilated elite. In more than one instance, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s Egyptian administrator knows, as much as Muhsin’s father, that the . English governor in Egypt “could impose his orders on the most highly placed Egyptian” for it is common to see the English relegating all to servitude, forcing even those of the highest rank to show attention and respect “to any young English official passing by” (p. ). Through Muhsin’s re-narration, we come across these fragments . buttressing the whole horizontal scope of the novel. Within this pattern, we encounter and can understand recurrent images, leitmotifs, bits of speech, and comments. The parrot, for instance, could stand for the Egyptian administrator as much as it could for Muhsin: both . wake up from disillusionment when faced with abuse or rejection. Typ-

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ical of the native bourgeoisie, their sense of national pride cannot be retained without such encounters (see Black Skin, p. –). Imitative and totally absorbed into the “mother” culture, they soon reject this parrot-like state, and pass into the second stage of self-recognition described in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (p. ). Finally, they mature into a national intellectualism that resists complacency and sham politics. Hence is Muhsin’s father’s readiness to suffer the con. sequences of opposition to the colonizer. Muhsin himself is to develop . his own worldview, whereby he “refuses to believe in the fall of things so soon” (p. ). To rely on some values, moral or political, is one way to resist the materialism of the metropolis, which also lies behind the colonizer’s arrogance. Unlike the characteristic attitude of existentialist heroes, with their readiness to go through an experience of nothingness that entails dissociation from any predetermined system of values, Muhsin’s asceticism is a personal outlook that is deeply steeped in an . “eastern” cultural context. As such, it should be seen as part of a system of values outside himself to which he clings and which should never be confused with current life in the “East,” for this East suffers some hybridity of its own due to a certain imitative drive which “provokes laughter” (p. ). Muhsin’s ascetic stand has something of that “… in . transcendence” which partakes of “disinterestedness” even while finding nourishment in Wagner and Beethoven’s music (p. ). Certainly, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s protagonist has not yet claimed interest in any affirmative action beyond his intrinsic susceptibility to the exquisite blend of the human and the heavenly usually invoked by that music. However, this protagonist’s view is not identical to Ivan’s polarization of binaries, which concludes in a prioritization of the East—a prioritization no less damaging for being romanticized than is the opposing essentialist representation of a static “under-humanized, anti-democratic, backward, barbaric” East (Said, Orientalism, p. ). Set against the other discourses in the novel, Ivan’s speech is effective but not conclusive. The protagonist’s reflections on that speech betray a certain amount of difference, for throughout these discursive encounters he negotiates a number of positions that usually attest to what Sfeir (p. ) has already stipulated about Arab intellectuals’ restless search for understanding and certitude. Sfeir’s time-referentiality suggests a historicity that contextualizes the very process of acculturation, a point that I accept. As much as existentialism has touched, and continues to touch, a sensitive chord in the individualistic drive among the rising classes and the national

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elite, pre-colonial as well as post-independence consciousness have also problematized issues of nationalism, identity and difference. However, nowhere have these issues been encountered with so much force and mastery as in al-Tayyib S¯ . . Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (; Sea. alih’s son of Migration to the North, ).49 The novel traces the protagonist’s career as a brilliant Sudanese child, who studies in England as part of the imperial educational program to get him acculturated in the life and thought of Great Britain, so as to be among the native elite who can rule with a colonial frame of mind. But the protagonist Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd proves to be so ingenious, independent and defiant as to undermine the imperial design. While inviting comparisons to such texts as S¯ Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,50 al-Tayyib . . counternarrative . alih’s develops strategies of revisionism, ironically emanating “from the belly [rather than ‘the heart’] of the darkness” (Season of Migration to the North, p. ) to assert the tendency among his Others to deny him his right to speak up or to settle whole issues of combat, difference and attraction. “The lawyers were fighting over my body,” he concludes while reminiscing the court scene. The protagonist can be easily mistaken with Frantz Fanon. In these scenes, he is there as if recalling Fanon’s response to a similar scene of rejection which involved him in “an objective examination” to discover, accordingly, his “blackness” and “ethnic characteristics” (Black Skin, p. ). Taking himself, as Fanon says, “far off from my own presence,” to make himself “an object” for self-analysis, Fanon has already reached a revisionist reading of others’ treatment of him, as “an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that splattered my whole body with black blood” (Black Skin, p. , emphasis mine). It was then, and along with this recognition, that he came to react with furious anger against such condescending comments of discrimination as “how handsome the Negro is.” Annoyed, Fanon adds, “[A]t last I was free from my rumination. At the same time I accomplished two things: I identified my enemies and I made a scene” (p. ). What al-Tayyib S¯ . . pro. alih’s tagonist intimates to the narrator is no less than an opening sentence for a muted story, replaced in the court scene by some perpetuation Al-Tayyib S¯ . . alih. Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (; Beirut: Dar al-#Awdah, ); English translation: Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, ). Citations in the text are from this translation. 50 Mohammad Shaheen, “Tayyeb Salih and Conrad,” Comparative Literature Studies,  (Spring ), pp. –; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, ), p. . 49

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of narratives of empire or fashionable ones of no actual consequence. Overlooking or bypassing his counterattack, the lawyers deny him his newly found ethnicity and difference against a long history of assimilation in which he has been initiated since the priest’s praise of his perfect and fluent English. Such comments merely rephrase another hidden discourse which, to use Fanon, says, “At bottom, you are a white man” (Black Skin, p. ); otherwise “there is no reason why”—to offer an identical example—“André Breton should say of Césaire, here ‘is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today can’” (p. ). In a similar context, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, in Season of Migration, rejects lawyers’ interpretations, which tend to deprive him of this national consciousness. Arab Homecoming Especially when read in relation to Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s unwritten autobiography, “My Life Story, by Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd” (Season of Migration to the North Season, p. ), with its dedication to disorienting and shocking the biased, the essentialist, and the monolithic (Eastern or Western), Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s anger at these lawyers is identical to Fanon’s against those who misunderstand the complexity of such an encounter. While claiming resignation to a life story without glory or significance (p. ), Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd has actually collected every piece of narrative relevance to fit into a reading of his life, a stance that the narrator recognizes with anger and some fascination (p. , ). The whole endeavor behind his orientalized room in London and the Anglicized one back home, “an exaggerated simulacrum of the cultural paradigms of East and West,”51 only asserts a pseudo heroic drive to make known what has been silenced, marginalized, or distorted. In view of the protagonist’s self-proclamation, the transcultural or contending narrative encounter assumes a larger meaning for the “overall structure and meaning of the novel” which Siddiq relegates to a “supportive part” (p. ) in relation to individuation and doubling.52 While there is a great deal to support Siddiq’s reading, especially as the narrator’s “white page” is inscribed

51 Patricia Geesey, “Cultural Hybridity and Contamination,” in Tayeb Salih’s Mawsm al-Hijrah Ila al-Sham¯al (Season of Migration to the North),”Research in African Literatures : (), pp. –, at p. . 52 Muhammad Siddiq, “The Process of Individuation in al-Tayyeb Salih’s Novel Season of Migration to the North,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –, at p. .

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with Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s life story of affirmation (Season of Migration to the North, p. ), there is also the recognition of “his egoism and his conceit” (Ibid., p. ), which are taken to be the very characteristics of the epic hero, who seeks to narrate a personal story of adventure and achievement. Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd acts similarly, for “he wanted history to immortalize him” (Ibid.). The narrator is reluctant to read this story as such, for he feels that it is a “farce,” yet one which he, nevertheless, finds himself driven to retell while trying to make sense of its ramifications, intentions, and even probability. However, the story makes sense only in view of its diversified stereographic space, which also absorbs a subtext of disguised Odyssean homecoming, along with denials and affirmations of mythical, historical and contemporary lineage. Unknown to the villagers, but with a good personal record to enlist their support and approval, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, the “deep one” (Season of Migration to the North, p. ), attests only to the “indeterminate identity of the returning figure” (Davis, p. ), an indeterminacy that shows up in every account of or about him (Season of Migration to the North, pp. , , and passim), including his own wife’s surprise at his “gibberish” (p. ) and the narrator’s distrust of any existence of his outside this narrative (pp. –, , , ). Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s shocking recitation, ostensibly while drunk, of an English war poem, should not be looked upon as a mere sign of cultural hybridity. The poem’s refrain of “faint light” and “great pain” also foregrounds this indeterminacy, for, like his women who “wait the lost,” the “women of Flanders” are waiting in vain. He himself identifies with this sense of loss, dissociated as he is from any traceable roots (p. ). This Odyssean hero, like his precursors, develops a discourse of combat, discovery, and retreat that is very much in character, for he needs only the right audience to recite and tell what he considers worth proclaiming. The narrator, despite latent anger and resistance, identifies with him; like other disguised epic heroes, he is bound to enlist admiration, and his discourse of seafaring, camping, and combat is carefully and meticulously told. Is he not, like Odysseus, the “husband … spreading his sails,” voyaging off “on the ocean in pursuit of a foreign mirage” (pp. –; emphasis mine), leaving behind a young, charming wife with a secret, closed room and her children, who withstands pressures and encounters a number of bids for remarriage (pp. –), and yet still calling for new adventures and encounters. Like the Odyssean hero, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd returns to retrieve and assert identity—through marriage, family settlement, cooperation—after failing to bring others to see his char-

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acter as it is and not in subordination to another construct sustained throughout ages of deformation and distortion. Mrs. Robinson takes his endeavor seriously, knowing that this identity entails that “Moozie” is “incapable of either accepting or giving happiness other than to those he really loved and was loved by” (p. ), for it is only then that a Fanon-like character claims its own sense of independence. Indeed, it is through this understanding of a traumatic experience of identity that Mrs. Robinson can finally resurrect Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, and a whole race, from distortion: “I shall write the great part played by Moozie in drawing attention here to the misery in which his countrymen live under our colonial mandate” (Season of Migration to the North, p. ; emphasis mine). The Encounter’s Postcolonial Intertext It is in this respect, in terms of the intersection between the heroic in an unheroic age and the drive for self-affirmation, that Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s encounter with Jean Morris should be read. The Victoria Station refrain, with its journey to Morris, is repeated three times (Season of Migration to the North, pp. , , ). Structurally, the refrain, “the train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris” tends to fit among three narrative sequences that bring together the protagonist’s whole career. The Jean Morris affair is meant to be central to this counter-narrative, because it is set after a number of structurally decisive elements. It is placed after the following: his renunciation of any belonging to the English language despite his fluency in it (p. ), the curse of a dead woman whose Orientalist fantasies he has failed to sustain (p. ), and the court scene with its binary structuration of “conflict between two worlds” in which he “was one of the victims” (p. ). The fact that Jean Morris’s name is the only remaining portion of his past life that surfaces in his dreams (p. ) only substantiates what he has already mentioned regarding her central position and role in his life, traumatic experience, and history at large. “Everything which happened before my meeting her was premonition; everything I did after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life” (p. ). As Mrs. Robinson explains, making love to Morris assumes such disproportionate dimensions because of Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s sense of identity, or collective conscience, as representative of a whole race. To him, Morris’ arrogance, sense of superiority, and coldness (p. ), along with her pose as representative of a colonialist mind

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that looks upon others as “savage” (p. ), “ugly” (p. ), but nevertheless attractive (p. ), make her the culminating destination in a quest for confrontation and redress, no matter what the consequences are: “She was my destiny and in her lay my destruction. I was the invader who had come from the South, and this was the icy battlefield from which I could not make a safe return. I was the pirate sailor and Jean Morris the shore of destruction” (p. ). While these allusions may well relate to many others that buttress the text, rendering “the encounter between East and West intensely riddled with fantasies and illusions” (al-Nagar, p. ), this specific passage also connects more explicitly to subsequent ones in which Jean asks him to press the dagger between her breasts to settle combat in death and love. “I almost gave up hope of you,” Jean says, because she is used to thinking of him as typical of a victimized, colonized and passive race. According to Rotraud Wielandt’s insightful analysis: She inevitably discovers that he is not—as she had accused him a few days earlier of being—a man who is by his nature incapable of killing even when he is continually tormented and humiliated, and … that he is not a representative of an inferior race and civilization condemned forever submitting to European violence. Thus she is now able to respect and love him. (Qtd. in al-Nagar, p. )

By the same token Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd comes to see her differently, for the “dying enemy ceases to be an enemy” and there “is nothing left to prevent love” (p. ). In other words, the encounter concludes with understanding and love at a certain moment, when both sides rid themselves of assumptions and platitudes. Yet, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s subsequent career demonstrates only a drive to test his identity in what Fanon’s three-staged analysis of native endeavor identifies as the fighting phase. Indeed, there is a great deal of textual support to Wielandt’s notion that S¯ . discourse in this novel,53 especially in patterns of self-defense, . alih’s does make use of Fanon’s works, endorsing some attitudes whole revising or contesting others. The Jean Morris murder scene should be seen as part of his protagonist’s retrieval of identity, first against assimilation, as his reference to language indicates (Season of Migration to the North, p. ; Fanon, Black Skin, p. ), and next against abuse (swearing that he will make Morris pay for that insult [p. ]). The murder scene is 53 Rotraud Weilandt, “The Problem of Cultural Identity in the Writings of AlTayyib Salih,” Studia Arabic et Islamica, ed. Widad al-Qadi (Beirut: AUB, ), pp. – , at p. , n. .



 

symbolically enacted to dislodge the inner desire to be white, taking, in Fanon’s words, “cognizance of a possibility of existence” (Black Skin, p. ). In a vein identical to Fanon’s, he has also “accomplished two things: I identified my enemy and I made a scene,” for “since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known,” putting an end to being “poisoned by the stereotype” which is being reconstructed for him and his black race (Black Skin, pp. –). While manipulating the Prospero-Caliban paradigm whenever language is brought into discussion (Season of Migration to the North, p. ), Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd also makes unidentified references to readings in Mannoni, Césaire, and Fanon. Like Césaire’s Caliban in Une Tempête of , and in line with Fanon’s reading of the exchange between Mannoni and Césaire, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, too, in retrospect, looks upon language as culture. “To speak a language is to take on a word, a culture,” writes Fanon in Black Skin (p. ). Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd, for his part, is no longer proud of being acclaimed as fluent, for “the schools were started so as to teach us how to say ‘yes’ in their language” (Season of Migration to the North, p. ; recalling Friday and Caliban). Working within such paradigms, he is bound to assess stereotypes, images, figurations, and representations as forms of deceit that are being prepared by no less masters of “illusion” than Prospero, who, as Caliban says in Césaire’s play, “lied about the world, lied about me,” ending up “by imposing on me an image of myself ” (see Davis, p. ). On the other hand, to relapse into stereotypes and fabrications is also a discursive strategy in these very narratives, as in the case of Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s tales to Seymour, for instance. Yet the whole purpose behind this strategy is to subvert these stereotypes by pitting them against many others so as to implicate the addressee in self-analysis, instilling a sense of guilt and anguish that usually finds expression in scenes that (like Symour’s in Season of Migration to the North, p. ) culminate in tears. In these scenes, however, the native intellectual is till obsessed by a desire to assimilate; even lusting for an English woman, or for any European for that matter, involves, according to Fanon, “a wish to be white,” which is contaminated by some lust for revenge. The more the female is identified with colonial arrogance, haughtiness, and challenge, the more foundational is the encounter for affirmative identity. As the Jean Morris love scene implies, in this paradigm of opposition al-Tayyib S¯ . . . alih’s male, as much as Fanon’s, stands for the colonized and the victimized.

   



References to Othello make sense in this relation. While indicating a wish to disengage himself from the stereotype of a jealous dark figure who is unable to get into the heart of whiteness which he craves for and desires, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd is keen on releasing himself once and for all from distortion and sustainable image-making. “I am no Othello. I am a lie,” he says, once (p. ), and again, “I am no Othello. Othello was lie” (p. ), while conversely enjoying this ancestry whenever his store of hackneyed lies and anecdotes, which reminds him of Othello’s power to ensnare Desdemona, provides him with those strategies of enticement and seduction that have lured many to his Orientalized bedroom in London. The seductive Othello is within him in his early assimilationist part; but his self-critical stance, his disavowal of a prior self, places him in the second phase of identity growth, the one preceding that total exorcism and annihilation of that portion of him which, in Fanon’s analysis, would represent his internalization of the white culture. However, the struggle to be oneself, free from the shackles of mimicry, leads the protagonist to revolt against his early self, as Raymond Williams argues in an analysis similar to Fanon’s.54 This last stage makes Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd so self-assured that he now speaks for the community, using the plural: “we,” who prefer “agriculture, engineering or medicine” for the benefit of the village (Season of Migration to the North Season, p. ). This proclamation of a position of superiority angers the narrator: “Look at the way he says ‘we’ and does not include me, though he knows that this is my village and that it is he—not I—who is the stranger.” However, the protagonist’s address is not made in vain, for he is there to prove the groundlessness of the theory of his metropolitan “masters.” According to Fanon, these masters inculcate into the minds of native intellectuals notions of individualism and subjectivity which are belied when, upon homecoming, they discover the cooperative web, with its “village assemblies” and local gatherings, that makes actual village life something radically different from those masters’ notion (Wretched, p. ). Hence, the narrator, as a latecomer, has to pass through this phase of apprenticeship, which, as a specialist in some obscure English poet, he desperately needs. At a later stage, the narrator will learn more that testifies to Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s right to speak for the whole community.

54

Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, ), pp. –.



 

Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s self-identification with Fanon imbues large textual portions of Season of Migration. The Kitchener detail (p. ) provides a clear picture both of Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd’s own attitude, and of some distant echoes of Fanon: When Mahmoud Wad Ahmed was brought in shackles to Kitchener after his defeat at the Battle of Atbura, Kitchener said to him: ‘Why have you come to my country to lay waste and plunder?’ It was the intruder who said this to the person whose land it was, and the owner of the land bowed his head and said nothing. So let it be with me. (p. ; emphasis mine)

Historically explaining the atrocity of colonial administration, its abuse of native rights and distortion of the very foundational bases of communication, this detail with its specific reference to the British Kitchener defeat of the Mahdists at Umm Durman in , sides with Fanon’s conclusion that the “colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and police force, the place of the native” (Wretched, p. ). Kitchener’s anger at the native leader amounted to saying that the native owner is the transgressor, who is “insensible to ethics,” representing “the negation of values.” However, Kitchener’s reference to himself and to the colonized country as belonging only to himself documents a historical attitude, which Fanon explains as follows: The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history, which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. (Wretched, p. , emphasis mine)

Due to this deeply instilled conviction, colonial historiography tends to look upon the national and post-independence states as signs of failure, an attitude carried over in the colonial’s view (exemplified in Prof. Maxwell’s argument against Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd) of their prototypes, the native intellectuals, as signifying only an innate evil which is bound to thwart the civilizational mission (Season of Migration to the North, p. ). Fanon explains the attitude of people like Maxwell as follows: “When the colonialists, who have tasted the sweets of their victory over these assimilated people, realize that these men whom they considered as saved souls are beginning to fall back into the ways of niggers, the whole system totters” (Wretched, p. ).

   



Al-Tayyib S¯ . . protagonist used the historical, the anecdotal, and . alih’s the polemical to support other discursive strategies. Involving the text, along with its tragic instance, in irony, the author recapitulates certain rhetorical questions of the “leaders of reform” such as “with what are you going to fight the settlers? With your knives? Your shotguns?” (Wretched, p. )—only to rephrase them in another context, that of a counter-journey to the heart of whiteness, where the protagonist Sa#¯ıd will indeed conquer, but with his sexual organ. The most ironic strategy, however, is that of the journey back. Taken or not, the very intention to go on that journey sets the protagonist in that hybrid space where all are contaminated by contact with other cultures, unable to bear the burden of one single identity and reluctant to engage in a one-track pursuit. As prototype for many expatriates, émigrés, exiles, and displaced intellectuals, Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd only foreshadows those who, currently engaged in the debate on cultural multiplicity or ethnicity, are now negotiating many attitudes outside the mainstream and master narratives. These negotiations also color current readings of the precursor, including that of Fanon who undergoes some revisionism as a theorist of “subversive slippage of identity and authority” in Bhabha’s analysis.55 However, Season of Migration to the North brings together all these patterns, perspectives, and terrains, addressing assimilation, acculturation, transculturation, hybridity, and resistance to ideological settlements as if to postpone any closure. It is in this respect that Season stands for all these spectra in Arabic fiction while claiming none. While Season of Migration to the North stands as one of the most impressive accounts of the encounter in its cultural implications, some readers may feel disheartened by the protagonist’s shows of virility. They may also raise questions regarding traditional customs, which enforce marriage on the widow Husnah bint Mahm¯ . . ud, who resists and commits murder and suicide to escape this coercion. In the first instance, the text is deliberately engaged in discursive parody, as it duplicates Western travelers’s accounts in order to undermine the image of the East. Its seeming mimicry is sardonic in a counter-Orientalist discourse, to undermine the image of the East as feminized, inviting penetration and control. On the other hand, the issue of traditional ways among rural communities is also deliberately introduced in a double bind, not only 55 Neil Lazarus, “Transnationalism and the Alleged Death of the Nation-state,” in Cultural Readings of Imperialism, eds. Keith Ansell-Parson, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ), pp. –, at p. .



 

to highlight these and thereby to question surviving traditions, but also as evidence of commitment, faithfulness and love on part of women against assumptions of desire and need. The widowed Husnah under. mines customs, platitudes and assumptions by a courageous and willful act. Suicides among women, there in the metropolis and back in the Sudanese village, should raise questions, as the novel has located these in two different worlds. There is on the one hand a masculine world, which builds on customs in traditional rural societies in the case of Husnah, and there is another liberal society, which is urban and . free, but unable also to fathom the implications of desire, race and gender. Season of Migration to the North directs attention to these issues, without necessarily getting implicated in offers and solutions that may have been the pitfall of many committed and engaged narratives. As the next chapter premises, there are other narratives that take women issues as their major preoccupations, not only in terms of thematic concerns, but also in terms of voicing, where women speak on their own.

  WOMEN IN ARABIC

There is an increasing interest in women studies in Arabic. Collections of women’s writings, centers devoted to the study of women, and revisionist readings of tradition are already in abundance. Yet, there is not a critical corpus that analyzes the nature of gendering in writing, not only in respect to men and women, but also to a “body politics” in its Foucauldian sense. As Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz argue in view of Foucault’s formulations, “body politics” refers to the “inherently political nature of symbols and practices surrounding the body politic and the human body.”1 A nexus for inscription of every sort (social, political, ethnic, gendered and racial), the female body is a center of attention, a register of symbols, and a terrain for the gaze, containment, and also a frightening presence that recalls and provokes, in certain religions, temptations and sins. Female body referentiality is not the monopoly of specific cultures, for it is manipulated for a purpose and circumstance. Certain cultures treat the body with longing, love and respect, albeit with awe at times. In Arab traditions there are treatises for the purpose, though the widely circulated ones, as passed over in compendiums and records, come largely from the empowered male perspective.2 Women’s own comments on their bodies and qualifications are usually enframed in these male narratives, to offer contesting views in certain periods of affluence when acquisition of slaves, concubines and wives called for such competitiveness. It is only in times of crisis, like the Prophet’s cousin #Al¯ı’s campaign against Mu#¯awiyah’s rebellion at Siff . ¯ın on the upper Euphrates (), the Mamluk period (–) and the post-fall Baghdad () that women have some unmediated say of their own. In times of anti-colonial struggle, they may be presented as supplementary 1 Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, “Introduction,” Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, eds. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . 2 See Manuela Marin and Randi Deguilhem, Writing the Feminine: Women in Arab Sources (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, ); and Nikkie R. Keddie and Beth Baron, eds. Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven and London, ).



 

to the heroic male, but they can retrieve a voice of their own nevertheless, as in the Algerian war of independence, as the veil itself becomes a rite of passage towards emancipation and freedom, as Frantz Fanon argues in A Dying Colonialism.3 In the last few years, the veil has resurfaced in discussions of women’s issues, not only in relation to the increasing interest in the area, its politics and resources, but also as a manifestation of political consciousness. The response in the first instance is subservient, superficial and negatively critical of a whole tradition; but in the second, it is in consolidation of an ongoing effort to dislodge issues of women’s rights and needs from the monopoly of ultraconservatism and its vested interest in subordination at large. Again the veil is the focus of attention, as it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this ultraconservative register, every thing rises and falls accordingly, and decency hangs on the veil, despite the fact that writers and faq¯ıhs, jurists, hold different positions in respect to the issue.4 On the other hand, secular thought in the Arab world has been targeting the veil for so long that recent resurgence of the veil in urban centers raises questions about secular ideology and its affiliation with Western thought. The failures of the nation-state in the last years, the unconditional American support of Israel, and the repressive policy of the police state, especially against opposition from the left, have left the scene open for counter ideology. Frustrations provide a receptive milieu for conservative ideology. Again, the veil becomes the trope for this ultraconservatism, a reaction against the secular state, and an expression of discontent with the whole scene. The present connotations of veiling draw to mind, albeit with difference, the complexity of these during the Algerian Revolution. Fanon problematizes the issue of the veil in context of actual encounters that fall within dialectics of violence and response. Taking into account the factual and pathological side of the politics of resistance against the French, Fanon notices that the veil becomes one of the many codes of resistance to the colonizer, an attitude that applies to every human act against forms of repression. “The colonized, in the face of the emphasis given by the colonialist to this or that aspect of his traditions, reacts violently.”5 See Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, ). See an early discussion of relevant issues in al-J¯ahi . z. epistle on singing girls in Lois Anita Giffen, p. . 5 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p. . 3

4

  



Veiling and Unveiling The argument for and against the veil in this context is ridden with complexity, as its participants belong to different platforms and orientations.6 The intricacy of the debate may well invite discussion of the whole issue of women in narrative. Participants in the ongoing debate tackle the issue from a number of perspectives that find enough justifications in the extant documentary record. This record, however, varies in authenticity, as it varies in interpretations. Some of the known jurists had received their education in fiqh on the hands of women, as was the case with the Andalusian Ab¯u #Abd All¯ah Muhammad Ibn Hazm . . (–), and some prominent women had important roles, not only in cultural and political life, but also in education and jurisprudence. But, more relevant to postcolonial Arabic fiction is the veil as part of reality, as much as a trope for both confinement and power. The Algerian experience offers a great deal to dissipate hearsay and generalizations in this context. Narrative reconstructions can be radically different in perspective. Some may be subservient to the European interest in the exotic, to the very vexation of the colonialist mind whenever unable to control and survey lands and people, or they may be catering to white feminism in its transposition of problems to the East.7 Others look at the issue from a cultural perspective, in an attempt to escape the constraints of stereotyping or typology at large. Algerian texts offer this variety, and demand therefore an awareness of the grounding socio-political complexity. In Assia Djebar’s (b. ) Ombre sultane (; English translation: A Sister to Scheherazade, , ), for example, the veil is mostly a confining shroud.8 But it can be a means to freedom, too. Hajila, as one of the wives in this narrative, speaks of her role in life in terms of veiling, but not in reaction against the colonizer’s offensive, which Fanon discusses. On the contrary, the veil exists mainly in relation to the husband, the “man” whom she is con-

6 See Lila Abu-Lughod’s survey of the thorough readings of both Leila Ahmed and Marnia Lazreg, in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, p. . See also Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, ). 7 See the present writer’s “Displaced onto a Muslim Orient: Romantic Desire and Manichean Aesthetics,” in Anglo- Orient: Easterners in Textual Camps (Tunis: University Publication Center, ), pp. –; and Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre,” Signs (Spring, ), pp. –. 8 Assia Djebar, Ombre sultane (Paris: J-C. Lattés, ). References are to the Interlink Books English edition, .



 

nected to by need, not love.9 Estrangement is the tone that underlies the narrative, as long as the role of women is defined in opposition to a man who is deliberately represented as patriarchal. On the other hand, the veil works as her voyeuristic mechanism towards the outside world. “Once you have dropped your veil: you are a stranger whom no one knows, moving freely about, with open eyes. Sometimes men stand aside to let you pass. And you sweep majestically by” (p. ).10 Yet, the desire to be seen by men is motivational as well, as it lies behind her wish to go out and be seen. Indeed, she is unhappy with the fact that “only the women have eyes for you. And you can feel their piercing gaze linger after they have passed” (ibid.). The implications in this kind of narrative are mainly reserved to dichotomous positions. The husband is the “man [who] fumes over his breakfast; he curtly demands his clean clothes. He repeatedly finds excuses to call to you from the bathroom…” (p. ). “The Man” (chapter ) exists to provoke women’s antagonism, and to relate to patriarchy in its enslaving practices. No remedy is in sight, and no effort is displayed to question issues of class, nation or gender in their wider contexts. The narrative space is one of disparagement, not engagement, and it fits well into travel accounts of exotic predilections. The case is different in the Algerian Rash¯ıd Ab¯u Jadrah’s [Boujedra], Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits; ), for instance. Although, the narrative is critical of patriarchy and parental practices, it makes no concessions to Euro-centric or colonialist platitudes.11 It is not after exoticism in its early Orientalist overtones. Fathers can be martyrs, but may be informants, too. The father-son relationship is a complicated one of great poignancy. The son’s, T¯ . ariq, cousin shows how his father can be as tyrannical as the French whom the father is working for as informant. The cousin’s father is the opposite of T¯ . ariq’s father who tries to acquaint his son with the heroic and the anti-colonial. Black-clad like other women in Constantine, T¯ . ariq’s mother took to the streets 9 This stand and line of emphasis are part of an attitude held also in Assia Djebar’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Paris: Des femmes, ); English translation: Women of Algiers in their Apartment, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ). See in this respect, Michele Bacholle, “Women in Their Apartment: The Trespassing Gaze,” West Virginia University Philological Papers,  (–), pp. – . 10 See also for a different reading, Wegimont Marie Ascarza, “Djebar’s Ombre sultane,” Explicator, , n.  (Fall, ), pp. –. 11 Rash¯ıd Ab¯ u Jadrah [Boujedra], Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits; ).

  



against the French, where she was shot. In other words, the mother is there fighting against the French, unrestricted by veil and uninhibited by its traditionalist constraints. But needed for Manichean transpositions, the veil is a fetishized relic for the European. Acting from a superiority complex, the white man thinks it is his right to be the privileged voyeur.12 In Fanon’s words: “The European faced with an Algerian woman wants to see. He reacts in an aggressive way before this limitation of his perception” (A Dying Colonialism, p. ). The problem lies with the sense of power at large. European women who are frustrated by the veil, argues Fanon, “experience a similar impression before the bared face, before that unabashed body which has lost all awkwardness, all timidity, and become downright offensive,” for the European woman “feels herself challenged on the level of feminine charm, of elegance….” He adds: “The European woman has no choice but to make common cause with the Algerian man who had fiercely flung the unveiled woman into the camp of evil and of depravation” (p. , n. ). What I would like to stress here is that issues that have been approached single-handedly and with less comprehensiveness and rigor are too complicated to be glossed over in dichotomous and binary terms. Many Arab critics and historians have already noticed that literature grows and enjoys rejuvenation in pace with a genuine presence and participation of women in social and cultural domains. As I have shown in my book on the beginnings of modern fiction in Arabic, AlRiw¯ayah al-#Arabyyyah: al-nash"ah wa-al-tah. awwul (; The Arabic novel: its rise and transition), many critics in the first decades of the twentieth century, especially #Abdull¯ah #An¯an in Egypt and Mahm¯ . ud Ahmad . al-Sayyid (d. ) in Iraq have daringly argued for a full presence of women in social life. Years later, the prestigious monthly journal al-Hil¯al () published a number of essays by prominent people, including King Faisal of Iraq, demanding freedom for women. Indeed, the King could not hide his repugnance at seeing women clothed “like ravens.” But to call for women’s rights is not identical with a fight and struggle for these rights. In Egypt, women, especially from the elite classes, put up such a struggle, but there was something similar in other parts of the Arab world, too. Especially when there was a political struggle for 12 The reader may be interested in further comparisons between Assia Djebar and Fanon, in Rita A. Faulkner, “Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land,” World Literature Today, , n.  (Autumn, ), pp. –.



 

independence, women were able to articulate their struggle in political terms. Writing about the Baghdadi society when she was an Egyptian secondary school teacher in Iraq in the s, Bahiyyah Faraj All¯ah, for example, wrote to al-K¯atib al-Mis. r¯ı (Egyptian writer),13 Until recently you don’t see unveiled women in Baghdad except Jewesses and a few Christians. But today, you will notice the conflict between unveiling and veiling, the new and the old. It is no longer as “dramatic” as it was in Egypt in the days of Q¯asim Am¯ın. But you are bound to see unveiling in the lead, getting ahead, with no missionary to enumerate its advantages. Unveiling moves forward, as a self-assured triumphant process. Why the need then for enmity and hatred? (p. )

The writer relates this to a number of factors, including the development and growth of equal educational opportunity, and the tendency of the whole society to acquire education and knowledge. She is more impressed, however, by what she specifically terms as “the awakening of young Iraqi ladies,” for “just watch each when she strides on. She walks gracefully as a sharp arrow, no stagger or sway, no hesitation or lewdness, not to the right, not to the left, but moving qubal (forward), directing her steps to a specific goal like a winged arrow” (p. ). Dunyazad Avenged What is significant in Faraj All¯ah’s article is the emphasis on women’s will to be full participants. The physical detail here assumes some realistic and symbolic dimensions, and the act of striding onwards, with no hesitation or fear, is the way to achievement. Surprisingly, the same phrasing appears in Fanon’s description of the young Algerian women who carried the struggle to the metropolis. “The shoulders of the unveiled Algerian woman are thrust back with easy freedom. She walks with a graceful, measured stride, neither too fast nor too slow” (A Dying Colonization, p. ). Although unused yet to this unveiled body, argues Fanon, the Algerian woman in the metropolis “must overcome all timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European), and at the same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself ” (ibid., p. ). He adds: “The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city and relearns herself, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion” (ibid.). In both cases the body is free by Bahiyyah Faraj All¯ah, Al-K¯atib al-Mis. r¯ı (Egyptian writer), April , vol. , no. , pp. –. 13

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willful self-recognition, but it achieves its freedom in context, too. In the Algerian case, the Revolution offers a new “dialectic of the body and of the world” as Fanon explains (ibid., p. ). In the Iraqi woman’s case, the body is under no constraints of a critical or a devouring gaze, not only because the society has been undergoing change since an early time, but also because of the daring practice itself which is highlighted in this passage.14 The narrative in the example on Iraqi women, in its journalistic ease, counteracts another discourse that has been dallying with women’s physical attributes to meet the repressed desires of its authors. It shouldn’t be surprising that, in relation to the same account, the cultural scene in Iraq had witnessed in the forties the participation of a large number of women in painting, teaching, publishing, editing and writing. While women writers have been engaged in the fight for their rights, and also in the social and political struggle at large, we need to see their writings against a body of literature, which is never uniform. Aside from the remnants of the conservative discourse, the religious has been offering a middle ground and negotiatory stance since Shaykh Muhammad #Abduh’s pioneering effort in this respect. In a narrative . reconstruction of the scene in Egypt since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif defines in her A Map of Love, the position of the Shaykh in terms of support for the emancipation of women (see pp. –). The Shaykh’s views are not radically different from these of the advocate of women’s rights the Egyptian Q¯asim Am¯ın (ibid., p. ). Women were aware of these attitudes and managed to develop a position that simultaneously helped in the liberation movement (ibid., pp. , , ). Nevertheless, the position of the enlightened Shaykhs and their associates should not blind us to the facts of privilege and misuse of power. The discourse of the privileged has been the target of biting criticism by Arab Marxists 14 See in this regard Ruf¯ a’¯ıl Bat.t.¯ı’s survey. He argues against the Lebanese President’s view that women are created to be wives, contending that in Iraq, “Our colleges and schools are filled with girls, according to a successful plan for mixed education, to the extent that we are ahead of Turkey and Egypt by fifty years.” He adds: “The Iraqi girl goes out in full confidence and very self-assured, relying on her own moral rigor. A female student at the College of Higher education attacked the veil severely in an article for a popular Iraqi weekly. If at an early time, religious groups used to go to the Royal Palace to complain about a girl who rode a camel and recited poetry in the modern #Uk¯az. market in Baghdad in , like the Khans¯a’, their daughters now are everywhere in broadcasts and literary gatherings.” Ruf¯a’¯ıl Bat.t.¯ı, Majallat al-kutt¯ab, Vol. , Pt.  (Cairo, Dec. ), pp. –.

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in a number of narratives in the s.15 Moneyed classes are after the female body. The privileged person of Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf alh. ajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), Q¯ab¯ıl (Cain), with his voracious appetite for antelope and gazelle meat, articulates this position unequivocally: “nothing is better than female flesh: You’ve never enjoyed a woman’s meat. It’s the tastiest of all” (p. ). Saying this to As¯uf the nomad, in connection with a pursuit of gazelles and antelopes, the cannibalistic association signifies more than greed and exploitation.16 But set within a corresponding search among these ancient sites for relics or oil by foreign archeologists, dealers of antiquities, agents of empires and neocolonialists, the speech is laden with colonial desires of every sort. In context, it epitomizes the thrust of hegemonic discourse. Discoursing Women Against this discourse are these of liberal positions, which speak for women and enlist their participation. Lut.f¯ı al-Sayyid’s Jar¯ıdah in Egypt was among the renowned liberal platforms which made women rights second only to full independence from the British and the Turks during the years – (See Sal¯amah M¯us¯a, p. ).17 These meet nationalist and Marxist discourses in more than one sense. But the nationalist is always for collapsing the nation and the woman’s body. In the nationalist discourse of war and chivalry, land is equated to the female body, and both are held sacred. The enemy should not be allowed to defile them, as they stand for honor, and should enlist, therefore, male sacrifice. Couched among paradigms of past glory and present fight for liberation, nationalist discourse, as in the Syrian Christian Michel #Aflaq’s (d. ) Dhikr¯a al-Ras¯ul al-#Arab¯ı (The Memory of the Arabian Prophet), of the early s grows into a rhetorical corpus that gained more through the Iraqi war with Iran, –.18 In its ideological rhetoric, the nation-state took it for granted that the equation is worthwhile to See Hilary Kilpatrick, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to ,” in Modern Arabic Literature. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, pp. – (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ). 16 For a critical survey of this novel, see Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, pp. –. 17 See also Albert Hourani’s views on the role of this nationalist newspaper of the Ummah party, especially on the role of women and the family in inculcating an emancipatory discourse. Qtd. in Omnia Shakry, “Schooled Mothers and Structured Play,” p. . 18 For samples of this discourse, see Farhat J. Ziadeh, A Reader in Modern Literary Arabic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, ), pp. –; and Trevor Le Gassick, Major 15

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monopolize the masses in the struggle against foreign encroachment, and at times against ideology of foreign orientation like Marxism. The emerging discourse has as distinctive markers tribal honor and fear for the female body. It deliberately borrows from the glorious past of war and conquest formulations clad in expressions of political immediacy and expediency. In reference to the latter, Fanon notices that the “old fear of dishonor was swept away by a new fear, fresh and cold—that of death in battle or of torture of the girl” (A Dying Colonialism, p. ). Not exactly nationalist, but a mixture of liberalism and nationalism are the distinctive and influential writings of Cost.ant.¯ın K. Zurayk, the Syrian-born intellectual (Damascus, –) who settled in Lebanon as professor at the American University of Beirut. Zurayk was unquestionably on the side of women in every detail, but his discourse, as manifested in his essay of  on “Arab Women in the National Life,” is after the immediate participation in national life. In “this critical stage, the stage of alertness and watchfulness, it behooves Arab woman to consider and ponder her special and distinctive share of the national effort,” he argues.19 While recognizing women’s potential, Zurayk is very much involved in ideology to discuss and analyze what keeps women from this participation. His emphasis on “national training” (p. ) without delving into the constraints and limitations imposed on their role and life renders his discourse as idealist as nationalist ideology at large with its elevated rhetoric and lack of realistic analysis. Taken together these secular discourses have been fighting for women’s full participation. Women writers recognize the significance of fighting for a place larger than what Zurayk describes as mainly “an inner and spiritual one” (p. ). The non-narrative writings of, for example, Lat.¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at, Naz¯ıhah Jawdat al-Dulaym¯ı,20 a member of the Political Bureau of the Iraqi Communist Party, and the renowned poetess the Iraqi N¯azik al-Mal¯a"ikah (b. ) are many and they demonstrate great understanding of their role and prospects.

themes in Modern Arabic Thought (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan press, ), for selections from a number of nationalist ideologues. 19 Costantin K. Zurayk, “Arab Women in the National Life,” in John Haywood, Modern Arabic Literature, – (London: Lund Humphries, ), pp. –, at p. . Further citations are within the text. 20 Naz¯ıhah Jawdat al-Dulaym¯ı, Nam¯udhaj min mash¯akil al-mar"ah al-#Arabiyyah (A Sample from the ordeals of the Arab woman, ).

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Yet to speak of the will to power does not necessarily entail a magical reversal of representation. Insofar as the novel is concerned, Scheherazade may well have been avenged by the growth and development of fictional literature. But this literature has left a lot unsaid. It has succumbed, too, to stereotyping and patriarchal representations. Scheherazade who has been T¯ and al-Hak . ah¯a Husayn’s . . ¯ım’s favorite as fighter for her rights is either rewritten or tasked by the new generation of novelists for allegorically succumbing to authority. H¯alah Kam¯al accepts, with no due acknowledgement, the revisionist reading of the Algerian W¯as¯ın¯ı al-#Araj. She also entrusts Dunyazad with the right version of the tales, for the popular one is a distorted version that suits patriarchy (Q¯alat al-R¯awiyah, p. ). Others accuse Scheherazade of a patriarchal consciousness. Even if her narrative collaboration is tactical, the new generation of male and female writers is more in favor with storytellers who roam the globe unrestricted by mandates or authoritarian strictures. Juxtaposing narratives of subordination with the suppressed and censored, the Algerian W¯as¯ın¯ı al-#Araj offers a revisionist reading of The Thousand and One Nights in his F¯aji#at al-laylah al-s¯abi#ah ba#da al-alf: raml al-m¯ayah (The calamity of the seventh night after the thousand, ).21 Since early Islam, the narrator stipulates, two discourses have developed: one avowedly objective, catering for the status quo, with no intention to destabilize authority; and another, which is marginalized and repressed. In referring to the great ascetic of the seventh century, Abu¯ Dhar al-Ghif¯ar¯ı, who suffered for his opposition to post-companions’ misuse of authority, Shahrayar is made to speak of him to Dunyazad in terms of disapproval: “Son of a bitch, can’t he keep silent and lead the life of the rest, just flock with the cattle?” “He has no choice, for he has been carrying the signs of another age, not the one he is living in.” “But Dunyazad, have I not known you, I’ll say you also belong to the rabble.” “You have to listen to the truth, Grand Sultan, for I detest truth myself, but you have to listen until the very end, for I have noticed my sister secretly omitting whatever shocks and disturbs” (pp. –). 21 W¯ as¯ın¯ı al-#Araj, F¯aji#at al-laylah al-s¯abi#ah ba#da al-alf: raml al-m¯ayah (The Calamity of the seventh night after the thousand (Algeria: al-Mu"assasah al-Wat.aniyyah lil-Kit¯ab, ). Quotations are from this edition.

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In terms of Foucauldian analysis, Scheherazade is conflated with traditional historiography, whereas Dunyazad is placed within neo-historicism and its advocates. Debating transmitted narrative and questioning its conclusions, she offers a new reading of the past. While she takes into consideration the past in context, her present perspective resurrects history from dormancy and valorizes its dynamics of conflict and change. She is given a new role, too, which radically differs from her subservient one in The Thousand and One Nights. She is no longer the foil to her sister Scheherazade, confined to listening and asking for more stories. As a narrator, from among the privileged class, she can get away with many narratives of subversive quality. Thus, she is able to challenge her sister’s history and to fill in gaps under the veneer of a present need for the whole story. There is disruption and “discontinuity,” and the present should be more informing than the past. Rather than succumbing to the premise of “unitary, closed, evolutionary narratives of historiography as we have traditionally known it,” argues Linda Hutcheon in Foucauldian terms, “we now get the histories … of the losers, as well as the winners.”22 The premise behind the Algerian novelist’s choice rests on the popularity of the frame story of The Thousand and One Nights. Manipulating this popularity and inverting the narrative, he is able to give a dissenting voice to the empowered in a recognizably hegemonic discourse. Dunyazad retrieves a voice among her aristocratic and privileged class. Positioned in authority as the supremely empowered, Dunyazad can speak in terms that should be acceptable to this class. She detests “truths,” but would like to listen to the whole story, from its many actors, without gaps and omissions. This recognition of multiplicity dislodges the frame story from its paradigms of power, and releases it from monopoly, endowing it with uncertainty and ambivalence, for narrative now carries within it an understanding of “discontinuity,” rupture and “disjunctions,” to use Hayden White’s Foucauldian articulations.23 While Dunyazad has her frame tale, there are many marginalized narratives which she calls upon to improve on the unitary discourse, which her sister is accused of accommodating to suit authority and Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Post-Modernism (London & New York: Routledge, ), p. . Further references are within the text. 23 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, ), p. . 22

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patriarchy at large. These narratives practice a number of discursive strategies, including irony, contrafaction and parody. In Bakhtin’s view these entail multiplicity and recognition of life as too large to be compartmentalized in a monologic discourse (The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Dunyazad is brought to the center of W¯as¯ın¯ı al-#Araj’s narrative after being marginalized for long as the “innocent” child, the passive mind, who is there to listen to her sister in submission. As a verbal construct, Dunyazad is made now to fill in gaps, which her elders cannot do for fear of punishment. Manipulating her marginalized position and taking advantage of her status as “innocent,” she steps into the narrative to account for her sister’s omissions: To tell you the truth, Sir, says Dunyazad whose throat is dry, these tales have been untold by Scheherazade because she has been afraid of her Master lest he blind her eyes… She knows them by heart, but whenever she reaches them, she decides to conclude, postponing denouement for the next day. Each following Night, she contrives a new lie, which has nothing to do with truth. Her Master, my dear wise Sir, has been harsh, sick and masochistic [sic] who derives joy and sexual pleasure from slaughter in each tale. Thus, she concludes each story with slaughtering a woman or with something similar (p. ).

The implications in W¯as¯ın¯ı al-#Araj’s novel are many, and Dunyazad is no less of a shrewd narrator than many writers in the post-colonial state. She tampers with the master’s sensibility so as to get away with her stories of subversion and to keep the door open for further accumulation. She fits well into Linda Hutcheon’s postmodernist politics, for the “multiple and peripheral perspectives offered in the fiction’s eyewitness accounts resist any final meaningful closure” (Politics, p. ). The ramifications of Dunyazad’s position as narrator are many, for her postmodernist strategies are so by default. Accommodated in the domains of popular literature, she recovers some discursive strategies to forward a current distinction between old and new historiography. There are historians of linear narrative, objective assumptions and attention to the privileged, and there are free-lancers and vagabonds. Her narrative partakes of her site or place, for her domain is a NamidaAmdocal, a hybrid space, which is not a republic, nor a kingdom. Thus, belonging to the elite, but bent on unfolding every account, she fills in gaps without the pose of the subversive intellectual. In other words, she is Linda Hutcheon’s type for the post-modernist intellectual.

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“Provisionality and undecideability, partisanship and even overt politics,” writes Hutcheon in Politics of Postmodernism, “are what replace the pose of objectivity and disinterestedness that denies the interpretive and implicitly evaluative nature of historical representation” (p. ). Dunyazad’s precursors are many. There is a male rebellious discourse, with no specific feminist agenda, which has nevertheless participated in unfolding political consciousness. Jabr¯a’s females in AlSaf¯ınah (The Ship, ) are no less rebellious than his men, as Roger Allen rightly notes (The Arabic Novel, p. ). No less so is Tawf¯ıq Y¯usuf #Aww¯ad’s heroine in Taw¯ . ah¯ın Bayr¯ut (; English translation: Death in Beirut, ). In these, as in many narratives, there is a broad justification for the resentment felt by women, but in women’s writing there is a carefully detailed representation of their feelings and responses, as in the writings of Colette Kh¯ur¯ı, Layla Ba#albakk¯ı, and Emily Nas.rall¯ah, for instance.24 To assume that there is a smooth and lucid reading of gender and sex in Arabic narratives of the modern and post-modern period is to miss the point, for it is to the credit of writers that they have let their narrative carry itself regardless of their proclaimed ideological position. In doing so, they enable us to read through their immediate writings and, perhaps, uncover strategies of repression or subordination. A woman writer like the Algerian Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı may well fall under the overriding male tradition, as I explain later, whereas a liberal-minded intellectual like the Iraqi Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı cannot release his protagonists from a virile pose that holds a panoramic novel together. In his Al-Masarr¯at wa-al-Awj¯a# (Gladnesses and pains, ), the young charming protagonist, Tawf¯ıq L¯am, occupies the center of the narrative, and as such he is doted on by women. They are around him, with slender but lush bodies and languid looks, stationed behind a window or at a doorstep to attract his attention or even to drop a note in his pocket. The narrative gives room to women officials with a say and position of their own (p. ), but they are nevertheless attracted to Tawf¯ıq L¯am. It is only when the omniscient narrator intrudes to enhance an underlying ironic tone that ambivalence overrules complacency, and the narrative undergoes multiplication. The male tradition assumes only one voice and representation, therefore, among many other voices, which compete through parody and stylization. Kam¯ılah, the uneducated but

24

See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, pp. –.

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moneyed girl, is attracted to Tawf¯ıq L¯am as a potential husband. “This girl Kam¯ılah is out of her mind,” says the omniscient narrator, “She thinks only of getting married to him, never to anybody else. Prayers be to God, women’s minds turn to be like this” (p. ). Women’s Writings: Examples There is, to be sure, a distinctive women’s writing. Women writers are carefully drawn to details, not to action, as we are to notice at a later stage. Speaking pointedly of the Lebanese war scene, miriam cooke rightly notes that while men “wrote of strategy, ideological violence,” her Beirut decentrists “wrote of the dailiness of war” and “abandoned loneliness.”25 Writing of women’s war narratives, miriam cooke dwells on Gh¯adah al-Samm¯an’s Kaw¯ab¯ıs Beirut (Beirut nightmares, ), for example, especially her focus on the “minutiae of her beleaguered state” (War’s Other Voices, p. ), to “measure the dailiness of the war” (p. ) and to emphasize the “transitoriness” of life against the “illusion of permanence” (ibid.). Sliced in snapshots, flights of fancy, news briefs, among other discursive strategies, this war narrative evolves as no less senseless and chaotic than its subject. Its postmodernist rupture also signals its postcolonial stance, for both poetics insert a body for the self as well as identity against erosion. Wars are senseless in these narratives, but this nonsensicality impels women writers to dwell on war in a minute engagement with its impact on individuals. Discursive strategies grow out of the challenge, danger and immediacy of the situation itself. To account for life against death, to stand for the human, and to decry absurdity, you need to portray human existence amid destruction, human desire against extinction, and also to set all within a perceptible site, usually a city where the battle is fierce. The act of writing becomes a celebration of life chances against the encompassing death. While partaking of the reality of war, the act of writing it remains different, for the writer is a voluntary participant at most, though impending civil war dangers turn women writers there into potential combatants, too. This situation stamps women war writing with a mixture of markers that can fit into postmodernist and postcolonial poetics. The reader may trace abandonment and engagement, a sense of identity along

25

Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. . Further references are within the text.

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with another of absurdity, free expression of desire amid awareness of tradition, a search for survival couched in nihilism, and abstraction that cannot be free from particulars. To say this about women war writers, however, does not entail the presence of a specifically delineated way of writing, a totally independent art, for the male tradition is not only dominating, but it has been conspicuously growing within both the surviving classical Arabic heritage and the borrowed European, American and Russian cultures. In context, it is almost impossible to speak of a one specific women’s style, but we can speak of voices with specific markers and interests. On the other hand, some women writers are inclined to work within male preoccupations with ideology and typology. Some are no less preoccupied with artistry that has been the domain of male writers like focused characterization and action, especially in matters of political or social ramifications. Salw¯a Bakr’s Maq¯am #A.tiyyah (#At.iyyah’s shrine, ; English translation: in a collection, The Wiles of Men, ),26 for instance, associates the effort of her young female protagonist #Izzah Y¯usuf with a class of journalists and archeologists who dig deep down to uncover truths that have been suppressed. She is herself made to disappear after distributing her report of discovery, the narrative itself, at doorsteps. Although commissioned by the newspaper to write down reportage about the shrine, she finds out that there are people whose interests lie in repressing that report. In other words, writing is not an easy task in postcolonial states. As a journalist, the young protagonist achieves her presence through a commitment that has been reserved for men, but her disappearance testifies to shared agendas and destinies, too. Women fare better as heroines in neo-historical accounts. The Bahraini woman novelist and writer Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd, for example, writes her Tah. awwul¯at al-f¯aris (The transformations of the knight, ) to ¯ ur writes highlight the role of women in popular revolts. Radw¯ . a #Ash¯ her trilogy Ghirn¯a.tah (Granada; ) to focus on the role of women in resistance to the inquisition.27 Sel¯ımah, the Andalusian girl, inherits a love for books from her father, the book-designer, engraver and binder,

Salw¯a Bakr’s Maq¯am #A.tiyyah (#At.iyyah’s shrine; Cairo: D¯ar al-Fikr, ); English translation appeared, along with other stories, in The Wiles of Men, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). The University of Texas Press print appeared in . ¯ ur, Ghirn¯a.tah (Granada; Cairo: al-Hil¯al, ). Citations are within the 27 Radw¯ . a #Ash¯ text. 26

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along with other interests in medicine and science (p. ). The novel is in part a narrative of her career to preserve a tradition against annihilation and destruction (p. ). But, no matter how careful she is to adapt to the new way of things, the inquisition will find out that “Gloria al-Fariz, her old name is Sel¯ımah bint Ja#far, conducts black magic, keeps things of suspicious nature such as seeds, plants and their like in her house, so as to hurt people” (p. ). The girl has been brought up, in temper and preoccupation, like Granada scientists (p. ). Knowing fully well that the enacted trial is no more than a farce, she decides not to plead for mercy: She will not add insults to an already insulting show. Mind is the human’s charm and self-confidence is sublimation. Let her stride on in dignity, even if treading towards burning on the stake (p. ).

¯ ur’s History is redrawn to meet the writer’s view of things. Radw¯ . a #Ash¯ women resist submission, to be sure, but their frame of mind is not gendered. They strongly believe in one main line of conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed. This line of demarcation does not exclude class, gender and ethnicity, but commitment here is never a gray site. While fully participating in the search for knowledge, they build up a character of their own that combines affection and thoughtfulness. Women in Arabic narratives emerge, grow, and regenerate not only within a male legacy, but also within another women’s tradition, which has its anecdotal and narrative store. Traditionally, story-telling at home is reserved for grandmothers, or mothers when they have a repository of some sort. The grandmothers or mothers relate their stories to their daughters and grand daughters within an understanding that stories vary according to every age, as the Egyptian woman writer Suhayr al-Qalam¯aw¯ı’s first collection, Ah¯ad¯ıth jaddat¯ı (My grandmother’s anecdotes, ), indicates. The act of storytelling is not a guarantee against penetration, and, like any expression, it undergoes contamination or rejuvenation in view of specific contexts. Women’s transmission is not always independent of competing discourses, and may at times end up with recycling patriarchal taboos and prohibitions, as Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s narratives tend to demonstrate. Aside from this site of blurred or mixed notions and attitudes, some women writers distrust any one-sided interest in gender as mere duplication of American white feminism. Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s voices her distrust of the whole cult of postmodernism and the focused interest in “culture” as the

  



newly found “god.”28 She strongly believes that class domination and patriarchal codes and relations should be addressed in narrative (ibid., p. ), to shatter the myth of patriarchy and explode the whole biological and theological apparatus of fabrications and distortions. Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s traces these in the very treatment of women’s bodies, for patriarchy itself sustains its presence in a hypocritical pursuit of these bodies while punishing them for what they biologically are. Patriarchy is, nevertheless, always after maternal and lush bodies to ensure ancestry. Feminist Politics and Poetics: An Overview Aligning with forces of change, women writers act in collaboration with these forces as noticed by a large number of intellectuals who wrote on the burgeoning women’s consciousness in the early decades of the twentieth century.29 They have also intimacies of their own according to the nature of the ongoing conflict. We can argue that women’s writing demonstrates feminist poetics and politics, but within an ArabIslamic culture of great complexity. Patriarchal patterns are conspicuously present in this culture as they are in every culture, but they are also challenged, undermined and overruled in many societies and during different periods in history.30 Feminist poetics and politics fit well into postcolonial theory and offer it a great potential and viability because of the very apprenticeship and initiation into this culture, and the effective participation, not only towards the enhancement of the positive and the enriching in heritage, but specifically in the fight against oppression, exploitation, backwardness and dormancy. We may trace in these writings the following politics: confrontation with patriarchy and its body politics; the search for lineage and ancestry, not only among the revolutionary male tradition, but also in the women’s tradition, or among heroines and female protagonists in revolutionary writings; the expedient manipulation of scene and circumstance to establish identity and selfhood; and the conscious interrogation of counterpolitics. Feminist poetics grows either by design as conscious strategies, 28 Naw¯ al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (New York: Zed Books, ), p. . Further references are within the text. 29 See for example the Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s memoirs, Mudhak. . kir¯at f¯ı al-siy¯asah al-Mis.riyyah, Vol.  (Cairo, ), pp. –. 30 See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam.

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 

as in the following examples from Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s writings, or in spontaneous answer to the nature of the narrative itself, its unfolding as stream of consciousness in a civil war situation with its counteraffirmation of life and its demand for detailed confession as in the Lebanese Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (; English translation: The Story of Zahra, ). The initiation in liberation movements invokes different poetics of mixed registers and modes, however, as we notice in the Algerian Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s Dh¯akirat al-jasad (; English translation: Memory in the Flesh, ). The claims of the national struggle, with its rhetoric of collectivity, impel the use of a poetic language, while the individual journey in the self invites realistic analysis. The Female Body as Confrontational Site The ramifications of body and gaze are many in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil), for instance. Women have to negate their bodies, to deny them first before opting for assimilation. To reach the school, Narjis “walked with a swinging movement of her tall, slim body” (p. ). But she has to avoid “lifting her shoulders lest she become taller than the men” (ibid.). A biological denominator is always present in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s writings, for her society is based on biological categorization. Women bodies are mapped and compartmentalized this way, and this body is discriminated against since Biblical times, or even before. As an essential like many others, biology works against women in patriarchal systems. But, there is another assumption, less than an essential, which is applied to women, too. They should be free from self-assertiveness. “She did not want to tread more heavily” when walking, lest people think she has not enough love for her “land” (ibid.). This last notion is deliberately focused, for Ab¯u al-#Al¯a" al-Ma#arr¯ı advises all, not only women, to tread softly. The Qur’¯an relates Luqm¯an’s advice not to tread with careless joy. But Naw¯al alSa#d¯aw¯ı’s narrator is keen on gathering evidence, for patriarchy has a focused interest in ostracizing women. The body therefore is picked upon and mapped as a site for disparagement. Jann¯at’s eyes provoke Shaykh Bassioun¯ı’s criticism, as they remind him of the first seductress, Eve, in line with a reading of tradition which is mildly challenged by other passing references (p. ). “Your eyes are full with the lust which is in Eve,” says the Shaykh. But a man in the street once whispered, “You are a female,” while his eyes were “fastened” on her “breasts with a look that meant she was a creature without brains” (p. ). Reading into

  



her characters’ minds, the writer leaves little for us as readers to deduct, add or induct. Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı challenges these views, but quite often, the challenge overlooks the social dimension of sexual repression, which provokes the “gaze,” and incites comments of admiration or solicitation in public places where women are few and where men flock in frustration and despair. The coffeehouse, the pub, the public garden and the street are terrains of frustration and fear as much as they are sites for socialization. Women have been deprived of these for years. The social and religious terms for segregation are many; and in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s narrative some are highlighted at the expense of others. Usually, ideological commitment since the s has been cutting across these, insuring greater participation and better interaction. Yet, the body is cherished, loved, admired, described or reviled and punished. Even admiration caters to some sadistic impulse due to sexual repression. It is always couched in terms of dismemberment, for the body is tall, and the eyes are ravishing. Every term of appreciation is laden with selection, which amounts to dismemberment. The woman’s body is not her own. In every culture, it is confiscated, sold out, drawn upon, mapped and deprived of its own identity. Jann¯at in Naw¯al alSa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil) realizes that her eyes disturb people around her, to the extent that she gives up her ownership of them. “She was separated from them by a solid, shining barrier” (p. ). Indeed, they turn into “stony spheres,” as alienating as people’s connotations, for they only reflect accusations against her as a “fallen woman whore” (ibid.). The body is a site for production of tradition, too. “The honor of a girl is as fine and delicate as cigarette paper,” says her Coptic grandmother (p. ). The connotation is not merely one of marginalization, for it is indicative of waste and trash, too, as the cigarette paper is turned out into cigarette to end up as a stub, “thrown away amidst the ashes” (ibid.). But Narjis’ father reiterates every verse and documentary evidence to prove that honor amounts to a woman’s body, or the other way around, “Honor meant chastity, and chastity was more valued than land,” and the “stigma of dishonor … could only be washed off by blood” (p. ). Narjis is taught that honor is “something invisible, hidden below the belly, like a fine sheet of paper that could be torn by a waft of air” (p. ). Standing for all girls, Narjis is raised with fear lest a jump or a jerk could damage this sheet, for “it burned like the head of a match at the slightest friction” (pp. –). Yet, to lose it is the end, “from where there was no return” (p. ). What Naw¯al



 

al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı narratively delineated is the belief, inherited from father to son, and mother to daughter, that honor is sustained in no other place. Women grow up in fear lest they lose it. Death or madness is the only outlet in patriarchal societies. In her reading of women, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı usually informs the narrative with some basic perspectives which happen to be hers throughout her writings. Her women are divided between submissive and subservient females like Nef¯ısah in Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil) and others who have a defiant look, a daring attitude, and some belonging to ideologies of subversion or revolt. Her whore in Suq¯ut al-Im¯am (Fall of the Imam) is among them so is Bint All¯ah. In Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil), both Jann¯at and Narjis are aware of their potential for revolt. Jann¯at’s eyes have always a defiant look (pp. , ), disturbing and thwarting male assumptions of female submissiveness (p. ). On the other hand, Narjis knows that her body is the focus of all eyes, for “People’s eyes opened wide when they saw her as though they had seen the Devil whispering to her at night, as though she had no right to be walking in the street, as though they owned the street and she owned nothing at all” (p. ). The gaze and the alienating look lead her to wish not to be seen, for the body is no longer hers, and she herself is merely the child of old days, a child who “was dead” (p. ): “Being dead was a pleasurable feeling. People were left alone when they were dead” (p. ). Mortified and subdued, the body loses its meaning and evolves as no more than a burden. Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s pre-adolescent women are the only ones who communicate their experience at home, for the postmaturation age is one of disappointment, a battleground where the unsheathed sword is a patriarchal weapon, solely owned by the “custodians” (Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs, Innocence of the Devil, p. ). Their adversary is always a “fallen” woman, a “whore,” a phrase that is secured solely for women. It is only a woman who is described as “Fallen! Low!” “Only a woman can be said to have fallen, my lady,” says Jann¯at’s grandfather, nodding his head affirmatively (p. ). But, “A man only falls in elections, my lady” (p. ). The narrator devises this binary articulation to develop a body politic whereby tradition is opened up, criticized, and dissected as an amalgam of symbols and practices. Playing on the word “fall,” yasqu.t, the grandfather claims to refer the verb to its classical lexicon. Significantly, it is the grandfather, with all the authority of age and history, who argues the case. Instead of uncovering the root for the verb, the grandfather offers its post-classical connotations that are endorsed

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through a bourgeois predilection for possession, especially of women’s bodies. By uncovering the underlying pattern of defilement and desire in the adversarial polemic and its practices, the author undermines its underpinnings, and conversely enhances women’s recognition of their bodies. Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s narrative is intellectually focused against an adversary who is narratively drawn and depicted in the form of grandfathers, directors, guards and presidents. Couched in conflict, women’s writing needs adversaries, represented by patriarchy as atemporal structure, to address women issues, especially issues of the body as it is treated, maltreated or cherished. But while Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s intellectual novels have their own agendas, other writers may let a woman’s narrative unfold as history of the self, with its ups and downs. Most often, and regardless of perspective, women protagonists end up wounded or murdered. Women’s Ancestry: Anxieties of Belonging Recognition of self and body amounts to political consciousness, which goes beyond the stage of confrontation towards the practice of identity formation. Whenever negotiating a place and using available tradition, writing resurrects a stamp of its own amid other markers and registers. Its confessions of borrowings indicate a burgeoning selfhood on the way of maturity and independence. In more than one sense, Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (; English translation: The Story of Zahra, ) is an exemplary piece of women’s writing,31 not only because of its specific engagements with a woman’s voice, her trauma and vindications of desire and inertia, but also for its anxiety of authorship. Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s woman protagonist Zahrah retains a genealogical lineage, a blood connection and tie to Tam¯ımah Nas.s.u¯ r, Tawf¯ıq Y¯usuf #Aww¯ad’s pioneering verbal construct of a southern girl in Beirut in his novel Taw¯ . ah.¯ın Bayr¯ut (; English translation: Death in Beirut, ). Both should test their feelings and thoughts in a city of rage, richness, death, war and temptation. Both are no mere romanticized characters in a journey from the rural to the urban, from heaven to hell, 31

See in this relation Charles R. Larson, “The Fiction of Hanan al-Shaykh: Reluctant Feminist,” in World Literature Today, ,  (Winter ), pp. –; also Ann Marie Adams, “Writing Self, Writing Nation: Imagined Geographies in the Fiction of Hanan al-Shaykh,” in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, , n.  (Fall ), pp. –.

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and from affirmation to denial. #Aww¯ad’s Taw¯ . ah.¯ın Bayr¯ut offers a Beirut of culture and temptation, however. But the task for the girl from the south is enormous, not only because of economic and social need, but also because she is confronted with cultural seduction that increases the pressure on a susceptible mind. The design of the narrative with its paratextual mottos and quotes highlight a decaying elitist culture whose signposts have been evading issues of gender through literary mystifications.32 Every paratext acts as a trap, and directs attention to snares, double dealings, and discrepancies, which the young girl has to find out through rites of passage, of loss, sacrifice and ultimate knowledge. With this in mind Han¯ . an al-Shaykh has to allow her protagonist to mediate a way within new eruptions of violence, war, rhetoric and ideology. Discourse and life scenes are bound togerther, interacting and producing each other. There are two sides in women’s engagement with their stories: first, they have to challenge male readings of women, especially in war and problematic situations, for women have a role of their own, which may borrow from dominating national or ideological discourse, but its accentuations are distinctively female and feminine. Following Adrienne Rich, both Gilbert and Gubar cite this attitude as a revisionist one of “entering an old text [male] from a new critical direction…[as] an act of survival.”33 The second, and by far the most significant strategy, is to seek “a female precursor” who has already set forth an agenda of limited but daring prospects (ibid.). The recognition of dearth in women’s output in comparison with a male tradition involves women’s writings in greater experimentation, which also manifests anxiety of authorship. Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (The Story of Zahra) enlists a number of readings, including Jane Eyre and Gibran’s writings. But, its subtext is no less involved in cultural politics than #Aww¯ad’s Taw¯ . ah.¯ın Bayr¯ut. Its civil war politics is posed against the thought of the Syrian-Lebanese ideologue Ant.u¯ n Sa#¯adeh (executed in Lebanon, ), which underlies the novel. Although Zahrah’s uncle H¯ashim is delineated as one of the leading

32

See the present writer’s analysis of the use of mottos and quotes as paratexts in “Dedications as Poetic Intersections,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –. 33 Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship,” in Feminisms, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ), pp. –, at p. .

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figures in Sa#¯adeh’s Nationalist Syrian Party (established in ), party politics permeates Zahrah’s mind and discourse, too. Sa#¯adeh’s classical Arabic (p. ), which evolves into disciplined performance, tells a lot upon the whole attitude of comrades. They share sincerity, commitment and faith in an ideology that had been once the hope of a large community, an ideology that cuts across religion, ethnicity and class. Yet, H¯ashim’s recollections of the past, its ideological remnants and present human inhibitions make it possible for him to understand Zahrah’s story of maltreatment, rape and disappointment. The narrative allows H¯ashim to justify loss of virginity while he insists that the rapist should be known, nevertheless. The complications of Zahrah’s past make more sense when the husband M¯ajid and the rapist M¯alik are juxtaposed against each other. Both strive for the female body, to be sure; but each is deeply caught in patriarchal moral politics. Each demands a body that is untouched, pure, uncontaminated and sacred. It has to prove itself by absence, i.e., to resist the touch of others before it is being legitimized. Indeed, to surrender to physical intercourse, even in rape, is to invite punishment. H¯ashim, the uncle, does not subscribe to this view, and his response may well explain his liberal politics, which may also provoke incestuous desire for his niece. The female body reacts in fear, and the image of Zahrah huddling herself “into a ball” (p. –) resonates throughout as the image of a woman who is always hunted out. Even in the most private places, like the bathroom, Zahrah is to act in fear, huddling herself into a ball, which amounts to an enforced negation of the human body. Instead of deriving freedom in Africa like some natives, Zahrah finds herself in webs and wedlocks of imprisonment, repression and inertia. Again this imaging is posed against that symbolic homeland, which Uncle H¯ashim’s ideology proposes and lords over Africa (p. ). But the challenge to Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s feminist politics in Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah lies in the underlying patterns that inform her narrative. Rather than a novel of education, or specifically a Bildungsroman, this novel takes issue with patriarchy and its latent undermining practices. The family scene is structured in patriarchal terms, as it is presided over by the father and the son, who is also involved in the civil war like other males. The son receives the mother’s attention (p. ), and the father beats the mother because of justified suspicions that she has an adulterous relationship (pp. , , –). Zahrah is to reap a legacy of deceit, repugnant or casual sexual scenes, rape and incest. She is to suffer intermittently for a family life for which she is not responsible.

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Amid conflicting narratives about her past and present, Zahrah grows into a misfit or a freak in a civil war scene in which males are the actors, but are also acted upon and endangered by snipers like S¯am¯ı. Identity Regained in War The sniper’s rifle may well stand for a blind civil war apparatus that builds on both: ideologies of power and a decaying patriarchy. Its challenge and presence are there to control and undermine. The rifle’s significations are attuned to the sniper’s penis, for he “thrusts into me again and again,” says Zahrah (p. ). Although mentioning once that she may have come to him to draw his attention away from his deadly practice (p. ), Zahrah has no illusions regarding the whole affair. She never proclaims symbolic representations either from mythology or current master narratives. She is a human being, a plain and poor girl who suffers at the hands of elders, including her mother. Yet, she reacts in anger, too. She is in need of a man, and the sniper’s interest in her meets her desire for such an intercourse. “Doubtless it was the war and the sniper’s lack of contact with life or women which made me the center of his world” (p. ). Although enjoying his stories of adolescence (p. ), Zahrah offers her body to avenge herself on patriarchy at large. But deriving some joy at times from his “thrusting inside” her, this surrender grows into a practice of anger and frustration, for apart from the act of covering her body with his own, “entering” her and “thrusting” inside her (p. ), she “felt no pleasure” (p. ). The act is her revenge against self and others. Her call for more is rather a call for revenge. “Oh, you sniper! You weigh on me like a vast but weightless mountain! Oh, you who dig these deep craters in my body, can’t you dig deeper and deeper until another orifice opens and sets free these old, fearful moments, these images that have until now haunted all my days?” (p. ). The sniper is her “god of death” (p. ) whose offers, including the four-month-old fetus, end up in sterility, futility and annihilation. Yet, these offers represent the end of a patriarchal career, too. The female body assumes its image of subordination and misuse in full, for it is there under the thrusting sniper’s blows as if duplicating or re-enacting scenes of beating, anger and abortion (p. ): Oh, sniper let me cry out in pleasure so that my father hears me and comes to find me sprawled out so. I am one with the dust in this building

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of death. Let my father see my legs spread wide in submission. Let every part of me submit, from the dark sex between my thighs, to my breasts with their still dormant nipples, my hands able only to tremble. (pp. – )

The implications of the scene are meant not only to highlight sexual psychology, for the scene culminates a narrative of socio-sexual politics, too. The family, the husband, and the society at large associate good fortune with beauty and achievement. There is no place for the plain or the socially marginalized. In civil war situations middle and lower classes undergo some equality or evenness, and the “god of death” brings the whole community, exempting the wealthy who have fled the country, under another control. Chance and coincidence have their say in this darkling plain. “This war has made beauty, money, terror and convention all equally irrelevant,” says Zahrah (p. ). In other words, it is only through a remedial or redemptive journey that things may release themselves from sham politics. Insofar as she is concerned, Zahrah feels that it is through this sacramental act that a self can be redeemed. “It begins to occur to me that the war, with its miseries and destructiveness, has been necessary for me to start to return to being normal and human” (p. ). While the symbolic implications of the sniper as the god of death permeates the last part of al-Shaykh’s narrative, the concluding scene of her being slain by the sniper’s shots is not necessarily a narratological contrivance to tie up the threads of the narrative. The god of death offers no love, to be sure, and his gifts are thrusts into the female body whose offspring should never survive. But Zahrah, as the narrator in almost two-thirds of the story, recognizes that things and people change. Even the father who continues to “drive her [mother] into the kitchen and beat her … with his leather belt” (p. ) is to undergo resignation at a later stage. He blames the mother for his daughter’s misfortunes: “Like mother, like daughter. No matter how hard you try to make things otherwise, the daughter will still follow her mother’s example” (p. ). The father associates the damage done to Zahrah with his wife’s illicit affair. “Why did you always have to take her along as witness? The poor, innocent, wretched creature?” (p. ). To repeat the father’s words implies some endorsement, for Zahrah as narrator recognizes that her father still cherishes the recollection of her early life as a smart girl, “the best girl in school” (p. ). Now, he can do no more than shaking “his head from left to right, feeling sorry that he

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hadn’t beaten … [her] enough when he was still strong, like a lion in his own stretch of jungle, growling out his words and devouring whatever crossed his path” (p. ). What makes Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s narrative quite feminist is Zahrah’s take-over of two-thirds of speech and narrative, leaving little room for further male domination. But, Zahrah’s narrative is never a “selfaggrandizing story of daring resistance,” as are the ones traced by Jennifer Krir, for instance.34 While narrative endorses acts of resistance, its unfolding lays bare sham politics. As patriarchy is at the heart of archaic societies, its working machinery and moral codes are undermined. Sites of adultery, rape, abortion, sexual violence and abuse cover every part of communal life. They influence speech and narrative throughout. The Beirut scenes of civil war offer some disorienting machinery of macabre politics, for patriarchy is no longer sustained. Parents and authority at large dwindle to insignificant apparatus. Snipers are both the voyeurs and the doers. No wonder the female body is victimized again. Instead of a father’s beating, the sniper’s rifle takes over, with bullets that are meant to kill, not to discipline. Zahrah tries to make sense of this reversal of roles, and her mind tries to retain some anchor, an image of love, “Where’s Ahmad? Where are you, my mother?” (p. ). In the middle of the street, as her blood drains out of her, she is sure that the sniper’s whole career is one of death and murder. “He kills me with the bullets that lay at his elbow as he made love to me” (p. ). In such a reversal everything loses meaning, and even skies offer no succor or help, for “their promises are ones of menace” (p. ). But, as miriam cooke argues, Zahrah’s espousal of the maternal and its connotations of “reaching out to others” (War’s Other Voices, p. ) is an act of sanity, which is already belied by the very senselessness and madness of the way in which she has been accommodated. Body Politics: Self-Affirmation vs. Symbols and Acts of Denial On the other hand, there is an underlying pattern of “body politics” that holds Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (The Story of Zahra) together. The plain child is a female body to be marginalized, ignored, set aside, placed some34

Jennifer Krir, “Narrating Herself: Power and Gender in Minaghabou Woman’s Talk of Conflict,” in Rewriting Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, eds. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, ), pp. – , at p. .

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where, whenever the mother goes to her lover. The child may be locked out, put to sleep, or ignored (pp. –). She is there as camouflage, an appendage with no identity of her own. Even when having sex with the sniper, in an effort to regain some selfhood, the sniper treats the female body carelessly, as lifeless or excremental. Hegemony is rampant, and acceptance of control is sustained, for “I couldn’t wait for the moment when he drew me on to the ground” (p. ). The female body becomes a site for scars, taboos and, also, joy. It is a site that invites discussion, analysis and claims of every sort. Around it and because of its presence many discourses evolve, empowering or undermining. Recognizing this body politic, Zahrah derives joy, not from the sexual act itself but from a deeper awareness of change in views and perspectives as brought about by the war itself: The war has swept everything away, for the rich and for the poor, for the beautiful and for the ugly. It has kneaded everything together into a common dough. My own looks have altered. I am no longer bothered by pimples on my neck, where once I felt that these were an inevitable part of me and that they and I could never part company. (p. )

The recurrent sexual scenes with the sniper only intensify her subordination and subjugation, but they are also her expression of willfulness, a willfulness that may lapse into madness, a craze that is beyond one’s control, like the senseless war itself (see miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. ). Although it is the sniper’s body that “covered” hers (p. ) after drawing her “down on the floor” (p. ), there is a sense of triumph over conventions. The picture of the Persian woman “hanging next to the wardrobe” is no longer an alienating presence (p. ). With a new understanding of her will against a whole traditional body politic, Zahrah says, “Yet, when now I lie in bed, it seems that I have joined that species of woman and am able to bear a comparison with her” (p. ). As if echoing Annette Kolodany (qtd. in miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. ), al-Shaykh makes her narrator speak for women’s willful consciousness in times of danger and war. What Foucault describes as “body politics” of intersectional nature applies with great force to Zahrah’s narrative. Although the hegemonic is there, regenerating in various forms, Zahrah’s acts of resistance or submission are heavily laden with meanings. Wedlock scenes have always been means to impose and practice authority. Her hysteria and numbness are counter-hegemonic. Yet, her submission to the sniper takes place in opposition to a denial of selfhood, which has been imposed by family and society alike, including her mother. Indeed, one

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may agree with Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz that “gender domination is never a thing in and of itself, and that it intersects with and in a very basic sense is constituted by other hierarchized domains like the body, the family, civil society, the nation, and the transnational arena, each of which is variously gendered.”35 Seen as narrative of the self, accentuated and mediated in part through two major male voices, the temporary husband M¯ajid and her Uncle H¯ashim, Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (The Story of Zahra) bridges both postmodernism and postcolonial discourse. Its New Historicism lies in its populist viewpoint,36 privileging as it were its own perspective against its victimizers. Even ideological discourse that suffers a setback like H¯ashim’s is no longer privileged. A narrative of frustration and failure which ideology usually minimizes in its elevated style and classical signposts undermines its tone of supremacy and rapturous achievement. As narrative of an ordinary self, a “plain” girl, as Zahrah says of herself, it runs counter to ideological pompous discourse. It makes no claim to truth, achievement, national pride or tradition. It is inscribed on a body, which has been used and abused, talked about and discussed. On the other hand, the narrative directs attention to postcolonial nations and states, their social and ethnic problems, which have not received due attention in ideological discourse at large. Female Consciousness and Male Intrusions Saying this, I should put a note of caution here, for al-Shaykh can fluctuate between counter-hegemony and stereotyping whenever she succumbs to male narratives of exotic scenes and masculine virility as in her other novel Misk al-ghaz¯al (; English translation: Women of Sand and Myrrh, ).37 Her narrative could borrow a great deal from the Orientalist canon. Her Oriental women of the desert are with languid looks and whose life is one of boredom, which can be blown into excitement only if there is “a man who slipped in after her [N¯ur] like a thief ” (p. ). But the radical shift in this narrative takes place 35 Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, “Introduction,” Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia, eds. Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz, p. . 36 Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, ), p. . ¯ ab, ); English transla37 Han¯ . an al-Shaykh, Misk al-ghaz¯al (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ tion: Women of Sand and Myrrh, trans. Catherine Cobham (London and New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, ).

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when the writer concentrates on the lesbian, and the gay. Indeed, alShaykh shows a mastery of detailed description whenever she delves into the secrets of households. This is a domain that not many male writers can reach or understand. In her lesbian relationship with N¯ur, the narrator develops a physical bodily response to meet N¯ur’s desire to be loved. In the days that followed, I plucked up enough courage to kiss Nur, when I’d shut my eyes and opened them fifty times. My limbs went numb before I reached that nameless, otherworldly region with her. I couldn’t open my eyes again easily; it was as if I was standing beside a large firework that might go off at any minute, or was dazzled in the presence of Nur the imperious queen bee. This was no longer an experiment; I’d tried a new fruit which I’d thought would be inedible and instead I’d found it intoxicatingly sweet; I couldn’t just spit out the stone and go on my way. (p. )

In other words, the protagonist-narrator argues against the biological, for sexual desire grows and develops in practice. The shift from the straight to the queer, from the normal to the abnormal, or from conformity to non-conformity and dissent is a matter of training and education like any other human activity. Han¯ . an al-Shaykh offers a repository of details in this untrodden terrain, and her Misk al-ghaz¯al (Women of Sand and Myrrh) builds on a classical tradition in this direction as Ibn al-Nad¯ım’s Fihrist shows.38 She can develop scenes of lushness and sexual excitement as, perhaps, few men can do. The protagonist-narrator witnesses a concert once where Jaleela, “the nanny of the Sidassi girls,” offers the most bodily excitement: Jaleela was still challenging the singer with brazen movements of her hands, her tongue and every part of her body, leaving it to transmit its own signals. But the rhythmic nature of her movement made it into a dance: she didn’t sway or rock her body; she ordered it or shook in response to it, disregarding the shouting around her; her ear was centered on the music and her other senses on the full-lipped singer. Jaleela’s eyes were in an agony of passion, her mouth a stubborn line. She tried to touch the singer’s face, to kiss her on the lips in the midst of clapping and laughter, the crashing tambourines and shouts of encouragement. (p. )

The scene is not an ordinary one, for the body writes itself with power, free from subordination to a voyeur other than a woman partner. It is the body that inscribes itself in terms and expressions against another kind of body language. Jaleela’s eyes, for instance, carry within 38

See the present writer’s Mujtama#Alf laylah wa-laylah, pp. –, –.

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them meanings, invitations, and the body itself resigns to an underlying discourse, which is laden with its significations. The dancer’s body is made to act, sway or rock, whereas Jaleela’s speaks, taking its signals from her looks and her mouth. The whole scene partakes of a busy and passionate life, which belies early implications of boredom. The desert outside is no longer a land of loneliness or desolation. The inside compensates for the emptiness of the outside. The body blooms, and the human touch thrives against a seemingly vast desert. Identity Nexus: Nation and Women Although devoid of overt body-land associations, al-Shaykh’s Misk alghaz¯al (Women of Sand and Myrrh) develops such an association in terms of natives and expatriates, need and wealth, and inside and outside. Especially in its use of site and discourse, Arabs and the West, it offers a viewpoint, which deviates from the counter narratives of the s until the s, as I explain elsewhere in this book. The case may not be the same in the Algerian Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s Dh¯akirat aljasad (; English translation: Memory in the Flesh, ) where the association between the land, the nation, and the beloved is stressed in line with an Arab ideology since the “Awakening.”39 Taking K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nadjma as its intertext, Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s Dh¯akirat al-jasad entangles its narrative in a network of associations whereby meanings unfold together in a pseudo-ideological profusion.40 The protagonist, the painter Kh¯alid, could exchange roles with Rash¯ıd, and Ziy¯ad the poet could exchange roles with the black person who is left unnamed. Every representative presence betrays absence, as it has no specific personal identity, for they are there as markers of a national struggle for Algeria, the nation and the land. Constantine draws their love, and they yearn for “every stone, every bridge … alive and fresh, as an amorous lover satisfies a body of a woman who is not his” (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. ). Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s narrative is meant to resist representation despite its lapsing in pseudo-nationalist discourse. Whenever there is ¯ ab, ); English trans39 Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı, Dh¯akirat al-jasad (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ lation: Memory in the Flesh, trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). The translation is sparingly used, and as indicated in the text. 40 On this novel, see Raj¯ a" al-Naqq¯ash, Qis. s. at riway¯atayn: dir¯asah naqdiyah wa-fikriyah li-riw¯ayat Dh¯akirat al-jasad wa-riw¯ayat Wal¯ımah li-#ash¯ab al-bah. r (Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ).

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yearning for land and women the elevated language is identical to the romanticizations of the s and s.41 The poet of women and love, Niz¯ar Qabb¯an¯ı notices as much. Writing for the back cover ( Aug. ), he suggests that this novel is “a poem written in many meters … the meter of love, the meter of sex, the meter of ideology, the meter of the Algerian revolution, with its militants and mercenaries, its heroes and those who have been its murderers, its angels and devils, its prophets and those who have been its thieves.” Partaking of Nadjma, Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s narrative is bound to borrow from the ghost-text its poetry and land connotations. Jacqueline Arnaud looks upon Yac¯ıne’s novel as “novel-poem,”42 whose collapsing of the symbolic and the real involves the text in never-ending meanings. The male in both is held between “atavism (Algeria as femme fatale), and historical dynamism (the emerging modern nation).”43 In Ahl¯ . am ¯ ¯ Mostagh¯anamı’s narrative, Kh¯alid duplicates Yacıne’s problematic convergence (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. ), as “a mark of the risk and uncertainty of the nationalist understanding” (Ibid., p. ). The addressee or the narratee Hay¯ . at maintains a similar convergence, which amounts to impossibility at times whenever there is a need to carry on a clearsighted analysis. Between a desire to deconstruct feminization in its colonialist ramifications and love for the nation as the mother, (alUmmah) and (al-Umm), there is a great deal of vacillation which has no final settlement other than its in-betweenness. The case is even more complicated in view of the Francophone legacy from which no postcolonial writer in North Africa claims absolute freedom. But while they react against the colonizer’s discourse of feminization, they find themselves drawn to another, which also emanates from the French basin. Lyotard’s “the name of Algeria,” for example, offers love and attachment for the “beloved woman,” the beloved land. These “love letters” were addressed in a series of articles to La Guerre des Algériens. The male here “laments the knowledge that she will not have the fate she merits by virtue of her valiance and beauty” (qtd. in Woodhull, p. xvi). Although addressed and dedicated to the Algerian writer

41

See for further readings of the novel in relation to Algerian history, Aida A. Bamia, “Dhakirat al-jasad (The Body’s Memory): A New Outlook on Old Themes,” Research in African Literature, , n.  (Fall, ), pp. –. 42 Qtd. in Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb (Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, ), p. . 43 Ibid., p. . Quotations from this book are hereafter within the text.

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M¯alik Hedd¯ ad, Ahl¯ . . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s Dh¯akirat al-jasad draws Kh¯alid’s character in duplication of a number of writers including Hedd¯ad, Yac¯ıne, Lyotard and Fanon.44 In one pronouncement after another, Kh¯alid duplicates them to imagine a “cohesive … national body” (Woodhull’s phrase, p. ) whose rhetoric draws on the discourse of nationalism which usually resorts to a reductivist strategy in order to make up its signposts and markers. The national discourse, in the case of the Algerian postcolonial political address, tends to “reducing the multiple, heterogeneous identities of Algerian women to a single figure, a woman” (ibid., p. ). But the counter emphasis in postliberation narratives should not be seen out of context, for, as Linda Hutcheon notes, postcolonial writing cannot escape its referentiality.45 As the colonial desire is focused on lands, a “world without men,” in Mannoni’s terms (qtd. in Fanon, Black Skin, p. ), counter-discursivity is to populate lands densely so as to bestow love jointly on people and lands. Especially in narratives by women writers of the post-liberation phase like Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s, the privileged narrator is drawn from among the fading memories of fighters and militants. They are redrawn and endowed with some art as if to atone for some sense of guilt for leaving men carrying the burden of the war. What may fade in memory and recollection is given flesh, maturation in art. Yet, the protagonist is molded into a supplement to the goddess, his own creation, where he is bound to worship in a pagan fashion. Kh¯alid addresses the narratee as follows: With one hand I embraced you, planted and plucked you … unclothed and clothed you, changing your bodily features to suit mine: you woman in the shape of a homeland. (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. )

The analogy has its power to collapse the prosaic and the poetic, for the woman has to be the incarnation of the land so as to enable him to regain a historical perspective when he has been a fighter in the liberation movement. He carries the scar of struggle, but this scar has to regain its meaningfulness amid sacrifice and love: “Offer me a chance for another heroic action,” Kh¯alid says. The yearning is no mere

In a broad context see Debbie Cox, Politics, Language, and Gender in the Algerian Arabic Novel (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, ). 45 Linda Hutcheon, “Circling the Downspout of Empire: Postcolonialism and Postmodernism,” in PSR, eds. Bill Ashcroft, et al., –, at p. . 44

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Romantic play on the theme of the unattainable. He is a slave to her love and looks, he tells us (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. ), but his dilemma lies in the complications attending this confusion between women, nation, and the ideology of national liberation. Debating Revolutionary Rhetoric What is significantly postcolonial in Dh¯akirat al-jasad is its narrative of the self in a spiral inner journey that uses embeddings and retrieves scenes and dialogues that are fading. The confessional tone has no aspiration for redemption, for it is caught between a desire for the narratee, the addressee Hay¯ . at, especially in her embodiment of the nation, and recognition of the postcolonial impasse. Every detail is enmeshed in other ramifications. Even his personal love for the narratee Hay¯ . at cannot survive the turmoil and the challenge, simply because his revolutionary rhetoric makes it impossible. Deeply set in masculine rhetoric, the post-liberation phase continues to alienate women who were actual fighters. As miriam cooke argues, the “women found that their battle for independence had ceased to be theirs. It was their fathers’, husbands’, brothers’ and sons’” (War’s Other Voices, p. ). Hay¯ . at’s reflections come to the same conclusion, which Kh¯alid has already reached. Her father’s memory as a great fighter and leader keeps him from thinking of her as a woman like other women. Si T¯ . aher, her father, is in his mind when he “was moving in an instant from loving attraction to blind adoration, from innocent feelings to lust” (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. ). But to be so means treason in his revolutionary rhetoric. “How could I not have felt any regrets afterward and not even any shame toward Si T¯ . aher’s memory when I committed, that day, the highest sort of moral treason?” (ibid., p. ). As revolutionary rhetoric has its aggrandizements, Si T¯ . aher’s name is “awe inspiring,” and it becomes both a “bridge and a barrier.” But as they both relate to Si T¯ . aher as a father and a leader, there is also another patriarchal pattern that involves both in sacrifice, challenge and promise. The ramifications here entail a “shared memory” and also “shared routes, alleys, and mutual sorrows and joys, too.” Reflecting on the wound that led to severing his arm, Kh¯alid equates it to her loss of the father. “My injury was conspicuous, and yours deep and hidden,” for “we are the remains of war” (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. ). Certainly, there is a lot for psychoanalysis in this equation, but Kh¯alid’s slow-paced confessional narrative implicates both in loss. Although

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she is seemingly better equipped to escape memory, Kh¯alid presents her in the image of the idealized woman, a symbol that has meaning only in relation to or in association with patriarchy or revolution. The Male Tradition in Women’s Consciousness “In contemporary patriarchal culture,” writes Sandra Lee Bartky, “a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment” (p. ). It is not surprising that Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı offers the male Kh¯alid the whole narrative through which the beloved female is drawn both as a young attractive lady of real presence and a symbol for a national dream, a state of some recognizable values that justify sacrifice and suffering throughout the national liberation war. Although avowedly fighting to clear some imaginative space for women, the Algerian writer cannot escape traditional assumptions, already traced and analyzed by feminists. Her narrator addresses the counterpart as a “woman whom I discovered later to enjoy orders” (Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. ), whose switching to French enables her to express her “secret jealousy” of Catherine whom he, as painter, has drawn (p. ). On the other hand, the narrator as artist resists drawing a nude, for “my brush, like myself, hates to share with others a nude, even in a joint ensemble for painters” (p. ). The dominating male is there to magnify his love, which is selfish and self-centered. The narratee Hay¯ . at is imaged as someone who derives happiness from this devotion. While the narratee is more at home with a discourse of revolutionary rhetoric that slides into poetic adoration, there is an intimate suggestion that the male protagonist is given this narrative space to bypass moral strictures which a woman writer cannot escape in her own voice. The narratee tells Kh¯alid that in Agatha Christie’s novels more than sixty murders are usually committed with nobody ever raising one single objection: “But it is enough for a woman writer to write one love story to have many fingers of accusation pointed at her.” She adds playfully: “I believe that critics should find a way to settle this matter once and for all. They should either admit that a woman’s imagination goes beyond a man’s or decide to put us all on trial” (p. ). These intimations occupy a substantial space in Dh¯akirat al-jasad, but their feminist twist is submerged into a large body politics, which attempts to cut across cultures, poetics, liberation movements, ideologies, and women. Its use of Niz¯ar Qabb¯an¯ı’s language of adoration,

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along with the poetics of master narratives, endows it with great stylistic power, which has foregrounded its nation-woman paradigms. This is not necessarily the case in other writings by women. A Voice of Their Own In tune with French feminist theorization for alliance “with everything in the culture which is muted, silenced, or unrepresented,”46 such a novel as the Tunisian Sabiha Khmir’s Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come digs into patriarchal tradition.47 Writing in English in retrospect, as an expatriate in England, the writer is in the act of selection and sifting, drawing therefore on what constitutes her own personal recollection and experience. Couched in space as much as in time, tradition evolves into a masculine gaze invading, and dominating privacy, leaving the female in an either-or position, to submit to the gaze and accept it in an act of subordination, or rejecting and challenging it, in search for a status of mutual recognition. In that novel Amina Ben Saleh Ben #Abd Slam (p. ) passes in front of the “Upper Cafe,” feeling men’s “scrutinizing eyes” (p. ): As I passed by, I could feel the weight of scrutinizing eyes on every part of my body. I could feel the life heat on that high spot and, as I walked, my legs got mixed up as always and I had this strange fear again that my knickers would fall right there… What would happen if I just stopped and looked at those people? Looked those men in the eyes? (p. )

But her contemplation of an act of defiance is not limited to a countergaze, for it assumes a better meaning in a contemplated panoptic space: What would happen if I turned left, walked up those stairs, sat at table and ordered some mint tea and a ‘bouquet’ of jasmine? What would happen if I did just that? (ibid.)

Recognizing, however, the enormous ramifications of defiance, Amina reassesses space in terms of time, for tradition is so deeply entrenched that an act of defiance is bound to suffer dearly, “every one of those small steps [up to the cafe] was a thousand years” (p. ). The way out of the dilemma is through writing. Engaged in metafictional historiography, Khmir collapses the real and the imaginary, askElaine Showalter’s view, “The Feminist Critical Revolution,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. E. Showalter (London: Verage, ; rpt. ), p. –, at p. . 47 Sabiha Khmir, Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come (London: Quartet Books, ). 46

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ing the reader to participate in journeying with her between Korba and Tunis, or between both and Europe. Yet, the journey involves first the self, as it is acted upon, as much as it is acting on events. Hence, the reader identifies with her for being an ordinary life, free from novelistic patterning “together, we can wave a carpet of time with which we will travel” (p. ). To use Elaine Showalter’s “Feminist Poetics,” Khmir’s Waiting is “feminist” in the very dramatization of Amina’s sense of injustice, bewilderment, and aspiration for release. While there is a tendency towards the “typically oblique, displaced, ironic, and subversive,” which Showalter associates with the feminist,48 Amina is also keen on providing her own versions of the domestic, the social, the political and the cultural. It is this metafictionality that involves Amina the narrator in redefining the limitations and prospects of her story (p. ), as if acknowledging what Showalter describes as the “female phase” in women’s writing (“Feminist Poetics,” pp. –). Male Feminism Yet, to highlight this potential is not the concern of women writers only. Male feminism can be duly engaged in these poetics and politics. More importantly, male feminism in narrative is concerned with giving a voice to women so as to articulate their presence on equal footing. This is the case in writings of political engagement, where party politics is a dynamic organizational action, also heavily involved in theorizations, as leftist parties were before the ascendancy of rival nationalism and its dictatorial mechanisms. In #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose, ), the young leftist woman Mun¯a, attracts three young male intellectuals. She also has some influence on the whole group, especially the protagonist W¯a"l al-J¯abir¯ı. But rather than imposing a discourse of another supremacy, Mun¯a’s is a Marxistfeminist perspective, highly colored by affiliation with political activism and wide-range reading in existentialism and leftist ideology. She may have a character of her own, but she may also represent a large segment of young educated people in Iraq throughout s and s before the rightist take-over. Her address to the protagonist includes provocative questions on every issue, including what may amount to testing his knowledge and frame of mind. She asks him specifically if Elaine Showalter in “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism, pp. –, at p. . Further citations are within the text. 48

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there is one sentence from Camus that imprints itself on his mind. But she may strive to reach the depth of her fellow comrades, too. Mun¯a’s questions negotiate an intersection of readings, attitudes and practices that fuse into each other in such a way that belies any endeavor to separate text from context. Discerning the protagonist’s resistance to show his passion for her in the presence of the other two who are doting on her, Mun¯a tells him that she finds love an expanding rather than limiting sentiment. In other words, she traces no contradiction in loving all the three, for each has something worthy of attention and love. “In pure love everybody is a participant in a moment of sublimity. Don’t we all love the moon, the stars, the flowers, nature and peaceful creatures?” (p. ). As if “desexualizing” sexuality in the vein of Foucauldian strategies, Mun¯a’s practice and discourse manifest an understanding of pleasure as beyond the immediately sexual. In Winifred Woodhull’s reading of Foucault, women “have not limited the challenge to male domination to questions traditionally recognized as falling within the realm of sexuality.”49 Mun¯a in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (The Suffering primrose) has already followed such a track in her concept of love, community relations and the ethics of activism. Yet Mun¯a also knows that men may confuse passion with love. Trapping the protagonist-narrator in another relationship, which she has instigated and masterminded to prove her point, she suggests to the protagonist that his love for her is no more than passion tinged with admiration. Mun¯a herself can be trapped by her very political activism. Her ardent lover, the Marxist Mu#izz, is so disturbed by her attention to the protagonist that he implicates and frames her in such a way as to lead her to believe that the protagonist is an informer, sent and planted by the Security Office, to undermine party structures. Believing that the protagonist is a dupe, a liar, as Mu#izz tries hard to prove, Mun¯a is not surprised to find herself captured and imprisoned the next day. It is in prison that she commits suicide. In other words, Mun¯a is no mere political activist, for her faith in progress, equality and freedom is so real and sincere that there is no separation in her attitude between theory and practice. Thus, Mun¯a is both the narrative catalyst and the towering presence among the group. Holding them together, she grows larger than her individual self. But, being so real, she is there to See Winifred Woodhull, “Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape,” in Feminism and Foucault, ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, pp. –, at p. . 49

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release ideology and political activism from its idealism. Losing her, the protagonist is bound to reach an impasse, in life as in narrative. Thus, he writes: “I am shattered, fragmented in silence. In my orbit no center is there, but my love for Mun¯a. Through that center I can reach myself. But what remains after the loss?” (p. ). On a narrative level, her character holds the novel together. With so much space and presence, her character regains a heroic role, which is denied to women in many male narratives. On the other hand, her intellectual impact functions as catalyst, endowing both the protagonist and the novel with a center and meaning. Without Mun¯a, narrative is bound to lose focus and become series of fragments. The concluding remarks on her disappearance from the scene and her loss are deliberately placed, to enable the reader to see the other side of the scene, its fragmentary nature, disruption and rupture. In terms of theory, she offers the novel its postcolonial stamp; but her enforced retreat from the narrative stands also for women’s intellectual and cultural absence under repression. Her disappearance leaves the narrative in disarray, which metonymically speaks of the plight and predicament of many intellectuals who are beset by both totalitarianism and sick practices of political parties in the Middle East. Desire as Narrative Male feminism is also concerned with desire, for it is desire, after all, which is behind the loss of Mun¯a. In broad terms, desire takes form in context, as it does within patriarchal and neo-patriarchal structures and mechanisms. It is behind curiosity and possession, and applies to colonialist interests and wars. It takes a number of forms and tropes to justify means of possession, acquisition, and invasion of public sites and individual privacy. Also, it is typically a middle class motive for possession. Unless carefully disciplined, it is behind the best and the worst in human life. The implications of desire, response and revenge take a number of forms in postcolonial narratives. While love is recalled, or retained, to counteract a presence of disappointment and failure, as in Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s Algerian protagonist, or in Issa Boullata’s renewal of ¯ il¯a al-Quds (Back to Jerusalem), it also grows into love for Widad in #A"id extramarital relationships. In Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose) the young married woman calls on the protagonist, upon meeting him in the street, to join her (p. ). Having known him as a radical revolutionary and painter since she was a schoolgirl, she looks upon him as the hero of movies, smart and virile. When asking her about her hus-

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band (p. ), she tells him that he knows of her affairs, as much as she knows of his. Her sense of betrayal and disappointment is augmented when the husband asks her to offer herself to a “friend” (p. ). She is all the more shocked to find the “friend” uninterested in her, “I want you, not her,” he says to the husband. After that it becomes difficult for her to accept her husband anymore, resorting instead to other men (p. –). Her justifications appear as if “in a rehearsal … indifferent … with no emotions whatsoever” (p. ), adds the protagonist. This non-committal language on the part of the woman deliberately negates purposefulness, for mechanical performance is nihilistic, a sign of sterility in a wasteland. This language is one among many, as it, in the example above, offers the other extreme, when women find themselves enmeshed in the nonsensical and the absurd. Male protagonists fare no better. In novels of confession and retrospection, like Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, the narrator as protagonist usually adds such qualifications as “I have been very silly” (Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, Suffering primrose, p. ) whenever he knows that he “has gone wrong.” Nevertheless in these narratives we come across “two voices, contradictory, and in enmity … dialoguing against myself, driving me to forget my troubling present, and to descend into the past” (p. ). Whenever he finds himself overwhelmed by desire against his better judgment, especially in respect to the young girl who has rested her head on his shoulder in the public garden, he chastises himself, for she is “as a deer sniffing and crying” (p. ). This position fits well in the protagonist’s existentialist paradigms of hesitancy and ambivalence. The case is different on other occasions whenever his Marxist sense of action and engagement overrules. When another woman takes the decision herself in her own hands, knowing full well that she betrays a husband for being indecent, a liar and polygamous (p. ), the protagonist puts hesitancy behind. With a woman who avenges herself on society at large, the protagonist cannot resist the overwhelming sexual impulse, for both “are overflowing with hot desire” (p. ). Yet, the woman also adds that she is asking for divorce, leaving all material privileges behind (p. ). In these cases, the narrator as protagonist valorizes the partner’s sense of independence, justice and revenge while highlighting as well his presence as pivotal in turning her against misuse, injustice and exploitation: “With you,” says the young lady, the wife of an administrator, “I came to the understanding tonight that my life [with the husband] was unbearable stupidity” (p. ).

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As voicing and articulating of desire or its negation assume so much importance in postcolonial narratives, male feminists look upon the whole issue in broad contextual terms, too. Aside from class, station, and color, there are other concerns that argue for further readings not only beyond the limitations of physical desire, but also in relation to issues of intrigue and challenge. Desire as a trap for the person involved is an ancient motivation in narrative, but its camouflage diversifies morphology and rhetoric of motives. In male feminist writing the woman is given a manipulative role to prove a point that runs counter to assumptions of female weakness and subordination. At times, this perspective may give way to a justification of transgressive desire. In scenes where the erotic interfuses with Sufism, for instance, women are no less inclined than men to defining the body as a medium for further elevation or sublimation. Especially in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, Suffering primrose, the other woman protagonist in the novel, #Adawiyyah, does not hide her dissatisfaction with a husband who thinks that “a woman is sex” (p. ). He terms her Sufism as no more than “sexual inertia” (p. ). She tells the protagonist, however, “I read for a Sufi: ‘Be a sea so that you won’t stagnate!’ Isn’t this infinitude? Isn’t it release for a body that is stifled by the finite? I am a woman filled with exuberance and health … in my blood is the whole bodily need … how is it possible then to imagine a woman … living outside the text of the body?” Thus, upon her husband’s temporary leave to fetch things, she pulls the protagonist to her, “filled with uncontrollable desire that never retracts,” arguing against his morality as mere pretension to hide “impotence” (p. ). With that word she hits the right cord, for to prove the opposite, he holds her to him to let her “feel his intense desire” (p. ). Reluctant to betray the husband, he finds her resolved to involve him in sexual intercourse, which happens to be a trap as well, so as to put an end to his love for her friend and rival (p. ). In other words, the woman protagonist is given enough narrative space to argue her case within a number of registers of specific appeal to the narrator so as to trap him and prove the overruling power of desire. Colony for the Divorced This recognition of women as protagonists with a potential of their own does not mitigate the complexity of the issue. On the other hand, not all women are as versed in schools of thought and as educated as the protagonists in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u. Subject to misuse, however,

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whenever there is inequality, women offer the underprivileged strata for fiction writers. Postcolonial fiction problematizes this subjection. Drawing attention to the unseemly, male feminism offers new scenes and perspectives that relocate women issues within dichotomies of exploitation and freedom, while recognizing desire as basically motivational regardless of gender. This is the case in Muhammad #Abd al-Sal¯am . 50 al-#Amar¯ı’s Ihbi.t¯u Mis. ra (Disembark in Egypt). The journey to the unnamed rich country and back to Egypt is both a process and a becoming, for the identity of the architect #Umar al-Sharn¯ub¯ı needs to pass through a trial of some sort to test his beliefs while penetrating the life of the hosting, but adamantly antagonistic, society. His experience grows and deepens in association with another character, Sa#d al-Shar¯ıf, who has already passed through a traumatic ordeal in that country. While attempting to unravel the story of the previously Nasserite Sa#d al-Shar¯ıf, his suffering and subsequent affluence, the architect reaches into the depths of that police state, its wealth, corruption, and double standards. Sa#d al-Shar¯ıf himself is turned into free state broker of great wealth after being offered the choice between Nasserite politics, imprisonment and torture, or wealth and affluence. The protagonist understands the price to be paid, and decides to escape, offering the reader in writing the muted voice of many who have to suffer death or imprisonment. While also exposing the degeneration of many, men and women, under the alluring and compelling power of wealth, magnified and embodied by the wealthy Ab¯u al-Khayr (p. ), the narrator also tracks the counter impact of women on the wealthy, as Abu¯ al-Khayr “stammers and his awe-inspiring presence dwindles into nothing upon seeing the two women,” Angela and Am¯an¯ı, the two secretaries in the company (p. ). Ihbi.t¯u Mis. ra (Disembark in Egypt) resorts to plain narrative: shreds of new journalism, reports and letters, that include a letter from the “the quarter of widows and divorced women” addressed to the Human Rights Commission. In this letter, the divorced petition for help to get husbands, for the colony is turning into a place “more besieging and frightening than prisons” (p. ). The colony, for the quarter is under close surveillance, may expose the other side of patriarchy, its resilient habits of thought and control, Muhammad #Abd al-Sal¯am al-#Amar¯ı, Ihbi.t¯u Mis. ra (Disembark in Egypt; Cairo: . D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ). 50

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but it is presented within a realistic context, forwarded through the eyes of the protagonist-narrator. Disguised as a woman in the company of another (p. ), #Umar the architect goes into that colony where the divorced are separated in order not to “contaminate” the so-called secure society of happy marriages (p. ). There, #Umar discovers the availability of everything that is meant to keep the divorced contented in isolation. But instead of joy, there is a growing sense of opposition, rebellion and anger. The author offers a space of isolation, a trope for the muted, which paradoxically grows into one of rebelliousness and dissent. Decolonizing Women: Agendas and Discursive Strategies The process of counteracting male chauvinism applies to every culture as long as there is a referential context of patriarchy and power monopoly. In Arabic a good number of male writers are involved into this practice through their recognition of discursive space as a battlefield that requires a position and a stand. The situation is the more urgent because male monopoly of writing has been going for so long. The process demands exposure of malpractices, access to open discussion, and criticism of whole registers and discourses. These three political agendas inform writing, and grow into discursive strategies of some potency in postcolonial writings. As an act of will and power, writing deliberately resorts to defamiliarization at times in order to expose hegemonic practices which have become part of the life of a certain community and group. The colony of the divorced in Muhammad . #Abd al-Sal¯am al-#Amar¯ı’s Ihbi.t¯u Mis. ra (Diembark in Egypt) grows into a trope for whole societies that accept divorce arrangements as a matter of convenience and expediency. The unreality of the “quarter of the widows and the divorced” does not bother the reader who may well suspend his surprise and disbelief for sometime due to the narrator’s claim to be a participant in that community for sometime. With journalistic ease and substantial documentation, the narrative underplays literariness, while conversely highlighting its authenticity and truthfulness. In a daring act of gender crossing, and disguised as one of the divorced, #Umar, we are told, spends sometime in the colony of the divorced. His attention to factual details, and his concentration on means for diversion there, relegate the issue of authenticity to the background. What remains in the reader’s mind is the colony with its connotations of exploitation and misuse. Its effectiveness as a trope derives

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from the author’s focus on detailed descriptions of the place, the life of women there, and their search for diversion. Its reality exists in the factors that lead to divorce, and the inability of the divorced to find jobs. By imbibing the real with strangeness, this narrative signals other widening prospects for contemporary Arabic fiction. Writing as such becomes a transgressive act, one of exposure and challenge. It certainly collaborates with other modes and strategies to give voice to the underprivileged. As if recognizing the limitations of the realistic novel, writers since the s have been keen on releasing their minds from patriarchal structures of feeling. Aware of postcolonial density, they fight back platitudes and problematize issues so as to reach to the roots of evil. Some male writers grant unmediated space to women voices. Three novelists are worth mentioning in this context, beginning with the late Jordanian Mu"nis al-Razz¯az (d. ) in his Mudhakkir¯at daiynas¯ur (Memoirs of a dinosaur, ).51 The narrator #Abdull¯ah the Dinosaur, who may stand for the rear guard, the outdated ideologue, repeats an old theory in a changing age, as if living in a shell of some other times. Indeed, the word “shell” appears a number of times, as the encompassing image of fossilization and resistance to change. Attuned to a past, irrecoverable and dead, the ideologue looks upon his life-partner Zahrah not as a woman but as a symbol for the nation for which he has been theorizing and writing. To him, she is a romance, the sacred beloved, who offers, like her meaning in Arabic (flower), a pleasant aura, refreshing but with no dynamism of her own. She is there to please him as the fragrance that is needed in times of repose. Zahrah’s voice undermines this male ideology, as it derives its rhetoric of deflation from the revolutionary politics of disenchantment in the late s.52 With no attempt to trace a connection between the male protagonist and the author’s father, the known ideologue Mun¯ıf al-Razz¯az (d. ), it is worthwhile to draw a comparison between the father’s idealization of the Arab nation in his book on nationalism and the emerging discontent after the  defeat.53 Zahrah emerges as the discontented woman who challenges nationalist ideology to take cognizance Mu"nis al-Razz¯az, Mudhakkir¯at Daiynas¯ur (Memoirs of a dinosaur; Beirut: MADN, ). 52 See in this relation, Lewis R. Scudder, “Arab Intellectuals and the Implications of the Defeat of .” Unpubl. M. A thesis (American University of Beirut, ). 53 See Mun¯ıf al-Razz¯ az, The Evolution of Arab Nationalism (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, ). 51

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of reality as it is, not as reconstructed by ideologues.54 She whispers “Well, my smell, it may envelop you like waves, but it hides sweat, too. You deny your sense … in order to smell me with your imaginative sense, this sense which is able to reach essentials not significant details” (pp. –). Without necessarily citing feminist politics, Zahrah replaces the author in the effort to expose and criticize the pitfalls of grand narratives, for nationalist ideology is known for its inflated symbolism and elevated style. Although no less committed to grand ideas, she rejects the tendency to idealize at the expense of the available and the real. Women are no more sacred than men; they are involved in a life that demands full engagement first. It is not surprising that Zahrah will ultimately feel suffocated and stifled by the encompassing language of ideology which gradually loses its meaning. The discourse of master narratives is undermined by the use of “the new sentence,” that cuts across #Abdull¯ah the Dinosaur’s discourse.55 Escaping sequential narrativity, the “new sentence” is fragmented, cryptic and free from logic. Its fragmentation conversely enables it to trace a bewildered mind in a disjointed time. Noticing that #Abdull¯ah’s mind is enmeshed in a heap of fragmented phrases, images, and recollections, Zahrah makes it clear that she “desires some vital space for herself ” (p. ) to restructure her presence as a real person free from the mediations of genres, ideologies and male chauvinism. And Against Masculine Discourse A similar confrontation, but on the level of familial languages and practices, takes place in the Syrian expatriate Khal¯ıl al-Mu#aym¯ı’s Tafr¯ıgh al-k¯a"in (Emptying of being).56 The title echoes Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.57 The novel, however, discloses another blurred vision, that of the speaker who finds himself in that late hour of the night, lonely and desolate. The woman who has been with him since their days in Damascus is now in Paris as well, enjoying the larger 54

Although of a different track, Mary N. Layoun’s book may be worthwhile in this relation, too. See Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, ). 55 I refer here to Bob Perelman, “Parataxis as Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice,” American Literature, , no.  (June ), pp. –. 56 Khal¯ıl al-Mu#aym¯ı, Tafr¯ıgh al-K¯a"in (Emptying of being; Cairo: Sharqiyy¯ at, ). 57 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. from Czech by Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, ).

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margin of freedom. Knowing that the speaker’s discourse is couched in binaries and paradigms of discontent, the female forces her own language on him, driving him to quote her when she says that a “joint bed” (p. ) should never mean the elimination of difference between the two. It does not mean a shared common fate, “Indeed, the idea of living together until the end no longer intrigues me” (p. ). As if anticipating Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s protagonist-narrator, she argues against male ideology at large. If the husband has been frightening her with a “common enemy,” she is ready now to tell him to his face that his own enemy is not hers: The common enemy with which you frightened me throughout the last miserable years was your enemy only. I can’t understand in fact why we should live a shared illusion, the illusion of one life, one behavior, one love. Imagine that! Yet, we are not of the same mind, nor are we of the same discipline. (p. )

It is not difficult to trace feminist politics in this text. But it is significant to notice that this feminist discourse is forwarded through narrative embeddings, for the male narrator is the one who quotes and argues back against a so-called “deep-rooted misunderstanding” (p. ). Whenever the narrator as protagonist gathers support from a subtext of culture and family tradition, there is the woman’s counter-discourse, which deconstructs and subverts. It is the narrator who allows these embeddings to develop and authenticate his statements, but the outcome is “a masculine mode,” which, in the words of Kathleen B. Jones, is “self-assured, self-assertive,” as it advances its “unqualified declaratives as the model of authoritative speech.”58 The wife sees into the involved nature of traditional discourse, the one that associates women only with motherhood. She reminds him: “I am not your mother” (p. ). She is on the alert to draw his attention to that heap of fabrications, which he takes for granted as acceptable hierarchal order. In view of his allegiance to this order, he looks at her independence as that of an “insect” (p. ). She also describes him as a “tyrant,” an “idiot” who argues as if knowledgeable (p. ). She never allows him the chance to impersonate the hero of romance, the one who passes through difficulties to win over the charming beloved. She asserts her presence to demystify that beginning. “You were crying, and I was 58 Kathleen B. Jones, “On Authority: Or, Why Women Are Not Entitled to Speak,” in Irene Diamond and Lee Quimby, eds. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston: Northwestern, ), pp. –, at p. .

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doting on you. Since seeing you, I have already decided that you are mine” (p. ). In other words, the female develops a reverse narrativity that deprives the male of his role as ultimate arbiter in matters of gender relations, which traditional narratives and epics, in particular, endorse. But Khal¯ıl al-Nu#am¯ı’s woman in Tafr¯ıgh al-k¯a"in is not a lonely breed, for the Egyptian Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s women have also been on the lookout for some “vital space” like Zahrah in al-Razz¯az’s Mudhakkir¯at daiynas¯ur. His protagonist in Al-Zaman al-¯akhar (The Other time; n.d.) or in R¯amah wa-al-tinn¯ın (R¯amah and the dragon; ) prefers to see his partner as a female who can offer him comfort and solace, but R¯amah never resigns to the will of the male society.59 Her background, as an activist, sets her apart from others, “for, like all authentic revolutionaries, she has an aristocracy of some sort; it is not pride but transcendence, sublimation and difference” (Al-Zaman al-¯akhar, Other time, p. ). She asks him to recognize in her the “laws of lovers” (p. ). He can be disturbed and annoyed by this rejection of his masculine attention, especially when she tells him, “she is no longer to be hurt by rain, cold or life” (R¯amah wa-al-tinn¯ın, p. ). The male protagonist accentuates his utterance according to a larger subtext of tradition that also subsumes extensive readings in other literatures. Hence, in Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s short stories, especially “#Al¯a al-H¯ . affah” (On the edge),60 Linda, who is retrieved from Orientalist accounts and European travelers’ writings, is redrawn in traditional terms of women, available for the needs and desires of men. Everything in Linda suddenly assumes shows of subordination to the protagonist’s desires. Every thing in her caters to his wishes and arouses his passion for her, for she has no other function than fulfilling his needs for a lush body, soft and inviting. This woman is no different from the peasant girl in his other writings, for whether it is Khadrah in Hij¯arat B¯ubill¯u . ¯ (Boubillo stone; ), or Ni#mat in Akhir al-sikkah (The End of the line),

¯ ab, n.d.); and ¯ Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at., Al-Zaman al-Akhar (The Other time; Beirut: al-Ad¯ ¯ st R¯amah wa- al-Tinn¯ın (R¯amah and the dragon. Beirut: al-Ad¯ab, ,  edition, MADN, ). 60 For more on the idea of image-making in Edwar al-Kharr¯ at’s writing, see Maggie Awadalla, “The Wedding of Imagination and Reality in al-Kharrat’s Alexandria: The City of Saffron,” in Images of Egypt in Twentieth Century Literature: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Comparative Literature, ed. Hoda Gindi, pp. – (Cairo: Dept. Of English language and Literature, Univ. of Cairo, ). 59

  



or other females in S¯a#¯at al-kibriy¯a" (Times for pride/arrogance, ),61 it is the soft but exciting body that invites the male in him (S¯a#¯at alkibriy¯a", p. ). Male Fantasies Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s writings offer interesting intersections whereby male and female discourses meet, converge or fight each other. Tradition and readings are available for his characters to manipulate. But resistance to the protagonist’s promises and desires may lead to the association of women with threatening, dangerous beasts, ferocious animals, “done with eating … [their] prey” (S¯a#¯at al-kibriy¯a", p. ). These women are available, nevertheless, to counteract a sustained desire for them as supplements. R¯amah can surprise him with her self-assurance, in AlZaman al-¯akhar, Other time (p. ), which is totally at variance with her when naked, enabling him of her “lavishly lush body” (p. ). He can be affronted, however, by finding her independent, for independence is opposition, or rejection of the protagonist’s virility and supremacy. Thus, “he doesn’t want R¯amah’s dominating presence to sweep him away from earth” (ibid.). He is afraid to see her “femininity, elegance, excellence as a hostess, woman and rare person, her attraction—as if against her will—of attention, the approval and agreement of all, all this invades and controls the rest” (ibid.). This encompassing presence disorients him and he, “doesn’t want to let her contain all, possess them, embrace them, somehow, with great love and welcome,” leaving no space for his masculine joy (ibid., p. ). In other words, the author lets the protagonist’s voice fuse into patriarchy, enabling the reader to see through conflictual perspectives that are ever changing according to different sites. The bedroom woman is not the social being. Even when deprived of his desire to hold her from the back, to “include to his excited virility the wealth of her back” (R¯amah wa-al-tinn¯ın, p. ), as he explains in this novel, her sense of independence frustrates his desires. Thus, she suddenly seems a person with “a body, which is a daily occurrence, sensuous, open and direct, with nothing romantic or erotic or exciting” (ibid.). As she is not the “soft woman” whom he dreams of having “beside him under the moon” (ibid., p. ), he is to tell her to ¯ ab, ); Akhir ¯ 61 Idw¯ ar al-Kharr¯at., Hij¯arat B¯ubill¯u (Boubillo stone; Beirut: al-Ad¯ alsikkah (The End of the line); and S¯a# ¯at al-kibriy¯a" (Times for pride/arrogance, ;  edition is used).



 

her face of what he thinks: “You have been a real Amazon? I think you have this Amazon in you hiding always beneath your femininity” (ibid., ). But she tells him in the same place that the “Amazon is a female first, before being a fighter.” Ideology and Desire: The Male Views In Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s novel, Yaq¯ın al-#a.tash (The Certainty of thirst; ) the writer attempts to account for the blurred vision of his surrogate, M¯ıkh¯a’¯ıl (Michael), as a male artist.62 Divided between ideologically oriented recognition of the female partner, and hence, females in general, as no less independent and resolute in positions and views, and his need to hold to her as supplementary, the protagonist discursively manages his ways across genres, anecdotes and recollections, in order to understand himself first, while negotiating series of dialogic intersections with other discourses. He delves into some analysis of his thirst for a woman, reaching the conclusion after a great deal of self-analysis that he is only a belated outcome of Romanticism, engaged to the unattainable while opting physically for her, “for he is dying to hold her to him, embrace her, to satiate an old burning thirst, which he acknowledges as insatiable” (p. ). Paradoxically, this yearning prevents attachment and physical touch for fear of loss. Thus, the narrator will say, upon separation from the male actor, “for some reason, he can touch her shoulder only lightly, kiss her hand in haste, or put his hand on hers for a minute” (p. ). It is this yearning, and this insatiable thirst that keeps his love burning, no matter how enveloped he is by her presence, for “the sea doesn’t drown us but increases our dryness” (p. ). Foucauldian and feminist identifications of the body as the “site of power … the locus of domination through which docility is accomplished and subjectivity constituted” are not necessarily adverse to the “crucial role of discourse,” as both Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby argue.63 Especially in reading Yaq¯ın al- al-#a.tash (The Certainty of thirst), this combination makes the narrative of great significance to postcolonial Arabic fiction. The protagonist’s underlying suspicion that a woman has “a bent for control” while in the act of submission (p. ) Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at., Yaq¯ın al- al-#a.tash (The Certainty of thirst; Cairo: Sharqiyy¯at, ). 63 Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, “Introduction,” to Feminism and Foucault (Boston: Northwestern Univ. Press, ), p. x. 62

  



is not a passing remark. Taken in context, it betrays some latent fear that drives the protagonist-narrator to survey his female partner’s history. This survey is mediated by his education and not via his “eastern Sa# . ¯ıd¯ı” background (p. ). In line with male narrativity, gender is clearly focused, and the whole narrative space is a contested terrain whereby she appears “wolfish” and a “murderer” (p. ) at times. Looking upon her rebellious bent, lush breast, dark complexion and softness, too, he recollects images of the first “huntress,” Diana the goddess (pp. , ). On another occasion, the woman in the novel is an upper class “prostitute” whose body and voice are bent on seduction. R¯amah loses innocence whenever she challenges the male voice, and her narrative of past adventures reminds him of loose women. Indeed, he sees in her what Sandra L. Bartky describes as “the unfettered staring of the ‘loose’ woman who looks at whatever she pleases.”64 Acts and speeches are held suspect. The protagonist is so disturbed by the woman’s accounts that he looks upon her way of speech as “speechification” or shaqshaqah, for she “mumbles, smacks, interesting speech, unusual, surprising in its wit and intelligence, overflowing with uncontrollable femininity” (p. ). The more she speaks, the deeper convinced he is that she duplicates another of her gender, perhaps Scheherazade. Her narrative is worth analysis, for it falls into three sub-generic divisions: “pure intellectual contestation,” “tales of adventure,” as real occurrences, and “lived experience” (p. ). He is the more suspicious because narrative assumes a reality of its own the moment it is told, as he argues. She asks him to tell her a story, “as if his knowledge of storytelling is full proof that he earnestly loves her” (p. ), he whispers to himself. What is of significance is that both Shahrayar and M¯ıkh¯a’¯ıl in Yaq¯ın al-#a.tash (The Certainty of thirst), and Was¯ın¯ı al-#Araj’s Dunyazad undergo some transformation or metamorphosis. M¯ıkh¯a’¯ıl is no longer a listener, and the female partner would like to hear him proclaim a commitment to a new social-aesthetic contract. Hence, M¯ıkh¯a’¯ıl “tries hard to train himself in this ordeal—which is a pleasure, too,” (ibid.) to demonstrate his love. While giving full “vital space” to every voice, Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at. lays bare the problematic of gendered narratives. The whole effort in his writings as in the writings of male and female feminists, especially Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, is towards a serious engagement with patterns and 64

Sandra Lee Bartky, “Feminity and the Moderization of Patriarchal Power,” in Feminism and Foucault, eds. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, pp. –, at p. .



 

practices that have been bypassed by some or consolidated by others. Writings in this vein tend to speak up of obsessions, repressions and preoccupations, and to problematize issues of sex, love and man-woman anxieties. Narratively, patriarchy is undermined and a postcolonial consciousness takes over. But to say this does not rule out lingering opposition, for the post-Mahf¯ . uz. scene is not a smooth or uniform one. It is rife with anxiety and contradiction, but it manifests an awareness of experimentation, its resourcefulness and pleasure. In war situations as in scenes and cycles of oppression, aggression and exploitation, writing undergoes radical shifts to measure up to the challenge. Indeed, the challenge is great, and prospects for greater artistic achievements, free from the imitative and the redundant, show forth in the upsurge of women’s writing and writing on women in Arabic.

  A VOICE FOR DISSENT: ROGUES, REBELS AND SAINTS

This chapter carries further the argument of narrative voicing of the marginalized and the underprivileged in its historical underpinnings and cultural contexts. The empowered and the powerless, and the exploiters and the exploited are not static structures. Power relations change and multiply, and within the Arab-Islamic context these should be seen in context, for Islam as ideology and faith is for the underprivileged, despite the fact that history tells us of power manipulation practices that run counter to Islam as faith.1 No wonder that postcolonial narrative makes use of this discrepancy so as to enhance its voicing of the marginalized. With more emphasis on marginal characters, greater variety and multiplicity in characterization and more accentuation of the unsaid, narrative is no longer constrained by dichotomous representation between two camps. Its use of stereographic space enables it to account for conflict in its changeable power relations. The emerging new patterns of characterization manifest new consciousness, which is also informed by changing power relations in a specific place and time. Reading this new sensibility and consciousness within larger socio-political contexts, this chapter argues, as a matter of convenience, that since the appearance of Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-Lis. s. wa-alkil¯ab (; English translation: The Thief and the Dogs, ),2 there has developed a narrative of dissent that questions the ideology of the modern secular state, its idealistic discourse, which generates totalitarianism and repression.3 While dissent may unfold in a variety of discursive

1 See in this relation, Trevor LeGassick, “The Faith of Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” in Religion and Literature, , n.  (Spring, ), pp. –; and Salih J. Altoma, “Westernization and Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, – (), pp. –. 2 For a further note, see Mohamed Mahmoud, “The Unchanging Hero in a Changing World: Najib Mahfuz’s al-Liss wa"l-kilab,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –. 3 See the present writer’s discussion of idealistic discourse as generative of manipulative norms, in Al-Istishr¯aq fi al-fikr al-#Arab¯ı.



 

strategies, the postcolonial appears more emphatically in narratives that engage the post-independence state. Novels that debate and expose feudal and patriarchal practices may fit well into the novel of dissent, like the Yemeni Zayd Mut.¯ı# Damm¯aj’s Al-Rah¯ınah (English translation: The Hostage, ),4 but dissent in these narratives often takes the form of the novel of education. As in the case of the above-mentioned novel, the narrative is focused on the career of the boy as hostage among the ruler’s household, to prevent his father’s rebellion against the Im¯am as the head of the ruling family in Yemen. It ends up with a detailed delineation of the household and women’s anticipations and desires there. Through the growing child’s eyes and impressions, we are enabled to enter into forbidden domains, to be sure, but issues of women and conflict at large are downplayed in comparison with the intrigues of life there as offered through his perspective. Narrating Dissent The postcolonial proper is more attuned to the colonial legacy, its aftermath and outcome. By giving so much recognition to Mahf¯ . uz’s . AlLis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab, such a reading carries no implication of a pre- Mahf¯ . uz. pacifying narrative, for narrative unfolds to account for the present as a stage in life. Perhaps, a comparison with the post-independence consciousness is worth noting insofar as manifestations in narrative are concerned. In respect to the pre-independence state, narratives are more direct in their rejection of colonialism and opposition to its mandate. In Jal¯al Kh¯alid () by the Iraqi Mahm¯ al-Sayyid, . ud Ahmad . for example, the young protagonist leaves for Bombay to meet with his friend, an Indian writer. Both share a register and a political agenda, as both India and Iraq passed under British colonization: “So you left Baghdad, to escape the heavy constraints of colonization?” “I hated to stay, for nobody is free: we are hostages, as there is no freedom, and our rights are confiscated. We are prisoners, condemned to hard labor.”5

The narrative takes it for granted that everybody is a participant in the struggle against the British, for the British took Baghdad in  Zayd Mut.¯ı# Damm¯aj, Al-Rah¯ınah (San#¯ . a’: Wiz¯arat al-I#l¯am, ); English translation: The Hostage, trans. May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley (New York: Interlink Books, ). 5 Qtd. in Y¯ usuf #Izz al-D¯ın, Al-Riwa¯ayah f¯ı al-#Iraq, p. . 4

   



and their mandate in Iraq ended in . The need for oblique criticism and manipulation of historical reservoir is not apparent yet. The educated urban class and rural population offer enough characters to these narratives to voice views and valorize positions. The situation invites no rogues and ascetics from historical annals to act as narrative masks in this anti-colonial struggle. As anti-colonialism is given such a privileged priority in each individual’s agenda and thought, we should assume that narratives tend to be more focused in this direction. Characterization is bound to evolve in dichotomous representation, whereas binary pairing between good and evil constitutes structural patterning. The indifferent and the opportunist occupy the gray space. The tendency towards statements and arguments is balanced by emphasis on action and binary structuration to account for the struggle. Insofar as the interest in argumentation is concerned, the nature of the struggle makes it imperative to allow it so much space, so as to account for, and inscribe, public views. On the other hand, at such an early stage in the s, writers were still practitioners in the novelistic tradition, and might not be capable enough to convey complexity in better artistry.6 In its immediacy and urgency, anti-colonialism imparts a rejectionist discourse with focused markers of national independence. Sociological Consciousness This is not the case with postcolonial “body politics,” its complicated strategies, practices, issues and claims. Hence, dissent evolves as a counter-discourse of oblique criticism, resentment, and disenchantment that makes use of the sociological readings of the s, along with less committed ones of existentialist temper,7 to develop its own strategies of subversion. Leaning heavily on historical accounts and figures, these narratives reconstruct the past to address the present. Their main focus 6 See the present writer’s “The Socio-Aesthetics of Contemporary Arabic Fiction: An Introduction,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –. See also Roger Allen, “The Beginnings of the Arabic Novel,” in M.M. Badawi, ed. Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, and notes, pp. –. 7 For a reading of this ambivalence, with its postmodernist accentuations, one may read the existentialist narrative subtext as discussed in chapter four. See also Richard K. Myers, “The Problem of Authority: Franz Kafka and Nagib Mahfuz,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (), pp. –; and the present writer’s “The Socio-Political Context of the Iraqi Short Story,” in Statecraft and Popular Culture in the Middle East (Florida, Miami: Florida International University Press, ), pp. –.



 

is centered on such characters as rogues, ascetics, and rebels, whose mission in life is to challenge unjust authority. The theoretical framework for these may be found in writings by sociologists, like the Iraqi #Al¯ı al-Ward¯ı, and his book Us.t¯urat al-Adab al-Raf¯ı# (The myth of elite literature), which appeared in Baghdad in , complementing his earlier book Wu#¯az. al-sal¯a.t¯ın (The Sultans’ counselors, ). #Al¯ı al-Ward¯ı’s argument tends to justify the need for writings that take into account the new productive powers, and to forego stylization and imitative patterns of address. While tending to shake up the very complacent view of history as consolidated by the status quo, #Al¯ı al-Ward¯ı’s writings call for serious and more committed engagement with the new dynamic social forces. He argues in the first book against imitative perspectives and techniques that invoke tradition while demonstrating indifference to social and political transformation. The call invites attention to new social powers. Literature has to account for change and show concern with characters and motivations that have never before found their place in writing. The concept of elitism is ridiculed, and the Iraqi sociologist argues for radical change in concepts and attitudes. With this critique, we can assume that theorizations for poetic and artistic innovation in the s were interactively engaged with life, politics and change beyond the canons of traditional or hegemonic discourse.8 Artistically, the implementation of ideology and thought in narrative patterns is not a smooth process, and writers were on the lookout throughout the s and s to build up a repertoire of motifs, characters and strategies to account for the real. As the post-independence state has proved to be more adamant than the colonialist in repression, the search for adequate strategies and models for characterization has to take into account the need to dupe or evade the censor. The use of history has been one of many ways to go beyond censorship, as historical records offer patterns of characterization that usually emerge and evolve in times of frustration and conflict, and which can address analogous situations in contemporary Arab politics and life. Notwithstanding being oblique in technique and direction, narratives with such characteristic thrust have achieved great popularity with the reading public that demonstrates their validity as a discourse of subversion and redress.

8

For an investigation of the genre, with its needs for borrowing and adaptation, see Mary N. Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology.

   



Although strongly committed to social realism,9 Arab novelists have recently developed a new outlook that leans heavily on historical accounts and popular lore. Reconstruction of past turmoil and conflict is so close at times to contemporary realities that it calls attention to itself, provoking the reader to question that very past as well as its identical present. History itself is read as narrative, with its gaps and omissions that invite some active imagination to recreate. Writers make use of documentation, but they add their own view of how things may have been. Through intertextuality, enchassement and reenactment of the past, some Arab novelists have been able to shake the complacent view of history as too sacred to be questioned. At variance with the earlier practice of Zayd¯an, Mahf¯ . uz. and others, these recent historical reconstructions and adaptations from popular culture are distinguished by subtlety and art, usually coming upon details or historical figures in times of frustration, tension and conflict that entail the emergence of warring parties: the unjust establishment and the oppressed. Within these two camps interests and attitudes directly tell on action and actors. Especially among the opposition, there appear basic patterns of characterization that greatly differ from those of the well-established realistic tradition. Among these patterns are ascetics, Sufi shaykhs, rebels and rogues, set within a context that obliquely directs attention to comparable present situations. This new tendency should not be considered apart from a growing intellectual disillusionment with romanticized views of history. Idealizations flood contemporary ideology with high-flown rhetoric, which, being unitary and diglossic, enhances totalitarianism. Its claims to truth and national necessity thwart opposition and prevent dissent. But dissent takes intractable forms, including the growing scholarly interest in the s in the history of vagabondage, which ultimately sheds some light on the underprivileged and the oppressed.10 These writings undermine traditional views of history as a solid structure of successive periods and temporary defeats brought about by non-Arab subversion.

9 See in this relation, Sabry Hafez, “The Transformation of Reality and the Arabic Novel’s Aesthetic Response,” BSOAS, , n.  (), pp. –. 10 See, for example, Faysal al- S¯ amir, Thawrat al-zanj (Black slaves’ revolt, ); . Ahmad Am¯ın, Al-Sa#lakah wa-al-fut¯uwah f¯ı al-Isl¯am (Vagabondage and fut¯uwah in . . al-Isl¯am; nd print; Cairo, ); Sa#¯ıd Daywa"ch¯ı, Al-Fut¯uwah f¯ı al-Isl¯am (); and Mus.t.af¯a Jaw¯ad’s (d. ) edition of Ibn al-Mi#m¯ar, Kit¯ab al-Fut¯uwah (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthann¯a, ).



 

Along with these symptoms of scholarly dissent that have been furthered later by solid intellectual works,11 there has evolved since the s a growing interest as well among Arab poets in such historical figures as the renowned ascetic and Prophet’s Companion Ab¯u Dharr al-Ghif¯ar¯ı,12 the Prophet’s Companion #Amm¯ar Ibn Y¯asir who lost his life at Siff . ¯ın (/),13 the renowned poet, martyr and Sufi Mans.u¯ r al-Hall¯ . aj (executed in March ),14 and the Prophet’s grandson alHusayn Ibn #Al¯ı, the Martyr, who revolted against the ruling Umayy¯ads . (–) as unjust and corrupt usurpers.15 Placing the experience of these ascetics and martyrs in a contemporary context, Arab poets have participated in creating an atmosphere of opposition and dissent that greatly departs from the earlier poetic interests of the s. In the last three decades, however, the reader might well come across numerous poems by the Iraqi Ham . ¯ıd Sa#¯ıd (b. ), the Iraqi #Abd al-Wahh¯ab ¯ al-Bay¯atı (d. ), the Lebanese Khal¯ıl H¯ . aw¯ı (d. ), the Egyptian Sal¯ . ah. #Abd al-Sab¯ . ur (d. ) and others whose poetry voices concerns that are identical with those of the novelists.

11 These include works by Sam¯ır Am¯ın, Hish¯ am Ju#ayt., #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim, Muhammad Arkoun, #Abdullah al-#Arw¯ı, Tayyib T¯ız¯ın¯ı, Muhammad al-J¯abir¯ı and others. . . . For a survey, see the present writer’s Tha"r¯at Scheherazade, pp. –. 12 For samples of Ab¯ u Dharr al-Ghif¯ar¯ı’s reports of the Prophet’s Traditions, see Arthur Jeffery, ed. A Reader on Islam (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton & Co. ), pp. –. 13 See EI, : b. 14 In H.A.R. Gibb’s neat conclusion, al-Hall¯ . aj’s “popularity alarmed the weak government of Baghdad, and on the ground of some incautious phrases he was condemned by a theological council and cruelly executed in .” See Arabic Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). As a poet, he also drew attention, especially in the use of language. For the nature of ecstasy in his poetry, see Samah Selim, “Mans.u¯ r al-Hall¯ . aj and the Poetry of Ecstasy,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (March ), pp. –. 15 The debacle, or the massacre of Karbal¯ a" on the Euphrates, as carried out by the governor of the Umayy¯ad Yaz¯ıd, led to the Im¯am’s murder () along with a large number of relatives and companions. See The Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, by H.A.R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, ), p. .

   



The Futuwwah Redrawn16 ¯ı and later the Iraqi #Az¯ız al-Sayyid Although the Syrian Mut.a¯ # Safad . J¯asim wrote novels of frustration where protagonists are confounded by the disparity between idealism and malpractices of institutions and political parties, it was Mahf¯ . uz. who set the tone for the new mode of writing, whereby the character of the rebel as a combination of the futuwwah and the dissenter is drawn. Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab () introduces Sa#¯ıd Mahr¯an as a product of false ideologies and social hypocrisy and deceit.17 When released from prison, Sa#¯ıd Mahr¯an finds himself committed to some responsibilities that will mark the career of a large number of characters in Arabic fiction: he has to ensure Shaykh al-Junayd¯ı’s approval of his new mission to attain his blessing and to retain some of his own lost faith. Along with this commitment, Mahf¯ . uz’s . protagonist thinks of vengeance as justifiable against those who have betrayed him. Especially when seen in context of his disillusionment with the  Revolution, this search for vengeance and Sufi endorsement speaks for an individualist temper that distrusts the nation state and its institutions.18 Here as in Mahf¯ . uz’s . later writings, especially Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (English translation: Arabian Nights and Days) and Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh (, English translation: The h. ar¯af¯ısh, ),19 the Sufi Shaykh figures out as providential presence in an otherwise godless universe. Although this presence will permeate action in the later novels, it appears in Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (The Thief and the Dogs) as a 16 As a phrase, the word futuwwah denotes praiseworthy qualities, especially gallantry, chivalry, liberality and hospitability. It grew into guild institutions, and fraternities, especially among Sufis. With the latter, it means self-denial, altruism, along with liberality and immunity against life ordeals. It has strong Im¯amite connotations, too, as it builds on the Prophet’s celebration of Im¯am #Al¯ı, as the only fat¯a, or gallant youth, and his sword, the exceptionally valiant and most esteemed. The Im¯amite Caliph al-N¯as.ir li-D¯ın All¯ah (–/–) was a fat¯a, and he accorded the futuwwah rank to princes and notables. The futuwwah grew among the masses, especially in civil wars, to stand against atrocity, ruthlessness and tyrannical potentates. See A Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, by H.A.R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers, p. . 17 References are to the original Arabic text. 18 See also Rasheed el-#Enany, “The Novelist as Political Eye-Witness: A View of Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Evaluation of Nasser and Sadat Eras,” Journal of Arabic Literature,  (March ), pp. –, at p. . 19 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The h. ar¯af¯ısh, trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Doubleday, ). References are to the original Arabic text. The epithet signifies the riff-raff, on the margins of society.

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spiritual power, but not necessarily heeded by the protagonist. Thus, while the Shaykh sees through Mahr¯an’s intentions to take revenge upon his wife and his revolutionary mentor, his call for resignation and love elicits no positive response from Mahr¯an. But not to heed an advice entails confusion and possible death. In other words, both the Shaykh and the rebel will reappear in Mahf¯ . uz’s . other writings sharing one position where there is some reciprocal relationship that varies in meaning and degree. Whenever the rebel thinks of his mission as justifiable, he feels no ultimate obligation to the Shaykh. As such Mahr¯an in Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (The Thief and the Dogs) considers himself too noble to be punished for carrying out his mission: “He who kills me is only killing the millions. I am the dream, the hope, the ransom for cowards” (p. ). Obviously, Mahr¯an allies himself with the futuwwah, the nonpolitical defenders of justice in medieval and contemporary urban centers alike.20 This feeling for futuwwah was too conspicuous in the s to be overlooked. In fact, the Iraqi poet Ham . ¯ıd Sa#¯ıd chose one of these medieval vagabonds to speak for the futuwwah in a poem titled “Ab¯u Y¯a#l¯a M¯us.il¯ı.”21 Although Mahf¯ . uz’s . Mahr¯an has not taken upon himself a mission such as that proclaimed by the vagabond in this poem, he is no less allied with the poor against institutionalized and corrupt politics. Both the poem and the novel may lead us to the increasing interest in medieval life and politics, where writers come upon a great repository rich with political strife. This material needs only a narrative skill to put it into a work of art with some contemporary relevance. In fact, Mahf¯ . uz. has not limited himself to the real, medieval or contemporary, for, paradoxically, he finds in Scheherazade’s tales some significant, though oblique, insights into political despotism beyond his early ambivalent dichotomies. The word is interchangeably written as futuwwah and fut¯uwah. Throughout, it indicates a chivalric code, and there are treatises on the subject. The standard extant document on the subject is Mus.t.af¯a Jaw¯ad’s edition of Ibn al-Mi#m¯ar, Kit¯ab al-Fut¯uwah (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthann¯a, ). See earlier note. 21 The poem runs as follows: 20

My name Ab¯u Y¯a#l¯a al-M¯us.il¯ı of the Baghdad bandits. Fighting the soldiers of the “Ruler in the name of God.” Defeating the police in al-Karkh market place. Dissenting against “God’s Shadow on Earth” But Blessed is my face among the poor. D¯ıw¯an Ham¯ . ıd Sa#¯ıd (Baghdad: Ma¸tba#at al-Ad¯ıb, ), pp. –.

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While it is easy to divide Mahf¯ . uz’s . characters into good and bad, there is always a touch of popular life and color that lends his characters vitality. Thus, even though reminding the reader of real people in the overcrowded cities of contemporary Egypt, the Shaykhs and rebels of Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (Arabian Nights and Days) and Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh leave their mark as well on the reader’s mind. His Shaykh #Abdull¯ah al-Balkh¯ı of Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah is a Sufi whose antecedent is al-Junayd¯ı of Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (Thief and the Dogs), whereas Mahr¯an finds his counterpart in F¯adil . San#¯an of the Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah. The difference in characterization between the two novels, however, is attuned to Mahf¯ . uz’s . gradual denunciation of institutionalized politics and his growing distrust of state machinery. Thus, the Shaykh’s advice to Mahr¯an to pursue a life of love and resignation and to forsake revenge has passed unheeded due to Mahr¯an’s idealistic vision and his overwhelming sense of self-righteousness, an attitude that is punishable in view of Mahf¯ . uz’s . ambivalence at that early stage in the s. In Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah, as signifying a new stage in his outlook in the s, it is enough to approach the Shaykh for advice or justification in order to gain the Shaykh’s blessing conditioned by a characteristic caution to limit one’s endeavor to the service of God. Jams.ah in the same novel takes this advice to signify approval rather than denial. Thus, while Mahf¯ . uz. does not endorse the action of those whose predicaments blind them to larger implications, he lets his hesitant characters carry on their acts of rebellion under the auspices of some probable Sufi blessings. Hesitation on the part of such characters as Jams.ah the police chief in the Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah as well as the musings and riddles voiced by Shaykhs is usually followed on the narrative level by action that moves through restlessness, anxiety and expectation. The Advent of Shaykhs Although more overwhelming as presences than as fully developed personalities, the Shaykhs show up in times of crisis through the others’ search for counsel or blessing. Both social tension and individual distress are usually combined in such a way as to imply that political corruption and injustice are behind calamities and troubles. As the implication entails distrust of the State, the Shaykhs ultimately endorse individual action on condition that it serves God rather than the devil. But as “#Ifrits” intrude into the lives of others when there is no justice, according to #Abdull¯ah the Madman in the Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah, this ser-

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vice entails opposition to the status quo. As such the Shaykhs endorse futuwwah rebels in order to uphold the medieval discipline of professional decency, honorable endeavor, magnanimity, chivalry and bodily might. Thus while refraining from blessing such rebels as Mahr¯an in Al-Lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (The Thief and the Dogs) or F¯adil . San#¯ . an in Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah, Mahf¯ u z’s Shaykhs bless Sindbad for his endeavors, Jams.ah for . . his undertaking to shake up the political system and #Ashour #Abdull¯ah for his role as futuwwah in Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh. It is through his first encounter with his own community that #Ashour the orphan begins his early initiation in futuwwah. Aware of the sordid life in the graveyards and the sprawling impoverished districts, #Ashour begins to assign to himself a mission of reform. “So many vagabonds from the h. ar¯af¯ısh with no jobs. Who is his father among them? Who is the mother?” (Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh, pp. –). Lest such a questioning drive him to frustration or rebellion, Shaykh #Afrah’s advice to him works as a bulwark, for he asks him to “use his bodily might for the benefit of people, but not the devil” (ibid., p. ). The advice certainly indicates the polarization of power between two camps of different inclinations and interests. But rather than a mere division between the rich and the poor there appear in Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh numerous levels of enmity and antagonism, especially among the underprivileged, that develop through narrative parallelism, doublings and juxtapositions whereby foil characters and subplots help substantiate the futuwwah as a person of some magnanimity and caliber in the face of dire circumstances. Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh is an epic only in the sense that it is centered upon a hero of some magnitude, otherwise its action evolves according to the picaresque tradition. This action is centered upon Shaykh #Afrah’s advice to #Ashour to leave for the mountain in order to save himself from the plague, an advice which #Ashour tries to spread to save others along with him. Upon coming back, he finds the district desolate, to be repopulated only at a later stage. Those surviving the plague call him al-N¯aj¯ı, the Survivor or the Saved, a nickname which has religious connotations, a belief in something miraculous about him. While bureaucrats and governmental officials have plundered deserted houses, #Ashour dwells in a castle, whereas the available wealth is distributed among fellow creatures. Accused by the bureaucrats of theft, #Ashour ends up in prison, only to be released some years later, deservedly cheered by the crowds and chosen as the futuwwah to replace his foster brother Darw¯ısh, the bully. According to #Ashour, the futuwwah has its own ideals and traditions which should be maintained through bod-

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ily might. As such, he and, later, his son Shams-al-D¯ın retain for the futuwwah as a discipline its historical meaning, saving it from the rampant rowdyism and intimidations of an earlier age. While Mahf¯ . uz. tends to involve his protagonists in direct action, introducing the spiritual presence of his Shaykhs only as guidance and bulwark against mischief, other writers develop an increasing interest in villains as recalled from historical annals. These happen to be mere rogues seizing upon power in times of trouble, offering the Sultan their services, usually including everything from spying to murder. Historical detail reflects with great irony on present political situations that cannot be criticized openly.22 Written a few years after the total defeat of June , and looking back on a history of repression, manipulation of power, and discrepancy between proclaimed ideals and actual happenings, the writer Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı in Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at (; English translation: Zayni Barakat, )23 finds in Ibn Iy¯as’s (–) history of Egypt parallel patterns.24 Using the year –, the defeat of the Mamluk Sultan al-Gh¯ur¯ı by the Ottoman armies at the battle of Marj D¯abiq, the novel draws attention to the factors behind the defeat, including the sustained effort to hide information from the public. While it depends a lot on talf¯ıq (patchwork) as discursive strategy in order to accommodate enormous information and detail, the novel is tightly organized in historical sequence. With the writer’s own recreation of historical events and people, the novel moves between the impending danger that led to the Ottoman occupation in , and the disordered political life in the late Mamluk period when the Sultan issued an official decree in , bestowing the title al-Zayn¯ı on Barak¯at Ibn Mus¯a as muh. tasib, in charge of markets, measures, and the whole economy in Egypt. The decree comes as a surprise to the other chief character in the novel, the police and security chief Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı who is caught unaware by the decree, as Barak¯at Ibn Mus¯a has never drawn attention as potential public or political figure. Both the decree and the surprised response set the tone for the rivalry and competition between the two. They also reveal a great deal about al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at as a great manipulator of power and public relations. See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, p. . Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı, Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at (Damascus: Wiz¯arat al-Thaq¯afah, ; Cairo: Madb¯ul¯ı, ); English translation: Zayni Barakat, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab (London: Penguin and New York: Viking, ). The Madb¯ul¯ı  edition is used. 24 Shaykh Muhammad Ahmad Ibn Iy¯ as, Bad¯a"i# al-zuh¯ur f¯ı waq¯a"i# al-duh¯ur (The . . choicest blooms concerning the events of fate). 22

23

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The novel builds its scenes through intertextual exchange, media traffic, and patchwork, manipulating history and fabricating a Venetian chronicle under the fictional authorship of Viscont Gianti. The traveler avowedly borrows from the Egyptian historian Ibn Iy¯as, but he also records impressions that do not occupy the historian’s attention. These are the writer’s atmospheric devices to activate the whole scene and compensate for the information withheld from the public. Hence we read on the first page of the Venetian chronicle that Cairo on the eve of war looks “as a blindfolded man on his back, waiting for some hidden fate to strike him.” Aside from historical sequence and detail, Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı’s AlZayn¯ı Barak¯at builds also on polarization or antagonism. Villains like the police chief Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı and the Sultan’s market inspector, the muh. tasib al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, appear more lively and colorful than others, leading action and working out all the intrigues that involve the rest. In this reconstruction of a medieval Cairene society the world is mainly divided between the secret police and the state machinery presided over by both Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı and the muh. tasib al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, and the common public, which finds in Shaykh Ab¯u al-Su#¯ud a sage capable of both active opposition and the attainment of justice. As such, Ab¯u alSu#¯ud is unlike Mahf¯ . uz’s . Shaykhs, for he leads opposition rather than settles for counsel and spiritual guidance. This new line of interest in Shaykhs should not pass unnoticed. Written in , the novel conveys deep understanding of the failure of secular ideology and the nation state. It certainly communicates new structures of feeling that have been in formation for sometime, especially among the mass population. These structures of feeling derive distrust of institutions from immediate experience, as these institutions offer social reform at the expense of freedom, and change and material achievement tinged with grudge. The presiding secular authority of the socialist regime is adamant in reminding the public of its magnanimity and beneficial presence while robbing the public of its right for free expression. The accumulating reaction of distrust, fear and opposition leads to incessant search for and anticipation of political change. Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı’s Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at anticipates the leadership of Shaykhs and religious institutions in reaction to both external antiIslam coalitions and internal repression of political and religious dissent. In order to win the Shaykh’s support and, for this matter, advance his own career, al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at as the muh. tasib (market inspector) spreads the rumor that it is not his desire to hold such a job, thereby

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deceiving many who actually begin to trust him, and building an image of disinterestedness in a corrupt world. The aspiration behind this hypocrisy is to manipulate the Shaykh’s support in order to wield more power and impose discipline and order to win the Sultan’s confidence and approval. Manipulation of discourse works with great effectiveness regardless of actual intentions. Such an attitude is not identical with that of the police chief Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı, for the latter thinks that maintaining authority and order automatically means the attainment of justice. Although both individuals are subservient to the Sultan whose survival should be insured first and foremost, the police chief is the more appealing for the Sultan. He represents both the military and the security apparatus, as he strives to prove the existence of a mounting danger that demands more of his services and commitments. This office has gained the upper hand in all Arab states, and it penetrates every other office and strata. The novelist is deliberately focusing on its medieval and pre-modern formation to elude association, however. The use of historical annals enriches the stereographic space, and enlarges the corpus of narrative beyond the characters themselves. It distances the subject matter, while it intensifies political consciousness.25 In this respect Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı’s view of things leads to some conflict with the muh. tasib al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at who is also kept under close surveillance! Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı’s spies spread among saints, poets, musicians, vagabonds, along with the old and the young in every station of life. Here Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı figures as a colorful and lively reproduction of the police officers of medieval Arab society, where despotism bred such villains to sustain a corrupt order. To focus on villainy through careful characterization and action is a new achievement in contemporary fiction, growing as it were beyond the picaresque into historical realism of ironic overtones. With an oblique view of contemporary life in the Arab world, the novelist creates other lively characters based on popular tales and anecdotes on fake Shaykhs who, along with their chief of police, build up a network of professional spies to infiltrate into and subvert the religious and social structure of the opposition. One such character in Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı’s Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at is Shaykh #Amr whose appearance in contemporary fiction is new, setting the norm for a fresh line of characterization. Indeed, Shaykh #Amr tries his best to be up to his superior’s See also Samia Mehrez, “Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at: Narrative Strategy,” Arab Studies Quarterly, , n.  (Spring ), pp. –. 25

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advice that “a professional bas. s. ¯as. (spy) is ears and eyes, eavesdropping and watching, memorizing and transmitting, even in the hours of sleep and rest” (p. ). Hence, this fake Shaykh loves to read people’s minds. “Oh, if there is only one trick to pass through another mind, then spies will reveal the very motion of the eye” (p. ). But #Amr is only an ardent follower of Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı, the police chief, whose motto is a wish to promote spying to the utmost: If time comes when we could know how people sleep along with their women, what children would come out, who among them would cause trouble. If this could be known, then men would be stopped from making love. Thus, evil will be cut off from its very roots. (p. )

To him everything, including gossip, indicates probable action. As such, his network is involved in wide-ranging activity, which means on the narrative level causal sequences that spread with a variety of implications for the characters, villains and ascetics alike. More of a devil than a person, this police chief is no less omniscient than the narrator himself, to the extent that he spies on the muh. tasib and possibly on the Sultan. He uses poets and manipulates storytellers to narrate in coffee houses the tragic story of the Prophet’s grandson, al-Husayn the . Martyr, to check on people’s reactions towards the injustice done to “the noble, the beloved in Kerbal¯a” (p. ). In fact, one of Shaykh Ab¯u al-Su#¯ud’s followers, Sa#¯ıd al-Juhayn¯ı, doubts even the capacity of the spiritual to curtail this spreading evil: Even when the master of the time, S¯ . ahib al-Zam¯an himself,26 appears from the House of God, brandishing his gold sword, Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı will stop him, preventing his coming. He’ll seize him, throwing him into the Maqsharah prison; for if there is any fact, al-Maqsharah is that only fact in this world, the first and the last. (p. )

26 The reference is to Im¯ am Ab¯u al-Q¯asim Muhammad al-Mahd¯ı Ibn al-Hasan al. . #Askar¯ı (d. ) al-Muntazar . (the awaited-for, and hence he is S¯ . ahib al-Zam¯an, the master or the guardian of time), the twelfth Sh¯ı#ite hidden Im¯am who went into the ghaybah, occlusion in  [some scholars used ‘occultation,’ see Arthur Jeffery, A Reader on Islam, p. ]. See also Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi#¯ı Islam (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, ), pp. –. In Albert Hourani’s neat summary: “Since the world could not exist without an imam, it was believed that the twelfth one had not died but was still living in ‘occlusion’ (ghayba); at first he communicated with the Muslim people through intermediaries, but after that he was out of the view of the living world, which remained in expectation of his reappearance to bring in the reign of justice.” See A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, ), pp. –.

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Shaykh Ab¯u al-Su#¯ud’s disciple and follower Sa#¯ıd al-Juhayn¯ı is also a new growth in modern Arabic fictional canvas, for he joins in his attitude and discourse leftist sentiments and religious grounding and politics. His emergence as character broadens the scope of postcolonial fiction and enhances its specific color amid non-Western narrative. Insofar as al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı’s Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at is concerned, narrative space is a battleground, and both discourse and action constantly reflect on each other. Sa#¯ıd al-Juhayn¯ı, for instance, has to cope with the increasing danger and evil on these two levels. Every word and act has a place, meaning and role in deciding the outcome of competing power relations.27 Although evil is personified here in Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı as a person and embodied in his profession as police and security chief, the spreading network fills the atmosphere with its reverberations of gossip, cover-ups and troubles, providing protection for unjust authority and enabling the muh. tasib to lie to people in public speeches, which are attended by the disguised police chief, lest the muh. tasib exceed the prescribed limits. In matters of characterization, Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı is drawn with great attention, and his moves and words are everywhere, to the extent that evil permeates every space, driving others to the margins at times. On the other hand the muh. tasib al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at enforces his presence through rumors and discrete penetration, which we trace through Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı’s responses, along with these of the associates of Shaykh Ab¯u al-Su#¯ud. We understand that he manipulates a number of discourses and registers freely and with no qualms of conscience according to the needs and demands of the occasion. With no narrative voice of his own, he nevertheless takes over the narrative space of a number of characters, as his hypocrisy and opportunism know no limits. Both Zakariyy¯a Ibn Rad. ¯ı and al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at occupy the narrative center. Their methods and means act as narrative techniques, for the novelist deploys these throughout as announcements, proclamations, orders, commands, pieces of gossip, clandestine literature, and dialogues. While overlapping with the narrator’s, these techniques project these antagonists as more colorful and lively than the protagonists in the novel, the Shaykh and his associates. Their penetration into the life 27 For a comparison with Mahf¯ . uz’s . early characters, see Richard Van Leeuwen, “Love and Mechanisms of Power: Kamal #Abd al-Jawwad and Sa#id al-Juhayni,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, eds. Roger Allen, et al, pp. –, –.

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of the community is so overwhelming that other characters find themselves in an impasse. Such an ardent follower of the Sufi Shaykh as Sa#¯ıd al-Juhayn¯ı is so frustrated that he gives up hope in any spiritual opposition to rampant corruption and deceit. He publicly calls al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, the muh. tasib, a liar upon hearing the latter’s promises to the public of forthcoming affluence and justice. But frustration is deliberately highlighted to draw attention to state power mechanism and its stupendous and disproportionate growth. As narrative voicing, frustration directs attention to mechanisms of distortion, deceit and misinformation that characterize corrupt rule. A similar juxtaposition exists in another novel by al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı, Awr¯aq sh¯ab #¯asha mundh¯u alf #¯am (Papers of a young man who lived since a thousand years, –?).28 This novella might have been the prototype for Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at. The use of historical paraphernalia from Ibn Iy¯as (–), the Egyptian historian of the late Mamluk period and the Ottoman occupation of Egypt in , and the emphasis on inscription in the title are elusive enough to distance the subject matter and displace it onto a pre-modern context. The young man does not appear in the story, and the papers amount to a historical memory, with a critical temper, that recollects the same scene of Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at in context of power relations. Here parallel characters and actions run throughout the novel within the larger context of comparison and contrast between the past and the present, the devil and the saint. But here, as in al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, the muh. tasib is central to the action. Representing the Sultan in public life, al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at looms high, but he follows a line of advance and retreat in his dealings with others, especially with the protagonist Shaykh Ibn Sal¯am, the sage who publicly stands against al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at’s corruption and deceit. Thus, the novel is based on this conflict in which the sage draws his strength from public support. Addressing al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, he says, “You have oppressed people, overtaxing them, driving them out, and increasing the number of widows” (p. ). He also castigates him for his hypocrisy, siding with the late Sult¯an, for he is “kissing his hand and the fringe of his garb many times a day. What happens that makes you suddenly a favorite of the new Ottoman Sultan?” (p. ) Following historical accounts, the writer is bound to avoid poetic justice; letting such accounts impose 28 Jam¯ al al-Gh¯ıt.an¯ı, Awr¯aq sh¯ab #¯asha mundh¯u alf #¯am (Papers of a young man who lived for a thousand years; Cairo: Maktabat Madb¯ul¯ı, Tab#ah , –). The  . GEBO edition of Al-Majm¯u#ah al-qas. as. iyyah is used.

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their aftermath on the novel. The villain, al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, waits for the right moment to neutralize public opinion, fabricate accusations against the sage, and proclaim in public ‘the vile liar, who claims sainthood and abstinence will be executed by the ax” (p. ). Knaves and Rogues Through such basic situational ironies devils endow themselves with the mask of sainthood, defiling the reputation of saints in a reversal of roles that passes with little notice in complacent societies. In Awr¯aq sh¯ab #¯asha mundh¯u alf #¯am, as in his other short novel Ith. ¯af al-zam¯an bi-Hik¯ . ayat Jalb¯ı al-Sultan (, Enriching time with the story of the Sultan’s Jalb¯ı),29 al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı sees through the motion and endeavor of his own villains, rogues and saints in a corrupt society presided over by a despot who only cares for his own survival and affluence. But the Sultan has always his own whims that trigger action in unexpected directions, keeping the characters, and the narrative for that matter, in constant restlessness and disequilibrium.30 Hence people may rise to power today, to be kicked out or executed tomorrow, for the Sultan’s whims are no less intrusive and overruling than coincidence. Such is the relevance of despotism to fiction in Arabic culture. Thus the poor young barber #Abd al-Razz¯aq finds himself chosen to shave the Sultan according to the muh. tasib’s desire to enroll somebody who is docile enough to remain within his control. As the job traditionally entails entertaining the Sultan, the young barber #Abd alRazz¯aq proves to be pleasing enough to win over the Sultan’s liking. But #Abd al-Razz¯aq soon resorts to treachery to rise to the post of the muh. tasib, for a life of corruption and social mobility prompts such knaves to make use of all means to rise to power. In fact, this career sums up a knavish tradition in which rogues look upon life as fleeting, changeable and unpredictable. Hence the barber thinks of tricks and treachery as the inevitable means of the intelligent before a reversal of Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Ith. ¯af al-zam¯an bi-Hik¯ . ayat Jalb¯ı al-Sultan (, Enriching time with the story of the Sultan’s Jalb¯ı; Damascus: Ittih¯ . ad al-Kutt¯ab al-#Arab, ), and within his Al-Hi . s. ¯ar min thal¯ath jih¯at: qis. as. (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mustaqbal al-#Arabi, ). 30 The ith¯af genre signifies great historical value, admonition or encouragement, . along with teaching and edification. The Tunisian Ahmad Ibn Ab¯ı Diy¯ . . af (–) wrote his Ith. ¯af al-zam¯an bi-akhb¯ar mul¯uk T¯unis wa-#ahd al-am¯an (Tunis: al-Mat.ba#ah alRasmiyah, –). The irony in the novel lies in the choice of the word itself for a title. 29

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fortune takes place and brings about misery and death. On the other hand, the loquacious barber is the narrator’s mouthpiece to avenge Scheherazade. But as a picaro the barber uses narrative in this instance as a pragmatic means towards achieving personal gain. Such a medieval scene of roguery and social climbing is only in line with despotism and corruption. But this corruption also provokes antagonism and resistance. In Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd’s novel, Tah. awwulat ¯ al-f¯aris al-ghar¯ıb f¯ı al-ard. al-# Aribah (The Strange knight’s transforma31 tions in the Arabized land), the narrator’s voice overlaps with that of the protagonist T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un, whose present memory is shocked by accounts of terror. These accounts constitute the material for the writer, as they also augment and grow through recollections of comparable scenes from the past when injustice and corruption drove many to resist. T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un’s memory retrieves scenes and compares past and present. The view of history as series of ruptures informs the novel. T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un may have been tortured for his criticism of totalitarianism and dictatorial practices, ending up in prison where identical stories of suffering and torture are no less haunting than the ones preoccupying his own memory. The haunted memory has no sense of time, for its readings and recollections roam freely in time and place. Thus upon listening to the narrator of such stories in prison T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un asks, “What people has he been describing, what towns, why does he say ‘we’?” (p. ). “Might he be narrating a nightmare more shocking than the strange events he has himself undergone?” (p. ). In such ambiguous circumstances, the imprisoned narrative needs only an outlet to release itself against repression, for narrative accounts could be prisoners’ recollections confused with past memories and historical realities under the strain of psychological pressure and bodily torture. Rebels T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un as a rebel is initiated in Shaykh al-W¯as.il¯ı’s school of spiritualism, which is a corrective force for the present. This takes place after the Sultan’s confiscation of his father’s land and wealth. Alliance with the futuwwah under the Shaykh’s spiritual guidance becomes T¯ . ahir ¯ 31 The use of “al-ard al-# Aribah” in the title could be deliberate to establish the . ¯ ironic pattern between the pureblooded Arabs, # Aribah, in their original lands, and the happenings that trigger opposition.

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Ibn Maym¯un’s relentless endeavor especially after Mihy¯ar’s (the muh. tasib) intrusion into his personal life, attempting by every means to possess his own beloved Jullan¯ar. The rebel in him not only endorses Shaykh alW¯as.il¯ı’s faith but also helps in organizing the masses in their revolt, for these people “expose themselves to hunger, vagrancy and destruction, driven to sustained endurance by the faith of an old sage struggling with the remaining strength in him” (p. ). In this novel the Shaykh’s character as a saint of different caliber from Mahf¯ . uz’s . ascetics unfolds through T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un’s action and comments as much as it evolves through opposing views of him. Comments here take the form of action, for both Mihy¯ar the muh. tasib and al-Shih¯ab¯ı the police chief exhaust their tactics in order to win the sage on their side after failing to annihilate him. Thus the muh. tasib asks the police chief to use “glittering words and shiny money” (p. ), only to receive a disappointing rebuff, “Not even if you brought him the treasures of the world would he yield” (p. ). The more they work against him, the greater is his stature, as Mihy¯ar admits to himself. Against him we turn into reptiles begging on the steps of time. He lures us to the light, only to shoot afterwards high like the wind to the summit where I deemed myself once presiding. (p. )

As usual, when Arab novelists reconstruct historical accounts, antagonists in this novel such as Mihy¯ar the muh. tasib and Shih¯ab¯ı the police chief receive better delineation as characters, for the writer puts both the Shaykh and T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un on the defensive or in retreat chased by snipers and soldiers from one street or area to another despite the mounting public support for them. Resorting to vile means and destructive measures upholders of the status quo turn into “reptiles” and villains whose ruthlessness knows no bounds. While guild chiefs, peasants, bandits, and craftsmen gather around the sage according to the medieval futuwwah tradition, al-Shih¯ab¯ı spreads spies and police everywhere to frame, hunt, and kill. Al-Shih¯ab¯ı’s spies pursue T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un for instance, not only because of his role in the rebellion, but also because Mihy¯ar the muh. tasib would like to get hold of him alive. As part of the writer’s feminist exposure of misuse of women, Mihy¯ar the muh. tasib is placed in the position of power, to use the woman and her lover as pawns. To force Jullan¯ar to accept him as husband, Mihy¯ar the muh. tasib intends to threaten her with killing her lover if she objects to him.

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On the other hand, even the love theme which could have helped in the drawing of T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un’s character turns into a causal sequence of action in which Mihy¯ar’s character exposes a great deal of its nature as an anti-hero. Thus Jullan¯ar’s servant asks her: “Madam, what is T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un in comparison with Mihy¯ar? Should your love to him be known to Mihy¯ar, the latter would use every means to get hold of him and to be ruthlessly tortured” (p. ). Accordingly, Jullan¯ar harbors fears lest “Mihy¯ar shut him in an underground cell” (p. ). While she succumbs under pressure to Mihy¯ar’s wish for marriage, T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un has to decide between this human commitment and love and complete negation of worldly desire in order to devote himself to al-W¯as.il¯ı’s person and cause. In other words, T¯ . ahir Ibn Maym¯un is rather a Shaykh’s subordinate than a knight, a politician rather than a futuwwah. In general, the novel is more concerned with anti-heroes, leaving little space for specific individuals from among the youth to evolve despite its wide-ranging interest in this medieval structure of craftsmen and youth. The medieval social structure beautifully appears in #Urs baghl (A Mule’s wedding, ) by the Algerian al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r.32 Although devoid of the medieval political context, this novel cares more for the futuwwah as a discipline of coded standards and principles held up with esteem even in the most unlikely place, a brothel.33 Regardless of its cynical view of contemporary life, #Urs baghl deals with the futuwwah proper seen and practiced by the protagonist Hajj Kay¯an, the Zayt¯unah Mosque student who visits the brothel to convert the prostitutes to the “path of the righteous,” only to be forced to make love to the mistress al-#Inn¯abiyyah herself. This initiation in guilt involves him in a love affair with her which also entails his stay at the brothel, defending her against others, beating two scoundrels and killing one bully to end up later in prison. When released a year later he is naturally accepted as the h¯ız¯ı or the futuwwah. Different from Mahf¯ . uz’s . ¯ whores and, perhaps, Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯awı’s young prostitute, “conspiring with outlawed movements and secret parties” as the Chief of Security says (Fall of the Im¯am, p. ), women at al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r’s brothel are so

Al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r, #Urs baghl (A Mule’s wedding; Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ). As the standard extant document on the subject, Mus.t.af¯a Jaw¯ad’s edition of Ibn al-Mi#m¯ar, Kit¯ab al-Fut¯uwah provides information on the codes of the fut¯uwah as discipline and fraternity. 32

33

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carefully delineated as to include all who have been surveyed in postcolonial fiction. More challenging is his treatment of the h¯ız¯ı. The delineation of the h¯ız¯ı is new in Arabic fiction, but its place in al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r’s novel is tied to the title itself. #Urs baghl, A Mule’s wedding, indicates groundless clamor, for nothing comes of such a wedding. In the novel, it refers to a circumcision party at the brothel, which is ostensibly meant to support poor children. Its actual purpose is to collect money to meet the newly emerging interests and needs of the brothel mistress due to her attachment to the young but demanding Kh¯atim. As a sincere h¯ız¯ı of futuwwah background, upholding bodily might and honorable endeavor, Hajj Kayan can see through the “pseudo-h¯ız¯ı” Kh¯atim who is no more than a scoundrel prone to use force to blunder: “This boy is a devil, a dog. He is a thief rather than a futuwwah” (p. ). To Hajj Kay¯an, the mistress’s interest in him is no more than a passing passion for a young lover to suck her breast, to satiate her dual desire for motherhood and lovemaking. Upon alluding to this bully, Hajj Kay¯an provokes the #Inn¯abiyyah to use a metaphor explaining such an uncontrollable craving, comparing herself to a jar driven to a rocky side by a pressing overwhelming desire despite expected damage. Women in al-T¯ . ahir Wat.t.a¯ r’s novel speak up. This speech uncovers their intimate feelings and yearnings more directly and openly than in earlier Arabic narratives. Bodily craving and physical desire are not despicable to shy away from. They are real and need to be discussed and explained in public. What makes Hajj Kay¯an a futuwwah is not only his early bodily might, but also his Sufi inclination, and personal appeal to others.34 Keeping the Saturdays and Sundays for himself, he attends a hiding place in the graveyard smoking hashish and passing thereafter into a reverie, a series of transformations, once as a version of Abu¯ al-Tayyib . al-Mutanabb¯ı (d. ), that of the rebellious poet and the scoundrel, and next as Hamd¯ an Qarmat. who led a revolt (/) against the . #Abb¯asids (–) and established a kind of republic in eastern Arabia, calling for equality and justice.35 In keeping with the ideals of 34 It is good to know that the association between Sufism and futuwwah exists, though with different accentuations. See Muhammad Abu al-Husayn Sulam¯ı (d. ), The Way of Sufi Chivalry: When the light of the heart is reflected in the face, the beauty is futuwwah, trans. Tosun Bayrak (New York: Inner Traditions International, ). Also translated as The Book of Sufi Chivalry: Lessons to a son of the moment. 35 The Qar¯ amit.ah or Carmathians belonged to the Ism¯a#¯ılis, and their leader Ham. d¯an Qarmat. began the insurrection proper around , when he founded a retreat for

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these historical figures, he usually reaches conclusions corresponding to his station as too old now to fight such a youth as Kh¯atim. Hamd¯ an . Qarmat.’s words ring in his memory: “To stand against a tide is mere madness” (p. ). As for the rebellious poet al-Mutanabb¯ı, he is no better than Kh¯atim himself, a scoundrel, “turning life into a concept of force, intimidation and pleasurable living. He was a h¯ız¯ı like Kh¯atim, looking at the four walls simultaneously. His whores, however, were powerless kings, emirs and sultans” (p. ). Still, however, the old futuwwah finds al-Mutanabb¯ı’s justifications tenable whenever tides are overwhelming. As such when Hajj Kay¯an sees the other h¯ız¯ı al-Jeedouka attempting unsuccessfully to beat Kh¯atim, he leans back on the rebellious-poet’s touchstones of resignation: “Death is justifiable, but patience is preferable. Land extends beyond need; and the world is for the winner” (p. ). Incapable of overcoming Kh¯atim, Hajj Kay¯an himself sets the trap for him according to his understanding of this h¯ız¯ı as a fake, a knave devoid of love, but keen on robbing al-#Inn¯abiyyah of her gold and money. Hajj Kay¯an has a resource of ruse and craft to be used in time along with enough tact to beat others. Hence Kay¯an still retains the whore’s love and esteem as a noble h¯ız¯ı who resorts to ideas when bodily strength fails him. As he sees it, the h¯ız¯ı of ancient times may be “enticed by beauty to abandon a career of religious commitment to set others in the path of the righteous” (p. ). This is obviously a creed that is built on self-justifications. Although upholding principles of integrity and justice, the protagonist works within the limitations of contemporary real life. Overcome by an institutionalized society, the futuwwah can sustain some domestic and minor public commitments and principles.36 When existing beyond wishful thinking or beyond situations of limited space, the fut¯uwah as an individual may show up again driven cruelly out of camps or watched over even in boats and ships that carry

his followers east of K¯ufah in Iraq. The whole movement started in the south of Iraq, after the Zanj movement in , developing its ideological system of reason, tolerance, social justice and equality. The movement was strong between the th and th centuries, and it established a kind of republic in al-Ahs¯ . a’, east of Arabia, in  and its followers seized Mecca in . See A Shorter Encyclopeadia of Islam, by H.A.R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers, pp. –. 36 See also Debbie Cox, “The Novels of Tahar Wattar: Command or Critique?” Research in African Literature, , n.  (Fall, ), pp. –.

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him away from impossible urban life. Such is the case of the narrator in the Palestinian Rash¯ad Ab¯u Sh¯awar’s novel, Al-Rab l¯a yastr¯ıh. fi alyawm al-s¯abi# (God never rests on the seventh day), which takes as issue the Palestinian ordeal in Lebanon.37 Advising another fighter and vagabond called Ab¯u al-#Abd to leave and escape like others, the narrator is rebuffed, for Ab¯u al-#Abd finds it more rewarding to choose a shelter, wherever possible, rather than to pull out; hence erecting placards in front of his hiding-place, cursing all who are responsible for turning life into hell. Driven back to the underground the vagabond is bent upon a career of revolt and resistance. Graveyard Populations Despondency, frustration and nihilism prompt other patterns of characterization to appear. Along with villains, plunderers, saints, futuwwah and rebels, there are also the rogues whose temporary retreat from the foreground makes them no less effective for being less conspicuous. The narrator in Shak¯aw¯a al-Mis. r¯ı al-fas.¯ıh (The Eloquent Egyptian’s complaints) by Y¯usuf al-Qa#¯ıd, poses throughout as a cynic addressing present issues and real events, anticipating that his writing may demonstrate that “the status quo is unnatural. That this will be said to the castle dweller as to graveyard habitants” (Pt., Nawm al-Aghniy¯a", Slumber of the rich, p. ).38 To show how life generates numerous norms of behavior according to a multidimensional process of adaptation and resistance, the narrator picks up a group, a family of sixteen persons in dire conditions, willfully endowing themselves a start with colorful social titles acceptable to the graveyard population. The choice of the graveyard setting is not random, as graveyards in Cairo make up the so-called City of the Dead and are inhabited by thousands of the destitute. The real assumes large symbolic connotations as the scene may stand for the country as a whole, while the father is the patriarch who still imposes authority and order to facilitate selling the country once and for all. The father hides his own obscure origin by

37 Rash¯ ad Ab¯u Sh¯awar, Al-Rab l¯a yastr¯ıh. fi al-yawm al-s¯abi# (God never rests on the seventh day; Ladhiqiyyah: Hiw¯ . ar, ). 38 Y¯ usuf al-Qa#¯ıd, Shak¯aw¯a al-Mis. r¯ı al-fas.¯ıh (The Eloquent Egyptian’s complaints; Beirut: MADN. ); pt.  Nawm al-Aghniy¯a" (Slumber of the rich; Cairo: GEBO, ).

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calling himself #Abb¯as the Millionaire, with an aspiration to be out of the graveyard as soon as possible. As for his son #Abb¯as, there is no better nickname than “B¯ash¯a” despite his career as a chance mediator for pseudo-marriage arrangements for girls searching for jobs abroad. The “graveyard enchantress” is the daughter, an engineer whose charm attracts a sailor from a wealthy family who is so shocked by her origins and graveyard abode that he deserts her. Another son is a scoundrel whose job is to pass information to the secret police regarding life in the graveyard. He also instigates demonstrations for or against the government according to police orders. The other son is deservedly called the “genius,” for he alone could get a governmental job with no credentials or education whatsoever other than passing free copies of daily and weekly journals to the nearby office manager. Along with the narrator’s cynical tone, the nature of characterization partakes of the picaresque tradition with its interest in roguery, vagabondage and brash cleverness or fahlawa. The narrative plunges into action when the father gathers his family to comply with his decision to sell them in an auction at the very center of the city. The decision is the more ironical because he encourages discussion while at the same time prohibiting them from raising any objection to this decision; for “talk” in his view brings more trouble. Here the narrator’s satirical voice overlaps with the father’s for the suggestion makes fun of the contemporary state’s ostensible interest in democracy while pursuing repression. The underlying irony is that a downtrodden pater familias impersonates the character of the patriarch. Thus, the father explains that in this world it is better to have a “castrated family” (p. ) than to lose it!! The allusion is not hard to follow, when the family is taken to stand for a nation. On the level of characterization, however, this underworld is proposed to be a mixture of contrasts, lively, intelligent, cunning, noble, sly, productive and parasitic. But it also teems with plunderers, looters and liars. Here exist the varying shades between the devil and the saint. Shepherds and Dervishes As place, time and social station work together in their impact on characterization, rural life also tells upon patterns of behavior, bringing about numerous attitudes and ideas that greatly differ from urban obsessions, inclinations, expectations, sly pursuits and ways of life. Such is life in Al-J¯aziyah wa- al-dar¯awish (Al-Jaziyah and the dervishes) by the

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Algerian #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd Benhadouga.39 The novel takes up the story of the infatuating young al-J¯aziyah as adored and loved by shepherds. But the writer places her story within a political context, as her late father, who died as martyr, was a well-known fighter in the struggle against the French. To give the narrative more substantiation, he builds an atmosphere of mystery around the character of the father, who still lives in the minds of all shepherds as the symbol of struggle. This sense permeates the novel and influences events, for shepherds conspire to keep alien suitors away from the daughter who gradually assumes communal and national significance. According to one dervish: “Al-J¯aziyah is the dream with which every shepherd, peasant or dervish sleeps every night! She is the past roots as well as the forth-coming fruits. She is a flying dove on a mountain summit. Who can ever capture her?” (p. ). But al-J¯aziyah is also claimed for marriage by the landlord’s son as part of his search for additional legitimacy through the reputation of her father. Resisting invaders, her father was surrounded by many, killed by “thousand bullets” (p. ), dying as a martyr and becoming as such a legend. According to dervishes and shepherds, his body did not rot even though it was intentionally left in the open, for birds picked it up into their throats, turning it into a song for their rural life. While attachment to her is many-sided, al-J¯aziyah only occasionally attends public meetings, tantalizing and enchanting various characters, but especially shepherds and dervishes. When coming to the foreground along with her probable father-in-law, al-J¯aziyah only thwarts such expectations and gossip, pointing out in passing that she is attached to al-Tayyib, the prisoner who is wrongly accused of murdering one . of her admirers. Another admirer, the protagonist #Ayid, concludes that her character and decision prove that the village is “not only saints, dervishes and the past. First and foremost, it is youth endowing life with shiny colors. She is the dream. Without the dream, life turns into a hag” (p. ). Although both the dervish and the youth compare her to a dream, the youth’s view implies some spiritual touch, whereas the dervish’s idea ironically partakes of bodily lust. In this novel, the protagonist shows no growth other than his concluding remark regarding al-J¯aziyah, for his career is more or less a narrative pattern to present dervishes and shepherds around a provocative center of attraction and challenge in a society that resists change. #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd Benhadouga, Al-J¯aziyah wa- al-Dar¯awish (Al-Jaziya and the dervishes; Al-Jaz¯a"ir: al-Mu"assasah al-Wat.aniyah lil-Kit¯ab, ). 39

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 

#Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd Benhadouga’s novel partakes of the typical Algerian concern with the national question. But as in the case of K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma, the young woman combines in her character the real and the symbolic. She is beyond the reach of a specific person, but she lives and exists in the minds of all. This signification can be achieved through poetic discursivity, as K¯ateb Yac¯ıne did, but it can be achieved also through careful recreation of mystery as #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd Benhadouga manages through dervishes and shepherds. These strategies enable the postcolonial Arabic novel to have its many accentuations and voices while striving to problematize its engagement with tradition, history, the modern nation state and issues of democracy and repression. Dissent finds voicing in various ways, and in situations and scenes that have never before occupied the attention of earlier writers. Both history and modern cities offer characters who speak for the past and the present and who also challenge the limitations of the canon in standard Western writing. Graveyard scenes, dire situations of siege and repression as well as historical annals enrich narrative with new patterns of characterization. These are the more colorful and appealing for being newly inscribed in fiction. Their effective presence across history, in its topography and time sequence, endows the postcolonial Arabic novel with an identity of its own, which is the more so for benefiting from readings into Arabic culture and its socio-political formations. Both time and space assume greater presence in fiction, as the next chapters argue, and the emerging new patterns of characterization appear so effective and functional due to this awareness of the spatial and the temporal as they act on the human agency. As change, with its spatial and temporal markers, overtakes many a social order, writers of fiction find themselves impelled to look into untrodden paths and tracks, capturing situations and patterns of living in crucial moments of tension and transformation. On other occasions, writers are so appalled by sordid realities that they either satirize the real or criticize it obliquely finding in historical anecdotes and details appropriate material for their narrative reconstruction of the past to expose the present. In such reconstructions, these new patterns of characterization have brought to the foreground saints, bandits and rebels along with villains and bureaucrats in a wider context that bear greater relevance to contemporary Arab life. The human interacts with space and time more strongly and effectively under the pressure of transformation and challenge in reciprocal and dialectical patterns that invite further investigation of narrative engagements in these domains.

  SITE AS NARRATIVE

In postcolonial Arabic fiction, site subsumes linear time thematically and structurally, not only because of the nature of postcolonial narrative, its intense negotiation with forms and strategies and its use of media fragments and peripheral voicing, but also because space is the foremost referent. Around space emerge and emanate conflicts, desires, nostalgia, love and war. It can be a deserted campsite, an old house of one’s childhood, but it can be the land, the country and its resources. It is in constant dialogue with the creative mind, as it also incites and goads the craving and the greed of the colonialist, the imperialist, the post-capitalist and the neo-imperialist. In postcolonial narrative, every motion, gesture or speech is deeply entrenched in space, not only as a setting but also as an interactive presence that informs life and response. Narrative preoccupation with space, therefore, is not mere susceptibility to it as location and locale, for site leaves its abiding imprint on the primary and the residual. As inventory of scars and signs, site resonates with postcolonial voices and concerns. Even a cursory reading of writings by Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at., Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Far¯uq al-Buqayl¯ı, #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim, Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd, Sahar . Khal¯ıfah and Han¯ a n al-Shaykh, among scores of other writers, is bound to lead . us into multiple tracks and terrains whereby fiction makes its multivoiced address. Diversity and difference manifest themselves in views, reviews, attitudes, and positionalities that reveal the roots, orientations and sites of production. The more the intensity of habitation and space is, the greater is its stamp on the very accentuation and embodiment of discourse. “Each place within the social ensemble is a particular site of production of discourse, a specific semantic field,” argue Peter Stallybrass and Allan White in Politics and Poetics of Transgression.1 But “each domain in turn can easily be reconstructed within the terms of other domains and according to the hierarchies and ranks governing

Peter Stallybrass & Allan White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, ). 1

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 

the social formation as a whole,” they add.2 Whether citing Ibr¯ahim alK¯un¯ı’s novels of desert life and hierarchical societies, or tracking Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s multi-voiced Misk al-ghaz¯al (English translation: Women of Sand and Myrrh), sites are tellingly present in the very formation of discourse. On the other hand, in postcolonial narrative, there is a dense intertextual space, which usually offers greater hybridity while vying for an identity of some sort. But no less problematic are writings of exilic drive. Positioned outside their cultural centers, they rely on memory to reconstruct an imaginary homeland, which they claim as real, but they, nevertheless, fight hard to forget. In these narratives of exile, there is always that bewailing saying of As¯uf ’s old father in Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf alh. ajar (Bleeding of the Stone), “There is no life for the émigré in another land. God’s curse follows wherever the émigré goes.”3 Fragmented narratives are in abundance, but there are others, too, which offer tightly organized plots as if to prove some omniscience and control in times of frustration and loss. The post-Mahf¯ . uz. novel, as more attuned to revolt and change, is not of one style, for the mere Mahf¯ referentiality belies claims for, or . uzian . promises of, categorization. Mahf¯ . uz’s . experimentation with form and content since the early sixties defies attempts to compartmentalize his narratives. Yet, looking upon the whole scene since the early s, a reader may well be struck by a large number of narratives that have experimented freely in fictional domains, beyond Mahf¯ . uz’s . style and vision. Experimentation involves both admission of bafflement in the face of an overwhelming experience and a striving to account for it. Experimentation entails therefore a deliberate manipulation of strategies and styles. It should not be surprising that Arabic fiction has its own rich store of discursive strategies along with spatial engagements and concerns. Memory and Forgetfulness: The House Both women and men writers resort to experimentation, for the past as concretized in space reappears in incessant recollections, and the present becomes a site of contestation and challenge. Throughout, Ibid., p. . Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı, Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (Tripoli: D¯ar al-#Arabiyyah lil-Kit¯ab, ), p. . Arabic text is used. 2

3

  



writers give up claims of vraisemblance, for writing is an attempt to bring about a verbal construct. Engaged in feminist poetics the Tunisian Sabiha Khmir, for instance, is keen on inscribing traces of a past life, whereby “all joined in a frenzied dance,” in her “crowded head.”4 Rather than over-imposing a pattern of logicality and chronological sequence, she lets people come out of her recollections, as words that “starting pressing to come out, and the story wrote itself.”5 Narrativity assumes its artistry whenever the narrator speaks to account for a happening, an occasion, or an insight. Even when Sal¯ım Barak¯at offers his R¯ısh (Feathers) as the very memory of the Kurds, he sets the feather in motion within a place as if cutting across age and space. Blending atavism and historical dynamism, Bik¯as, the newborn child of Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s other novel Fuqah¯a" al-zal¯ . am (Jurists of darkness), for example, warns his family that he is to grow and cover in a day what people witness in years, and that he needs to get married now. Amid shock, surprise and fear of communal disbelief or negative response, the father is forced to accept this “miracle.” Collective memory is present, argues the writer, and it has to survive in the face of annihilation and physical destruction. In both novels, Sal¯ım Barak¯at substantiates memory with space, as the miraculous and the natural are jointly present in a house, with its surroundings and people: for every unfolding narrative act has a location, specifically a house that triggers these recollections. Indeed, Barak¯at is seemingly in agreement with Bachelard’s notion, for “beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.”6 Whenever in a state of exposition, confession and recollection or under strain or stress, narrators go back to the old house of childhood. But especially in archaic societies or ones with ancient lineage, this return assumes great significance. No matter how complicated this “odyssey of many years” (Bachelard, p. ), memory travels there, for, argues Bachelard, we “are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house,” while “all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme” (ibid.). In that “oneiric house, a house of dream-memory” (ibid.), narrators as protagonists become attached 4 Sabiha Khmir, Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come (London: Quartets Books, ), p. . 5 Ibid., p. . 6 Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, ), p. . Citations from this work are hereafter within the text.



 

to its “passionate liaison,” as both “an embodiment of home” and “dreams.” Thus, for instance, Kh¯alid the fighter in the Algerian Ahl¯ . am Mostaghanam¯ı’s novel Dh¯akirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh) retains the image of the “unforgettable house” (Bachelard’s term, p. ).7 When he is wounded and carried to a bordering Tunisian city for medication, he intimates: I was about to scream when remembering my childhood, that woolen “blanket,” my cover in cold seasons in Constantine. I was about to scream in that night of alienation and loneliness: “Constantine cover me … cover me.” But I said nothing that night, not to Constantine, nor to the owner of that miserable room. I kept my fever and cold to myself. It is difficult for a person coming immediately from the front to confess feeling cold, even to himself.8

The implications of the “woolen blanket,” the old house, and the city are many. The protagonist’s cry is, to use Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination, p. ), “a hybrid construction” that includes and contains a religious appropriation of the Prophet’s call for cover upon being called on to read in the name of God. But, ironically, Kh¯alid’s cry foreshadows an aborted liberation movement that has left many scars on the body of the nation. No wonder, the novel itself includes its conflictual double, an embedded novel, avowedly by Hay¯ . at the addresse or the narratee that sets the professed memory against a politics of forgetfulness.9 Both memory and forgetfulness are fraught with intention, for memory attempts to retain and capture the past, its glories, faith, commitment and sacrifice, which the other side, now in control of the liberated state, tends to erase. The emerging condition in the post-independence state is one of tension, too, as both factions, the old guards and the new bureaucrats, have conflicting interests and premises. The narrator has no other choice but to locate his thoughts in some spatial image, like the house and the city. The city is recollected to harbor these intimacies, facts and fictions, but it is also recalled to endorse the narrator’s vision, for it is a city that is “destined to be revolutionary, militant and rebellious to the end.”10 Lyotard himself is recalled and used in the

7

For a reading of the Algerian question, war and ethnography, as formatively present in the art of the Algerian novel, see Thomas M. Lyons, “The Fictional Artifact: Ethnography and the Novel in Algeria.” Ph. D Thesis, Univ. of Chicago, . 8 Ahl¯ . am Mostaghanam¯ı, Dh¯akirat al-jasad, p. . References are to the Arabic text. 9 Ibid., p. . 10 Ibid., p. .

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narrator-protagonist’s musings, for, as Lyotard says in the  issue of Le Genre humain, the city is credited also with “awakening” his imagination and mind since he was a teacher there in .11 Site as a Nation-State If memory and oblivion are juxtaposed as two voices of separation and unity in a dialectic narrative which is belied nevertheless by its poetry, the “unforgettable house” of Bachelard (p. ), its “original shell” (p. ) that “retains the treasures of former days” (p. ) may be drawn on to develop a critique of revolutionary rhetoric. Kh¯alid, the liberation movement fighter and narrator in Ahl¯ . am Mostaghanam¯ı’s novel Dh¯akirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh), does as much, as if duplicating Lyotard, but this critique is also directed against the post-colonial state, its opportunism, misuse of resources, its bureaucracy and blind and brutal pragmatism. This political dissection occurs in a number of postcolonial Algerian novels, as we have already noticed in Boujedra’s Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits, ). Such retention evolves in postcolonial fiction at large in order to fathom the pitfalls of the liberation struggle when it sets liberation as its ultimate and only goal. Lack of insight into the complexity of independence and the contaminating colonial legacy draw the attention of many writers, who take issue with the informing ideologies in a number of narratives, especially in #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose, ).12 The unforgettable house in this novel is recalled in association with some rustic life, a rural setting which is punctuated also with traditional coffee-houses and pleasant sites along the river al-Gharr¯af which runs smoothly from the Tigris towards the swamps of al-Shat.rah and other towns (in Sumerian Iraq). The house and the river bring back the comforting prayers of Shaykh Murtad¯ . a, the muezzin, as if their dawn reverberations are heavenly gifts. “Whenever in bed, I run with my soul towards that small village on that river of plenty” (p. ). But memory and daydreaming also recall the “compassionate mother,” the gentle childhood, and pleasant life in contrast with a present of great mischief (pp. , ). Regretting accepting an offer to leave this house of childhood behind, and looking upon the politics of the post-colonial 11 Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb (Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, ), p. xiv. 12 #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯ asim, Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose), p. .



 

state in Iraq as appalling apparatus of betrayal and destruction, the narrator-protagonist compares himself to an “artful swimmer, forsaking swimming later, forsaking it when the only meaning of happiness is swimming” (p. ). “Swimming” may be a trope for survival, but its connotations in the novel are many. Its basic emphasis on the speaker’s good grasp of life and art also entails greater interaction with cultures and traditions. Hence, Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u has its chronotopic “journeying” in time and space, between a past life recalled in memory, and a lived one of great danger and challenge. The latter is a threshold for further narratives that map out post-colonial Iraq, especially its years since . The autobiographical thread holds other elements together, but a collapsing of “utterances and languages” takes place to intensify a heteroglossia of significant pronouncements for readers in search for warring discourses in post-colonial Iraq. In respect to this form of stylistic richness, Bakhtin argues: These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel. (The Dialogic Imagination, p. )

Spatial Narrative Variations . The Chronotope But saying this, we, as readers, should be on the alert regarding stylistics and accentuations, whenever the chronotope is involved. First, whenever the spatial and the temporal coalesce in an “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” there emerges the “chronotope” in Bakhtin’s words (“Forms of Time,” The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Second, there is greater amount of intentionality whenever the protagonist is the narrator, for “all words and forms are populated by intentions,” writes Bakhtin (ibid., p. ). Whenever the protagonist as narrator views things that fall outside the self, there is lack of aesthetic distance. Especially when attempting to recollect things, there is an intentional design to select. Bakhtin stipulates that words begin as neutral, but they lose their innocence whenever the speaker “populates it [the word] with his [her] own intention, appropriates the word, adapting it to his [her] own semantic and expressive intention” (ibid., p. ).

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The intentional is the more conspicuous whenever in association with the spatial, for as Yuri Lotman argues, we have to understand how “the dimension of space” is present in “human imagination.”13 Locations themselves change meaning as they pass through reflection, refraction, or association. Both time and space inform, or are informed by, narrative. In a city intersection in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose), for instance, two friends meet after years of separation. But times and fears preoccupy their minds, thus they “look at each other furtively, from the corner of the eye, waiting for each to begin a warm greeting” (p. ). As nothing takes place in that very crucial moment, each continues his separate path, but “a few steps further, and each looks backward as if mourning the death of an intimate friendship” (ibid.). Narrative captures a rich moment in space and time. Its richness lies in its grasp of habits, attitudes and a long tradition of repression. On the other hand, the present itself is a “dissolver” of intimacy, as much as it is a dissolver of tradition. Post-colonial political rhetoric, its division of people into segments and sectors, and its compartmentalization of ideological positions and styles shatter friendship. No one in the above-quoted scene can initiate a greeting for fear of rebuff or disapproval. The human is made to suffer at the altar of another “body politics.”14 The implication of spatial intersections can take serious dimensions that affect one’s life and career, even when these narrative spots are seemingly trivial. A spatial trope, which could lead to different ramifications from the one mentioned above, is the bedroom door. In Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, too, a certain female by the name of #Adawiyyah leaves her bedroom door half-open while the protagonist stays in the drawing room, adamant in rejecting her advances. Situated in a position to see her practicing scenes of sexual seduction, the protagonist gives up his resistance to join her in a scene that has been framed and designed to shatter his claims of faithful commitment to Mun¯a, the other female protagonist in a novel of gendered characterization (p. ).

Qtd. in Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, p. . The reader may check, for further views on the nationalist paradigms in relation to other novels, like Sahar . Khal¯ıfah’s, Najd Isber Yaziji’s, “Questioning the Nationalist Paradigm: toward a post-colonial narrative critique.” Ph. D. Thesis, Univ. of Texas at Austin, . 13

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 

While the intersectional scene involves narrative in disequilibrium and hesitancy, “the door is an entire cosmos of the half-open,” suggests Bachelard, for it accumulates “desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings” (Poetics of Space, p. ). Opened up by one, the door leads to discovery, like the scene in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, an attestation to the power of temptation. But its liminality, when “barely ajar,” argues Bachelard (p. ) prepares for a new beginning, for it tempts to be pushed by the protagonist, like “many doors … of hesitation” (ibid., p. ). The door involves the narrative in disappointments, for the young intellectual woman Mun¯a believes now that he is prone to treachery as his party rivals rumor. The half-open door is the way to temptations, beginnings, successes and failures. Ambivalent space undergoes destabilization, and the human touch may well load and teem it with action, which amounts to no less than an autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical narrative. In Bachelard’s apt conclusion: How concrete everything becomes in the world of the spirit when an object, a mere door, can give images of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and spirit. If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to reopen, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life. (p. )

The story of one’s life may also relate to an outside of so many forms. In the background of all, there is enough irony to undermine or shake up situations. Irony lies between expectation and desire and achievement and ambition. In other words, irony is narrative. . The Ironic Site Irony may well unfold in parodic constructs, too, whereby space is a terrain to double another in order to destabilize. In hierarchical and authoritarian systems, such reconstructs have the same role of the carnivalesque. In Bakhtin’s stipulation, “Everything serious had to have, and indeed did have, its comic double.” (“Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). Whenever hierarchy takes form as a seriously observed discipline, laughter is one way to wreck it, as the fake court scene indicates in Ibr¯ah¯ım #Abd al-Maj¯ıd’s L¯a Ah. ad Yan¯amu f¯ı al-Iskandariyyah (; English translation: Nobody Sleeps in Alexandria, ). The re-enacted court scene, presided over by a mock judge, and directed against the #umdah and his family, is a travesty. Offering scandalous information and discrediting the privileged there,

  

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the court scene is a comic double of great potential to subvert rules and structures of belief and feeling. In Bakhtin’s words this parodic-travesty literature offers “the corrective of laughter and criticism to all existing straightforward genres, languages, styles [and] voices” (“The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). The parodic is to force people “to experience beneath these categories a different contradictory reality” (ibid.). Parody is no less effective whenever style, in its institutionalized or ceremonial form, is targeted. In Bakhtin’s significant theorizations for parody, “parodic stylization” of grand or ceremonial styles (“Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. ) expands the narrative and implicates it in contested terrains of great richness. Arabic postcolonial fiction is not oblivious to this practice, to be sure, whenever hierarchical or authoritarian discourse is the target. Fu’¯ad al-Takarl¯ı’s AlMasarr¯at (Gladnesses) is involved in “hybrid constructions” (Bakhtin’s term, ibid., p. ) whenever the protagonist Tawf¯ıq L¯am succumbs to his taste for the ironic to destabilize official discourse. This contestation assumes meaning and relevance in a specific location, like the office, for instance. In these accentuations as hybrid constructions, there are usually “two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems,” to use Bakhtin (“Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). But these do co-exist in one utterance, which, at the outset, belongs to one single speaker. In application to al-Takarl¯ı’s protagonist and narrator Tawf¯ıq L¯am in Al-Masarr¯at, the appropriation of the security officer’s speech in a circular is meant to undermine that speech, for the officer who is in charge of the institution has no managerial qualifications. His “avant garde opinions” (p. ) amount to no more than a superficial jargon which smacks of vanity and ignorance. Certainly, the ironic also exposes Tawf¯ıq L¯am’s opportunism. He is, after all, a non-committed individual, a figure from among existentialist, non-Sartrean, constructs. He and his colleagues have reached the conclusion that the  Suez crisis has turned everything upside down. He describes the group as “respectable officials, non-interfering in politics, whose concern is to meet punctually every Thursday night to play cards” (p. ). In other words, the narrator speaks in a non-committal manner, which aspires to survival, unless it is driven to do otherwise.

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 

. The Poetic and the Representational Language can escape hierarchical and historical limitations by its generic specifications, too. The poetic, for instance, is beyond the mimetic and the representational. The latter could account for the procedural and the real, whereas the poetic is more personal. In Ibr¯ahim alK¯un¯ı’s W¯aw al-s. ughr¯a (Waw the smallest),15 the scene is one of bad¯awah (nomadic life) where hierarchy obtains and communal interdependence is sustained by the strict observance of rules and codes of authority and tradition. Upon being chosen by the council of the elders as the chief, the poet, who is the immediate relative of the dead chief, is unhappy. He knows well that his poetic frame of mind cannot cope with the rules of the seniors. It is his “purely poetic, extra historical language” which sounds, to use Bakhtin’s terms, “far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life, a language of the gods” (“Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). The collision between the poetic and the “historically concrete and living” (Bakhtin, ibid.) is bound to dislodge one for the benefit of the other. It is not surprising that the poet speaks of his love poetry and imaginative recreations as beyond the needs of his community, hence his journey of resignation which is also a journey towards al-khal¯a", the boundless and the unlimited. The poetic evolves as a sense of the boundless, the vast and the unlimited, against the prosaic which has the constraints of the social. The novel derives its narrativity, its flowing unfolding, from this collision, yet the survival of the community into semi-urban growths attests to the ensuing narrative which manifests “the feeling for the historical and social correctness of living discourse,” a feeling “for its participating in historical becoming and in social struggle,” as Bakhtin explains respecting the poetic and the representational (ibid.). The poet’s rites of passage are many, but, as a start, there must be renunciation, for “renunciation is a treasure whose pleasure can be reached and attained only by those who experience it” (W¯aw als. ughr¯a, p. ). It should build on some understanding of the possible and the impossible, and the poet knows that to accept leadership means annihilation of selfhood. “Leadership is a thousand and thousand curse, dominion is a blight” (ibid., p. ). He recollects the elders’ view regarding his poetry, their suggestions to keep it anonymous or pseudonymous: 15

Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı, W¯aw al-¸sughr¯a (Waw the smallest; ).

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

“But does poetry remain as poetry if secretly recited? Is it poetry when pseudonymous?” “This is how we have found our fathers doing.” (p. )

To escape these strictures he has to make his journey into the wilderness, to recover a spontaneous joy, away from constraints. Although seemingly a narrative of ancient ways and styles, its recovery of the past and recapitulation of ancient ethnic practices situate it among postcolonial experimentalism. The case is more so with Ibr¯ahim al-K¯un¯ı’s Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (The Bleeding of the Stone) with its mixture of mythological topography and immediate colonial intrusions into the life and lands of other people. As¯uf, the lone Bedouin, and his parents, in their choice of isolation and survival on the occasional exchange of sheep and goats for flour and sugar, may well stand for rustic and nomadic life. But intrusion into their life, and subsequent encroachment, continues, nevertheless. Every intruder comes with a language that commands or persuades first to know the secrets of these desert rock lands. Every intruder is after something, and As¯uf is to suffer crucifixion for not satisfying the whims and voracity of the maniac Q¯ab¯ıl with his indefatigable and relentless search for the wad¯an, mouflon, in the rocky wilderness of southern Libya. But every intruder has a discourse, which emanates from a positionality of some sort, and the Italian captain Bordello, as representative of the Italian military occupation of Libya, –, needs no persuasion to capture and enlist every youth in the army to invade Ethiopia, for instance. This is different from the discourse of the American captain John Parker. His Orientalist knowledge empowers him to choose people who can help him not only in the search for oil and riches, but also in the search for antelopes to satisfy his desire for the best of meat. The native, shocked and bewildered by this inhumanity, repeats every now and then in resignation, “Nothing can fill the hunger of Adam’s son but soil.” Al-K¯un¯ı’s contributions at large offer very salient examples of sites as having their own languages. Certainly, here as in W¯aw, there is some valorization of the primordial and the nomadic. Al-K¯un¯ı’s W¯aw reverses the premise of the poet—the sage of ancient societies and traditions. A Romantic paradigm is superimposed, and the poet’s rite of passage also takes an inverted direction, away from community towards the wilderness. Surprisingly, many post-Mahf¯ . uz. narratives indulge in this recourse as if in revolt against the inhuman, artificial and alienating nature of post-



 

modern cities. Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Sha.th. al-mad¯ınah (City trance or Distant city; ) may offer a good example of contestation, conflict and human surprise at the lack of soul and spirit in market-economy centers.16 . The Journey against Cultural Hegemony A mixture of Sufi discourse and meditative intimations may be the writer’s recourse to recover identity in metropolitan centers or sites of great globalization. Such is Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Sha.th. al-mad¯ınah. Juxtaposed to his homeland, the present metropolis is impersonal and inhuman, and he holds hard to his “passport and airplane tickets” (p. ) to ensure a peaceful return. The narrator as protagonist maintains no illusions in respect to his homeland, for there he has suffered imprisonment and persecution. But here, “fear” overwhelms him, and his “alienation is complete” and his “identity is dissipated” (p. ). His mind recollects stories of people who have disappeared or got lost without identity papers in cities whose “certainties change and buildings get transformed” (ibid.). Yet, the implications of site, identity and discourse are many; for as long as he preserves his documents, keeps to himself, and remains noncommitted to issues of political or cultural engagement, he is bound to survive. But upon renouncing his passivity and siding with the African in a conference held in that metropolis, he is shocked to find his identity papers lost. Without ideological pronouncements, the protagonist is made to understand that he will be well taken care of as long as he is passive. To retain an identity and a voice could, ironically and paradoxically, lead to a loss of his identity papers. Polarized between a homeland and impersonal but vicious metropolis, he comes to understand space as “self-sufficient, distancing others” (p. ). This polarization stamps the narrative with paradigms of comparison and contrast, and contaminates language with an overwhelming, but disconcerting, presence of space. Space offers more discursive strategies whenever the human soul is in a state of reciprocality and correspondence. As long as dislocation is the context for human life there is bewilderment and shock. In Khal¯ıl al-Nu#aym¯ı’s Tafr¯ıgh al-k¯a#in (Emptying of being), the narrator Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt¯an¯ı, Sha.th. al-mad¯ınah (City trance or Distant city; Cairo: D¯ar alShur¯uq, ). 16

  



as protagonist is “facing the ocean” (p. ), an outcast, searching for refuge, and “forced to be lonely, at night,” ending up with “feelings of deep repugnance, against the East and the West” (p. ). The site evokes battling confessions, against self and others. To sustain a “no” to humiliation, confiscation, repression and brutal treatment (pp. , , , ), he has to undergo more suffering. He realizes that his confessions are contradictory and his language is fragmented. It is only when he reverts to the old self and the subtext of the ancient culture that his discourse assumes a well-structured, grammatical and rational stature that downplays deviation or difference (p. ). But with this sense of dislocation, a refugee in France, he is at the threshold of time and space, bewildered and silent—“Are you dumb, or deaf,” the woman, his companion, asks (p. ). . Thresholds of Ambivalence At these thresholds of ambivalence and uncertainty, division and rupture color the feeling of Khal¯ıl al-Nu#aym¯ı’s protagonist. Everything seems or sounds in negative terms; for the Paris moon looks cold and dwindling, unlike the Syrian (p. ). Paris rain is dead; the window glass is dark. This darkness “has changed features and fortresses, changing simultaneously the nature of his confrontation and its subject. It no longer arouses the desire to speak, nor does its silence sound suitable” (p. ). If he is drawn to a decision in this loneliness, it is to put an end to a life of emptiness, for “this evening I intend to speak up, to cry” (p. ), not to write, for inscription “is dumb and dull,” and he needs “some noise” (ibid.). Prioritization of speech is only a postmodernist, or specifically a Derrida- deconstructionist stance. The text itself follows a confessional, speech-like and deconstructionist unfolding, where nothing relates to another, for “I am in search of myself among fragments” says the speaker. The moment of disintegration is inseparable from his living space, for “throughout my life I have been trying to make sense of things, but this penetration between this moment and the next freezes the potential for understanding and blinds critical insight” (p. ). Narrativity has its prospects or limitations in line with this liminality, for to oscillate between moments of subordination and resistance, past and present, and decision and indifference is to keep narrative within a postmodernist terrain of ambivalence: cryptic, tense, and fragmented. Although speech is highlighted as a show of life and, for that matter,



 

resistance to an “attempt to empty us” (p. ), the narrative unfolds in a gray space, where a confessional soliloquy takes over at the expense of other discursive strategies. It proves “a release from sorrow” (ibid.), without necessarily giving in for other strategies of affirmation. The site of irresolution, the threshold, is not a beginning yet, and hence confession is fraught with soul-searching, which is usually distinctive of the inner voyage into the self, the spiral journey that has been a feature of postcolonial narratives. Confessional narratives may go beyond a double-voiced text whenever the narrator, as in #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose), for example, develops a narrativity that enhances a multi-voiced heteroglot of many registers and languages, including Sufi utterance, coffee-house chats, prison anecdotes, interrogations, and intellectual, especially existentialist, discourse. As these are left to grow, they detract from the narrator’s own voice, leaving him, textually, alienated, marginalized and coerced, as he is in life. This text deserves detailed analysis for its terrains of contest, discovery and challenge. A. Site as Narrative Inversion Written in retrospect, #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (Suffering primrose) has the characteristics of veiled autobiographical narrative. It is centered on sites as recollected or retained at the present moment. Its narrator’s voice accommodates, without containment, other voices, insofar as these inform or are informed by situations. The narrator’s recognition of his limitations makes it possible to be free from Romantic egoism. The voice is juxtaposed against other voices of authority, party systems, comrades and half-brothers. Prior to any welcome intrusion into his life, there is only a dark void, which the reader has to take into account as it prepares for the commencing narrative density: “In this hour, I am a pendulum falling down from the clock, or a coat slipping from a hanger, in a stage of rupture, ringing invades my depth” (p. ). He is trapped later in a sexual intrigue, planned and instigated by the lovable young Mun¯a to prove her point that, in his love for her, he is not rising in sublimity as he claims. Consequently, he is driven back to taverns, pubs, brothels and streets, the very sites of city life that imprint their languages on him (p. ). There he discovers for himself the ever-changing face of city life. Populated and controlled by the newly moneyed classes, criminals and common traffickers of every sort (p. ), the city is a network of corruption and death.

  



Only when drawn by the compassionate call for prayers in the early morning does he recall and recapture an echo of a Sufi song by alHall¯ . aj whose consummate fusion of the infinite and the finite provides him with a sense of wholeness: “You annihilate me by your presence in me, bringing me so close to you I thought you were me” (p. ). Passing through the Sufi experience, he achieves release from bondage to the earthly, for “there appeared a private life for me, so special and secret that I no longer take into account the society outside” (p. ).17 The Sufi vision may be disturbed, however, whenever he is recalled from this state of reconciliation with the self to account for his past experience. Mun¯a, the young intellectual female with whom he is in love, develops strategies of interrogation that parallel others, which he has already undergone in prison. Wielding in her character challenge, charm, integrity and knowledge, Mun¯a subverts his very inwardness. Under her interrogative, yet pleasant, gaze he is forced to recollect half of the narrative, i.e., his experience as a political activist (p. ). Although demonstrating a great deal of sympathy for this experience, Mun¯a sees through his reluctance to recall that past (p. ). B. The Female Interrogator But both the interrogator and narrator develop highly conflicting perspectives that derive their oppositionality from originary sites. Her urban upbringing is not his, nor is her liberal view of love and sex. Discerning the repressed in his answer, she argues: “You are in love, and your clumsiness makes me laugh… Are you afraid of me?” “Afraid? Yes…” “Do you love me so much?” “Almost sacred love…” “Why do you love me, married as you are?”

17

The Sufi reference can be pursued further, as in this narrative the protagonist will also suffer accusations at an early stage of being a charlatan, and to be excommunicated by party communiqués. He suffers imprisonments and torture. Al-Hall¯ . aj’s suffering and his ultimate killing (March ) permeate the novel. The reference in the passage is to al-Hall¯ . aj’s basic belief, expounded in poetry, that God’s existence transcends the limits of creation. The living witness of God is in the fusion, through love and exerted will, of the created spirit into the Divine. See Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, by H.A.R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers (Leiden: E.J. Brill, ), pp. –.



  “I admit, there must be a reason for everything. Perhaps, love is the exception, as my heart yearns for you. In my empty life, I long for whatever that brings me refreshment and joy… and in you I find the softness and comfort versus the roughness of my life.” “Have you ever loved?” “I am withdrawn and shy by nature. I cannot face the real as it is. The real undergoes transformation in my imaginings. Hence in my early life Gibran Khalil Gibran used to fascinate me… I often drew nude women, as Gibran used to do. My imaginings and impressions of holiness soar among colored clouds, transparent skies, and soft ethereal creatures.” “But this is merely a cover for frustrated sexual desires. There is no pure love, but masks of variable colors for this frustration.” “At times, human beings combine Sufi yearning with sensual desire.” “Water and fire in the same person?”

Digging deep into the protagonist’s mind, itself a site of willful forgetfulness and nagging recollections, Mun¯a is no less than an inquisitor, or, at times, the writer. This exchange of roles enriches the narrative as much as it causes a number of disruptions here and there that call for the reader’s own intrusions and interpretations. On the other hand interrogation acts as a discursive catalyst, as it provokes memory to retrieve scenes of interrogation. Specifically, Mun¯a’s interrogation drives the protagonist to recall another scene, which he passed through, at the security office, after days of torture and loss of consciousness: He [the ruthless officer] told me after a devouring look: “Listen, you there, rumours say that you resort to magic and magnetic power. Some colleagues asked to be excused from dealing with you. But, it is my wish to play with you, interrogate you, pluck you out of life like [pointing to his shirt] this very button.” Like any idiot, he pulled out the button, uncovering his hairy chest. (p. )

This scene culminates another and prepares for a second where an inversion of roles takes place according to a carnivalesque switching of codes. Aside from omissions, broken sentences and fragmented narrative, these scenes situate the narrative in patterns of ritual and romance closely related to Shi#ite beliefs and practices in Iraq.

  



. Poetics of Inversion: Sites of Shi#ite Rituals Drawn brutally to interrogation by police guards, the narrator as protagonist resents the maltreatment. Pushing them back and asking them to stop their brutality, he is attacked and beaten. Recalling his Shi#ite “ashr¯af ” (i.e. descending from the prophet’s family) lineage, the protagonist calls on the martyr al-Husayn for support and help,18 only to . receive more beating from the guards, who shout back at him, “but you are infidel,” referring to his leftist ideology. Falling down unconscious, he is carried back to his prison cell, to wake up at night with one of the guards bending over him, tending his wounds, asking him for forgiveness, and bringing him food and fruits. “Master, take pity on me,” says the police guard. Surprised at this reversal of roles, the protagonist rejoins questioningly, “Am I your master?” “Yes. Yes. In a dream, there visited me a personage in white, with a green flag, telling me, ‘How dare you take part in a crime against your master?’ ” “But, I am not your master, nor your servant? I have nothing to do with your dreams.”

Shi#ite rituals are highlighted through the prisoner’s call for al-Husayn . the martyr, as it implicates the whole scene into a web of response, guilt and retribution. The Prophet’s grandson was murdered by the Umayyads () at Karbal¯a" with virtually no support from the Iraqis who promised him help and succor. Hence there is an enormous sense of historical guilt. The protagonist’s call for al-Husayn acts as rites of . passage, for it bypasses the historical, the actual murder, to establish itself as faith in al-Husayn’s martyrdom and its impact on the Iraqi . conscience, and the conscience of Shi#ites at large. It is an act of filiation, too, as it establishes the protagonist’s lineage within the Prophet’s 18 The reference is to Im¯ am Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, the second son of . Im¯am #Al¯ı and F¯at.imah, who was his grandfather’s favorite. “The accession of Yaz¯ıd [to the Caliphate] altered his views,” regarding the Umayyads’ rule, and he decided to take action. The appointed governor of Iraq #Ubayd All¯ah b. Ziy¯ad “cut off all access to the Euphrates, hoping to reduce him by thirst.” #Umar b. Sa#d b. Ab¯ı Waqq¯as. became the commander of , at Karbal¯a" to fight the Im¯am. With a weak escort of relatives and devotees, the Im¯am was surrounded with a “circle of steel” to prevent any outside rescue or support, and was wounded deliberately, in many places, before being beheaded. His tents were pillaged, and his family and relatives taken prisoners, on the th of Muharram,  A.H./th October, . See Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, by H.A.R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers, p. .



 

family. It also cuts across the discourse of authority, alienating it and emptying it from any further hegemony. The call acts on the guard’s conscience and liberates him from bondage to the official discourse in its authoritarian identifications since the Umayyads while conversely converting him to another site of allegiance. The guard, like the prison authority, is part of a system that is akin to the Umayyads, the slayers of the Prophet’s grandson. Overtaken by a sense of guilt, through an overwhelming vision, he is no longer the same. The prison as space undergoes division under the impact of ritualistic discourse too, for the protagonist’s call to the martyred al-Husayn signifies a reenactment of . the Karbal¯a" scene of , and the concomitant sense of guilt. It leads to a reversal of positions and attitudes, incriminating, as it were, the authoritarian as responsible for al-Husayn’s death. . The guard’s answer explains this change and transfer of homage, as follows: “Pardon me… I haven’t finished. But you should ask me about the cause of the dream. When you were fighting us back with exceptionally powerful might, you were shouting: ‘Help me, master of martyrs, my beloved al-Husayn.’ Thus, you are not an atheist, as they told us. Then . followed God’s vengeance.” “God’s vengeance?” I asked with surprise. “Yes, for the chief guard went blind soon after.”(p. )

To use Bakhtin’s dialogic principle, “meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers,” attaining some “co-voicing” among people who share similar rites and backgrounds, but separated by political and administrative division into high and low, guards and prisoners.19 Functioning in a manner similar to Bakhtin’s “carnival,” to disrupt a compact order of control, this scene dethrones one authority while re-enacting another within a historically oriented lineage with its accompanying festivities and associations.20 The call for help will gather momentum in other utterances of affiliatory stance that place the protagonist among Sufis and martyrs. Passing through these states, the narrator as protagonist re-enacts a personal experience already addressed

M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, ), p. . 20 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” Carnival, Hysteria and Writing: Collected Essays & Autobiography, by Allon White (Oxford: Clarendon, ), pp. –. 19

  



in the #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim’s other novel, al-Munad. il (The Militant). In another instance in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, there is an “anti-pilgrimage” journey conducted by prison guards when dragging the protagonist to another prison, perhaps in the wilderness. They speak of him in the car as if he were non-existent. As long as he is passive, and “absent” (p. ) from their concerns, they feel assured of power and control. It is only when passing through a city on the way to their destination, and arranging for their meal there, that they remember his existence. The restaurant owner slips money into his pocket and offers him a free meal. The protagonist asks the guards for a mosque to pray, “But do you care for mosques, you, God’s enemy!” One of the guards shouts at him. “Take me to a mosque to pray,” I said.

Dragging him handcuffed from the car, the protagonist falls down, while he cries, “God is Great.” At this point, the narrator as protagonist recounts an experience of reverie, exaltation and rapture. Unconscious because of the fall, he has passed through a reverie, a vision of swimming among the stars and the ringing bells of jubilee. “The blue horizon to which I am ascending looks like a blessed carnival.” Upon regaining consciousness, he finds himself surrounded with people who protect him from the guards. In other words, the “carnival” in this instance is used in a non-Bakhtinian sense while it regains its temporary transfer of power. It occurs here in tune with al-Mi#r¯aj, the prophet’s nocturnal ascension to heaven, while it simultaneously implies the inversion of that scene for the benefit of the downtrodden and the underprivileged. A temporary reversal of positions takes place, for he is free while the guards are held prisoner: “When I finished my prayers, I lifted my head up … mud and blood covering me. People surrounded me, holding the police at bay with their hands at their throats” (p. ). Yet, to follow Peter Stallybrass and Allan White in their Politics & Poetics of Transgression, it is possible to read the marketplace scene in terms of the interrelatedness between space and discourse. In their reading of Bakhtin, both tend to accept Susan Sontag’s suggestion that “Every place is a different language.”21 The old marketplace as much as the feeling of disappointment and pain drive the speaker’s memory Qtd. in Peter Stallybrass and Allan White, The Politics & Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, ), p. . 21



 

back in time, to the village, its mosque, river, peacefulness and availability of Providence to be addressed in an open space of infinitude. Thus, the sudden surprising need for prayer and direct communication with God. The buried self surges up to recapture the fleeting and the flickering in a moment of transcendence, which simultaneously acts, in narrative, as transgression of present forms of repression and control. The scene recalls the very language of that buried self, in opposition to a dominating discourse that sounds all encompassing, suffocating and stifling. In the car that takes him to some distant unknown prison, the guards speak of him as non-existent as if to negate his presence in preparation for physical annihilation (p. ). It is only through festivity and ritual, a carnival, that roles undergo a reversal. . Banquets as Language Sites Resourcefulness can bring about a similar change whenever there is no place for festivity and faith. Such is the scene in the police headquarters, where the police inquisitor admits that he is a murderer and that he has already murdered five political prisoners. But, as soon as he is assured of (i.e., duped) the political prisoner’s cooperation, he calls for a meal of beans and rice, a feast for a new start of mutual friendship. To celebrate his seeming success in winning the prisoner to his side and confiscating a press for clandestine literature, the officer conducts a feast which, in Bakhtin’s words, “triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world’s expense.”22 The officer is so happy and joyful that he is no longer the same vicious murderer, for, as Bakhtin argues, “No meal can be sad,” as “sadness and food are incompatible.” The banquet is, after all, a celebration of “victory” (p. ). Yet, for the prisoner, who has already tricked the officer, it is impossible to have food with the officer, in a shared “communal meal.” To do so is to betray a cause, to breach a code of honor: How to share a meal with a criminal? A few minutes back he was ready to kill me, to drink of my blood… I was raised to honor the rituals of food…. To share a meal is to bind each other to mutual protection. Even if there is no pledge of solidarity, there is, in sharing food, a vow of friendship as opposed to animosity… Self-rebuke invaded me, confusing

M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, ), pp. –. Citations hereafter are within the text. 22

  



me, and a cold sweat covered me… I felt suffocated… suffocated… suffocated… I have no idea of what happened next. (p. )

Deeply entrenched in communal life and customs, this discourse partakes of a whole code of retribution and reward, punishment and solidarity. The police officer is an opportunist whose feast celebrates a sense of achievement. Set in a prison, the feast cannot obtain, for as Bakhtin argues, a feast should always occur in gladness. The police officer is designated as the enemy for being so brutal and the feast is void for this matter. Freud’s reading, as well as Hegel’s, of the cult of food is worth mentioning: The ethereal power of the public sacrificial meal rests upon archaic notions regarding the significance of communal eating and drinking…. Practices, which today are still in force among the Arabs of the desert prove the binding element in the communal meal is not a religious moment but rather the act of eating itself.23

Freud’s reading is more applicable to the protagonist’s dilemma, for “Whoever has shared the smallest bite with such a Bedouin, or drunk a swallow of his milk,” Freud argues, “no longer needs to fear him as an enemy, but rather may be certain of his protection and his help.”24 Rejection of the offer entails dissociation and enmity. Hegel’s conclusion regarding this cult provides a deeper meaning for the symbolic value of reluctance to share the meal. In Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u, the psychological pressure provoked by the invitation to share food with a criminal leads to a terrible sense of being suffocated or stifled. The act of eating involves denial of the protagonist’s values and cooperation with a murderer. According to Hegel, “To eat and drink with someone is an act of unification and itself a felt union, not a conventional sign….”25 The narrative potential of the feast is not limited to its codes, despite the significance of these in the valorization of motives, and their concomitant manifestations in contesting languages and acts. It includes mirth and celebration of life whenever the feast is for more than two. Its politics fits it within other communal celebrations and scenes of social life. Conversely, its disappearance in narratives that engage institutionalized life, official transactions and dealings is a sign of menace, 23

Qtd in Werner Hamacher, “The Reader’s Supper: A Piece of Hegel,” trans. Timothy Bahti, Diacritics, ,  (Summer, ), pp. –. 24 Ibid. 25 Qtd. in Werner Hamacher, p. .



 

instability and disorder. Such is the case in Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Hik¯ . ay¯at al-Mu"assassah (Tales of the institution or foundation, ).26 The novel is fittingly devoid of feasts, as if to substantiate its rampant intrigues, grim politics and underlying irony. . Sites of Micro-politics Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Hik¯ . ay¯at al-mu"assassah (Tales of the institution or foundation) is a narrative of an institution, probably D¯ar Al-Akhb¯ar as the second large press institution in Egypt. It deals with its emergence and growth as set and planned by its founder, whose presence endows it with a halo of significance and mystery still celebrated by the old generation of officials and assistants. The narrative uses this background in contrast with the present situation under the new director. Its concerns can stand, allegorically, for the debates on the modern state: its emergence, growth, change and demise. Yet, it also resists this interpretation, for the novel concentrates on the building which circles a hole caused by an earthquake. The narrative elaboration on the hole is worth investigating, as it may refer to some perennial damage that can poison the present with further repercussions. The happening drove the owner of the land, the peasant, to turn to his son, saying, “it is no place to stay at any longer” (p. ). The narrator’s discreet voice adds that, “the peasant seems, at that moment of hurrying up his family to collect their things, as if he were in haste to flee some imminent danger” (p. ). Villagers and their families, women and children, gathered in rows around the hole, in preparation for departure, as in a funeral, “reciting elegies as if they were bidding farewell for the departure of people who are so dear to their hearts” (p. ). Against this scene stand the impressions voiced by al-Jawahir¯ı, the janitor, who became so close to the founder as to speak of him with love, admiration and knowledge. He is the person who relates stories of the founder and details about the institution. He associates prosperity and affluence with the emergence of the establishment under the guidance of its founder, who is anonymous throughout, as if standing for all forebears, contemporaries and successors. But while apparently supporting the founder’s speeches and actions, al-Jawahir¯ı leaves margins and gaps for suspicion, whenever cases partake of duplicity or misuse and manipulation of power (pp. –, ). Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Hik¯ . ay¯at al-mu"assassah (Tales of the institution or foundation; Beirut: D¯ar al-Intish¯ar, ). 26

  



In fact, al-Jawahir¯ı’s language combines a number of discourses, for there is a discourse of ritualism that believes in portents and omens while delving into the rites of passage and growth. There is also a revolutionary rhetoric that partakes of the Nasserite language of revolution and change; and there is a third one that is well entrenched in the founder’s own ideals of stability, affluence, comfort and resistance to radical transformation. The narrator may intrude every now and then, to foreground or to offset a certain saying; yet, people who speak are many, dividing terrains of interest, between old and new generations. It is only when things overlap, and when “prostitutes” reach the very center of decision-making (p. , ), that al-Jawahir¯ı makes it clear that he “expects everything to happen now when prostitutes are stationed in the President’s floor” (p. ). But even such a man can no longer be sure of his position, for the new President’s man, al-Ashm¯un¯ı, touches him on the shoulder one day, telling him that his services are no longer required. The tales are many, and they cover lives, intrigues, conspiracies, manipulations, acts of valor and others of deceit. They grow out of certain speeches and emerge from specific offices, but they also creep out of other channels, such as newspapers or people who are so shocked by discrepancies that they lose their minds. Such is the case of the Shantar¯ın¯ı who has been a “very disciplined” official. Opening the door of the President’s office one day, to place an urgent letter on a small table specifically stationed nearby for this purpose (p. ), he is surprised to see the President making love to a woman with shiny back whom he cannot identify. He loses his mind and stands with his back to the wall that surrounds the earthquake crevasse, carrying a placard that says, “I am the one who saw” (p. ). The foundation imposes its discourse, for al-Jawahir¯ı believes in a talisman that exists in that earthquake crevasse that confers on the foundation a power of its own that entangles people in its web. “No stranger or foreigner associated with it ever wants to leave. When compelled to depart, they usually end up crying, trying every means to ensure their return,” says al-Jawahir¯ı (p. ). But other reports also conclude with certain suspicions that the foundation’s clinic was actually established to provide the founder with reports on officials, their moods, and physical and sexual conditions. While mentioning these rumors, al-Jawahir¯ı will hastily add that all “is meant for the benefit of this grand establishment” (p. ).



 

Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Hik¯ . ay¯at al-Mu"assassah does not aspire to grow into another master narrative, or as a social treatise of epochal grandeur. It connects fragments, snatches of rumors, letters, comments, gossip, and semiotics of every kind, offering in the end an overview of micro-politics that may well expose current institutionalized practices, which happen also to represent the modern state and its minute entanglement in the very web of its machinery. What stamps this narrative with liveliness and color, however, is its emphasis on the strangeness of daily situations and practices. Individuals are not a peculiar breed in this narrative, but their obsessions and dealings smack of both the rituals of tradition and the pragmatic and, at times, dishonest alignments and practices of the modern state. Although rumors may impart some aura of sanctity to the Founder, there is a lot that undermines this sanctity, as if discrediting the whole tradition of heroic ancestry and allegiance. In such narratives, the hero is in eclipse, to be sure, but narrators and protagonists as narrators are there not to replace, through verbal constructs, the discredited leader, but rather to emphasize the demise of heroic figures and their gradual substitution by a monster-like institution, no less menacing than dictatorial supremacy. Through its many sites of narrative, in relation to time and change, Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Hik¯ . ay¯at al-Mu"assassah can be cited as the most representative, from among the novels under discussion, of the dialogic principle. Its engagement with gossip, detail, languages of hierarchy and subordination, anxieties and disappointments, along with its review of ways of speech and action, as informed by the foundation itself, makes it a rich intersectional space. But, taken together, in their manifestations of the function of space in narrative, these postcolonial Arabic novels combine consciousness of place with the pressing awareness of time. Space imprints its markers strongly and effectively due to its actual presence, which is bound to subsume every other element including the metaphysical. To use Bakhtin’s wording, novels in their postcolonial workings move in and towards a site whereby the body, the literary image, human action and accentuations meet together, for the “chronotope is the place, where the knots of narrative are tied and untied” (“Forms of Time,” The Dialogic Imagination, p. ). The narrative variations on site and language demonstrate how space takes on a character and identity through this interaction with the human agency. Both confer on each something of their own in an intimate interaction, which we define as narrative. To this effect, Bakhtin argues: “All the novel’s abstract elements—philosophical and social generalizations,

  



ideas, analyses of cause and effect—gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work” (ibid., p. ).


  TIME IN NARRATIVE

The emphasis on space in postcolonial narrative does not necessarily reduce the functional presence of time. As long as narrative takes coloniality as referent, its engagement with the past becomes also its threshold for the present. Its issues cut across personal, communal and national concerns, and engage tradition, history, and memory, along with the aspirations and disappointments of individuals and groups in their ethnic, religious, social and gender formations. The postcolonial consciousness of time is not, therefore, a linear one, despite its contextualization in time and space. Linearity is present in combination with other dimensions of time that derive their narrative substantiation and concreteness from the human will, energy and endeavor for survival. While the historical, for instance, receives great attention, its functionality in postcolonial narrative goes beyond chronology towards the density of the moment with its human complexity. Time as such is focused in more than one spot of action and evolves thereby in horizontal, vertical and metaphysical dimensions that belie mere linearity. While every human act emanates in response to another or as a new initiation couched in beliefs, commitments, aspirations or greed, its materialization in time and space implicates it in density that invites an accomplished narrative consciousness. One can cite a number of examples in this respect from among both the later postcolonial constructs and the early colonial ones. In Ahdaf Soueif ’s novel The Map of Love,1 the Ghamrawi family saga is meant to encapsulate the history of the national struggle against the British occupation of Egypt, (– ), but Anna Winterbourne’s (–) itinerary, which is the epistolary backbone for the novel, is interspersed with meetings, gatherings, comments, contemporary intrusions that thicken linearity and lead it into other dimensions of time to account for aspirations, feelings and schemes which present a map of colonial and postcolonial under

1

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love ().



 

pinnings.2 In a work written during the colonial period, but informed by the colonizing culture,3 like the Algerian K¯ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma,4 for example, the author achieves this density through a liberating narrative strategy that takes the presence of the colonial for granted in order to look upon the whole situation from a number of angles. The girl Nedjmah, whose name means ‘star’ in Arabic, grows as a symbol of Algeria, but she is also the illegitimate child of either Si Muhkt¯ar or Rash¯ıd’s father from a French woman. The outcome is not a smooth one, and the novel deals with colonialism in its complexity and impact on the colonized.5 Using poetic language and passing through the minds of a number of characters, the author projects Algeria as a land scarred, ravaged, but also enriched by time. In other words, he involves the narrative in postcolonial preoccupations under the impact of the colonizing culture. Postcolonial awareness means therefore an engagement with both the pressure and the promise of time. Fraught with urgency and complexity in the best postcolonial narratives, this consciousness informs discursive strategies beyond the reach of many earlier novels. Perhaps, a comparison between examples from these earlier narratives and the later ones may shed light on emerging discursive strategies as they are informed by postcolonial consciousness. The immediate concerns of the narratives of the first half of the twentieth century are tied to social issues and identity problems as these unfold through characters. Writers were keen on tackling issues pertinent to independence and social reform. In their narratives, time can be chronological or cyclical, depending on the writer’s agenda and vision. With the increasing national consciousness since the Arab awakening or Nahd. ah, the vision of regeneration or rebirth influenced writing until some time in the late s. Both Mahf¯ . uz. and al-Hak . ¯ım offered 2 See, for instance, pages , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , . 3 See Aida Bamia on the writer’s use of French culture, “The Interaction of European and Arab Cultures in Modern Algerian Literature,” Proceedings of the Eighth Congress for the International Comparative Literature Association, in Bela Kopeczi and Gyorgy M. Vajda, Actes du VIIIe Congress de l’Association Internationale de Litterature Comparee (Stuttgart: Bieber, ), p. –. 4 K¯ ateb Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma appeared in  (Editions du Seuil). 5 Perhaps the issue may show forth better in comparison with the treatment of colonialism in other writings. See in this context, Phillip Dine, “The Formal Implications of Anti-Colonialist Commitment: A Comparison of Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing and Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma,” in Emmanuel Ngara and Andrew Morrison, eds. Literature, Language and the Nation, pp. – (Harare: Atoll and Baobab Books, ).

  



their narrative constructs of an ancient past as an impetus to rebirth according to a cyclical view of time. On the other hand linear time appears more conspicuously in novels of ideas, especially whenever these are focused on their protagonists’ growth and education. The Egyptian Muhammad Husayn Haykal (d. ) in Zaynab ()6 and . . the Iraqi Dh¯u al-N¯un Ayy¯ub in Al-Dukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım (), for instance, tend to accommodate characters to ideas in a linear time scheme.7 They depict characters as carried away by a time flux whereby their ideas are tested in linear time with some stations in a historical past or a political present. Enthralled by ideas of progress and change and unconcerned as yet with the modern preoccupation with psychological time, they cared little for that inner time which has drawn the attention of later novelists since the s. Retrospective Time Retrospective narratives, in autobiographical or veiled autobiographical novels, unfold also in linear chronology. Such texts as T¯ . ah¯a Hu. sayn’s () Al-Ayy¯am (published serially, –, and in book form in ),8 the Egyptian Ibr¯ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı’s (d. ) Ibr¯ahim al-k¯atib (; English translation: Ibrahim the Writer, ),9 and the Iraqi Mah. m¯ud Ahmad al-Sayyid’s (d. ) Jal¯ a l Kh¯ a lid ()—to mention only . a few—are retrospectively linear in time in the sense that their narrators’ mature selves chronologically retain what could have led to their present status and position. Although retrospection usually entails some introspection, or psychological analysis of the self and its spiral journey in time and place, these works use retrospection mainly to recount a career that justifies the present occupation of the writer as a public intellectual. They escape actual introspection, with its confessional mode, by cutting out intimations and reflections that could have been unacceptable at the time of publication.10 This remark should not be On Haykal, see Hilary Kilpatrick, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to ,” in Modern Arabic Literature, The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, ed. M.M. Badawi, pp. –, at pp. –. 7 For further views on the Egyptian novel of ideas, see Ali B. Jad, Form and Technique in the Egyptian Novel, – (London, ). 8 See Hilary Kilpatrick, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to ,” p. . 9 Ibr¯ ah¯ım al-M¯azin¯ı, Ibr¯ahim al-k¯atib (Cairo: Mat.ba#at D¯ar al-Taraqq¯ı, ); English translation: Ibrahim the Writer, trans. Magdi Wahba (Cairo: GEBO, ). 10 See the present writer’s Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah; and Sakkut, The Arabic Novel, : –, –. 6



 

taken to imply their lack of intellectual rigor, for retrospection is a matter of communication not confession or interrogation of the self. Recounting intellectual growth certainly broadens and intensifies the temporal element in the novel, especially when it touches on issues of acculturation. As both an adaptation of the target culture and retention of native identity, acculturation permeates these novels, but it is subsumed in the chronological relation of events as they influence the writer. Incomplete introspection, and the ensuing lack of density, in narrative, recurs due to writers’ reluctance to confess. Hence, the reader is offered a distanced autobiography, whereby the writer refers to himself in T¯ Al-Ayy¯am, for example, as our friend or companion, . ah¯a Husayn’s . “S¯ a hibun¯ a .” Introspection has little role in comparison with the space . . allocated to the retrospective journey back in time and space to select and skip information in a manner that cannot obtain in immediate narratives. In these retrospective journeys, “we have an individual proceeding through life,” explains David L. Higdon, and “at some point stopping to survey his [her] past, and attempting to make some sense of it.”11 While writing one’s life story entails giving it a form, as Georges May argues in L’autobiographie, the use of a third person means that the “writer is in earnest need to look upon himself from the outside, to dissociate from the past self.”12 But dissociation is not always possible. As long as the writer feels constrained by customs and ways of life, free dissociation remains much desired. Retrospection is deliberate and, for that matter, contrived. It is worth comparison with veiled voyages and encounters, for both involve a sustained effort either to justify the self or to unravel the mystique of these encounters. Process Time A journey to the metropolis involves some cultural shock, which may broaden one’s vision without necessarily winning the person over to the host culture. A later maturation could entail commitment to one’s own culture or a search for improvement on both cultures as in al-Hak . ¯ım’s #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq (; English translation: A Bird from the East, ).13 David L. Higdon, Time and English Fiction (N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, ), p. . Citations from this book are hereafter within the text. 12 Georges May, L’autobiographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ), p. . 13 Tawf¯ıq al-Hak¯ım, #Us f¯ur min al-Sharq (Cairo: Matba#at lajnat al-ta"l¯ıf, ); English . . . 11

  



The journey occurs as a linear process whereby time acts on the individual in a cross-fertilization fashion. In this text, process time imposes a sequence on events, but interruptions and interpolations operate with spatial thickness and density, which increase the protagonist’s negotiatory space without radically changing him/her. Although process time operates on life and events, writing as retrospective journeying in the past undergoes editing to meet the writer’s assessment of self and others in a present socio-political context. Al-Hak . ¯ım’s Muhsin . in #U s. f¯ur min al-sharq gains knowledge, but he uses his own primary measurements to assess scenes of love in Paris. He emerges from the journey with an outlook of his own, to be sure, but it primarily corresponds to a number of paradigms, which he associates with the East. Another example is Suhayl Idr¯ıs (b. ). In his novels, especially al-Khandaq al-gham¯ıq (The al-L¯at¯ın¯ı (The Latin quarter, ), the deep trench, )14 and al-Hayy . narrative retraces the protagonist’s growth according to a sequential time, as he reflects on his cultural shock and subsequent acceptance of a different culture regardless of the tendency of the other culture to identify him as an alien. The self in retrospection is already made, and the act of retracing the past only stresses its “being” rather than “becoming” as David L. Higdon argues in respect to this time dimension (p. ). Idr¯ıs’s protagonists receive another culture and interact with it, but retrospection at a certain time in the author’s career, when he endorsed the literature of engagement in a Sartrean fashion in the early s, entails no radical dissent from their past experience. This experience is an assertion of the already-made self albeit with an additional borrowing from the other culture. As Kierkegaard stipulates, “Life can only be lived forward and understood backward.”15 Writing down the past means satisfaction with it, however, for to record experience is to believe in its value. In other words, retrospection asserts authorial positions and views regardless of the cultural richness of textual space. The Polytemporal as Textual Density This kind of veiled autobiographical journeying differs from the counter-journey to the West, the one that keeps itself separate to a large extent from the author’s personal experience. In the latter, the personal translation: A Bird from the East, trans. R. Bayly Winder (Beirut: Khayyats, ). ¯ ab, ). 14 Suhayl Idr¯ıs, Al-Khandaq al-gham¯ıq (The deep trench; Beirut: D¯ ar al-Ad¯ 15 Qtd. in David L. Higdon, Time and English Fiction, p. .



 

may fuse into the narrative, as every author has a story to tell, but whenever distance is achieved the writer is obliged to put inhibitions aside and involve the protagonist in open encounters and discussions with people, identities and cultures. Time goes beyond retrospection, and gathers density not only in relation to the protagonist’s maturation, but also in dialogue and conflict with cultures, platitudes and traditions. Embattled lives are therefore sites of cross currents and identities. Such is al-Tayyib Sali . . Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (; English . h’s translation: Season of Migration to the North, ). The alien protagonist Mus.t.af¯a Sa#¯ıd is a self-styled hero whose perspective cuts across retrospective time to enable the reader to listen and watch other views of no less validity, power or confusion. While Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s novels conclude with some intellectual compromise that leaves the protagonist complacent and happy at his own achievement, al-Tayyib Sali . . protagonist . h’s is bound to disturb any milieu, including his own. Time in Suhayl Idr¯ıs’s novels is “process time” where experience follows a linear but causal line, while the narrative in Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (Season of Migration to the North) is involved in causality as well as in psychological time. Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (Season of Migration to the North) appropriates polytemporality and subsumes time and space to account for encounters. Every detail is intersectional and every intersection is a hybrid space and time. Al- Tayyib Sali . . novel is also different from . h’s veiled autobiographies of political disenchantment. In the writings of ¯ı, #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim, #Abd al-Rahman Mut.a¯ # Safad al-Rubay#¯ı and . . Haydar Haydar—to mention only a few—we come upon disillusioned . . protagonists who look back upon their careers as series of frustrations and failures retraced and reconsidered chronologically from the beginning, but set nevertheless within some sequential order according to a retrospective vision. There, the narrative plays on numerous forms of time. It is a series of mature reflections from some interceptive vertical line cutting through linear time. In novels of political conversions and ideological disappointment causal sequential narratives blend with meditations, arguments and personal intimations that involve the narrative in other non-fictional genres. While hindering the flow of narrative sequence, these interpolated genres may only intensify and complicate time spots and provoke further considerations to account for both density and fleetingness.

  



Time Flux Response to a time flux operates in different ways in narrative, but linearity as chronological framework is usually the dominant form. Traditional narratives at large are more at home with this time scheme. Aware of gradual socio-political transformation and change since the late s, Arab novelists such as Mahf¯ D¯ıb have . uz. and Muhammad . paid greater attention to flux that overpowers all, drawing them under some irresistible control and involving them in some order of birth, dissolution and death. Mahf¯ . uz’s . trilogy, Bayn al-qas. rayn (), Qas. r alshawq () and Al-Sukkariyyah (),16 is a family saga centered also on the protagonist Kam¯al #Abd al-Jaw¯ad whose career and life are colored by both tradition and modernity. These signify time schemes, and the intersectional spot in the novel is always the one that carries more density than descriptive or anecdotal passages. Generations of families fall under the impact of time when socio-political change overcomes the individual, entangling him/her in certain incomprehensible situations. Dialogues in these narratives stand as means to comprehend change, but conflicting attitudes are mostly the outcome of generation gaps or surrenders to what may sound as “subversive” ideas in Mahf¯ . uz’s . traditional society. Time as flux overpowers all, and the human response remains minimal in comparison despite shows of resistance and interaction. Time appears as tradition, denial, misfortune, generation gaps and fate. The representational in narrative lives on these as long as they are available in abundance. The Algerian Muhammad D¯ıb’s trilogy is . no less so, especially in its association between family and communal life under the impact of French colonialism. His Al-Har¯ . ıq (L’Incendie, ), Al-D¯ar al-kab¯ırah (La Grande Maison, ) and Al-Nul (Le Metier a tisser), as well as his Man alladh¯ı yadhkur al-bah. r (Qui se souvient de la mer, ?),17 the colonial question is the background against which lives and careers unfold.18 In D¯ıb’s trilogy, however, ideas hold some “construcSee Sakkut for a summary, The Arabic Novel, : –. Muhammad D¯ıb, Man alladh¯ı yadhkur al-bah. r (Qui se souvient de la mer, ?); . English translation: Who remembers the sea, trans. Louis Tremaine (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, ). 18 For a discussion of French colonialism in the novels, see Winifred Woodhull, “Mohammed Dib and the French Question,” Yale French Studies,  (), pp. – ; and for a specific discussion of the resistance to the French in L’Incendie, see Tar Adejir, “Breaking Out of the ‘Cryptostasme’: The Fellah Strike in Dib’s L’Incendie as a Precursor to the Algerian Revolution,” Revue Celfan, , n.  (), pp. –. 16

17

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 

tive” associations, sustaining as such the chronological rather than the causal, for historiography in D¯ıb’s narrative is tightly tied to national consciousness and formation. The National and the Personal as Time Schemes Chronology sustains faith in growth and achievement, too. In Al-B¯ab al-maft¯uh. (; English translation: The Open Door, ),19 the Egyptian woman activist and writer Lat.¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at is concerned with the national question, especially during the repressive rule of the notorious Sidq . ¯ı Basha in the s. The novel deals with the growth and career of the young heroine Layla. Raised in an upper middle class family with great care for the welfare of its members, Layla is prepared to accept the family choice of her future husband. The family has a strong national sense, and the girl grows up with a strong national feeling, too. This feeling also affirms her sense of independence and self-reliance, which materializes in her participation against the  aggression during the Suez crisis. Maturation entails also a free choice of her future husband. This narrative thread will not do justice to the novel, however, but it shows how the novel follows historical sequentiality whereby time moves forward influencing all and provoking the interaction of others. Lat.¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at situates her protagonist Layla in linear sequence; but instead of a thin sequential narrative, there is emphasis on familial, social and political transformations, which keep the heroine actively responsive to the outside world throughout the years that led to the  Revolution and the  aggression and war on Egypt. The anti-colonialist growth of Layla is not an individualistic endeavor after all, and the dialogical scenes that make up a large portion of a pioneering feminist text thicken the historical element. As Hilary Kilpatrick argues, the heroine Layla’s “efforts to emancipate herself [from the shackles of customs, including the family arranged marriage] are mirrored in Egypt’s struggle for national liberation.”20 On the other hand, detailed historiography, especially regarding Sidq . ¯ı Basha’s repressive rule in the s, broadens and deepens vertically the horizontal dimensions of the narrative. Sidq . ¯ı Basha, “who buried Lat.¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at Al-B¯ab al-maft¯uh. (Cairo: Al-Maktabah al-Angl¯u-Mis.riyyah, ); English translation: The Open Door, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). Citations from this translation are in the text. 20 Hilary Kilpatrick, “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to ,” p. . 19

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people alive,” as Layla’s father describes him (p. ) receives as much attention as many characters in the novel. The historical and the personal interweave so as to outgrow the limits of each. The combination of the personal and the national substantiates the temporal with the spatial, as every act of affirmation assumes its meaning and validity in space. Hence is the relevance of time to narrative techniques. Whenever they coalesce, there is a dense outcome, an “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” which Bakhtin calls “chronotope” (“Forms of Time,” The Dialogic Imagination, p. ), as shown in the previous chapter on site as narrative. Along with the increasing awareness of individualism on the one hand and the growing attention to the past in its religious and social-political variety and complexity on the other, a keen sense of time has developed in Arabic fiction since the s. This awareness is strongly tied to politics in its many dimensions. Whether relating to state machinery, its deployment of intelligence services against opponents, social issues, ethnic and gender issues, or class and race encounters, this awareness appears with strong literary images and linguistic accentuations. Modern short story writers have achieved earlier a better understanding of mind time, or its flashbacks, stream of consciousness and dialogues with itself whenever the individual is introspected. Short story writers in the s concentrated on the psychological inner self of the individual, but novelists have found it difficult to use the same compression, which is the undisputed privilege of the short story.21 It is possible, however, to trace a number of time concepts in contemporary fiction that have been growing since the appearance of Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (, The Thief and the Dogs): the mystical (Sufi) as set against the worldly; the mystical as a Providential commitment set against evil; mind time to penetrate the prohibited and the tabooed; the inwardly transcendent; the mythical and the legendary; the pseudo-dissociation from the timely through opium; and the intrusive time of the dead whereby restless souls reenter human presence. Along with these there are views of dormant time temporarily shaken by rumors or actions, or characters so unsettled by intrigues that they find both space and time changeable and fleeting, as in al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Sha.th. al-mad¯ınah (City trance, or Distant city, ¯ısh’s Majn¯un al-Hukm ) or in Ben S¯alim Himm (Obsessed by power, . . ).

21

See the present writer’s “The Socio-Political Context of the Iraqi Short story,” in

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Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab is strong in its psychological time, for the protagonist undergoes a shocking experience, which he cannot account for and accept in view of his early ideological grounding and faith. The novel problematizes this introspective time and concentrates on the protagonist’s mind as he tries to make sense of the change that overtakes people, beliefs, attitudes and principles. Unable to find a rationale for so much confusion he resorts to metaphysics and faith. Time in the first instance is psychological and sequential, vertical and horizontal whenever the protagonist uses his ideologically rooted measurements against present mobility and pragmatic temper. Recourse to Sufism is a sign of frustration, or, in time terminology, inertia and torpor where there is a temporary halt, for the Sufi discourse in the novel negates time and boundaries, and resists parameters. The listener may reach his or her own interpretations of these Sufi pronouncements and take whatever action in line with this understanding, as the case is in Mahf¯ . uz’s . Allis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab. At a later stage, writers are to carry the Sufi moment further through narrative accommodations of the trance, the epiphany, and the dislocated spot of madness. Especially in women narratives, like Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (Story of Zahra), madness disrupts continuity, undermines logic, and, for that matter, turns upside down both the normative in patriarchal traditions and ideologies of possession. Sufi Time The association between Sufism and art is not hard to follow in Mah. f¯uz’s works, especially in Lay¯ a l¯ ı alf laylah (; English translation: . Arabian Nights and Days, ). In line with a large number of Sufi women in the history of Islam,22 Scheherazade alludes to the Sufi Shaykh #Abd All¯ah al-Balkh¯ı as her mentor, who has established her grounding in the art of storytelling as a medium to entertain and instruct. Unlike Shaykh al-Junayd¯ı of Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (The ¯ Thief and the Dogs), al-Balkhı of Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah believes in the capacity of action to reform this world if it has been committed to the service

Statecraft and Popular Culture in the Middle East, eds. Eric Davis and Nicholas Gavrieldes, pp. –. 22 For a review of this significant genealogy of al-Niswah al-S¯ufiyy¯at, Sufi women, see Ab¯u #Abd ar-Rahm¯an as-Sulam¯ı (of Nishapur, d. ), Early Sufi Women: Dhikr an-Niswa al-Muta#bbid¯at as-S¯ufiyy¯at, ed. and tr. Rkia Elaroui Cornell (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, ).

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of God. In Al-lis. s. wa-al-kil¯ab (The Thief and the Dogs) human action or search for safety are both held suspect for their association with the timely, the worldly and the temporal. Al-Junayd¯ı’s refutations of Sa#¯ıd Mahran’s human intimations and frustrations build on a passive attitude in Sufism that looks upon this world as too fleeting to be worth attachment, consideration or involvement. Not so, however are Mahf¯ . uz’s . later Sufi saints. In Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı tutors others into both the love of God and the rejection of injustice in this world. His allusions to the late Sufi Shaykh alWarr¯aq always concentrate on this rejection, which encourages others to stand against despotism.23 Although Mahf¯ . uz’s . Shaykh criticizes attachment to the temporal (pp. , –),24 advising others to disregard whatever is transient, he also stands as bulwark against such evil powers as the bad #Ifrits. To many, however, supernatural interference in human affairs is due to injustice (p. , –). Along with human restlessness, injustice drives the supernatural to fuse into the natural, imposing on the Sultan himself new patterns of living and driving him to roam around at night or to search for some solace here and there. In other words, the supernatural works not only vertically in time, but also horizontally, intertwining the two together according to a rather dense time scheme. As for the Sufi Shaykh #Abd All¯ah al-Balkh¯ı, he always stands for this double time, as a combined effort towards justice in this world and achievement in the next. While opposed to any surrender to the temporal, he nevertheless directs the youth towards God’s face which cannot be maintained in an unjust world: “he who is pleased with transience will surely be sorrowed by the disappearance of what is joyful” (p. ), for “to love God is to be needless of all” (p. ).25 On the other hand, bad #Ifrits always think of the Shaykh as a hindrance to their ambition to disturb human affairs. Here, as elsewhere, the supernatural escapes time and space, bringing lovers together (p. ) or awakening the merchant, for instance, to embark on an unexpected mission. Thus, while releasing the narrative from causality or chronology, this supernatural interference brings about some disequilibrium in 23 The reference could be to Ab¯ u #Isa al-Warr¯aq (d. ), known also for his debates with the Christian Arab Yahy¯ . a Ibn #Ad¯ı on the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or to Mahm¯ al-Warr¯aq, the poet of wisdom and edification (d. ). . ud Ibn Hasan . 24 References are to the Arabic text, Cairo: Maktabat Misr, . . 25 For a general review of faith and Islam in Arabic fiction, the reader may consult Trevor Le Gassick, “The Faith of Islam in Modern Arabic Fiction,” Religion and Literature, , n.  (Spring, ), pp. –.

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the narrative, which is also indicative of the variety of time forms and spots in the text. The Sufi and the supernatural should be seen as characteristic of post-colonial Arabic fiction, too. Pertinent to any understanding of the temporal and the permanent in their application to both life here and now and faith in the next world, both the supernatural and Sufi elements are central to Arabic culture. Their reappearance in fiction highlights its context while perpetuating its narrativity. Again, in terms of Scheherazade’s art, there is no actual division between the two, for the “magic of the real” and the realism of the marvelous are not far fetched in her domains. Mahf¯ . uz’s . Sufism is only a variation upon durability. Related to art, as represented by Scheherazade’s in his Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah, Sufism is too elusive for the timely and the temporal. It has also its own doubts regarding logic and reason. Thus, al-Balkh¯ı says to his friend the physician, “There is nothing wrong with you my friend except your exaggerated faith in reason” (p. ). Active Sufism pays no less attention to worldly issues, however. Modeled after medieval precedents, Sufi Shaykhs in contemporary fiction are no less opposed to the modern police state. Thus, the Sufi Shaykh may pass through some psychological agony as other people before taking a stand against corruption. In the Bahraini Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd’s Tah. awwul¯at al-f¯aris al-ghar¯ıb (The Strange knight’s transformations, ), Shaykh al-W¯as.il¯ı has made such a decision. Filled with love of God and attachment to his own people, the Shaykh’s reputation has soared, whereas that of his opponent, the police chief Mihy¯ar has declined. The latter is quite surprised to see the Shaykh reaching the very summit, “which I thought I had alone been presiding over enjoying the privilege of its being mine” (p. ). While the “summit” represents the highest worldly gain for the police chief, to the Sufi Shaykh it means only another battle worth fighting as a step towards the eternal. As the temporal holds no significance other than that of a testing ground for faithful souls, the latter are bound to endure the flux in their attachment to the eternal. Despite this fusion of the vertical and the horizontal and the eternal and the temporal, Fawziyyah Rash¯ıd’s Sufism is not identical with that active Sufism in al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s historical reconstructions, especially in al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at (; English translation, ). In line with the Sufi tradition, al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Shaykhs are never easily involved in politics. In fact, it is only when Shaykh Ab¯u al-Su#¯ud’s followers are treated harshly that Ab¯u al-Su#¯ud begins meditating on the possible public rejection of worldly authority. Relegating himself to a life of seclusion, he explains

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to his followers, “I dug this hole to keep my body in whenever the soul is restless, overcome by time” (p. ). As the use of repression and coercion prolong the life of regimes, the Shaykh waits for God’s grace to help him out before publicly embarking on resistance. Because the state still proclaims itself as the worldly embodiment of Islam, the Shaykh cannot renounce it entirely. Unfamiliar with state machinery, he even thinks it is within his power to ask his followers to get hold of the muh. tasib (market inspector) and bring him to trial. But such an action involves the Shaykh in daily politics, which may end with an open conflict between the two authorities, the religious and the temporal. These conflicts conclude on a sad note, however, for worldly authority survives difficulties through its intrigues and double-dealings. The “triumphant time” here is one-dimensional, for it overcomes all ideals and dreams through a full immersion in utility, interest, selfish aspiration and utter worldliness. Along with the disappointments of male protagonists, women in these narratives end up with their cherished love and devotion smothered. Like their lovers, and the Shaykhs with whom they side, they suffer repression and maltreatment. But mortals are mortals after all, and fiction needs them as characters involved in both action and time. As such it will make use of the timely and the timeless, holding both together in order to come out with some artistic recreations that stand for the durable. Because active Sufism is workable only insofar as it provokes revolt or challenges the legitimacy of ruling bodies and governors, it has no hold in plot or sequence structures. It is not surprising, therefore, that even Mahf¯ . uz. in Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah has his own alternative creations for this world, presided over by Ibr¯ah¯ım the Water Carrier, who has recently come upon some money. Finding his real world deeply steeped in corruption and despotism, he has decided to spend his money on creating an ideal world of justice and comfort wherein opium becomes a means to obtain whatever is lacking in the real world of Shahrayar. Thus, Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah enacts an alternative world, albeit a counterfeit one, that temporarily escapes the strictures of time and space. Although reality usually intrudes into such “Palaces of Art” and ideal worlds, the latter still signify a human search for the just and the durable against a harsh striding time. No less relevant in this regard is the Algerian al-Tah . ¯ır Wat.t.a¯ r’s (b. ) novel #Urs Baghl (A Mule’s wedding, ). As the title indicates, the novel investigates the impossible through numerous modes: realistic, sarcastic and imaginary. The novel has no political overtones

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unless we think of personal encounters in terms of allegory,26 and assume that Hajj Kay¯an’s transformation in the brothel from D¯a#¯ı (Muslim missionary) to a futuwwah is an underlying ironic critique.27 The protagonist Hajj Kay¯an still retains his other character under the impact of hashish, as he leads a life of seclusion every weekend, smoking hashish in a near-by graveyard where he enjoys solitude in a hole down there and where he has his own musings on faith, history and life. These spots of time are snatched from everyday life, and retain density through liberation from logic. As it is no longer possible for him to lead a life of utter resignation to necessity and old age at a brothel where he has been once the man in charge, he finds in hashish his means to recreate life in a manner that suits him and simultaneously justifies his present position. Thus, Hajj Kay¯an accepts clock time while reworking it according to his own dreams, impersonating under the impact of hashish his preferred historical personages, appearing as the revolutionary medieval poet al-Mutanabb¯ı (d. ) or as the idealist fighter Hamd¯ an Qarmat., who led an ideologically rooted insurrection against . the Abb¯asids between the Zanj revolt in  and  when he established a stronghold and retreat for his followers in the neighborhood of W¯asit. south of Baghdad. Hajj Kay¯an is sarcastic, too, whenever annoyed by their justifications of personal resignation to overwhelming circumstances. Like them, however, Hajj Kay¯an is also driven by necessity and old age to adapt, while finding in his weekend journey into the past an alternative world that provides him with some comfort and solace. In such a recreation, place and time are manipulated carefully so as to fuse their temporal dimensions into a whole that also points to the durability of art. Through this reversal of time the writer has managed to regain meaning for a confusing present. Mad time If Sufi, or hashish and opium, time may partake of every epiphany, vision, dream and present engagement, mad time is more mixed, and deserves great attention. It is a negation of time, for the spatial takes over, and every moment is a liminal spot, which could lead to the primeval, the genetic, the historical, the mythical and the impending 26 For an attempt to read ideological meanings, see Debbie Cox, “The Novels of Tahar Wattar: Command or Critique?” pp. –. 27 For the meaning of the phrase, see Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, p. .

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encounter. It is interfused, disseminated, fragmented and mysterious. Nobody can control the mad spot of time, and human agency can only devise ways to control it as space. “Solitary confinement under supervision, and three sessions a week,” says the Director of the Palace, The Yellow House, or the madhouse, in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at waIbl¯ıs (, English translation: The Innocence of the Devil, ).28 Jann¯at, the female inmate of the madhouse, was “put in a room adjoining the female ward” and the door was locked on her (p. ). There, the mad impersonate the roles of God, Ebl¯ıs and the rest. There, too, people, especially women, are sent, locked in, misused and brutally treated. It is a venue for the intelligent, too, to escape imprisonment. But in the madhouse, time barriers collapse, and Nef¯ısah could well believe that the male inmate whose “aspect was awe-inspiring like the King or the President” with “unshod feet” could be God (p. ). “In her dreams she used to see God walking on bare feet like her mother” (ibid.). Even more than the Sufi presence in post-colonial Arabic fiction, the madhouse heteroglot is a mixture of the connotative, the representational, and interactive. It has also its metalinguistic quality, in Roland Jacobson’s terms, for it is directed inside, too, towards the code. Although the narrative offers many representational sites that strive to draw the body politic of post-colonial Egypt, its regeneration of power relations (pp. , –, ), with its headmen and pharaohs (pp. –), and its people who love their country (pp. –), there is a configuration of meanings that build on a wide range of indices, to denote look, touch, lock, control and action. The body is cited, addressed, injected, punished, watched, tricked and violated. Mostly it is the female body, which carries the scars of time. Yet, the whole site is also an upside down scene where registers and agendas do not hold true even for the Head Nurse. Female inmates recall vaguely a past life, but present prayers for God’s mercy in a madhouse get them human maniacs or directors who still entertain a patriarchal and empowering sense of domination. Only when the mad go beyond this recognition of patriarchy and power relations can they shake the very foundations of hegemonic thinking, a case which becomes a leitmotif in women’s narratives, as Han¯ . an al-Shaykh’s Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (Story of Zahra) demon29 ¯ strates. Nefısah’s mother in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs loses her son in the war and loses her mind, too, cursing everything, includ28 29

Citations from this translation are in the text. See miriam cooke, War’s Other Voices, p. .

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ing paradise and the present order. Even her reliable supporter Shaykh Mas#¯ud cannot appease her with his complacent prayers, as he becomes also a target for her anger, for she “climbed over him as she would clamber over a cow in the fields” (p. ). Unleashed, anger and madness act as transgressive means beyond the restraints of temporal time and authority. Her curse of the Headman of the Village signifies this transgression, for it “was the first time they [in the village] had heard a woman curse the Village Headman. She could curse the King, or the Pharaoh, or the prophets of God,” but “the Headman of Village was real” with a prison, chains, “and armed soldiers at his beck and call” (p. ). Insanity is uncontrollable, and its wide scale presence is not identical with hysteria, which is usually associated with an early stage of anger against exploitation and misuse. The recurrence of insanity in post-colonial fiction should be looked on as both representational of the real and symbolic of the frustration and anger against patriarchal practices, which happen to be central to the post-colonial state apparatus. In Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (The Innocence of the Devil), the patriarch is regenerated (p. ) under different names and titles. Even in a madhouse, people impersonate power, which also has its machinery and means to duplicate the body politic in its theological, social and political ramifications (pp. –). Mad time is no time, but its insinuations and shades unravel every power relation of consequence, especially whenever this pertains to the present. Dead or Collective Time? This present poses so many problems to writers that readers may agree with the Syrian Kurd Sal¯ım Barak¯at that all action in it is no more than “a dead timing for a dead appointment,” as his “dead” protagonist Mem Az¯ad concludes in Al-R¯ısh (Feathers, ).30 The novel deals with the Kurds’ collective memory, their aspirations, customs, traditions and ordeals. To control the complexity of this memory in its present underpinnings, the writer chooses the return of the dead in the middle of a family that leads a normal and peaceful life, but amid the troubles and difficulties that have become characteristic of this life under exploitation and oppression. The seeming return of the dead brother Mem Az¯ad is the focus of the novel, its pivotal engagement with issues and tradi-

30

Sal¯ım Barak¯at, Al-R¯ısh (Feathers; ).

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tions. Time no longer holds, as it is no time in human understanding and logic, but the intrusion of the dead defies this understanding and demands new meanings for occasions and happenings. A “dead timing for a dead appointment” is only an understatement, for the dead man himself, Mem Az¯ad, provokes all further views and actions in an otherwise complacent worldly milieu. Regardless of the actual reasons behind his “assumed” suicide or his meditations on a second one in the opening pages of the text (p. ), Mem Az¯ad has been so imposing and so thoroughly involved in details that his “dead” presence now is more conspicuous and abiding than the living. Here, the time scheme is so reshaped as to elude categorization. Even the twin brother Dino cannot make sense of this presence, asking his “dead” brother rhetorically, “Isn’t it enough to bewilder me by your very existence to shock me further by your speech?” (p. ) The reader may also ask such a question. The narrator of the first chapters of Al-R¯ısh asks himself regarding the credibility of a second suicide, blaming a dwindling brown feather for distracting his attention away from making a decision. The feather soon becomes an instigator of action, provoking the narrator of these chapters to re-enact the past. But it is not only the retrospective time he is after, for Mem Az¯ad carries into his mind the very aspiration and possible missions he is supposed to undertake or achieve in some future time. As the future disintegrates in the very dissolution of the present, re-enactment in speech or writing of missions related to national (Kurdish) issues becomes a mere artistic release from the overpowering sense of commitment, which nobody can absolve, even the dead. The ambiguity of the narrative may drive the reader to see these chapters as possible projections released by the twin brother under the abiding presence of the dead, but the twin brother Dino finds himself so entangled in these missions that he decides to embark on what his own brother has failed to attain despite the latter’s reconstruction of the whole issue in his nightly addresses to Dino. The confusion is set within a marvelously flowing narrative that plays on the numerous concepts of time. The dwindling feather accused of distraction soon becomes identical with “a moment of distraction” that looks on him “vertically with drunk distraught curiosity.” Thus, moving between the real and the imaginary, the temporal and the timeless, the feather soon works as the correlative for this fusion. This fusion of time concepts is not necessarily the father’s view of time. As a merchant, life to him assumes significance only in moments

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 

of suspense and expectation; otherwise, it is no more than a “commercial deal” (pp. –). Hence, time to him is an oblique construct, held in suspense because of its numerous connotations. For him as merchant, time is clock time, which, in the words of A.A. Mendilow, “has no meaning for the imagination but is a highly artificial and arbitrary convention evolved for purposes of social expediency in order to regulate and to co-ordinate actions involving more than one person.”31 It is a solid chronological order that can be measured, analyzed and understood. It is pragmatically delineated to meet his career and options. But in view of his ambitions and national dreams (p. ), time is a memory of national encounters, successes and failures. The timely and the legendary as timeless are held together, for the Kurdish father knows that he needs a homeland to insure a pleasant life. The fusion between the real and the fantastic is never out of context in Islamic traditional societies. Thus, the mother takes Mem Az¯ad’s presence for granted. It is only due to some sense of guilt that Dino decides to embark on the same mission that he is always reminded of by others’ references to his dead brother. To him Mem Az¯ad “moved his grave into the house” (p. ). The temporal is no longer acceptable as a recognizable shape, neither is the non-worldly. Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s writings, especially Al-R¯ısh (Feathers, ) and Fuqah¯a" al-zalam (The Jurists of darkness, )32 delve into memory and . its embodiments with sophistication that invites further exploration of time, erosion, and memory. In the Fuqah¯a" al-zalam (The Jurists of dark. ness) the new-born Bik¯as looks at his brother Karzo with surprise, “Why don’t you ask me how come I grow so fast?” As everything is carnivalesque, Bik¯as assumes surprise, whereas the normally born brother is quietly resigned to the new situation. The fast-growing Bik¯as adds that he is “no less stunned and surprised” (p. ), for being with the knowledge and understanding of a fully-grown man. Certainly, memory is sustained as a male property in archaic societies, but its genetic ramifications of national history bear no relevance without some spatial formation. As Bachelard argues, “Memories are motionless and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are” (p. ). In both novels by Barak¯at the underlying pattern is spatial in order to escape the merely historical. In a work of art with great post-modernist and postcolonialist negotiations, memory resurrects its reservoir in a 31 32

A.A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (New York: Humanities Press, ), p. . Sal¯ım Barak¯at, Fuqah¯a" al-zalam (The Jurists of darkness; ). .

  



place, significantly a house where there are a father, a mother, brothers and sisters. As Barak¯at is true to a male Kurdish tradition, gender is subsumed in a large ethnic memory that is desperately in search of permanence in the face of temporal erosion. History by itself helps little, and the Kurdish writer has to localize memory in space. Bachelard argues in this respect: To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding history of its conjunctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For knowledge of intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates. (p. )

Localization in space involves death and rebirth, generation and regeneration, so as to keep memory unfolding. The emphasis on a cycle interrupted by a sharp vertical cut or wound is central to this Kurdish poetics. In Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s Fuqah¯a" al-zalam (Jurists of darkness), . time in its historical and sequential order is shattered, for what holds things together is a sense of space that defies elimination and annihilation. The newly born Bik¯as grows into manhood in a matter of hours, announcing to the stunned father that, “duration is duration whether in a day or in twenty thousand days” (p. ). Before offering the bewildered father some other acceptable explanation, he further demands, “Not a lot of time is left.” “But whose time, you miracle?” (p. ), asks the father. The son insists on marriage, to ensure heredity, as a collective memory of a nation endangered by extinction (pp. , , ). Hence, the paradigms of death and rebirth assume great significance in this body politic, for death itself is no end. While playing on the socio-religious context of life and death along with recreations of the legendary and the fantastic, Sal¯ım Barak¯at leaves the speaking soul in Al-R¯ısh (Feathers) to act, metamorphosing into a fox despite the ambiguity associated with this metamorphosis. Has Mem Az¯ad changed into a fox? Or does he merely behave like one? Has the soul forsaken its human shape to enjoy a rather free life? As a fox he has no memory (p. ), for he has some sensual desires instead. If some human images intrude into his new life, these are only “the remains of his human past” (p. ). Thus the release from the human shape is also a release from memory, which is past time. By playing on the forms of time, however, Sal¯ım Barak¯at’s Al-R¯ısh has also placed itself within a traditional religious thought that has never decisively ruled out the possibility of soul endurance and durability



 

in transfers, fusions and transfigurations. It also plays on the occult and the strange in the real. Insofar as common beliefs are concerned, metamorphosis is not ruled out as well. This text has also pointed out new patterns of writing that draw the attention to the supremacy of art as the most durable, endowing life itself with new significance through its discovery of such multiplicity of time shapes. Time In-Between: The Cyclical and the Eternal Beliefs in the occult work easily within flexible contexts of archaic life that make it credible and acceptable to move in and out of clock time. Moreover, Dervishes and fortune-tellers may manipulate such beliefs so well that they elicit approval and enjoy recognition in rural societies. In #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd Benhadouqa’s novel Al-J¯aziyah wa al-Dar¯aw¯ısh (The J¯azihah and the dervishes, ) the temporal always gains some ultra significance as tightly intertwined with the occult through dervishes’ ambiguous manipulations of incidents and details to sustain the belief that to court the legendary al-J¯aziyah entails some obscure death. In order to ensure her presence among them, shepherds manipulate images and illusions to track down strangers and murder them to prove their point. Although the novel explains these intrigues, the text is far more interesting without them, for the presence of the occult is so pervasive that causality and logic are superfluous machinery, which the narrative does not desperately need. Yet, occult time, its release from time barriers, cannot explain sublimations, which are not identical with Sufi visions or epiphanies. These may occur in step with psychological inwardness that transcends barriers towards some form of filiation. Rites of passage vary, but their accentuation as soul responses to a deep buried self becomes a dominant in Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s W¯aw al-s. ughr¯a (W¯aw the smallest), for instance. Like many of al-K¯un¯ı’s novels, this narrative also surveys scenes of rupture and fear among a nomadic community. As the community survives the repercussions of change through a settlement that survives on rain or wells, there is a yearning for water, which could also evolve as a yearning for the inner soul of a mother, a land that enables its blessed people to listen and enjoy its throbbing heart. One can borrow from Bachelard his expression “the absolute sublimation that transcends all passion” (Poetics of Place, p. ), for, in al-K¯un¯ı’s novel, there are these reverberations, which only the well-digger could hear. It is this inner language of water, which he strives to hear, and as it “gath-

  



ers, appears, increases, and borrows a tongue, to flow and proceed” (p. ), he stretches himself to penetrate the depths and fuse within. He extends, attached to the soil, stretches himself, his face to the soil, touching the clay with his lips, and salt drops reach his mouth and tongue. He feels the taste, so delicious is that salt. He pushes his body to the ground. They are one, a lover and a partner. He quivers and shivers at the consummation of fusion and integration. Then the external melody emerges from the hard rock. (p. )

At this moment he cries, yearning to join that flowing melody. As a professed dervish, the well-digger performs incantation, wailing and crying for some fusion with that melodious flow: “Is it possible to be in your company, master? Why are you not taking me along with you in this journey, O god of passengers” (p. ). As a culmination, a consummation and response to this prayer, an explosion occurs down below, letting water erupt profusely and spread, drowning the digger. He is found later placed under a white awe-inspiring rock where mysterious writing appears (ibid.), as the letters of magicians’ scrolls. But, on his lips, there is “a light smile” and in his eyes there is some “deep resignation” (p. ). The well digger’s journey plays on the sacrificial, the mythical and the cyclical. It is through his offerings of love that nature repays. Otherwise, it exchanges sterility for neglect, and waste for indifference. The journey across time and space, the past and the present, has its consummation in this rapturous moment of achievement and sacrifice. Its chronotopic ramifications are so bountiful and plenty that no time scheme can account for them. Bordering on the mythical but engaging in inwardness of delicate and sensitive souls, this passage collapses the cyclical and the eternal in a nexus of bliss. But no matter how concretized space is in al-K¯un¯ı’s novels, there is so much of the poetic in his texts that resists definitive representations. In Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s W¯aw al-s. ughr¯a, the opening scene of expectation, waiting and anticipation of water is an attempt to get hold of that pleasant sighing that comes from the hidden birds, a sound that cannot be emulated or transferred, for it is “wan, tired, as the whistling of the wind in reed strings” (p. ). But it offers a promise of water to a wilderness and a maze (p. ). Birds as much as fortune-tellers, the possessed, the mad, and the doubles appear in response to anxiety and expectation that has driven the chief-poet to make a space-time journey in the wilderness away from his community and beyond the reach of



 

his elders. The journey in the wilderness, al-khal¯a", is an escape from the mission of the chief assigned to him by the elders, but it is an act of fusion and diffusion into the boundless and the vast, a sacrificial atonement that may be no less effective than the well-digger’s death. Answering his fortune-teller, his double, who is afraid of a journey that implies forgetfulness and renunciation of ancestors and the past, the poet is after a timeless region where no rule obtains: Does it bother you to forget the people of the Eastern wilderness? Its hardships? Does it bother you to move from a sterile land to live in a homeland that recognizes no place, because it is free from the domination of time? (p. )

What begins chronotopically with markers of time-place, whereby time “thickens, takes on flesh” as Bakhtin says of the chronotope (p. ), may evolve in reverse to resist the very poetics of the chronotope. Life in Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s W¯aw al-s. ughr¯a, for instance, gathers substantiation through yearning and search for water. As time sequence punctuated with perditions, omens, signs, occasional happenings, life is concretized through pragmatic stratagems, to ensure survival. Every potential presence, including human beings, contributes voluntarily to its continuity and growth. The very acts of atonement and sacrifice entail a paradoxical communal survival and individual extinction, as in the case of the well-digger. The poet’s journey entails the preservation of the community only if we understand this journey as a voluntary retreat to let the community continue its unpoetic ways of survival. His journey in the wilderness is a journey in the unknown, “free from the domination of time,” as he says, but it has its reservoir of the past as preserved in his understanding of the compensatory realms of poetry and lore that are his impetus now. In total release from time and place, a non-human fusion can be reached by the poetic, its extra-temporal tropes, which, according to Bachelard, are always “a blend of memory and legend” (p. ). Postcolonial markers distinguish such narratives because of this blend of authenticity and strangeness, particularity and generality, communal life and individual roads. These narratives derive their potential from their culture, its life and textual richness. Their indigenous concerns and discursive practices call for measurements of their own, beyond the European tradition. As manifested in Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯un¯ı’s W¯aw al-s. ughr¯a and other narratives, especially in the use of the spatial and the temporal, and their inversions in poetic or transcendent and Sufi outlets, the familiar and the defamiliarized accentuations

  



stamp the postcolonial Arabic novel with a character of its own. Clock time, with its measurements of temporal distance, entails preoccupation with the lived reality, and, for that matter, it imposes its own topics and concerns. These represent the shared register and agenda of many cultures, especially in terms of the human bewilderment in the face of new mechanisms and changes in ethics. The search for escape from the temporal, or from part of it, into another domain of contrived forgetfulness, constitutes narrative journeying in many postindependence novels. Even non-problematic protagonists search for escape from its entanglements. Thus, Yu¯ suf Mans.u¯ r the protagonist in the Egyptian Fath. ¯ı Gh¯anim’s (–) Al-Afy¯al (The Elephants; ),33 prefers a trip into the unknown to his present life, despite his seemingly happy career and marriage at this stage. The arranged trip is voluntary, as it is a way out of ennui. The moment the choice is made, the individual is in the hands of the organization, which will be in charge of everything. The journey takes the form of a drive for many hours to an unknown location. Throughout the first stage of the trip he continues to think of life as he has already known it, series of hours and days, only to be rebuffed by the driver: “we have no knowledge of names for days, Sir” (p. ). He also receives similar answers upon asking for specific timing: “This does not mean that you have covered the trip in hours or days. I might also tell you that there is no assurance regarding the correctness of any conclusion you have reached” (p. ). Upon learning further details about his own past life, including his wife’s extra-marital relationships, this pressing sense of clock time soon gives way to a desperate attempt to attain forgetfulness through daylong preoccupation with chess. In other words, he gives up memory as such, replacing it with daily engagements that release him from its burden. The irony in the novel is not hard to follow; for frustrations have driven many to escape their “mind time,” which in tightly organized systems turns into a prison no less stifling and limiting than the socio-political life of the last decades. Not many reach such easy surrenders. The narrator in the Egyptian Sun#¯ . allah Ibr¯ah¯ım’s Al-Lajnah (; English translation: The Committee, ) sees the present time as a “barrier time” which involves him in the present meeting with the committee regardless of the reasons behind his presence. Committee members repeat to him that his presence is Fath. ¯ı Gh¯anim, Al-Afy¯al (The Elephants; Cairo: R¯uz al-Y¯usuf, ). References are to this text. 33



 

voluntary, yet he is under close scrutiny and surveillance. The time element works in a seemingly sequential order, but each moment is rife with challenge. Every meeting he is made to request brings him further trouble and increasing entanglement. The past itself is controlled by the committee which chooses what to reveal and when. Written partly after a Kafkaesque fashion,34 the novel certainly eludes logical explanation despite its avowed unfolding in time. Its present time, however, is only a web that entangles the protagonist in bewildering temporal and spatial intersections, involving him in series of situations that deny his will, driving him to actions for which he cannot account. His answers regarding this very presentness abound with subtle ironies and slick criticisms of the bureaucratic state which turns the individual into a mere number in an artificial world of sordid details. Such protagonists have no names, for neither time nor place is identifiable. In Jam¯al al-Ghit.a¯ n¯ı’s Sha.th. al-Mad¯ınah (City trance, or Distant city; ), the narrator is also nameless, finding himself in a nameless city which is so involved in a funny and absurd conflict that it treats him soon not only as an alien, but also as suspect. Conflicting parties claim attachment to the past while the present itself is unstable and shaky. The physical complexions undergo unpredictable changes, while people themselves disappear or are treated as non-existent (p. ). Looks are mixed with suspicions. Surveying the whole situation, the narrator reflects, “One of the irrefutable facts is that place is permanent whereas time is changing, man is only a passer-by … a temporal being” (p. ). The reader may suspect the narrator of some distraction of mind, for he also rejects recollections of “dangerous” details that have caused him trouble (p. ). He attempts to keep away from entanglements, regarding the city as no more than “degrees and angles of forgetfulness, vanishing every now and then” (p. ). To him, the city has no heart, which may evoke some inner emotion. He finds solace only in remembrances of his old city, of some moments that are “isolated, harmonious, representing distinctive marks, unforgettable, inerasable” (p. ). Such moments are temporarily retrieved from sequential, mechanical and heartless time. The present has no center to hold to, nor has the city. Alienation has never assumed such concepts before, for modern Arabic fiction concentrates presently on this disenchantment with the present, which is baffling with its simultaneous cruelty and absurdity.

34

See Sakkut, The Arabic Novel, : –.

  



As the burden of the real is as true as life itself, some writers plunge into its disconcerting details. In Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Innocence of the Devil) women’s time is psychological, for their past and present no longer obtain and patriarchy stamps a seal of its own that turns life into a scene of macabre variation. Undermining Clock Time Psychological time in Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s novels often works in association with patriarchal practice and discourse. Couched in her paradigms, every relevant phrase is loaded with authority and disparagement of women. Each phrase is a compressed moment of humiliation that has stuck deep in her women’s memory. For example, yas. qu.t, “down,” recalls derivatives and connotes expressions of disparagement and discrimination based on biological notions of honor that have been given theological meanings.35 Impregnated as such, these words are loaded with whatever that has been sustaining patriarchy. Even women participate in this register, for Jann¯at’s grandmother in Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs goes back to her Biblical tradition to subscribe to the notion that Eve is a fallen woman. She reads from the Bible, “Thou shalt crawl on thy belly throughout eternity, and thy longing shall be for thine husband and he shall rule over thee” (p. ). But the word “fallen” that dwells in memory surges up, too, and floats whenever it incites echoes in the register of revolutionary rhetoric, undermining the disparaging side in traditional culture, as seen by the writer. Her participation as a young schoolgirl in demonstrations flashes back in her memory, cutting through her reveries, to let the roaring voice of demonstrators speak out, enabling herself, too, to shout “as loud as she could: Down! Down,” against a political system of corruption, patriarchy and loss (p. ). Rather than the absurdity of the s and the s when short story writers devoted their attention to the projection of subdued emotions in overwhelmingly antagonistic situations, the absurd of the s and s is the only possible reaction to the cruel reality of totalitarian regimes and international greed. The individual is cheated, trodden down, uprooted, maltreated and killed under numerous pretexts and falsifications. What remains is only a shivering truth, which

35

See Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Men, Women, and God(s), pp. –.



 

writers attempt to recapture. It is not surprising that the Moroccan Muhammad Zifz¯af (d. ) describes this life in his Al-Tha#lab yazhar . . wa-yakhtaf¯ı (The Fox appears and disappears, ) as a “comedy” (p. ).36 The novel is a fragmented record of the narrator’s preoccupations and undertakings in daytime in the city. There is no plot to hold it together, for the writer is deeply immersed in experimentation. Dusk is hateful because it reminds him “of the end of things. Everything lies down to begin the comedy … anew: The great circus whereby manners repeat themselves throughout history. So are love, hatred, justice, hypocrisy, theft, good manners gloved in moral intentions that may or may not be truthful” (p. ). Zifz¯af ’s world is involved, nonetheless, in some cyclical concepts of time. Repetition is taken for granted as recurrently existing in archetypal patterns of behavior. Such a view is not completely independent from that of the Moroccan Ben S¯alim ¯ısh in his Majn¯un al-Hukm Himm (Obsessed by power, ).37 Placing . . the medieval Egyptian Fatimite Sultan “Ab¯u #Ali Mans.u¯ r Ruler in the Name of God” (–), otherwise al-H¯ . akim, in a historical context, the writer obliquely addresses present time.38 Whimsical on the one hand and cruel and suspicious on the other, the Ruler is no different from present figures. They only repeat the archetypal despot who also stipulates, “No comfort for the Caliph unless he suspects all, cutting his very shadow with the sword if it appears suspicious or strange” (p. ). Time for a despot is a flux, but it is one that runs into killings and murders. Hence, his favorite lines of poetry are those that see the morning as brandishing a sword to murder darkness, night and its stars (p. ). Their inner time is, however, much heavier and longer than their actual age. Thus, he corrects his historian who specifies the Caliph’s age as thirty-six, telling Mukhtar the Historian, “This is only appearance, you most adept and artful documentator, for my inner age is three times as much. Nobody feels its heavy steps or suffers from its bruises more than myself. Your papers remain—but for rare exceptions—therefore, lacking in vital issues and inner sufferings” (p. ). While duplicating the despotic and the cruel, the Caliph here lives also his own inner

Muhammad Zifz¯af, Al-Tha#lab yazhar . . wa-yakhtaf¯ı (The Fox appears and disappears; Al-D¯ar al-Bayd¯ . a’: Mat.ba#at al-Kit¯ab, ). 37 Ben S¯ ¯ısh in his Majn¯un al-h. ukm (Obsessed by power; London: Alalim Himm . Rayyis, ). 38 On the novel as pseudo-historical, see Juan Goytisolo, “The Truth of Fiction,” trans. Peter Bush, Banipal,  (Autumn, ), p. . 36

  



time, which makes him somehow different from others. While the inner eludes documentation, public time is identifiable and open to investigations or surmises. The fusion of the cyclical and the temporal does not necessarily follow the same pattern in other works. In the Moroccan Mub¯arak Rab¯ı#s novel Burj al-Su#¯ud (The Tower of good fortune, ),39 the small town suffers from inexplicable diseases that confuse the physician only to find later that these have existed for a long time, following some obscure pattern that eludes investigation. So used is the indigenous population to these seasonal diseases that people’s bodies have developed some immunity. It is only when someone spreads the rumor that the marginal comic figure, al-Reet.¯ı, has come into a fortune due to the discovery of minerals in his land that action speeds up in the novel, driving al-Reet.¯ı himself to believe the rumor and hurry up towards his land like a “pendulum,” surrounded by a semi-circle of people, young and old, who form a spatial clock that moves and ticks. Reaching his land, he lies down on the ground, listening hard while the surrounding semi-circle waits in suspense. The shape is of a dead clock that awaits the pendulum to work again. The moment of expectation stands outside linear time. Life, however, returns to its daily routine upon his discovery that the land is as dead as ever. Standing up, he uncovers himself in an act of disappointment, poking fun at himself as well as at others who have also been deceived. As rumor leads to action, the sequential narrative develops according to a causality that also brings about variety and change in an otherwise stagnant life. Such a life partakes of death in a town described as “a city of brass” (p. ). Love here degenerates into lust, while religion loses its soul. This emptiness leaves the town desolate, destitute of certitude and love. Even al-Reet.¯ı, who is never suspected of harboring vicious designs, will commit murder out of jealousy. Upon receiving a slap on the face from the prostitute who has rejected his offer to be her husband, he also runs towards his land, like a pendulum, followed by the semi-circle. There he uncovers a hole to expose the bloodstained clothes of the victim. Nothing grows in such a land but death. Time itself is a clock time that may undergo a jerk once in a while. Otherwise, people hold fast to their holes, leaving the wind alone to discourage others from coming into the town. Mub¯arak Rab¯ı#, Burj al-Su#¯ud (The Tower of good fortune; Casablanca: Al-Naj¯ah. Press, ). 39

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 

Al-Reet.¯ı’s hole offers the pendulum’s fleetingness some sense; otherwise the transitory dimension leaves the narrative insubstantial. Localization in space has often the characteristics of the anaphoric, for it is a threshold, too. Al-Takarl¯ı, for instance, begins his historiography in Al-Masarr¯at (Gladnesses) by spatial markers: “For no one has thought of specifying the history of the appearance of the Monkeys’ Road” (p. ). ¯ il¯a On the other hand, Issa Boullata collapses time and space in #A"id al-Quds, for “it was a London warm summer,” explains his protagonist (p. ). No less drawn to this fusion of the temporal and the permanent, the fluid and the dense, is #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim in Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (The Suffering primrose). When the narrator begins in medias res, pondering the inevitability of suicide, he ends up at the door of a poorly lit nightclub (p. ), as another liminal space. Even when Mostaghanam¯ı in Dh¯akirat al-jasad (Memory in the flesh) allows Kh¯alid to speak most of the time, it is only to make him endorse a “two in one” view, a shared memory in “shared routes” (p. ). In other words, a pertinent metaphor for this combined spatial and temporal effort is that of the threshold. To make sense of experience, there must be a beginning in time and place. In these narratives as in numerous other works, Arab novelists have made extensive use of the multi-dimensional. Aside from linear, horizontal, vertical and polytemporal shapes or perceptual and conceptual presence of time, Arab writers have also rediscovered the mythical and marvelous, the fantastic and the mystical. Along with these shapes and patterns, narrative techniques have also appeared in tight association with the element of time, but usually working according to Arab writers’ preoccupation with the plight of man in the Arab world. In this world and due also to international interests, there has evolved a whimsical pattern of rule that re-enacts medieval despotism into the arena of modern politics. Replacing Providence, the despot triggers coincidence and event, involving the whole polity in bloodshed. As political pressure makes it impossible to oppose, indirection has grown into a pattern of writing that includes historical constructs or literary models. On the other hand, clock time itself only serves in narrative to expose the sordid and the absurd in an attempt to psychologically mitigate the agony usually undergone by all. Taken together, narratives as verbal constructions of durability and change place themselves in spatial tropes as if in a counter-move against the colonialist search for lands and riches. But there is a post-colonial legacy, too, which has survived in police states, totalitarian regimes and neo-patriarchies.

  



The post-colonial nation-state often offers its versions of habitations, lands and citizenship. Narratives are rich with these as a starting point for their counter-charges or images. The madhouse, the hospital, the mirage city, the Kurdish house, the cemetery, the prison, the palace, the well, the trench, the door and the coffee-house are only recurrent images to embody or erase time, for the fight throughout is one of survival against extinction, erosion and annihilation. While narrative proper accommodates these concerns and preoccupations, writers at times feel a further need to theorize, in self-reflexive fiction, for their art and perspectives. In these metafictional works as in narrative proper, writing as a conscious inscriptive endeavor evolves in texts to establish, sustain and capture its own memory.


  CULTURAL CONTESTATION AND SELF-DEFINITION IN ARABIC METAFICTION

The recurrence of metafictional practice in Arabic should be viewed in relation to the dynamics of postmodernism and its challenge or contribution to postcolonial theory. On the other hand, the practice finds its roots in traditional lore, too, and, especially, in Scheherazade’s self-conscious story-telling, its arrangement and sequence into lay¯al¯ı or nights in an ideal ordering of plot, or fabula, to sustain the listener’s suspense and, for that matter, to save her life. It is not surprising that critics, fabulists and metafictional writers like Martha Pike Conant and later John Barth claim her as the fairy godmother of fiction.1 Arab writers pass through a process of disidentification and identification that is closely tied to their cultural agendas during the time of writing.2 Recourse to metafictional practices is not new, but it has gained impetus in the s to the extent that many writers took it as a sign of literary exhaustion and the death of the novel genre.3 Conversely, instead of signifying the death of the genre, its tombstone, it has become necessary to its growth, its burgeoning diversity and cultural contestation. In more than one sense, the “metafictional impulse has become an integral element within the wider cultural moment of postmodernism.”4 1 See Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (N.Y.: Columbia Univ. Press, ), pp. –. See also the present writer’s Scheherazade in England, pp. –. See also John Barth, “The Scheherazade Factor,” in U.S. News and World Report, Aug. , , p. . On John Barth, see Max F. Schulz, The Muses of John Barth: Tradition and Metafiction from Lost in the Funhouse to the Tidewater Tales (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). 2 For the use of these terms in cultural theory, see Michel Pécheux, Language, Semiotics, and Ideology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, ); and Issa Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (New York: State Univ. of New York, ), pp. – . 3 See the present writer’s “Metafiction as a Theoretic Discourse in Contemporary Arabic Writing,” Gilgamesh,  (), pp. –. See also Robert E. Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, ); ad Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, ). 4 See Grant Stirling, “Neurotic Narrative: Metafiction and Object-Relations Theory,” College Literature, , n.  (Spring, ), pp. –, at pp. –.



 

The postmodernist stamp may undergo qualification whenever juxtaposed against cultural identities, for, in the instance of Arabic culture, narrative and anecdotal transmission at large has ensured the transmitter a place and a voice and implicated narratives in self-referential forms. Authorial presence on the one hand and duplication of texts, embeddings, and transfusion of material, on the other, are customary practices in traditional Arabic culture, and they invite further analysis of metafiction to account for the diversity and variety in the practice. Yet, the practice, in its epistemological and ontological ramifications as studied by Linda Hutcheon and Patricia Waugh, manifests so much self-reflexivity that it bothers upholders of theory at large.5 The question raised against indulgence in self-reflexivity or “narcissistic narratives,” as Linda Hutcheon terms the art,6 amounts to a critique of its lack of commitment to life, its possible co-option with late capitalist forms of production and styles of consumerism. Counter readings trace in the practice potent means of subversion.7 Both sides have enough justifications, depending on the nature of the texts in use. In Arabic metafiction, the case is no less complicated. One can argue, however, that the art demonstrates both an increasing endeavor on the part of novelists and fiction writers to secure their readers’ involvement in their textualized fictional worlds and a search on their part for poetics of fiction. In this two-part venture, they are no different from their counterparts the Arab poet-critics of the twentieth century, who, while canonizing new beliefs in their poetry and prose, also retained distrust of established conventions.8 Further qualifications are needed, however. A number of early twentieth century writers, and in line with the Nahd. ah or awakening spirit, showed a surprising For Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (New York: Methuen, ). See Frederick Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Texts,  (), pp. –; and also The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, ). See also Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literatures (London: Verso, ), pp. –; and Peter Stoicheff, “The Chaos of Metafiction,” in Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles, pp. – (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, ); Michael Arnzen, “The Misery of Influence,” Paradoxa, , n.  (), pp. –; and Einar Helleland, Metafiction: Questioning the Notion of Literary Self-Reflexivity (Copenhagen: Department of English, Univ. Copenhagen Publication, ). 7 See Grant Stirling, for instance, among the new advocates of the practice as postmodernist art with subversive potential, ibid. 8 See the present writer’s “Engaging Tradition in Modern Arab Poetics,” Journal of Arabic Literature, , n.  (), pp. –. 5

6

   -



metafictional temper to assess the suitability of the new novel genre for their cultural milieu and their views of art and literature. On the other hand, later engagements with this issue partake of worldwide literary endeavor to test the limit and scope of the novel as a bourgeois epic. Since fiction in the Arab world had not acquired a full critical corpus until late in the s, realist conventions of the second half of the twentieth century emerge as perhaps the only available achievement worth challenging, digressing from, and, ultimately, discrediting. While poets since the late s have a formidable tradition and a poetic to contest or engage, novelists and practitioners debate a recent realistic trend, with its conventions, practices and varieties. Ironically, however, realist fiction still prospers, whereas some of its able advocates continue to make use of its protean self, employing scientific and technical achievements to live up to the challenge of the age. But the challenge is there, forcing many names into oblivion and relegating a great deal of material to a status of sheer neglect. Along with the challenge comes the struggle to match up to it. “Metafiction” is only one attempt among many to prove that contemporary fiction is able to cope with or to contain the challenge. Meant, according to Patricia Waugh and others, as a “term given to fiction writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality,”9 metafiction cannot be viewed as a trend or a sustained attitude; nor can it be acclaimed as an inevitable postmodernist substitute for the novel proper. Rather, it is one aspect of a many-sided pursuit which, anticipating change and evolution, resorts to experimentation as simultaneously inevitable and worthwhile. Participants in this endeavor, as well as advocates of experimentalism, felt the urge to address their audiences, justify their practices and valorize the art, while they simultaneously recognized the overwhelming supremacy of realist conventions and attitudes. Representational narrative matrices enforce recognition while they ultimately incite dissent to transpose into metafictional tools that cut across the mimetic. Prompted by the awakening spirit, its sense of urgency, this dual consciousness may explain Arab writers’ keen interest in the aesthetics of the novel early in the twentieth century when the novel has not yet gone beyond the imitative practice of romantic fiction and rural realism. This early engagement

9

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, p. .



 

with metafiction is worth studying not only because of this double bind, the recourse to pure aesthetics and covert attention to representation, but also because it lays the ground for further practices that problematize the issue between late capitalist postmodernism and postcolonial perspectives, as I intend to explain in this chapter. No matter how much genealogy exists in this metafictional practice since the s, there is a two-line engagement with the aesthetics of fiction, the theory of narrative or narratology along with concepts of representation and similitude, and the scope of authorial presence in narrative constructs. Both overlap, but the nature of the discussion varies in view of social or aesthetic contexts. As a period of fervent social, political and intellectual search for identity, the s witnessed manifestations of this literary quest in a number of writings. These vary between a clear authorial presence as a means towards representational narrative as the case is in the Iraqi Dh¯u al-N¯un Ayy¯ub’s Duct¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım (), and inversion of the authorial role so as to appear as narratee, and thereby as a potent vehicle for narrative manipulation and reclamation as the case stands in Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The Enchanted palace, ), the joint venture by T¯ and . ah¯a Husayn . Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım. In both examples from the s there is a self-object relation to the text in the sense that authors valorize the text and by extension the role of narrative in life and literature.10 The Author in the Text Permeated with contemporary issues, the novel re-enacts its narrative design and plot through a confrontation between the author and the protagonist. Out of this confrontation grows a verbal construct, entitled Duct¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım. In this pioneering work, the Iraqi novelist Dh¯u al N¯un Ayy¯ub looks upon the art in view of Zola’s naturalist terms, regardless of personal feelings for a particular character. Sitting in a café in Baghdad, the writer treats novel writing as a self-conscious practice. “In this place and at this time there is refreshing weather, a public café, a large number of people talking to each other or playing dice. What

10 I am stretching Heinz Kohut’s phrase from psychological accentuations to textual extensions. The view that a self-object relationship means no separation but oneness by extension could prove useful in this respect. See The Analysis of the Self (Madison, CT: International Univ. Press, . I am indebted to Grant Stirling for drawing attention to this use.

   -



should the scene inspire? Let us try, listen and wait for what is coming up!” As the chit chats that reach him are dirty jokes, slander and casual comments, he asks himself, “What inspiration can one get out of this nonsense, a literary issue, a realistic story or a fantastic novel?” (pp. – ). But this self-questioning leads him to Zola’s art, as he is willing to pick on a creature who may grow into a fictional construct and whose life inspires great emphasis on the sordid and the mundane. Preparing himself for counter-criticism, he asks his readers: “Why should I be blamed? Give me a perfect milieu and I’ll supply you with unblemished charming stories” (p. ). But even when striving to provide a fictional construct, he is challenged by a “scientific frame of mind” that belies and undermines fictionality, driving him therefore to “curse Zola” for such an influence (p. ). The narrative implications of these pronouncements relate to the fictional and the representational. Ayy¯ub believes that social and personal details make up a present, which is the material for fiction. Thus, his novel takes shape as a human scene of conflict, disparity and challenge. The author as narrator notices: “somebody is directing his steps towards me… He looks dark, with a pointed nose and black eyes” (p. ). Insofar as his response is concerned, he is no less shocked than his reader, for fear “takes over, shouting in triumph: So, don’t you know who this man is? Don’t you? He is in your mind when you have written one of your stories. You know him well” (p. ). Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım comes back in the flesh to shock and warn him for exposing his hypocrisy, criminality and fraud. Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım tells him now that he intends to tell the prominent director of education Dr. Fadil . al-Jam¯al¯ı, a real historical personage who died in , that he is also abused and slandered in that same story (p. ). The novel uncovers Dr. Ibr¯ah¯ım and, by implication, a number of prominent figures. What begins as metafiction grows into a text of great ramifications for postcolonial culture. Its metafictional frame accommodates its author’s anger and fury and rationalizes his intension to expose others as hypocrites and subordinates to the British. The novel, as noticed in Chapter One, unfolds as a rare narrative text of postcolonial potency. Although it is difficult to claim this novel as the ancestor to metafictional reconstructions of reality since the s, it is worth citing as a landmark in the map of self-conscious experimentation with the real, as this study shows later.



  Debating Representation

The case is different in Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The Enchanted palace, ) by T¯ and Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ah¯a Husayn . . ¯ım.11 The authors debate the adequacy of representational narratives, for similitude is not their concern. They deploy the famous medieval frame story to scrutinize narrative codes and conventions. Along with Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ¯ım’s play Shahraz¯ad (Scheherazade, ), Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur is self-referential, proposing to disorient the reader’s familiarity with the Scheherazade motif while simultaneously flaunting the author’s godlike authority in his work. While novelistic pretension to omniscience is held suspect in this work, the authors present themselves as narratees, the ones who are acted on by Scheherazade, as she is the kidnapper and they are the hostages, whom she, nevertheless, aims to prosecute for tampering with her being in their own writings. By doing so, they deny Scheherazade her established role as the liberator of women, for she is now an authoritarian presence with means to kidnap, persecute and contain. Moreover, she is in a position to interrogate them, while they are relegated to a marginal status. As listeners who may ask for the reasons behind their plight they take over the place of the marginalized in her narratives, reclaiming these to themselves within a wide interpretive vista that belongs to them. Furthermore, as narrates they establish their prioretic code of action, for by acting as listeners, they act as readers, too, simultaneously offering the motivation and the meaning for the narrative. By improving on the presentational narrative, the story or sjuzet, through their roles as narratees, they also give the plot or fabula its structure and construction. This work can be cited as parodic. Parodic implications go beyond the author’s ostensible claims, however, as they may well point to some covert preoccupation with aesthetic or social issues.12 LaCapra notes, “Irony and parody are themselves not unequivocal signs of disengagement on the part of an apolitical, transcendent ego that floats above

11 T¯ and Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . ah¯a Husayn . . ¯ım, Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The Enchanted palace, n. d. ). References within the text are to this edition. 12 For more on the notion of parody, the reader may consult Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, and Rabelais and His World. See also Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History,” in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, eds. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis, pp. – (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, ).

   -



historical reality or founders in the abysmal pull of aporia.”13 Hutcheon also notes that “Parody can be used as a self-reflexive technique that points to art as art, but also to art as inescapably bound to its aesthetic and even social past.”14 Both as a parody of al-Hak . ¯ım’s play and a reversal of the Scheherazade motif in literature, Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur is divided into chapters which are self-consciously arranged by the two authors. The setting is a place in France where Scheherazade is no longer the prisoner, victim, or appeasing artist. On the contrary, she poses as the pursuer, the kidnapper who has overtaken the authors by surprise, criticizing al-Hak . ¯ım for his image of her in his play Shahraz¯ad only as knowledgeable, understanding and wise. Shahrayar and his minister are no less angry for being represented as sedate, meditative and thoughtful. Thus, intending to teach him a lesson on how to approach her own character, Scheherazade demands that he should be tried, even though the reader, through the underlying irony, has already formed the impression that she cannot impersonate this role outside al-Hak . ¯ım’s context for the play. Endowed with new traits and qualifications, she is able to surprise her author, who comments: “Amazing! So it’s you who inspired me with the idea for a book, you who emerged from my mind and thought! But it is you who kidnapped and imprisoned me in this huge palace!” She answers: “What about you? Didn’t you kidnap and imprison me between the covers of a large-size book?” (pp. –)

Thus, while drawing the reader’s attention to this novel as artifact, the authors set out to undermine the readers’ complacency regarding archetypal patterns, simultaneously defamiliarizing them through new notions of individualism, intellectual freedom, and equality that were in vogue at the time. Characters are thus bound to enjoy such privileges to the extent of overruling their authors. But rather than being endowed with omniscience, the author “invents events and fabricates characters.” (p. ). On the other hand, the writer has to devote his full attention to this device so that his characters may assume the sophisticated, rather than the imitative, image of the real. Hence, according to al-Hak . ¯ım in Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur, the realistic characterization in such novels as the Egyptian Haykal’s Zaynab (a girl’s name, ) and the 13 Dominick LaCapra, History, Politics and the Novel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, ), p. . 14 Linda Hutcheon, Politics of Postmodernism, p. .



 

Egyptian al-M¯azin¯ı’s Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯atib (; English translation: Ibr¯ah¯ım the Writer, ) does not conform to this notion. Comparing the affront that he receives from his characters with the creations of other writers, al-Hak . ¯ım subtly suggests that he is the only one who suffers at his characters’ hands. It is quite painful to see that among my fellow writers, I am the only one to be set in this situation… It surprises me to recall that other writers haven’t been similarly rewarded. (p. )

Al-Hak . ¯ım draws further comparisons related to literary trends specifying a number of novels and plays that draw, among other modes and conventions, on social realism. The Egyptian Muhammad Husayn . . Haykal, he adds, enjoys his own personal freedom, in that Zaynab, the heroine in the novel bearing her name, does not demand court proceedings against him. Their contemporary Egyptian writer al-M¯azin¯ı deals with neither ghosts nor the dead, but rather uses the milieu of his writings to portray the living from among his family and relatives. Nobody complains, argues al-Hak . ¯ım. Ostensibly addressing Scheherazade, the narratee debates the claim that representational literature is the only medium to valorize the epistemological and the ontological. By ascribing so much potency to art in its metafictional manifestations, he transposes the underpinnings of the relation between characters and narrative in this joint text into critical strategies directed towards their immediate cultural milieu. Signifying a self-object relationship, through questions and comments, the author as narratee eludes suspicion as a manipulator of textual space, usually leveled against authorial intrusions, while hijacking the medieval frame tale with all its perennial power. Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur, more metafictional in nature than a mere parody of a framing story and its archetypal pattern, has some selfreflexivity of its own which also develops its specific stature as an artifact. When confronted by Shahray¯ar’s demand to name his own kingdom, the author ponders the question, searching for an appropriate response. The implicit conclusion is that such a kingdom exists only in the mind’s eye or perhaps in the fancy: Is he actually asking me for the name of his own kingdom? How could I know? All that I have learned about his person is that he is a king. I have no idea where his kingdom is or where to find it on the world map. (p. , my emphasis)

   -



Theorizations for Narrative as Invention ¯ Before analyzing an obvious use of this novel as intertext in #Alam bi15 l¯a-Khar¯a"i.t (A World without maps, ), by the Palestinian Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a (d. , in Iraq) and the Saudi #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur is worth comparing to another approach to Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights in the Egyptian Y¯usuf al-Qa#¯ıd’s Dif¯a# al-bulbul fi al-qafas. (The Defense of the caged bulbul, ).16 Belated as this reconstruction is of the storyteller Scheherazade, it nevertheless conveys a change in the cultural milieu since the Nahd. ah days. The author feels committed to stand for Scheherazade as the epitome of art and beauty against some fundamentalist objections to The Thousand and One Nights on moral grounds. When The Thousand and One Nights and similar works came under attack in Egypt in ,17 authors and writers found in the controversy new incentives to underline the power of imaginative literature, its richness and beauty against bigotry and narrow-mindedness. As metafiction, the text uses the controversy to argue for Scheherazade as the culmination of charm and literary efficacy. Faced with prosecution, the artist Scheherazade wins over the hearts and feelings of people who are free from prejudice, prudery and squeamishness. The writer makes it clear that he is dissatisfied with the state of things in Egypt, for “nothing can put an end to anarchy in the land of Egypt save a miracle” (p. ). His narrative is no more than his account as an eyewitness in the trial, a show of moral support to the female “gazelle” as the incarnation of dreams and beauty. She is the embodiment of the book that has been part of people’s thoughts and feelings (pp. –). The judge finds himself on the side of Scheherazade. Indeed, he is under pressure to succumb to ultraconservatism, but as a way out he comes to a legal term to indicate a “conflict of interest” (p. ). He cannot be an arbiter in a case in which he is a party. Scheherazade is always present in his dreams and aspirations. Viewed in comparison with Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur, Y¯usuf al-Qa#¯ıd’s Dif¯a# al-bulbul fi al-qafas. may not be as rich in intertextuality, but it is more dynamic in cultural contestation. ¯ Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a and #Abd al-Rahm¯ bi-l¯a-Khar¯a"i.t (A World . an Mun¯ıf, #Alam ¯ without maps; Baghdad: Al-Maktabah al-#Alamiyyah, ). 16 Y¯ usuf al-Qa#¯ıd, Dif¯a# al-bulbul fi al-qafas. (The Defense of the caged bulbul; Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ). 17 For a short survey of the issue, see David Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: Brill, ), pp. –. 15



 

Almost fifty years after the publication of Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur, two Arab novelists, the Palestinian Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a (resident of Iraq) and the Saudi #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf (resident of Jordan, Iraq and ¯ Syria), embarked on a similar project titled #Alam bi-l¯a-Khar¯a"i.t (A World 18 without maps, ), obviously borrowing the idea from Al-Qas. r almash. ¯ur, and specifically from the narratee’s answer to Shahrayar: “I have no idea where his kingdom is or where to find it on the world map” (p. ). Joint writing is a self-conscious art par excellence, as it involves division of labor, discussion, design and elaborate planning. It builds on the will of the two to co-ordinate and level down differences. The novel dwells on creation and invention, fancy and representation, drawing on modern theories of fiction in dealing with authorial viewpoint and characterization. Despite the representational nature of the framing story in which the disputes of #Al¯a" the author with his acquaintances serve to remind us of similar ones with his invented characters, it is as a text within a text that the novel is meant to be read. Such is Najw¯a’s comment on the author’s method of omniscient narration. According to this charming woman, whom the author loves but is unable to win over, the writer’s technique is mostly faulty. The author himself feels constrained to behave with a certain amount of carelessness or neutrality in order to avoid being angered by her hostile and even pejorative comments. She feels, for instance, that novelists maintain and nourish dreams to such a degree that they come to replace the real, thereafter regarding women as “coming from another planet” unrelated to reality. As such Najw¯a approaches him with questions that always draw him back to his novels (pp. – ): “#Al¯a" why did you drive Salw¯a to commit suicide in your first novel?” Or again: “Do human beings invoke nothing else, other than being transferred here and there… motivated and destined in accordance with authorial decrees?”

No matter how hard #Al¯a" tries to explain his own view of fictional discourse, the charming woman rejects explanations, introducing instead her own concept of writing:

See my comments on the novel and its textual forefathers, in Al-Riw¯ayah al#Arabiyyah. 18

   -



The right method is to write pointedly and unequivocally about what is deemed by the writer to be the secret, hidden truth in respect to what he senses as a link between his own self and the horizon that envelops him in a circle. (p. )

The argument is not an ordinary one, as the authors obviously feel the need to confess and lay bare the truth as they understand and see it beyond social or cultural constraints. On the other hand, Najw¯a’s intervention intensifies the metafictional character of the text, for the “hidden truth” in the orbit of the person and the “circle” can be read as another variation on the self-object relationship, as the unfolding narrative of the hidden truth will be no more than another inseparable extension of the self, according to a dialectic of love and hate paradigm or its transferable applications to author-text mechanism. Najw¯a, the narratee, is also the one who is idealized as the charming woman, for whom the author in the text #Al¯a" holds deep affection, but she is also the one who debates his credibility as author. Holding him between the parameters of attraction and defiance, she involves the metafictional text in relentless testing of narrative codes and significations. Although the author is ambiguous regarding Najw¯a’s role in his personal life, he invites and manipulates her comments on writing, characterization, and love as a contextual design for an artifact in this uncharted world of his. Other characters, such as his uncle Hus¯ . am al-Ra#d, also draw on books and methods of writing to support their arguments. The work therefore aspires to be taken as a text, maneuvering now and then within an aesthetic distance to attain its social criticism. The authors work out their fictional deconstruction in another embedding, a text within the uncharted world of the novel, calling it Shajarat al-n¯ar (The Fire tree). This intertext is referred to as a manuscript ¯ at one time, and it is also mentioned as a novel elsewhere in #Alam bi-l¯a-Khar¯a"i.t (A World without maps). In Shajarat al-n¯ar the authors propose their theory of fiction regarding both the subject matter and its manner of presentation. Foremost among their preoccupations is the role of fiction in the present culture. While they are against any imposition of political or cultural agenda, including the concerns of social realism or its likes, they debate the role of the state in cultural life, its pose as the upholder of tradition and cultural values. The protagonist Riy¯ad, . for instance, argues that the interest of state systems and institutions in tradition is no more than a staunch defense of the static or irrational in order to keep the masses under control. But rather than



 

writing with a definite purpose of constructing a viable worldview, the artist in command of a literary world, according to the protagonist, is prone to destroy: #Al¯a" (the author): “How cunning you are! I don’t know why I create such characters like you!” Riy¯ad. (the protagonist): “You have no other choice, you are forced to, for the sake of…your sanity, to be sure.” #Al¯a’: “Oh yes? Maybe you are right this time. I have always felt that writing is a sign of sanity and spiritual well-being.” Riy¯ad: . “For you or for others?” #Al¯a": “For both. But for that, I shouldn’t have undertaken this project.” Riy¯ad: . “A nice illusion…” #Al¯a": “Have we started quarrelling again?” Riy¯ad: . “Yes, because this writing of yours which you deem spiritually fulfilling for others, I regard as rather destructive” (p. ).

Drawing on other fictional texts the authors invoke authoritative sources in order to substantiate this line of provocation. On the other hand, they present their textual author as a controversial figure whose views and reviews come under harsh criticism from conservative circles. Getting a dramatic dialogue published in the newspaper, #Al¯a" the author suffers more than one rebuff. Supposedly written originally in Greek and then recast in Arabic, this piece of writing provokes somebody into writing a rejoinder, inviting state action against the author for his critique of despotism and lack of democracy. With the implication running throughout the framing and other stories that the writer fights covertly against despotism and complacency, ¯ #Alam bi-l¯a-Khar¯a’.t (A World without maps) balances such suggestiveness with a great deal of talk about sex and women, along with numerous references to the art of writing. The significance of the text lies in its metafictional strategies to debate issues that may prove difficult to articulate in criticism. In other words, metafiction is deployed to assert dissidence and valorize the need for further cultural contestation among its readers. To elude accusations of deliberate propagation of dissident values, the author in the text, #Al¯a", is placed within other characters who hold opposite views and who debate his positions freely. His dissident protagonist, Riy¯ad. al-Burh¯an, is kept under scrutiny, but with allusions to his transgressions that highlight rather than demean their value. As a novelist in perpetual dialogue with his creations, #Al¯a" poses throughout

   -



the work as being someone who is overruled, challenged, corrected and criticized by them to the point of self-effacement. Concluding a debate on fiction writing, the protagonist, Riy¯ad. al-Burh¯an affirms, “Had I written a novel about you, I could have shown you the variety, complexity and sophistication, as well as some surprising transformations” (ibid.).

When set within the broader context of realist as well as modernist views of the novel genre, such references to both the fictionality of the text and the conventions of the realistic novel only partly impart a sense of metafiction as a form of self-indulgence. They can, however, be viewed as an aesthetic critique ostensibly falling under the impact of a rather Western sense of crisis. While according novelistic criticism admirable attention, and targeting hegemonic discourse and its opportunist appropriation of history and tradition, the novel deviates from the need to tackle issues in their relevance to Arabic culture, especially regarding structures of feeling, ways of life and customs. Metafiction and Historiography Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a’s line of argument in respect to history and tradi¯ tion in #Alam bi-l¯a-khar¯a’.t is not hard to follow, as it echoes his earlier views on the art of the novel. In matters of theory, he believes in a divide between tradition and modernity, and he views with suspicion any recourse to history to reconstruct a reality of some sort.19 Jabr¯a’s short novel S. ur¯akh f¯ı layl Taw¯ . ıl (A Cry on a long night, ) can be illustrative of this early position, as it obliquely undermines the historical view of familial and social life.20 The protagonist is Am¯ın, a writer and journalist, whose public image is totally at variance with his inner feelings and theory of writing. Commissioned by a traditional aristocratic family to produce a chronological documentation of its history in which he is to emphasize the moral lessons that could be drawn from such a history, Am¯ın finds himself personally involved in a story in which he is torn into conflicting entities searching in vain for harmony. While working on the material at his own disposal, he ends up with another story in which the personal takes precedence over an archival record of the past. When set against the historical construct he is com19 See my discussion of this issue in “Engaging Tradition in Modern Arab Poetics,” pp. –. 20 Jabr¯ a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a, S. ur¯akh f¯ı layl Taw¯ . ıl (A Cry on a Long Night; Baghdad: ).



 

missioned to undertake, this self-conscious story, which he discusses and evaluates, is meant to offset the framing historical account. It simultaneously discredits the whole idea of history with its social and moral edification. This approach to history is metafictional as long as it invites “uses and abuses” as Linda Hutcheon argues.21 Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a’s dispute of historical validity is not common among writers of fictional historiography, however, despite its metafictional offers of self-reflexive strategies. The difference between Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım Jabr¯a and Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, for instance, is not hard to trace. Jabr¯a is ahead of the rest in raising questions regarding the viability of history in narrative. As modernity is a move forward, any search for justifications in the past act as hindrance, he stipulates.22 His novels work within a present whose past is limited to immediate issues of immediate bearing on present unfolding of events and characters. His views should be seen as a reaction against a sweeping faith in history as indisputable truths and happenings. Until recently history has not been regarded as a construct. History is not only re-drawn, invoked and referred to by a large number of people, educated and uneducated alike, but also relived as if it were only yesterday. Being so close and so fresh in one’s memory, it is always treated with sensitivity, which emerges through rhetoric, clichés and platitudes. Early historical reconstructions like the Lebanese immigrant writer to Egypt Jurj¯ı Zayd¯an’s (d. ) aim at awakening the reading public through entertaining historical narratives of heroism and glory.23 Later attempts are reluctant, in the main, to deviate from this cherished opinion. On the other hand, following the  military defeat of the nation state, the incentive to use history as a foil finds enough justification to elude censorship under the pretext of authenticity and historical exactitude. The author’s alter ego in Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s AlZayn¯ı Barak¯at, for example, appears as the Venetian traveler Visconti Gianti, a fictional character whose narrative reflects on the contemporary scene. If the use of the alter ego in historical reconstructions is of limited metafictional efficacy, as the use of Visconti indicates, narratives 21 Linda Hutcheon, “‘The Pastime of Past Time’: Fiction, History, Historiographical Metafiction,” in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, eds Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, pp. – (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, nd edition, ), at p. . 22 See the present writer’s “Engaging Tradition in Modern Arab Poetics,” p. . 23 See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel, pp. –; and Sabry Hafez, “The State of the Contemporary Arabic Novel: Some Reflections,” The Literary Review Supplement (London: Namara, ), p. .

   -



partaking of the memoir can be better of in focusing the ramifications of past life around the self. Such is the case in Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Kit¯ab al-tajalliyy¯at (The Book of epiphanies, ).24 The use of the word Kit¯ab, book, in the title aims at historical transposition among books of Sufism and tradition at large. History is obliquely recalled in order to criticize and expose political fabrications and social ills. History as such is no longer a record of factual detail. The very effort to re-narrate it implies revision. The writer develops a self-conscious discourse, meant and referred to as fictional, where the author himself is addressed by name whenever the moment of Sufi rapture and revelation is attained. Here the present is set against the past, and the past is fused into the present in the ever-reflecting mirrors of the author’s soul and mind’s eye, where images of the Prophet’s grandson al-Husayn, the martyr . (d. ), the late Egyptian President and leader #Abd al-N¯as.ir (d. ), and the writer’s own father always shine upon his soul to disperse the enveloping darkness. Such a text could be seen as the best that could be achieved in self-conscious writing. In its subtlety, richness, variety and pliability of expression, al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Kit¯ab al-tajalliyy¯at stands as a text that achieves aesthetic purity without losing sight of the ever-impending threat of castigation, persecution and possible torture. The Sufi text reappears as an outlet, its symbols and details serving as the artist’s realist patterns of rapprochement and edification. Metafictional Critical Typologies . Textualizing Social Dissent Dh¯u al-N¯un Ayy¯ub’s text Duct¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım () may not be a wellrecognized precursor for subsequent reconstructions of the real in view of its peripheral site of production. As Iraq of the s was not in a state to draw cultural attention, Ayy¯ub’s Duct¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım might not have reached wide readership outside Iraq. But its metafictional frame and engagement with Zola’s naturalism should grant it a precursor’s position in the history of Arabic metafiction. It demonstrates an early acquaintance with the theory of fiction in its European underpinnings. Combined with the writer’s known Marxist politics, its theorizations for metafiction resonate with dissident politics that belies associations Jam¯al al Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Kit¯ab al-tajalliyy¯at (The Book of Epiphanies; Cairo: D¯ar alMustaqbal al-#Arab¯ı, ). 24



 

between metafiction and capitalist modes of consumerism. It also foreshadows subsequent theorizations for fiction within realistic narratives, like Mahf¯ . uz’s, . but it falls short of Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s mixture of postmodernism and flippant dissent. In Al-Shah. h. ¯adh (, English translation: The Beggar, ),25 for instance, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. embarks on a discussion of the anti-novel and similar experimental forms of expression as tokens of crisis. Partaking of the worldwide discussion of the novel genre, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . metafictional interpolations are almost out of context in comparison with Dhu¯ al-N¯un Ayy¯ub’s questioning of the author’s deployment of representation. In Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Al-Shah. h. ¯adh, the journalist, Mus.t.af¯a, leads a debate with the wealthy lawyer, #Umar, and the political rebel, #Uthm¯an, concerning new expressions and manifestations of change in culture. Mus.t.af¯a, explains: “As an established artist I think it’s an artistic crisis as well, the crisis of our artist who is tired of the subject matter and in quest of something new.” “Why is he tired of the subject matter?” #Uthm¯an asks. “Because whenever he finds a topic, it’s already sullied by overuse.” “But the artist’s job is to impose his own vision on his subject matter and turn it into something new to a certain degree.” “In the era of radical revolutions that’s not enough. Science is the enthroned king now, and the artist finds himself ostracized. No matter how hard he tries to reach and fathom great truths, he is incapacitated by impotence and ignorance. In frustration he turns into a young rebel, or writes the anti-novel or the theatre of the absurd.” (p. )

Although meant to be taken as theoretical opinions expounded by two individuals who complement each other’s attitudes through a shared grounding in revolutionary thought, such views as these receive due substantiation in the matrix of the novel only at a later stage, to integrate into the diegetic structure of the narrative or the story, in a manner that Ayy¯ub has already ensured in his novel. They coalesce at a later stage, however, with another theme that runs through the novel on a profound and subtle level. As rebels who have initially withstood state oppression, their views also suggest some dissatisfaction with conventional rules and attitudes, including these that pertain to literature. The third of the trio, the wealthy lawyer, #Umar, has been a poet, only to develop later a complacent world-view that matches his new social sta25

Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Al-Shah. h. ¯adh (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ). The  edition is used.

   -



tion. But when satiated with wealth and comfort, #Umar begins to suffer from ennui which drives him to escape from society and to impose upon himself a self-styled isolation which becomes the aesthetic equivalent of the artist’s rebellion against social realist mediations of experience. Realist discourse and the reality it mediates are discredited when #Umar is shot. At that precise moment he comes to feel the purity of soul and sobriety of mind that invoke the flow of poetry. In a reference to the poetry that has deserted him for so long, the narrator informs us that: He felt his heart was really pumping, not in a dream; somehow he was coming back to the world. He found himself trying to remember a line of poetry. When had he read it? Who composed it? The line echoed through his consciousness with a stunning clarity: If you really wanted me, then why did you forsake me?

The implication is not hard to follow. Realist conventions and language constructs of the novel are wooden, stale and prosaic means to represent a mundane bourgeois life that lacks both poetry and insight. #Umar, the wealthy lawyer, has reached a state of stupor that, under the impact of his all-embracing ennui, he finds himself almost unwillingly deprived of even the slightest desire to communicate. In other words, communication in its conventional style is equivalent to a life pattern that is also dying. Hence the wound that #Umar receives serves to initiate him into a new life of poetry, devoid of sterility and torpor, albeit in association with retreat or death. . Transference and Transposition: The Textual and the Personal A similar approach to language constructs of reality can be traced in a novel by the Iraqi novelist, Gh¯a"ib Tu . cmah Farm¯an, entitled Zil¯ . al 26 #al¯a al-n¯afidhah (Shadows on a window, ). Although presented as a story of familial relationships, this novel builds within its matrices a metafictional intertext in order to undermine social platitudes as well as the narrative constructs that stand for them. The so-rumored elopement of the newly married Has . ¯ıbah is revealed to the reader through a meeting with her father-in-law, #Abd al-W¯ahid, . who is in a state of extreme trepidation. Experiencing feelings of distress, agony, and, mostly, shame, the father-in-law meditates and reflects on the Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah Farm¯an, Zil¯ . . al #al¯a al-n¯afidhah (Shadows on a window; Beirut: D¯ar ¯ ab, ). al-Ad¯ 26

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 

whole issue. At one point, the novelist makes use of his omniscient power to supervise the whole affair, but then he loosens his hold, leaving the father-in-law overwhelmed by a sense of misery that finds expression in flashbacks and other techniques. More important for our purpose, however, is the overall design: the novel is divided into four parts, each of which involves three different viewpoints. While the first of these in each part mostly represents the omniscient view intermingled with comments or recollections from the characters and descriptions of events, the second is the subjective view of the elder son, Maj¯ıd, which is marked by an early political career of frustrations and disappointments. In this and other accounts Maj¯ıd also reveals his sympathy for the girl and promises to help in the search for her, but we know also from his remarks that Maj¯ıd entertains incestuous passion for his sister-in-law. Maj¯ıd’s view is offset by the third viewpoint in each of the four parts. This third portion is the most metafictional, as it builds on self-conscious interpretations of the girl’s life in a traditional family with divided views on the only woman in the house who is also young and charming, but married to an indifferent artist. The technique in this portion is dramatic. It focuses on the younger brother’s account of her disappearance and pursuit, but is analyzed and discussed as a possible play by the participating actors. The third subdivision in each of the four parts develops a view of the text that searches for a definite version of reality as lived and seen not only by the family involved but also by others, namely the actors, who dare to revise the suggested text. This dramatization of the seemingly real casts doubts on our views of reality, for every actor will come with a different interpretation that belies claims to truth. Moreover, the very act of the husband as an outsider, an artist in search for meanings without a superimposed vision, undermines omniscience as narrative strategy. By transferring the whole issue to other participants in a play, he increases the fragmentation of the plot, the case of the young wife, while engaging the attention of others, and perhaps their attachment to or rejection of the young wife. In other words, this portion in the four parts of the novel is the dynamic metafictional intersection that cannot be set at rest save by a counter occurrence, such as the return of the young wife. Both the father and the elder brother depict the younger brother Sh¯amil as neutral, indifferent, and uncommitted to his family. In his own early account of Has . ¯ıbah’s disappearance and its aftermath, Sh¯amil also describes himself to the unknowing actors as a “stranger to

   -



his family.” However, while intended to be a dramatic reconstruction of the escape and its consequences, the account soon turns into a separate version, which needs to be accepted or refuted. Although lacking in theoretical consistency and progression, Sh¯amil’s account as offered for dramatic representation soon stands as an histoire or story, taking shape as a sujet or discours through a process of collation, assessment and identification. The text in its early shape—offered by Sh¯amil as author—is bound to undergo some modification, regardless of the author’s commitment to his material. At one point, the novelist relies on reality to discredit Sh¯amil’s view, but this assessment is reached through the agency of one of the actors who embarks on a separate investigation in order to appreciate the probable motives behind Sh¯amil’s version. As metafictional discourse, the comments on this version are worth considering, drawing as they do on the material as a possible text susceptible to interpretation and deconstruction. When first offering his idea for dramatic representation, Sh¯amil suggests introducing the story as he sees it, rejecting therefore any formulae that will merely produce stereotypes. He notices that the story contains conflicting elements that trigger a series of problems closely related to the mysterious origin of the newly married girl. Everyone participates in precipitating the situation that forces the girl to run away, but she is no less responsible for resigning to humiliation. As the author, Sh¯amil suggests no godlike authority, asking the actors to feel free to develop the dialogue and action, leaving in place his general outline that holds the entire drama together. The more involved Sh¯amil becomes in the drama, the greater is his authority. Thus, the actors accuse him of wanting total domination over his characters. They force him to retreat into the background from where he can only impose his veto when characters veer away from his overall design. Ironically, his use of this right makes the dramatic reconstruction open-ended, involving further qualifications and revisions. Portrayed in his elder brother’s account as being emotionally unstable, Sh¯amil is prone to contradictions. While criticizing the actors for idealist views of life and people, Sh¯amil finds it difficult to move away from the details he has provided regarding his characters: “They are so printed on my mind as to seem real” (pp. , , –). Earlier he has been forced to change some of his details and opinions, a process, which he admits, has “destroyed his pleasure as creator.” But, this “pleasure as creator” has no basis, since in the final subdivision he contradicts himself again, concluding under pressure from the actors

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that he never “invents or creates but merely garners slices from reality.” Once they acknowledge such a state of affairs, the actors admit that they are “characters searching for an author.” Here, as elsewhere in the dramatic sub-divisions, the text under deconstruction suffers from lack of theoretical consistency. Nevertheless it does conform to Sh¯amil’s early description of life as a “maze” within which it is difficult to maintain clear-cut consistency. This dramatic reconstruction gains some literary meaning, however, when viewed alongside the other text offered piecemeal through the elder brother’s recollections: unrelated meditations and comments written in sheets of paper on numerous occasions with no attempt on the writer’s part to combine them all into a definitive text (p. ). It is not surprising that the elder brother’s desire to write comes to an end at the moment when his father concludes the search with the announcement that he has found the girl. This means of termination may ironically signal a beginning of new complications or disequilibrium, even though the father’s imperious tone is intended to ensure the family’s approval, including his elder son’s. Accordingly the elder son, Maj¯ıd, concludes: “the pen will write no more… I shall tear up all the blank pages” (pp. , ). The written material is therefore presented to us as Maj¯ıd’s verbal construct of reality, implying that complacency and compliance serve as equivalents to equilibrium, itself a means, according to Todorov, of terminating a story.27 As the father’s concluding remark takes the form of order, it signifies, too, the “victory of one reigning language … over the others,” as Bakhtin argues for similar cases.28 However, the father has tracked down the girl, unknowingly, to a mysteriously run brothel, whereas Maj¯ıd is only willing to make some ambiguous reference to the same detail. Further disruption therefore seems probable, triggering more language motivations such as the one that drove the girl to run away in the first place. When asked why she ran away, she answers: “What was there to do when faced with words that plunge into the heart as deeply as a dagger?” (p. ). In this novel language invokes action without necessarily being curtailed by realistic detail. The novel offers keen epistemological insights into the potency of metafiction in directing attention to issues of social complexity. Its T. Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. –. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination, p. . Hereafter citations are within the text. 27

28

   -



dramatic portions, along with the elder brother’s unfinished version, debate and problematize social issues. The obscure origins of the girl, which have been the source of friction in the family, are undermined as a human issue in comparison with both the integrity of the human mind and the impact of customs. When weighed against other issues such as the fear of a scandal, patriarchy is ready to downplay the issue. The metafictional portions are the most dynamic in the text because they build on the girl’s sudden disappearance, an act that triggers action and motivates the narrative, but it is also an invitation to textual or dramatic involvement. The textual outcome, the dramatized parts and the elder brother’s fragmented version, grow in volume to fill in the gap left because of this physical disappearance. Gradually they assume a presence of textual complexity that embodies her feelings, troubles and ordeals. Her return only testifies to her textual presence as both merge into each other, exciting perhaps further comments has it not been for the father’s command to put an end to further speculation. On the other hand, the young wife evolves into a text, to be inscribed, analyzed and mapped out. As long as she is away, she undergoes scrutiny and speculation like the veiled woman. The reference to her obscure origin only intensifies an image of a mysterious selfhood that invites dymystification in the act of inscription or dramatization. She becomes in these textual intrusions into her privacy the locus of narrative, its plot and story, but her actions keep these accounts questionable. As a configuration of many views and comments, the young wife also evolves as an extension of other characters, for every body has incorporated part of his character into the projected image of the young wife. Her return is ironic as it culminates a journey into the world of brothels that should be more disturbing than obscure origins. The return is a textual contrivance to shock, destabilize and question social customs and ways of thought. The metafictional portions exchange place with the returning young wife, as both operate on the real with great subversive power. Playing throughout on transference of meanings between the real and the fictional, and transposing its codes in the process, the novel directs attention to social hypocrisy while inviting free discussion beyond social strictures. In its technique this novel manages to draw attention to the scope of innovation and change in fictional writing. In its own way it illustrates new viewpoints and outlooks, showing how a family story can be too explosive to be dismissed as a social event of frequent recurrence.

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 

. Narrative Fragmentation and Dissident Politics Problematic returns underlie as well #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf ’s novel, Sharq al-Mutawssi.t.29 The protagonist Rajab’s return entails his death, but it also signifies his textual presence beyond the reach of dictatorial and oppressive regimes. It also imposes a design and a form on narrative fragments. While ostensibly introducing its protagonist’s political career through some recollections of his imprisonment, torture, and consequent betrayal of his colleagues, the novel is conceived as a text.30 It comprises Rajab’s written account, worked out according to his view of the novel today. In a letter to his sister he suggests a novel about something shocking, something that demonstrates the plight of those involved in political action. He points out the need to consider the idea from different angles and viewpoints, without imposing on the issue the normal limitations of time and space. The protagonist then proceeds to develop his rejection of chronological narrative as well as his disapproval of omniscient authority (p. ). In fact, he goes on to suggest that his sister, as well as her husband and their children, should begin writing their own views before he embarks on the process of completing the whole. Ironically, his nephew endorses his history teacher’s view that action is what counts nowadays, and not writing, while his brother-in-law is imprisoned for leaking some information about the torture and suffering of political prisoners. But those viewpoints, presented in their disconcerting tones, are the fictional equivalent of democracy in life. As fragmented narratives, they also speak for a disjointed time. They are impossible to take a novelistic shape in times of oppression, for disjointed time offers disjointed narrative. To test these views and bring them into focus, Rajab has to return and participate in real life, only to suffer torture and death. In Sharq al-Mutawassi.t (East of the Mediterranean), Rajab the protagonist proposes a literary theoretical construct, which also involves a clear political message. Thus, without necessarily losing sight of the latter in the context of fictional literature, the text emphasizes the ever widening potential of writing, which is bounded only by the writer’s capacity for achievement and growth. Instead of being driven to extra-

29 #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, Sharq al-Mutawassi.t (East of the Mediterranean; Baghdad: D¯ar al-Rash¯ıd, ). The Beirut, MADN  edition is used. 30 See Sakkut, The Arabic Novel, Vol. , pp. –.

   -



neous theorization characteristic of discrete authorial intrusions, the author manages to make it an intrinsic component of the compositional process. Fragmented narrative in search of focus characterizes Y¯usuf alQa#¯ıd’s novel, Yah. duth f¯ı Mis. r al-¯ana (It is happening in Egypt now, ).31 It is only through search and interrogation of issues and details that we can, as characters and readers, make sense of the absurdity of exploitation. The novel deals with the disappearance of the landlaborer al-Dabish, who is perhaps picked up by the state or by landowners and imprisoned, “disappeared” or killed, not only with no trace or information, but also with a total denial of his existence in the first place. The novelist is involved in both the text and the reality he chooses to interpret. Written in a sub-literary style verging on that of newspaper reportage, the text makes no claims to literary sublimity. The story of the land-laborer who is tortured and dies is a frequent topic in describing rural lands under exploitation. But the text draws attention to the exploiters’ efforts to confiscate the very identity and existence of those exploited, referring to them as “the scum of the earth” at one point and listing them as disreputable escapists at another. In other words, the text has material for the plot of a possible novel. But rather than relegating the metafictional to the status of marginal comments, the novelist gets involved in the reshaping of material, digging here and investigating there, without discrediting the functionality of the text. “Instead of a sensational introduction,” as he terms the opening, he addresses the reader as follows: “From the moment when you encounter this first line until you reach the final words at the end of the last page, a relationship will develop between us, one which involves the creation of a novel about what is happening in Egypt now” (p. ). Here, as in many other paragraphs, the novelist (using his real name, Y¯usuf) adopts a strategy of affirmation, questioning, and deflation. It is the last strategy, which succeeds in deflating and annulling expectations of carefully drawn, planned literary fictions. The author intimates for instance that he intends to get into the novel with no preliminary remarks. On another page, he continues this deflation, saying: “In accordance with the intimations of great novelists, I should point out it is only coincidence that gets me into a meeting with al-Dabish’s Y¯usuf al-Qa#¯ıd, Yah. duth f¯ı Mis. r al-¯ana (It is happening in Egypt now; Cairo: GEBO, ). 31

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 

wife [The land-laborer].” (ibid.) The final pages also build on this deflation. For, while we are reaching the end, “the end is not happy at all… for the tale does not terminate” (p. ). All those formally involved in the search for the laborer tend to disregard his death, turning him into either an escapist or an illusion whose existence cannot be substantiated by association, regardless of the actual existence of children who bear his name as their father and of a wife who claims him as a husband. But, instead of using only deflation as a technique for shocking, undermining and disturbing the reader’s complacency, the novelist builds up moments of tension that run counter to realist conventions of integration, for what is offered is a fragmented text in discontinued spans: “Since you’re sitting there, reading this novel for enjoyment as a way of escaping, as it were, the frustrations of daily life, I should not bother you with any more questions, when I already know that they have no answers either in life or in your mind” (p. ). The last few pages provide us with the novelist’s explanation of his undertaking. He no longer believes in neutrality. He must dissent and eschew complacency and silence, knowing full well that his novel will be criticized for many things. He finds some consolation, he says, in the fact that he only comes upon a loophole in order to express the inner reverberations of his soul. Some will describe him as being “of a bourgeois mentality,” a writer of “superficial” understanding untrained in Georg Lukacs’s poetics, failing therefore to carry the laborer’s death to its logical resolution (p. ).32 To the writer, the purpose of the novel is to destroy dreams and illusions, to unsettle our understanding of the common and the real. Atrocities should be depicted as such, interpreted as no less than what they are. Like #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an Mun¯ıf, the writer believes that the novel must shock. Muhammad Barr¯adah’s Lu#bat al-nisy¯an (The Game of Forgetting, ) is . somewhat different,33 for it is an in-between game between postmodernity and postcoloniality, or as the late Magda M. al-Nowaihi describes it, it is “committed postmodernity.”34 Its fragmented narrative is due to a theoretical or critical frame of mind that conceptualizes at length 32 Reference is to Georg Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ). 33 Muhammad Barr¯ adah, Lu#bat al-nisy¯an (Rabat: D¯ar al-Am¯an, ); English trans. lation: The Game of Forgetting, trans. Issa J. Boullata (Austin, TX: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Austin, Univ. Texas at Austin, ). The Arabic text is used. 34 See Magda M. al-Nowaihi, “Committed Postmodernity: Mohamed Berrada’s The Game of Forgetting,” Critique,  (Fall, ), pp. –.

   -



while there is a need for narrative unfolding. Here the text is biographical, introduced by al-Had¯ı and continued by other participants such as al-Sayyid Tayyib, S¯ı Ibr¯ah¯ım and al-Tayia. As they all belong to . one family, they provide us with a number of viewpoints regarding each position and status, both socially and politically. Biographical or autobiographical in turn when the speaker is concerned, the text is a story without contours, a material that needs organization in order to become a sujet, a discours, or a plot. Al-H¯ad¯ı’s opening alternatives are meant as metafictional, undermining, as it were, the illusion of reality and drawing the reader into a fictional text that aspires—in its capacity as artifact—to interpret relevant issues concerning al-H¯ad¯ı’s family (which is allegedly that of the writer). The chief narrator refers to these openings as being specifically al-H¯ad¯ı’s; they are thus unrelated to the rest which are those of the author, seen or mediated through other people’s viewpoints. It is the chief narrator, however, who poses as a literary critic, providing suggestions, qualifications, comments, or disagreements with the author. Even so, his role is not integrated into the text and fails to endow it with any structural or deconstructive sophistication that might serve to justify its existence. Thus in the first encounter with the chief narrator, the reader is taken back to al-H¯ad¯ı’s account of al-Sayyid Tayyib, . in spite of the expectations he has raised at the beginning relating to al-Tayyib’s inner life which has thus far remained untouched by other . commentators. It is only when the chief narrator draws the reader’s attention to the disparity between himself and the author that the novelist develops some theoretical views regarding the rhetoric of fiction. What appears to the author as raw material undeveloped into art is assigned to the narrator who is tasked with making something out of it. Deflating expectations, the chief narrator admits that his only intention is to impress the reader with his selectivity and subtlety (pp. –). Such reflections are not limited to narrative styles and techniques. The chief narrator also addresses the concept of time, disapproving of the author’s intention to depict time as part of a setting that periodically changes. To the chief narrator, time changes only in consequence of human consciousness as mediated through experience. It is the discovery of this interrelatedness that imposes a sense of newness on the durable or permanent. He continues in a platitudinous manner to the effect that change can be seen through “characters, their attitudes and patterns of behavior, as they experience the impact of time” (p. ).

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 

The conclusion rescues the text from numerous pitfalls, leading the reader—as it were—back to the changing lives of the family circle. However, it has nothing new to offer to the theory of fiction or metafiction. Elaborated as self-conscious theorization, the metafictional element only succeeds in drawing attention to the prospects and failures of this practice when carried out on the basis of theory alone. As a wellestablished critic and intellectual, the author’s mind is too analytic for a narrative that needs the poetic impulse to endow material with life and life with intrigue. . Idealizing the Narratee While self-reflexive in the main, metafictional narratives are not necessarily mere self-conscious exercises. On many occasions the very act of writing is an inscribed action, a take-off in a verbally constructed relationship that blurs the line between language and representation. In Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı’s Dh¯akirat al-jasad (English translation: Memory in the Flesh, ),35 the confessional voice of Kh¯alid is no more enthusiastic than the partner Hay¯ . at or Ahl¯ . am for self-conscious analysis of his role in fictional writing.36 Her rejoinders and comments, on the other hand, infuse into the text a woman’s language that valorizes the text as a gendered debate that cuts across national politics. As an idealized narratee who stands for the loveable woman and the nation,37 she derives enough address from the narrator to buttress the text and substantiate it with her implied or pronounced response. Her rejoinders, on the other hand, act on the addressor as catalysts that involve him in explanations and poetic outpourings. In outcome, the text is a blend of the confessional, the epistolary, and the “historically concrete and living,” to use Bakhtin’s phrase (“Discourse,” Dialogic Imagination, p. ). The text and context exchange places, for Kh¯alid notes that paper is meaningless without some sense or writing: “Some are old, rough scribbles, others blank sheets that have been around for days, awaiting a few words to breathe energy into them and bring them alive” (p. ). The pas35 Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı, Dh¯akirat al-jasad; English translation: Memory in the Flesh, trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih (Cairo: American Univ. Press, ). References are to the translated text unless otherwise indicated. 36 See Ellen Anne Mclarney, “Unlocking the Female in Ahl¯ . am Mostagh¯anam¯ı,” Journal of Arabic Literature, , no.  (), pp. –. 37 See Aida A. Bamia, “Dhakirat al-jasad (The Body’s Memory): A New Outlook on Old Themes,” Research in African Literature, , n.  (Fall, ), pp. –.

   -



sage from speech to writing, from memory to documentation, and from abstraction to inscription plays on the idea of creation as release and authorship as freedom from memory: “Words are all that is needed to take the ferry from the silence of oppressive reminiscence to the thunderous joy of cathartic oblivion” (p. ). But the effort to write down a love story of great sexual, social and political implications is not an easy task despite his pronounced belief that novels are personal narratives in the first place. The theorization is not solid enough, to be sure, and novels “are not in the end… just the letters and greeting cards we write off-season where we get our intimate feelings inscribed to those who take some interest” (p. , slightly revised). Suspected to have been written or revised by a male writer for having so much male voicing, the matrix of the novel soars over these suspicions. As narrative it downplays the male voice despite Kh¯alid’s encompassing presence. Indeed, a careful reading of the novel may refute suspicions of a male partner’s authorship. Kh¯alid’s views of fiction writing are cursorily presented in comparison to the female’s narrative. Hay¯ . at’s or Ahl¯ . am’s narrative belongs to the professional novelist whose view of novel writing builds on Derrida and De Man, especially in matters of translation and creation. Every start is a murder of a precursor, and every new text is a burial of a pretext. Narrative is not an act of retelling or representation, but a jailbreak or resurrection. She says: I need to put some order in my life and to get rid of some of the old furniture. Our spirits need refurbishing just as much as any house we live in and I can’t keep my windows closed on more than one body. (p. )

Writing fiction is maturation, an outgrowth, which could amount to murdering an old self in order to make a new start: The only reason we write novels is to kill off heroes and do away with people whose presence has become burdensome. Every time we write them down we rid ourselves of them to fill up with fresh air. (p. , slightly emended)

In very Derridean terms love in the narratee’s, Hay¯ . at or Ahl¯ . am, viewpoint is never devoid of hatred. There is something venomous in every act of affection, reciprocal care or presentation of gifts, argues Derrida in Counterfeit Money.38 Applying the same notion to translation, there is 38

Jacques Derrida, Given Time: . Counterfeit Money (Chicago and London: Chicago

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love in the very choice of the targeted text, but it is the kind of love that vies for succession rather than subordination. She argues, “in the end we kill only those we have loved. We give them literary immortality as compensation” (pp. –). Memory as the very enclave of emotion, feeling and recollection of every sort is also targeted, for “every successful novel is a kind of crime that we commit against some memory and may be against someone.” She adds, “We carry out a completely silent murder in full view of everyone and only the victim recognizes that the lethal words are intended for him” (p. ). The text itself belies these theoretical pronouncements, but its underlying design manifests some anxiety of authorship. The male’s voice assumes submissive posture throughout, especially when the narratee transfigures into the young enchantress who is also the symbol of the nation like Yac¯ıne’s Nedjma. His responsiveness is underscored as if to highlight the narratee’s creative resourcefulness. The woman’s voice attains release from the framing male narrative, and the latter’s shows of love and adoration are taken for granted as basic to the formation of a body that grows in beauty and rapture despite dire circumstances. Not so is the nation, as the narrator’s musings and disappointments demonstrate. The disparity between the body and the nation in its postindependence stage speaks of the failure of the narrative equation of the two early on in the novel. . Reclaiming the Suppressed Metafiction could be cited as a post-modernist endeavor,39 but its engagement with socio-political and cultural issues brings it to the center of postcolonial referentiality. Although attuned to indirection, its narrative strategies are obliquely entangled in exposure. In the Egyptian Ibr¯ah¯ım As.l¯an’s M¯alik al-Haz¯ . ın (The Heron, ),40 the narrator Y¯usuf al-Najj¯ar develops his narrative as a continued self-interrogation in respect to his way of recollecting and inscribing details. Afraid of repression and imprisonment, he writes down only some details, while overlooking others, concerning students’ demonstrations. He suppresses the threatening look, the frightening gaze, the pointing finger and the Univ. Press, ), pp. –, –, and n. . 39 Along with works already cited, see Catherine Burgass, “Reading against Theory: Mimesis and Metafiction in the Postmodern Novel,” Euresis, – (Bucharest, ), pp. –; and Derek C. Maus, Postmodernism (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, ). 40 Ibr¯ ah¯ım As.l¯an, M¯alik al-Haz¯ın (The Heron, ). The  edition is used.

   -

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menacing pose of the man with glasses who has been trying to end student strikes (p. ). He knows that man “who has been engaged in a heated discussion with a certain student, who has been staring at the student. You remember him but you don’t write this down. You wrote things but you left out others” (p. ). The man with white trimmed hair intimidates students while speaking of the “present circumstances of the country, the occupation, which call upon us to mind our own business” (p. ). The threatening look is there, nevertheless; and a friend is quoted as referring to the man as a security officer (p. ). Belonging to a long succession of existentialists in Camus’s vein, al-Najj¯ar is indeterminate; he doesn’t write down every detail, and doesn’t raise his voice to sing and shout like other demonstrators. “What is it that keeps you so?” (p. ). His inner self knows that he wishes “to write down everything, a book about the river, the boys, the angry youth who revenge themselves on placards and advertisement signs” (p. ). But questioning is only one strategy in metafiction, for the voyeur picks up empty shells of grenades thrown at demonstrators. “The military have been throwing these at the city entrance, but boys pick them up while still smoking and throw them back” (p. ). They carry a U.S. factory sign. One hits the narrator, as if to shock him out of complacency. Postmodernist poetics may explain the snatches and fragments that make up the “indeterminate” and hence “plural” narrative of M¯alik al-Haz¯ . ın,41 but the shells that hit and the self-interrogation that brings omissions back to the text set it again into postcolonial poetics. The metafictional plays on self-reflexivity to retrieve omissions and to fill up gaps that involve the text in a further generation of narrativity. The whole effort of juxtaposition doubling, patching and recollecting is a narrative of replacement and transposition, an indirect inscription of the suppressed. But metafiction can offer more exposure whenever the narrator is attracted to pairing, as in the Moroccan Ahmad al-Mad¯ın¯ı’s Hik¯ . . ayat 42 wahm (A Tale of illusions, ). The tale is designed as a rambling confession to account, in a very oblique and intentionally confusing way, for the disappearance of the teacher for no reason other than using some space on the beach far away from the palace. To be far away is not enough, for people should avoid being in sight. In a one-sentenced narrative in a stream-of-consciousness technique the narrator relies 41 42

Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill & Wang, ), p. . ¯ ab, ). Ahmad al-Mad¯ın¯ı, Hik¯ . . ayat wahm (A Tale of Illusions. Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯



 

on his bewildered memory and its intertextual ramifications to build up a political binary, whereby al-Makhzan, which stands for authority and its repressive apparatus, has it censors and police, whereas the writer has his sack of papers and a tape that records his life and the careers of others who have been “disappeared” (p. ). There is an underlying warning that the tape and the papers may fall into “their hands,” i.e., al-Makhzan, and instead of an extant record there will be “a speech attack,” as equivalent to a heart attack (pp. –) in reference to murder and repression of opposition. The tape, unfolding as narrative, contains information about people who are “massgraved” or “disappeared” (pp. , ). While scattering these bits of information in line with a postmodernist recognition of fragmentation and disruption as the belying underpinnings of the present, there is a body politics that exposes patterns of oppression in the modern postcolonial state. The metafictional eludes direction by design. It is left for the omniscient narrator to patch pieces together, and for the reader to respond according to “readerresponse theories” (p. ). The author never assumes a solid and sound position, for he is paranoid, asking readers to take care of these gaps (p. ). He knows that his safety is in jeopardy and that to mention deaths and disappearances could entail his death, too (p. ). Writing is dangerous in the postcolonial state, and discontinuity and fragmented narrative are Ahmad al-Mad¯ın¯ı’s strategies in Hik¯ . . ayat wahm to escape censorship. Ahmad al-Mad¯ın¯ı’s narrative has his early novel Al-Jan¯azah (The . Funeral) as intertext. This narrative is no less fragmented and involutedly rambling, as it attempts to see into the outcome of repression, its murders and deaths. The intertextual element is underscored as a strategy of diversion. As censorship can easily detect the direct and the plain, strategies of fragmentation, disruption and evasion are profusely used in this novel. Intertextualizing the writer’s own writing is a strategy of disruption. It certainly betrays great self-consciousness and selfindulgence that verges on authorial vanity, but its reclamation of the suppressed also manifests an overwhelming preoccupation with political issues, a preoccupation that could amount to a lasting obsession. The texts have a genealogy of their own that can escape censorship. But their referentiality is textual with very slight postcolonial signals to the appalling apparatus of the post-independence nation-state. In Linda Hutcheon’s specific explanation of such intertextual strategies, the practice “uses and abuses those intertextual echoes, inscribing their pow-

   -

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erful allusions then subverting that power through irony.” She defines them as postmodernist because of self-reflexivity, as “there is little of the modernist sense of a unique, symbolic, visionary ‘work of art’; there are only texts, already written ones.”43 The Moroccan Ahmad al-Mad¯ın¯ı has another novel, Wardah li-l-waqt . al-Maghrib¯ı (A Rose for the Moroccan time),44 which defends this writing as the most efficient in tackling the sensitive and the unsaid beyond the reach of the photographic novel. He, as the narrator-protagonist, says: “I am unconcerned with acquainting you with past and present happenings, or wrapping you with suspense and waiting, so as to grant me a certain talent, or the talents which were used and abused, for you can find these in the writings of modern practitioners.” He adds that these “have a camera-eye, and enjoy narrating and patching mechanically to show how extra-realistic they are, and to conceal their impotence to say the truth.” . Embodying Abstractions Writers may resort to other metafictional techniques as strategies of indirection. Abstractions could be embodied, and even sleep could come out on its own as a personalized presence with a repository of dreams and secrets. The Jordanian Mu"nis al-Razz¯az offers his Sultan al-Nawm wa Zarq¯a" al-Yam¯amah (The Sultan of sleep and the legendary Zarq¯a" al-Yam¯amah [Who Can See from Far Away], ) as an exercise in writing.45 The novel plays on the common usage of the phrase “the sultan of sleep” in reference to its irresistible hold on the human. It is personified throughout the narrative, with its own intrigues and control of dreams and secrets. The narrative begins with the author who is in search for a topic in a world in which stagnation and sleep reign supreme. He is no exception: “I found myself gnawing curiosity, after I had been gnawed by ennui, discovering that my emptiness was filled with the juice of surprise after meeting the ‘well of secrets.’” Making fun of Romanticization and literary stylization, he adds: “My imagination, which has been dry and drained, is rich now with woods 43

Linda Hutcheon, “The Pastime of Past Time,” p. . Ahmad al-Mad¯ın¯ı, Wardah li-l-waqt al-Maghrib¯ı (A Rose for the Moroccan time; . Beirut: D¯ar al-Kalimah, ), p. . 45 Mu"nis al-Razz¯ az, Sultan al-Nawm wa-Zarq¯a" al-Yam¯amah (The Sultan of sleep and the legendary Zarq¯a" al-Yam¯amah [Who Can See from Far Away] (Amman: MADN, ). 44

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 

of the sensational. Nay, my fancy which was numb for years, yawning and sleepy, is stunned and shocked with surprise” (p. ). Sleep itself assumes a voice and the text unfolds as secrets that relate to media fabrications and governmental politics. The author’s own voice steps in to relate scenes of torture and imprisonment in the postcolonial Arab state (p. ). Censors appear, too, represented by a certain Sarh¯ . an who is annoyed by “M.,” in reference to the author’s initial. Sarh¯ . an takes pride in “watching all of them [writers] while they are unaware” (p. ). But surveillance is not enough, for censorship is only a substitute for genocide, murder and elimination. “I carry an authorized gun, and so I can put an end to their lives,” says Sarh¯ . an (p. ). Sarh¯ . an is not a unique presence in postcolonial fiction, for he is the heir to many including Gh¯alib Halasa’s officer in al-Su’¯al (The Question) which I have already discussed. . Building up Sites of Selfhood The saving edge in postmodernist narratives of fragmentation and self-conscious strategies lies in the effort to build up a verbally constructed selfhood, as retained or recalled from among disjointed times, bewildering realities and/or blurred histories. Metafictional strategies could include the speaker’s “strong narrative voice,” which, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, is used to assert a “selfhood in a typically postmodern and paradoxical way.”46 Such is the case in al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı’s Sha.th. al-mad¯ınah. The novel is monologic, for it records the speaker’s feelings, recollections and fears upon visiting a monstrous city that, to his shocked and bewildered sensibility, changes shapes and directions. The narrator’s subdued survey of his shocking encounter in a postmodernist city is not a smooth monologue, however, for it is also interspersed with questions, trite comments and hallucinations. Notwithstanding his brief alliance with the African against market economy and its politics, the narrative is no less postmodernist for being one of disconcertion and, conversely, longing for his homeland. Two other metafictional practices may be worth mentioning. Both Muhsin al-M¯usaw¯ı’s Awt¯ar al-Qas. ab (Reed strings, )47—as noticed . by the Iraqi critic Fadil . Th¯amir,48—and Sabiha Khmir’s Waiting have 46

Linda Hutcheon’s words, “The Pastime of Past Time,’” p. . Muhsin al-M¯usaw¯ı’s Awt¯ar al-Qas. ab (Reed strings; Baghdad: D¯ar al-Ma#rifah, . ). 48 Fadil Th¯ amir, Jar¯ıdat Al-Q¯adisiyyah, , April . . 47

   -



a postmodernist ambivalence while ostensibly building up a colonial referentiality. Both are involved in a problematized search for meaning in respect to “the nature of identity and subjectivity; the question of reference and representation, the intertextual nature of the past; the ideological implications of writing about history; narrative emplotting; and the status of historical documents,” which Linda Hutcheon assoal-M¯usaw¯ı’s Awt¯ar ciates with historiographic metafiction.49 In Muhsin . al-Qas. ab (Reed strings) love story of the non-Muslim Salm¯a in the marsh areas of south Iraq incorporates conflicts that pertain to religion, patriarchy and colonialism. The Shaykh’s son is involved in this love at a time when the father leads the revolt against the British. Undermining patriarchy and tradition, the love affair is also a delicate test of anticolonialism, for is it possible to forsake distinctions and, ultimately, give up patriarchy for a love affair? The novel is not a straightforward narrative, for its embeddings are many, and its use of lore and historical detail blend with its dense account of habitation and locale. Restarted back in history, in its Sumerian context, life in the marshes is both a present and a past. The narrative captures the past through extensive footnoting and embedded Sumerian poetry. The immediate history of the British colonialist presence is traced as a priority in the preoccupations of the Shaykh who is the protagonist’s father. On the other hand, there are elements that are beyond the reach of time. The marshes are as boundless, vast and dark with their thickets of reeds as in old times, and the practices of magicians continue as if life is the same since Sumer. These are not the only markers that distinguish the text and its belonging. The love affair derives its potential from the locale, too. The young Salm¯a and her community are the indigenous population in these marsh areas. Their mutual love and affection cut across religious divisions but build on a history of identifications. For the father, the fight against the British should relegate every other preoccupation to the background. Full devotion to the cause of the struggle comes foremost, a belief which is shared by the community at large, but debated and disputed by the protagonist who thinks that there is no separation as such. To him, love no less indicates commitment and belonging, as the fight against ethnic and religious segregation and discrimination should go hand in hand with struggle against the British. His personal beliefs do not necessar-

49

Linda Hutcheon, “‘The Pastime of the Past Time,’” p. .



 

ily bring him enough comfort, for he feels the dilemma, its acute and cutting edge. When captured by the British as the leader of the insurrection, the father’s gaze at the son is a combination of disappointment at the son’s lack of militancy and annoyance at being captured and humiliated by the British. The liminal space of the look, the gaze, and the site of arrest stamps al-M¯usaw¯ı’s Awt¯ar al-Qas. ab with ambivalence rather than affirmation. Even its corpus of annotation and its convergence of voices and documents belie its anti-colonial drive, which gathers momentum in the last scenes. In retrospect, a reader might agree with Linda Hutcheon’s analysis of historiographic metafiction, which “often points to this process [foregrounding difference between events and facts] by using paratextual conventions of historiography (especially footnotes) to both inscribe and undermine the authority and objectivity of historical sources and explanations.”50 Sabiha Khmir’s Waiting is ostensibly a recreation of a past detail in the anti-colonial struggle. The narrative is the protagonist’s reconstruction of a past when her father has been a leader in the struggle against the French in Tunisia. But, fragments could hardly develop liberation or liberating narrative, for the narrator is busy with her metafictional advances, which make up a great portion of the narrative. “I will tell you a story and when I end, another one will start. And so every end is a start and every start is an end” (p. ). The narrator Amina is enmeshed in postmodernist poetics, for foretasting occupies the narrative, and we listen more to intentions than delineations: “I will tell you what I have witnessed, but the story does not start with me nor does it end after me” (p. ). The narrative grows as an attempt to escape a certain maze, a web of fact and fiction, for even the rue which is named after her father #Abd al-Salam gradually loses its name, and the recollection of the old muj¯ahid¯ın (fighters) gradually fades like the placard itself that carries the name of the rue, leaving Amina in a shell of recollections from which she attempts to escape: For a moment a feeling of hope overcame me as if it seemed possible to sneak out of this body, this prison, and go somewhere where I could be. Nobody would notice and everything could work out … It always felt strange living in this body of mine, anyway. In fact, the real me was not living, it was most of the time over my left shoulder, watching closely. (p. )

50

Ibid., p. .

   -



While viewing and reviewing the site of her narrative, the old house of memory, the road, and the whole quarter, the protagonist is also conscious of her body, as if it were the locus for every gaze and whisper. Her body becomes no less inhabited than her narrative space, and both interchange and exchange places, for her body “was inhabited by all sorts of people, ancient, old and young and by all sorts of beasts, creeping, crawling, flying, swimming beasts” (p. ). What the attempt to escape the body amounts to is a theoretical rehearsal of postmodern poetics where no serious attempt is made to engage tradition, belief, or the colonial past. The scattered mention of the anti-colonial struggle could have merged into a substantial reading of the very referentiality of the text (pp. –), but Sabiha Khmir is more drawn to metafictionality as a short-lived exercise. Self-conscious engagement with history in its colonial referentiality demands a good grasp of both history and the art. Excessive indulgence in virtuosity may lead the text, however, into further postmodernism, as the case is in Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at.’s refined literary works. Not necessarily intent on refuting Bakhtin’s emphasis on the novel as “the one least susceptible to aestheticism … to a purely formalistic playing about with words” (“Discourse,” The Dialogic Imagination, p. ), the Egyptian novelist Idw¯ar al-Kharr¯at. never tires of verbal virtuosity that resists representation. His speaking persons fuse into narrativity as practice and theory. In R¯amah wa-al-tinn¯ın, as in his other works, Mikh¯a’¯ıl elevates every detail to a refined literary language that reflects on the protagonist’s view of things including his self-image. He poses as no less refined than the language he uses, a sense that enables him to relate to tradition as literature beyond religious imposition. Literary transference occurs while the protagonist improves on the written discourse with intentional virtuosity. With this background and empowered as such, Mikh¯a’¯ıl can delve into experimentalism with gusto, while simultaneously acting as the voyeur and the male commander of the whole scene where women bodies assume meaning and presence in the light of his desires. Mikh¯a’¯ıl’s discourse is not exclusive, however. There are so many dialogues and gaps that invite further dialogization. To Bakhtin, however, a “particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance” (p. ). Yet, narrators could well identify with the author whenever their voice integrates in a number of motifs, images and verbal patterns that recur in an author’s whole output. Certainly, al-Kharr¯at.’s narrativity invites textual opposition whenever a voice is divided in two, an



 

inner and outer, but recurrence of patterns also betrays “a purely formulistic playing about with words,” which Bakhtin excludes from the novel as genre (“Discourse,” The Dialogic Imagination, p, ). The saving formula provided by Bakhtin for works of greater stylistic virtuosity is well couched among his dialogisms that leave enough space for the reader to participate “in acceptance, rejection, or mere hesitancy.” Thus, writes Bakhtin, When an aesthete undertakes to write a novel, his aestheticism is not revealed in the novel’s formal construction, but exclusively in the fact that in the novel there is represented a speaking person who happens to be an ideologue for aestheticism, who exposes convictions that are then subjected in the novel to context (ibid.).

Indulgence in metafictional practice may amount to a “self-pleasuring” exercise. In Arabic literature, however, and in context of its broad prospects and scope between communicative discourse and virtual literariness, there is enough space to accommodate literary indulgence as a traditional practice not necessarily tied to European sites of exhaustion. The Tunisian Sal¯ . ah. al-D¯ın Buj¯ah’s Al-Nakhkh¯as (The Slaver) can be cited as an example of this metafictional practice within the domains of an indigenous literary culture.51 What saves the novel from a “Western” sense of exhaustion is its place in a literary tradition, which goes back to the author’s Tunisian heritage in al-Qayraw¯an. The pivotal point in the narrative is a manuscript that draws the attention of others while ensuring its owner’s attachment and care. The manuscript reminds the reader of the Tunisian erotica tradition and its like, especially the work of both Shaykh #Umar Ibn Muhammad al-Nafz¯aw¯ı, Al-Rawd. al-#A.tir f¯ı . nuzhat al-kh¯a.tir, translated by Richard Burton as The Perfumed Garden,52 and Shih¯ab al-D¯ın Ahmad al-Tif¯ash¯ı (d. /), Nuzhat al-alb¯ab f¯ı m¯a. l¯a-y¯ujad f¯ı kit¯ab. Between the text and his playful exploits, the author creates an intersect of reflections, as both the journey and the manuscript reflect on each other in what emerges as a metafictional text in which the author appears under his own name Sal¯ . ah. al-D¯ın Buj¯ah. The writer also picks on nakhkh¯as; a word that has many connotations in Arabic, for the title could mean a slaver, a writer, and a defender of people. He may be somebody who “stands for people against despoSal¯ . ah. al-D¯ın Buj¯ah, Al-Nakhkh¯as (The Slaver; Tunis: D¯ar Al-Jan¯ub, n. d. ?). #Umar Ibn Muhammad al-Nafz¯aw¯ı, Al-Rawd. al-#A.tir f¯ı nuzhat al-kh¯a.tir (English . translation: The Perfumed Garden); trans. Richard Burton (Secaucus, N.J.: Castle Books, ). 51

52

   -



tism” (p ), but he could be a person who stretches “the claws of his imagination to people and things” (p. ). The writer exchanges roles with the nakhkh¯as in a cruiser on its way to Italy where he plays on the meaning of the word as exemplified in his different roles in that cruiser. Faithful to a tradition of literary culture and pleasurable life of wine, food and sex, the writer produces a metafictional text, pure and simple, free from any claim to representation. It is another understanding of literature as a pleasurable experience, divorced from theoretical or, for this matter, socio-political concerns. Its intertextuality, reference to other manuscripts and to the craft of engravers and illustrators, makes no claims other than its celebration of embellished and profusely decorated manuscripts within a tradition that has been alive once in Muslim Spain and the Arab West. Studied as a whole, metafictional discourse in Arabic fiction may be regarded as a critical endeavor that should not be overlooked in any assessment of modern Arabic fictional criticism, nor should it be seen as irrelevant to the mainstream drive in postcolonial fiction. In an attempt to assess its evolution and growth, we may identify the early efforts by T¯ah¯a Husayn, Tawf¯ıq al-Hak . . ¯ım and Ayy¯ub as indicative of a restless search for meaningful channels through which experience can be mediated, without specific tackling of its ways of emanation. The questions raised regarding history and fiction, conventions and reality, illusion and the text, recur in Arabic metafictional writings with great frequency. Aside from such preoccupations, however, the novelist also seems inclined to leave occasional imprints in his/her text relating to the strategy of writing. In both enterprises, metafictional writing is inexorably woven into the entire developmental fabric of fiction and criticism. Its achievement as literature depends on its incorporation as an integral and readable part of the text, rather than as marginal comments irrelevant to the organic life of the novel and its transgeneric excursions. Its merit and significance will continue to be seen in relation to the novelist’s position as an artist in search of a resolution to impending detriments to the novel as a genre at crossroads. On the other hand, to speak of metafiction only in postmodernist terms of discontinuity and fragmentation is to miss the whole point, for its very recurrence signals a search, not a terminus.


  ¯ Z’S SCHEHERAZADE’S GIFTS: MAHF . U . NARRATIVE ¯ I¯ ALF LAYLAH STRATEGIES IN LAYAL

It may sound odd to include such an extensive discussion of Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (English translation: Arabian Nights and Days) in a book on postcolonial fiction.1 The work is a reconstruction of Scheherazade’s tales whereby Scheherazade regains control of authority and participates with other beneficial powers in enforcing justice. The objection to devote a chapter to this work can be raised also against other works of magic realism or works that vie for a reconstruction of a native tradition. It is no longer enough to theorize about the indigenous without delving into its matrix, for only a close reading of the native tradition can contribute to its understanding. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . thorough acquaintance with The Thousand and One Nights enables him not only to convey the atmosphere and the properties of the tales, but also to reconstruct them in such a way as to involve the morbid imperious Sultan in action, whereby he is forced to admit that he is no more than a “poor man,” inadequate as both a husband and a king (p. ). But Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . reconstruction of Scheherazade’s tales is not confined to the framing tale. Enchassement as a combination of embedding, inclusion and interwoven narration here is so intricate that the other tales partake from, as well as influence, the main story. Through juxtaposition, duplication, parallelism, coordination, subordination, intertextuality, gradation, embeddings and distortion, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. has recreated the tales in order to regroup the socio-political morals of the original, providing them with a contemporaneous drive, which is not hard to notice. The fantastic with its “instrumental” and supernatural properties, as explained by Todorov,2 is central to Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . narrative strategies. Set within the socio-religious context of the original, the fantastic works with no less force, despite the fact that Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . utilization of its properties tends always to stress what the narrator’s 1 Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ; ; English translation: Arabian Nights and Days, ). Citations are from the Arabic text. 2 T. Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. –.



 

alter-ego, the madman #Abdullah for instance, tells the king to his face, “the ruler should maintain justice from the beginning so the #Ifrits won’t intrude into our lives” (p. ). In this as in other authorial intrusions and narrative strategies Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. has Scheherazade avenged, not only as woman and wife, but also as a faithful follower of a Sufi tradition represented here by Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı and his Sufi teachings which happen to enclose a large portion of Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . thought, as this chapter proposes to show. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. makes extensive use of Sufism, not only as nonfundamentalist position, but also as a strategy to decenter the secular discourse of the nation state, its monopoly of fact and fiction to undermine opposition. While duplicating his early Sufi figures, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. is rather keen in Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah on counteracting discursive manipulation in essentialist and unitary discourses. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . text deserves special attention, not only because of its intense engagement with the original Thousand and One Nights, the recognition of its place in popular heritage, but also because of a postcolonial drive. It contributes to postcolonial poetics, as it decenters the novel as a “bourgeois epic,” and calls for new theorizations that re-place or relocate narrative in some Asian-African nativity. At the same time, it covertly manipulates traditional lore to undermine a neo-patriarchy presided over by another unredeemed Shahrayar. Through situational and verbal irony, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. builds his main narrative strategy, whereby language fluctuates between solemnity and resignation.3 The opening chapters resonate with this grandeur and magnificence in line with Shahrayar’s self-assurance and imperiousness. Abstract idealism enables him to speak with authority and power of the nature of the state and the need for reform and achievement. Upon passing through the thousand and one nights, as symbolic of unlimited time, listening to tales of many shades and meanings, he is no longer the same. The narrative itself resumes its flow in a language of dialogic implications, free from arrogance and unitary accentuation, for Shahrayar undergoes metamorphosis. Listening implies change. In textual terms, Shahrayar of the opening pages only condescends to accept Scheherazade as “our wife,” a condescension that brings about cheerfulness to all, except Scheherazade and Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı. To her this 3 For narratology and narrative terminology, see Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative; and Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, ).

’ 



will not wipe out the crimes committed against innocent women, a fact, which along with others makes her “miserable” (p. ). Her amateurish feminist caution springs from her understanding, as a waz¯ır’s daughter, of power politics, as marriage entails empowering, not misusing or murdering, her like the rest. This position comforts her, to be sure, has it not been for the past that incriminated the Sultan in her eyes. Her sympathy for the lost and murdered falls within this stage of amateurish feminism, too. The Sufi Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı, on the other hand, warns the community not to trust reason and logic in the context of mixed agendas, for the Sufi Shaykh sees through power relations as centered in interest and greed that ultimately target women’s bodies for conquest. The Sultan’s decision can change, and even if not, there is no reason to trust the apparent logic of things. These reservations constitute two main deviations from the original. The original builds on the strategy of cancellation and refutation. Not all women are adulterous, and not all men are unfaithful or morose, and that life has a bit of everything. Distant narrative mirroring does its job of juxtaposition, and each mirror may provide a different image to offset an early one. Change overtakes the Sultan at the end, but in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı, the Sultan has already made a decision to be married to Scheherazade, for he has passed through a process of listening which transfigures him and involves him in the affairs of the state. Yet Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . deviations are more powerful because they are meant to perpetuate the narrative further in issues of gender and class lest it degenerate into monotony and stagnation. Bypassing the first stage, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . narrative is no longer concerned with appeasing the Sultan’s anger, for the latter should be as active as the H¯ar¯un of the original. The Sultan’s restlessness has already been overwhelmed, his anger appeased by Scheherazade’s “lawful magic, opening worlds that call for meditation” (p. ). The Shaykh’s reservations, his distrust of appearances, overshadow the joyous mood at the Amirs’ Coffeehouse, and raise questions regarding hegemony in its changing power relations. They also keep the reader alert whenever the Sultan asks for a meeting, studies a development or listens to a confession. Hence, when calling upon Noureddin and Dunyazad to attend, Scheherazade comments, “I am in fear for both Dunyazad and myself, too. No safety in the company of a bloodthirsty murderer. The worst that man can be infected with is the delusion that he is a god” (p. ). While hinting at political despotism, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . discourse lays emphasis as well on unpredictability and



 

moodiness, two aspects that constantly involve the narrative in disequilibrium, setting it for all possible disruptions and paving the way for further subversion. Scheherazade’s cautionary remark is not a passing one, for the narrative is often marked by rejoinders, precautions and warnings, as these belie any claims for stability and order in patriarchal systems. As a self-styled god endorsed only by hypocrites—as Scheherazade has noticed (p. ), Shahrayar cannot at first believe in supernatural interference. It is only consequent to the confessions of both F¯adil . San#¯ . an the merchant and Jams.ah the police chief regarding the supernatural intrusion into their lives that he partly relents. Hence his minister Dandan notices a “restless look” in his eyes which is quite different from what he “was in the past, sharp, cruel and dull” (p. ). While the intrusion of the supernatural bewilders and subverts business and governmental dealings, Shahrayar is only partly unsettled, asking about #Ifrits (p. ), and searching for answers. Both the questioning note, as well as the wording, indicate a break in the noble, grand rhetoric of Shahrayar, a break that also points to corresponding restlessness in the socio-political system, a fact that the Sultan recognizes when musing upon the madman’s reference to supernatural intrusion as due to injustice (p. ). Further events increase Shahrayar’s bewilderment, driving him to search for ease of mind in nocturnal adventures. Coming upon the madman’s story and, later, Noureddin’s version of his inexplicable affair with Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazad, Shahrayar is forced to relent, “Marvels intruded into my own house, dressed as a dream.” He further adds, “days and nights have taught us to care for marvels and to keep on investigating into the mysterious until reaching a solution” (pp. – ). As the wording demonstrates, Shahrayar’s self-reference still partakes of the grand style or the noble frame of reference. His solution to the lovers’ problem encourages him to roam at night, attending incidentally the duplicate court—the pseudo-kingdom—where Ibr¯ah¯ım the water carrier enacts a trial to attain justice for #Al¯a" al-D¯ın who has been framed and executed due to the jealousy of the police chief, #Adn¯an Shouma. While seeing himself and his corrupt court as in a mirror, Shahrayar distrusts his very reasoning, accepting instead Scheherazade’s line, which is, ironically, that of Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı. Thus, he asserts, “Scheherazade has taught me to believe what man’s logic refutes.” He also adds, “Whenever the night comes I realize how poor I am…” (p. ). Both the supernatural and the real work hand in

’ 



hand to bring about the change of heart in him. Thus the #Ifrit Sanj¯am notices “a pulse of faith” intruding into his bloody world (p. ). While the supernatural triggers action, it also stands as a substitute for the desire to punish corruption and injustice. Hence the madman remarks to Shahrayar’s face, “If the head is right, the rest will be reformed” (p. ). But the other line of the supernatural, the evil, attempts also to subvert the good. Hence, F¯adil . San#¯ . an is enticed by the power of the invisible cap to commit atrocities, refraining only later from further misdoings due to the #Ifrit’s insistence on him to kill the good, mainly the madman and the Shaykh. Insistence rarely leads to compliance, for in Scheherazade’s world there is space for counter-response. F¯adil . San#¯ . an’s later rejection and consequent confession obliquely teach Shahrayar not to indulge in the provisions of authority and power. Ma#r¯uf the cobbler passes through a similar experience, finding himself since the first initiation unable to accept an evil power offered to him by a bad #Ifrit. In the dialogue with the #Ifrit, the cobbler proves decent enough to reject the enticements of authority and supernatural power. Listening to Ma#r¯uf ’s experience with the devil as well as to Sindbad’s repository of aphorisms and wisdom, Shahrayar wakes up from disillusionment, recognizing his failure as a Sultan and as a man, “how petty is this Sultanate. How petty is vanity” (p. ), rejecting therefore the kingdom and asking Scheherazade to care for her son as a new Sultan. As a token of goodwill regarding the future, he reshuffles his cabinet, appointing both Ma#r¯uf and the madman for primary offices. He furthermore realizes that Scheherazade is right in entertaining repugnance for him, a realization which indicates a great deal of self-criticism (pp. –). Unsatisfied by such defeat for Shahrayar, the narrator drives the crownless Sultan into further experiences, leading him to a celestial subterranean kingdom where time stops at a durable moment of heavenly bliss. Diving and submerging into the lake there, he comes out youthful and happy, for the act means a kind of purgation and baptism to initiate him into a world of bliss. A king in a haven of beauty and charm, he could have remained there forever, concluding the narrative with rapture and joy. Being mortal, however, his curiosity leads him to the closed door, like the mendicants of the original. Opening it, he is kicked out back to his kingdom, senile and old, weeping like others who have undergone similar experiences. Thus, he only looms large and received with love upon rejecting authority, for acting as a mortal caught up by curiosity and love for further knowledge, he invites sympathy. His experience con-

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 

cludes on a note of wisdom pronounced by the madman, the police chief or, as he is called now, #Abdull¯ah the Wise. The note only stresses the nature of life as a riddle. Ironically, it is only through affiliation with good supernatural powers that riddles could be straightened up and solved as #Abdull¯ah’s quest indicates. Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . engagement in this supernatural machinery should be seen in context, too. While intertextualizing the text densely, his whole endeavor is no less experimental than many parodic or travestying writings. Making use of the original, mostly through collation of motives, he targets the real through means that allows for extensive interpretations. Open to the fantastic, the text can take as many directions as concomitant with the reader’s predilections. Engagement with the supernatural machinery enables the narrative to reconstruct the real, highlight its relations and expose these in the process. No less than a carnival, the magical distances the real in order to deconstruct it. More than most characters, including Shahrayar himself, the reader is aware of reversals of action and fortune in accordance with the enclosing ironic design. In fact, Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı’s rejoinder upon his follower al-Muhayn¯ı’s trust in reason and logic foreshadows a series of sequences teeming with antagonism, restlessness and conflict. “A pure soul may save a whole nation” (p. ) could mean Scheherazade as well as others, including Jams.ah the police chief upon sealing a pact with the good #Ifrit. While #Ifrits are unleashed, especially at night, to attain their freedom or revenge, psychological restlessness accelerates the narrative as well. Thus, Sindbad disappoints complacent friends at the Amir’s Coffee House when he expresses a desire to travel: “an irresistible call is within me. I said to myself, try your fortune, Sindbad, put yourself in the hands of fate” (p. ). While disapproving of complacency in the Amirs’ Coffee House, Sindbad also appears as the narrator’s surrogate. In the same pronouncement of his, Sindbad uses such words as “naqala” or “transport,” which its original Arabic plays on another meaning, “to copy.” He further expresses his dissatisfaction with an earlier career, deciding to switch to a profession where the unknown leads him to the marvelous. As if speaking for the novelist’s dissatisfaction with vraisemblance, Sindbad says, “I am tired of districts and alleys, tired of moving furniture and carrying things. There is another life where the river meets the sea, and the sea extends into the unknown, the unknown leads to mountains and islands, and life, angels and evils” (pp. –). Such a choice is identical with that of the writer whose new attempts in writing open into the unknown, leaving behind him critical

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realism with its care for urban life and detail. Similitude, or copying from the Arabic “naqala,” gives way to invention, and the Sindbad’s old occupation as naqq¯al or carrier gives way to the new occupation of the adventurous seafarer. This subtle metafictional device explains and justifies the writer’s new approach to writing and his use of the instrumental marvelous of the original. On another level, this punning on the word naqala opens the door for Sufi visions and attitudes, as naqala also entails subservience to life and its practical side. Conversely, invention and adventure go beyond the pragmatic towards the boundless and the vast like the Sufi vision itself. In fact, Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı’s Sufi musings in his praise only stress this renunciation. “Happy is the being whose concern is one, not occupying his heart by what his eyes have seen or what his ears have heard” (p. ). Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . new pursuit in the marvelous releases him from the mundane. Hence Sindbad’s rejoinder stands as Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s, . for “calls from a thousand and one marvels have flowed” (p. ). “Marvels” is meant not only to replace “nights,” but also to suggest a line of action identical with Sindbad’s voyages, where marvels are explicable despite their strangeness and where the human could make use of intelligence, humility, wisdom and patience. Set in parallel with the “nights,” Sindbad’s marvels involve action and discourse, story and moral, releasing Sindbad’s audience from restlessness and fear through constant association with faith in a Godly universe which Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. purposely sets as a foretaste of the celestial kingdom that concludes his Lay¯al¯ı structural pattern. Aside from the allegory of the celestial city and Sindbad’s marvelous tales, the greatest body of moralism and socio-political criticism is centered upon the first six primary narratives where the two narrative units in the middle (dealing with Noureddin and Dunyazad and the #Ifrit and #Ujar the Barber) serve as an interlude, a resting place free from further murders, but liable to complications to entertain bad #Ifrits. In each of these six primary narrative units the fantastic intrudes alternately for providence and for the devil in a series of juxtapositions where lines of action and characterization move either together or in conflict. Although already present, the benevolent agent is either entangled in black magic from which he needs release, as in Qumq¯am’s case, or caught in King Solomon’s sealed bottles waiting for some interference to let him free, as in Sanj¯am’s. Ironically, it is only the human race that could attain such release. Thus, the first two primary narratives follow a paralleled structure where human beings help #Ifrits

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to be free, only to find that these creatures know so much about them that they ask them to choose between retribution and punishment for misdoings or unwelcome servitude. Both human characters, San#an the . merchant in the first tale and Jams.ah in the second, receive harsh criticism as hypocrites, corrupt and evil. Taken by surprise, both the merchant and the police chief are driven to accept these commitments, killing the governor and Shahrayar’s deputy. But before embarking on his mission the merchant asks, “Could you promise safety?” Qumq¯am answers: “I have chosen you for safety.” Qumq¯am’s “safety” partakes of Sufi meditations and riddles, whereas the merchant’s means specifically bodily safety. Thus, the merchant accuses the #Ifrit of deceit, while the latter explains, “this is a public commitment from which no faithful man could excuse himself. But it is a commitment to people with some good intentions as you are” (pp. –). These formulations provoke action through some harping on providential pledge to set things right, a viewpoint which terminates hesitation, opens action and drives the ordained to ask for Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı’s endorsement. The merchant skips the encounter, whereas Jams.ah attends to explain that he has a tale to tell. The Shaykh rejoins, “the decision is enough to realize the meaning and the purpose of the tale” (p. ). Jams.ah takes this as a blessing conditioned by limiting his purpose to the service of God. The merchant misses the blessing, executed therefore with no further complications, for his son’s involvement in politics antedates this incident. Two reservations are made regarding the supernatural, specifically the good: they attend and enroll people who supposedly have less faith in the supernatural, hence Jams.ah the police chief makes fun of F¯adil . San#¯ . an’s #Ifrit until he comes upon his colleague in a sealed bottle (p. ). The merchant, due to his career and nature, is prone to worldliness as in The Thousand and One Nights. Thus, a bite is left on his arm as a reminder, a mark which his wife associates later with a change of character, for he is no longer F¯adil . San#¯ . an the merchant she has already known and slept with (p. ). This change may occur differently in another character. In Jams.ah’s case and soon after his visit to the Shaykh he remarks to himself that old Jams.ah is buried, a new one is born (p. ). As much as this pronouncement accelerates action and enforces primary narrative, it also amounts to holding magical pacts, taken as it were for granted by the omniscient supernatural as a wish that should materialize (p. ). Owing to this wish Jams.ah will pass through a number of transfigurations, as a carrier revenging himself on

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the merchant Ibr¯ah¯ım al-#Att¯ar before embarking on political assassinations including that of the policeman #Adn¯an Shouma. On a second transfiguration, however, he appears to others as a “madman” whose riddles make no sense to the worldly unless accepted within the context of madness. Aside from warnings to him lest he exceed the limits, both Qumq¯am and Sanj¯am leave the land for the madman, #Abdull¯ah, to interfere as their representative. Along with the Shaykh, he stands for the godly in a universe of conflict. Powers of evil are bound therefore to account for such presence. Thus, when evil #Ifrits, Sakhrbout. and Zirmbah¯a, have brought unlawfully together the most charming young man Noureddin and Dunyazad, both evil spirits leave complications open for further growth, enjoying the aftermath regardless of possible scandals and tragedies. Hence such spirits let action unfold, unleashing all in a universe teeming with unlimited possibilities, whereas the narrator lets his own agents interfere. Thus, the male #Ifrit asks, “Any place for more playfulness?” “No, we let things take their own course as they need not our interference.” “But I am afraid …” She cut him short, “From whom my love?” “The good may creep and catch us by surprise…” She says with disdain, “Don’t be pessimistic” (p. ).

Although meant as a playful interlude in the supernatural and the real world presided over by Shahrayar, Noureddin’s and Dunyazad’s tale could reverse the gradual change of heart undergone by the Sultan. In fact Scheherazade is afraid lest “his doubts wake up again” (p. ). It is only due to the power of the tale to express itself that Noureddin finds in confessions to strangers, ironically Shahrayar and his minister in disguise, a release from fear and tension. He says, “The Bewildered releases his secret to strangers” (p. ). The tale provokes Shahrayar to retell it to Scheherazade (p. ), defusing tension and fears by bringing the two together in a lawful marriage. The supernatural may intrude playfully as well whenever events tend to be harsh but dull. When the police surround the vagabonds and the riff-raff in order to imprison them in a desperate search for murderers, the evil #Ifrit appears to #Ujar the Barber in the shape of a prosperous man, explaining to #Ujar that Shahrayar intends to choose his cabinet

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and governmental figures from among these. #Ujar’s greed drives him to mingle with this riff-raff, only to expose himself to further troubles. Playful as it is, this intrusion provides the narrative with motion and endows it with humor. But here as in the other structural units of playfulness, evil spirits love to entangle highly “respectable” individuals in scenes of seduction and orgy. Thus Nur-al-Jalees is no other than the female #Ifrit, posing as the most ravishing lady in a house called Manzil al-lay¯al¯ı alHamr¯ a" (the red nights house) attracting all including Shahrayar and . Dandan the minister, who are held naked in a number of closets. Indeed things could have taken a very disruptive course had it not been for #Abdull¯ah the madman’s intrusion. Pronouncing a few disenchanting words, #Abdull¯ah has returned the woman to her shapeless being. This narrative unit of enticement, seduction and mockery concludes on a note of moralism in which #Abdull¯ah the madman exclaims, “Woe betide people under a shameless Ruler!” (p. ). Such intrusions provide therefore a resolution on the structural level of the story; but on the level of discourse they still point, however, to the possibility of further troubles due to corruption. Whereas good spirits endorse public desires and expectations, evil spirits pick on each individual’s potential and response under a moment of stress. Thus, the two narrative units subsequent to the playful interludes seize on both F¯adil . San#¯ . an’s desperate wish to escape pursuit and Ma#r¯uf the cobbler’s yearning to have his pretensions to possessing magic power materialize. Such moments of desire and despair expose characters as powerless, susceptible to subversion. On the narrative level, life is in limbo. Action joins the intruding fantastic, for Ma#r¯uf calls for such a magical power to find himself raised up in front of his fellow creatures at the coffee-house. The public mood is so receptive to supernatural interference that the news reaches the king who is no less keen on knowing and seeing with his own eyes. Ma#r¯uf calls for magical assistance, ready to apologize in case things work differently. To his amazement he is raised a few meters before being brought down. This moment of achievement is also his point of weakness: either he’ll accept the #Ifrit’s condition to murder the powers of good (namely Shaykh alBalkh¯ı and the madman), or the police will capture him. In line with his character he chooses the latter. Only the crowds defend him, forcing the Sultan to come and appease their anger. Ma#r¯uf is one of them, after all. Such a narrative tension is resolved against the wish of evil spirits.

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The other structural unit, where evil spirits foreground action, concerns F¯adil . San#¯ . an. The narrative suffers from monotony due to the King’s appointment of governors and officers of some good reputation, a gesture that involved little trouble and, for this matter, some stability. The appointment occurs due to the King’s attendance of the pseudo-court. Thus, the #Ifrit Sakhrbout. “expects no deviation in the near future” (p. ), a pronouncement that entails fear of monotony. It is very much the narrator’s own pronouncement in order to revitalize his narrative with action.4 Both spirits come upon F¯adil . San#¯ . an, providing him with an invisible cap that allows him to roam around, doing, as he likes, and never abiding by conscience (p. ). This instrumental marvelous provides the restless forlorn and frustrated youth with new possibilities of joy, leading him to commit atrocities. As for the #Ifrit he encourages the playful and the evil in F¯adil . San#¯ . an’s character, wishing to bring him closer to the real goal of this enticement, mainly to kill Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı’s (p. ). Despite some misdeeds committed under the impact of the invisible cap, F¯adil . San#¯ . an rejects the #Ifrit’s offer, choosing instead to confess and receive his due punishment. His affiliation with the elite and the rabble along with his confessions increase confusion and disruption (p. ), as the omniscient narrative voice explains. But when seen in context, this articulate use of the supernatural is not innocent. The real of the nation-state is deliberately constructed in marvelous terms to allow analysis and criticism. State machinery is made available for the reader and a potential for comparison and contrast is obliquely gathered. Mahf¯ . uz.’s . text resorts to indirection, when the seventies were not congenial to criticism under Sadat. As supernatural agents, the evil #Ifrits’ search to get rid of both the madman and Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı points to the structural significance of these characters. In his early initiation in life and within his metamorphosis, the madman has received his education at al-Balkh¯ı’s hands. Later he is advised to do what serves God. The last advice to him is to “do what he can,” a phrase repeated to him by F¯adil . San#¯ . an as well. Thus, the madman appears later as an obstacle in the face of disruption and evil designs. His character sums up a number of characters in the original tales, as the opposing #Ifrits also represent a larger portion of the evil supernatural elements in the original. But the madman 4

On the nature of “deviation” in general, see “The Poetics of the Novel,” in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan ), esp. p. .

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assumes this role not only in affiliation with providential supernatural powers such as Sanj¯am, but also in relation to the Sufi Shaykh alBalkh¯ı, whose antecedents in the original are too scattered and obscure to make out such a Sufi. Indeed, despite the shadowy character, his presence through discourse is too overwhelming to be overlooked. From the beginning to the end his words and influence permeate the discourse directly or through others’ speech and actions including his foes. His antecedents are in other novels by Mahf¯ . uz. . In this text, Mahf¯ . uz. clings to some sort of Sufism, which, as an attitude, entails criticism of injustice, corruption and despotism. In this text as elsewhere in his late novels, Mahf¯ . uz. no longer believes in the possibility of imposing clearcut alternatives on the semiotic level. It is no coincidence that al-Balkh¯ı is the last to accept story telling as a way to justify action. Shaykh al-Balkh¯ı may be cited as Shahrayar’s opposite insofar as storytelling is concerned. To him discourse is not necessarily identical with the story. Nor is it necessarily enchained within interwoven plots of some consequence. When Jams.ah intends to tell him “a tale” regarding his experience with the #Ifrit, he answers: “I am not interested.” “I have to make a decision which is meaningless without narrating the tale.” “The decision is enough to realize the meaning of the tale.” He concludes, “it is your own tale, and the decision is yours” (p. ).

Such answers are in line with his ambivalence regarding public jubilee upon hearing of Shahrayar’s acceptance of Scheherazade as a wife. In context of Shahrayar’s reaction towards tales and marvels, the Shaykh stands on the opposite side. Upon confession Jams.ah, for instance, tells Shahrayar that he has a marvelous tale to tell, a proposal, which Shahrayar accepts with characteristic enthusiasm (p. ). The Sultan himself becomes a storyteller, repeating to Scheherazade stories of fantasy and adventure (p. ). It is worth noting, however, that all storytellers in Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı, including Jams.ah, F¯adil . San#¯ a n and Nouredin, undergo and meet certain troubles that vary . between mere shock and death. Listening to a tale is no less menacing, for Dunyazad partly blames the tales for her enigmatic experience. “I have fallen captive to your real invisible world, but I don’t want to be offered as its sacrifice” (p. ). Shahrayar himself asks rhetorically once, “Have Scheherazade’s tales addressed me with anything other than the

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address of death?” (p. ). In this as in many other allusions tales appear as more than mere chit chats, involving as they do a series of complications on both the narrative and the representational levels. In a passing reference to Shahrayar’s self-delusion as a god, Scheherazade and, for this matter, the narrator buttresses the basic irony with substantial criticism. The narrator’s voice unsettles any possible confidence in Shahrayar’s imperious world. As a deluded god he is gradually driven out of Scheherazade’s world, which is simultaneously a world of narrative art. As a fallen god he appears in the concluding pages crying for a lost celestial and timeless bliss, telling #Abdull¯ah the madman, now the police chief in a temporal world, “my tears will not disturb order” (p. ). As such, rather than merely dissuading Shahrayar from his imperious bloody designs, the tales work out differently, driving him to undergo change while opening the way for subsequent disruptions and events due to the increasing sense of opposition to corruption and despotism. Thus, Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz. has brought many a tale in a single narrative unit, intensifying the atmosphere of both the real and the fantastic and reshaping motivations to fit into the basic design of his Lay¯al¯ı. Hence, his Shahrayar is the summation of the caliphs and sultans of The Thousand and One Nights. Without depriving them of their colorfulness and occasional sense of justice, he questions their very imperiousness, moodiness and whims through a number of duplicate scenes, disruptive happenings, dialogues and instances of defiance and fortitude. In these as in al-Balkh¯ı’s and al-Warr¯aq’s Sufi discourse, despotism is readdressed and exposed, as it presently exists.


IN LIEU OF CONCLUSION To conclude this book with Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz’s . Lay¯al¯ı is only in line with its overall design, for the reclamation of Scheherazade may stand for the whole postcolonial endeavor in Arabic literature. While involving us as readers in discussions of Western mediations for the Arabic novel as an “awakening genre”—albeit within underlying great, but disrupted tradition—the Scheherazade trope opens up the whole narrative pursuit for further analysis. The “awakening” effort was ignited by collision and attraction whereby the West was actor and opponent, attractive and appalling. Yet, cultural interaction was, and is, a fact, for Arab intellectuals draw on Western culture to revive a present that was castigated, reviled and exposed as a “wasteland.” Although emphasis is laid on individualism, constitution, democracy, freedom and other markers of the European enlightenment, Arabic fiction has been fighting, too, for its own protean self. Experimentation signals some independence from a European narrative tradition. It also signals some release from the enormous impact of the Russian novel. But independence is as hazy as its political connotations in postcolonial life. Every encounter contaminates another, and Arabic narrative, like the rest of Arab life and culture, carries conspicuous attributes and scars for this reason. Scheherazade is reclaimed, but she is no longer the same. Nor is the tale. Preoccupations entail greater experimentation in discursive strategies. To account for contexts of great complexity, textual routes have to be redrawn and matrices have to be mapped out. But rather than following linear growths, Arabic fiction manifests diversity in style and narrativity that cannot be gauged in historical periodizations. The postcolonial is there as a post-dependence referent, but its postcoloniality is interwoven in a past and present, and its postmodernism elicits attraction and repulsion, too. Gender, class, tradition, history, nation and the West are the focus of postcolonial narratives. They are its locus, too, but there are many narrative practices through which issues are in the making, for the act of becoming entails the participation of more than one agent. While some practices take shape in the process, others resist finalization. But, the abundance of experimentation in so many texts

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situates us as readers at a vantage crossing to listen, to see and to understand, but also to participate in further experimentation or in making sense of the whole pursuit of the postcolonial Arabic novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arabic Novels & Relevant Writings #Abd al-Maj¯ıd, Ibr¯ah¯ım. L¯a Ah. ad yan¯am f¯ı al-Iskandariyyah (Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ; English translation: Nobody Sleeps in Alexandria. Trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). Ab¯u Jadrah, Rash¯ıd [Boujedra], Ma#rakat al-zuq¯aq (Struggle in the straits; AlJaz¯a"ir: Al-Mu"assasah al-Wat.aniyyah lil-Kit¯ab, ). Ab¯u Sh¯awar, Rash¯ad. Al-Rab l¯a yastr¯ıh fi al-yawm al-s¯ab# (God never rests on the seventh day; Ladhiqiyyah: D¯ar Hiw¯ . ar, ). Alf laylah wa-laylah, muq¯abalat wa-tas.h. ¯ıh. Shaykh Muhammad Qat.t.ah al. #Adaw¯ı. Facsimile edition (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthann¯a, ?) The Shaykh’s name also appears as Shaykh Muhammad Qit.t.ah /Qut.t.ah al. #Adaw¯ı. Al-#Amar¯ı, Muhammad #Abd al-Sal¯am. Ihbi.t¯u Mis. ra (Disembark in Egypt; . Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ). Al-A#raj, W¯as¯ın¯ı. F¯aj#at al- laylah al-s¯abi#ah: raml al-m¯ayah (Algeria: Al-Mu"ssasah al-Wat.aniyyah lil-Kit¯ab, ) ¯ ur, Radw¯ #Ash¯ . a. Ghirn¯a.tah (Granada; Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ). ¯ ab, ). As.l¯an, Ibr¯ah¯ım. M¯alik al-h. az¯ın (The Heron, ; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ Ayy¯ub, Dh¯u al-N¯un. Al-Dukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım (Baghdad, ). Reprint. Al-A#m¯al alK¯amilah (Baghdad: Mansh¯ur¯at Wiz¯arat al-Thaq¯afah, ). Al-Azd¯ı, Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ab¯u al-Mut.ahhar. Hik¯ . . . ayat Ab¯u al-Q¯asim alBaghd¯ad¯ı (Baghdad: Maktabat al-Muthann¯a, ?). Bakr, Salw¯a. Maq¯am #Atiyyah (#Atiyyah’s shrine; Cairo: D¯ar al-Fikr, ); English translation in The Wiles of Men. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ; Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, ). Barak¯at, Hal . ¯ım. #Awdat al-.t¯a"ir il¯a al-bah. r (); English translation: Days of Dust. Trans. Trevor LeGassick (Wilmette, Ill.: Medina, ) Barak¯at, Hud¯a. Hajar al-d. ah. k: riw¯ayah (London: Riy¯ad. al-Rayyis, ); English . translation: Stone of Laughter, by Hoda Barakat. Trans. Sophie Bennett (New York: Interlink, ). Barak¯at, Sal¯ım. Al-R¯ısh (Cyprus: B¯ıs¯an, ). ———. Fuqah¯a" al-zal¯ . am (Cyprus: B¯ıs¯an, ). Barr¯adah, Muhammad. Lu#bat al-nisy¯an (Rabat: D¯ar al-Am¯an, ); English translation: The Game of Forgetting. Trans. Issa J. Boullata (Austin, Texas: Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Austin, Univ. Texas at Austin, ). Benhadouga, #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd. Al-J¯aziyah wa- al-dar¯awish (Al-Jaziyah and the dervishes; Al-Jaz¯a"ir: Al-Mu"assasah al-Wat.aniyyah lil-Kit¯ab, ).

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¯ Il¯a al-Quds (Returning to Jerusalem; Beirut: Al-Ittih¯ Boullata, Issa J. #A"id . ad Press, ). Buj¯ah, Sal¯ . ah. al-D¯ın. Al-Nakhkh¯as (Slaver; Tunis: D¯ar al-Jan¯ub, n. d. ?). Césaire, Aimé. Tempête, Tempest: based on Skakespeare’s The Tempest: adaptation for a Black Theatre. Trans. Richard Miller (New York: G. Borchardt, ). Al-Dabb¯agh, Gh¯anim. Dajjah f¯ı al-zuq¯aq (Baghdad, ). . Al-Dam¯ır¯ı [al-Dumayri], K¯amil al-D¯ın Muhammad Ibn M¯us¯a. Hay¯ . . at al-h. ayaw¯an al-kubr¯a.  vols. Damm¯aj, Zayd Mu¸t¯ı#. Al-Rah¯ınah (San#¯ . a’: Wiz¯arat al-I#l¯am, ); English translation: The Hostage. Trans. May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley (New York: Interlink Books, ). Darw¯ısh, Usaymah. Shajarat al-h. ubb gh¯abat al-ah. z¯an (The Love tree, the forest of ¯ ab, ). sadness; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ D¯ıb, Muhammad. Man alladh¯ı yadhkur al-bah. r (Qui se souvient de la mer, . ?); English translation: Who remembers the sea. Trans. Louis Tremaine (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, ). Djebar, Assia. Ombre sultane (); English translation: A Sister to Scheherazade. Trans. Dorothy Blair (London: Quartet, ; New York: Interlink Books, ). Farm¯an, Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah. Al-Nakhlah wa-al-j¯ır¯an (The Date-Palm and the neigh. bors; Beirut and Sidon: Al-Maktabah al-#As.riyyah, ). . ¯ ab, ). ———. Zil¯ a l #al¯ a al-n¯ a fidhah (Shadows on a window; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ . ¯ Gh¯anim, Fath. ı. Al-Afy¯al (Cairo: R¯uz al-Y¯usuf, ). Al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Jam¯al. Hik¯ . ay¯at al-mu"assasah (Tales of the institution or foundation; Beirut: D¯ar al-Intish¯ar, ). ———. Sha.th. al-mad¯ınah (Mirage city, or Distant City; Cairo: D¯ar al-Shur¯uq, ). ———. Kit¯ab al-tajall¯ıyy¯at (The Book of epiphanies; Cairo: D¯ar al-Mustaqbal al-#Arab¯ı, ). ———. Khi.ta.t al-Gh¯ı.t¯an¯ı (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mas¯ırah, ). ———. Ith. ¯af al-zam¯an bi-h. ik¯ayat Jalb¯ı al-Sultan (Enriching time with the story of the Sultan’s Jalab¯ı; Damascus: Ittih¯ . ad al-Kutt¯ab al-#Arab, ). Also in AlHi . s. ¯ar min thal¯ath jih¯at: qis. as. (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mustaqbal al-#Arab¯ı, ). ———. Awr¯aq sh¯ab #¯asha mundh¯u alf #¯am (Papers of a young man who lived for a thousand years; Cairo: Maktabat Madb¯ul¯ı, Tab#ah , –?). . ———. Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at (Damascus: Wiz¯arat al-Thaq¯afah, ; Cairo: Madb¯ul¯ı, ); English translation: Zayni Barakat. Trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab (London: Penguin and New York: Viking, ). Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, Im¯ıl. Al-Waq¯a"i# al-ghar¯ıbah f¯ı-ikhtif¯a" Sa# ¯ıd Ab¯ı al-Nah. s al-mutash¯a"il (Jerusalem: Mansh¯ur¯at S¯ . alah. al-D¯ın, ,); English translation: The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, by Emile Habiby. Trans. Salma K. al-Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick (New York: Vantage, . Interlink Books, ). Al-Hak . ¯ım, Tawf¯ıq. #Us. f¯ur min al-sharq (Cairo: Lajnat al-ta"l¯ıf, ); English translation: A Bird from the East. Trans. R. Bayly Winder (Beirut: Khayyat, ). ———. Shahrazad, in Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim, trans. Wil-

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liam M. Hutchins (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ), vol. , pp. –, at p. . ———. #Awdat al-r¯uh. (Cairo: Mat.ba#at al-ragh¯a"ib, ; English translation: Return of the Spirit. Trans. Williams M. Hutchins (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). Al-Hak T¯ . ¯ım, Tawf¯ıq & Husayn, . . ah¯a. Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The Enchanted palace, Cairo, n. d., ). Halas¯a, Gh¯alib. Al-Su’¯al (The Question; Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ). Haykal, Muhammad Husayan. Zaynab (Cairo: Mat.ba#at al-Jar¯ıdah, ); En. ˘ glish translation: Zaynab, trans. John Mohammed Grinsted (London: Darf, ). Himm¯ısh, Ben S¯alim. Majn¯un al-h. ukm (Obsessed by power; London: Riy¯ad. alRayyis, ). Husayn, T¯ . . ah¯a. Ad¯ıb (Cairo: Mat.ba#at al-I#tm¯ad, ) ———. Al-Ayy¯am (Cairo: D¯ar al-Ma#¯arif, ); English translation: An Egyptian Childhood. Translated by E.H. Paxton (London: Routledge, ). The second part (), English translation: A Stream of Days. Trans. by Hilary Wayment (Cairo: Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop, ; Longman’s edition, ). Part three (), English translation: A Passage to France. Trans. Kenneth Cragg (Leiden: E.J. Brill, ). Husayn, T¯ . . ah¯a & al-Hak . ¯ım, Tawf¯ıq. Al-Qas. r al-mash. ¯ur (The Enchanted palace, Cairo, n. d., ?). Ibr¯ah¯ım, Sun#allah. Al-Lajnah (Beirut, new ed., ; Cairo: Mat.bu#¯at al. Q¯ahirah, ); English translation: The Committee. Trans. Mary St. Germain and Charlene Constable (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse Univ. Press, ). Idr¯ıs, Suhayl. Al-Hayy al-Lat¯ın¯ı (The Latin Quarter; Beirut: D¯ar al-#Ilm lil. Mal¯ay¯ın, ). ¯ ab, ). ———. As. ¯abi#un¯a allat¯ı tah. tariq (Our burning fingers; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ¯ ———. Al-Khandaq al-gham¯ıq (The Deep trench; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ab, ) ¯ ab, ); Jabr¯a, Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım. Al-Bah. th #an Wal¯ıd Mas#¯ud (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ English translation: In Search of Walid Masoud, Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, ). ———. S. ur¯akh f¯ı layl .taw¯ıl (A Cry on a long night; Baghdad: ). ¯ Jabr¯a, Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım, and Mun¯ıf, #Abd al-Rahm¯ bi-l¯a-khar¯a"i.t (A . an, #Alam ¯ World without maps; Baghdad: Al-Maktabah al-#Alamiyyah, ). ———. Hubb f¯ı Copenhagen (Love in Copenhagen), in vol. , Mukht¯ar¯at (Selec. tions; Cairo: GEBO, ). ———. Muh¯akamat Muntas. af al-layal (Cairo: GEBO, ); English translation: Trial at Midnight. Trans. Nehad Selaiha (Cairo: Prism Publications, Foreign Cultural Information Dept., ). ¯ ar alKanaf¯an¯ı, Ghass¯an. Rij¯al f¯ı al-shams (Men in the sun, ?); in Al-Ath¯ ¯ k¯amilah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal ı #ah, ); English translation: Men in the Sun. . Trans. by Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Heinemann, ; Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). K¯ateb Yac¯ıne, Nedjma. Translated from the French by Richard Howard (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia-Caraf Books, ).

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Khal¯ıfah, Sahar. Mudhakkir¯at imra"ah ghayr w¯aqi#yyah (Memoirs of unrealistic . ¯ ab, ). woman (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ———. Al-S. ubb¯ar (Jerusalem: Manshu¯ r¯at Galileo, ); English translation: Wild Thorns. Trans. Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea (London: Saqi, ). ¯ ab, ); English Al-Kharr¯at., Idw¯ar. Y¯a Ban¯at Iskandar¯ıyah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ translation: Girls of Alexandria. Trans. Frances Liardet (London: Quartet Books, ). ¯ ab, ); English translation: City of ———. Tur¯abuh¯a za#far¯an (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ Saffron. Trans. Frances Liardet (London: Quartet, ). ¯ ab, n.d.). ———. Al-Zaman al-¯akhar (The Other time; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ¯ ab, ———. R¯amah wa- al-Tinn¯ın (R¯amah and the dragon, ; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ). ¯ ab, ). ———. Hij¯arat B¯ubill¯u (Boubillo stone; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ¯ ———. “Akhir al-sikkah” (The End of the rail, ), in. S¯a# ¯at al-kibriy¯a" (Times ¯ ab, ). for pride/arrogance, ; rpt. Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ———. S¯a# ¯at al-kibriy¯a" (Times for pride/arrogance, ; rpt. Beirut: D¯ar al¯ ab, ). Ad¯ Al-Kharr¯at., Idw¯ar. Yaq¯ın al-#a.tash (The Certainty of thirst; Cairo: Sharqiyy¯at, ). Khmir, Sabiha Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come (London: Quartets Books, ). ¯ ab, ); English Kh¯ur¯ı, Ily¯as. Mamlakat al-ghurab¯a": riw¯ayah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ translation: The Kingdom of Strangers, by Elias Khoury. Trans. Paula Haydar (Fayetteville: Univ. of Arkansas Press, ). Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. from Czech by Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper and Row, ). Al-K¯un¯ı, Ibr¯ah¯ım. Naz¯ıf al-h. ajar (London: Riy¯ad. al-Rayyis, ); English translation: The Bleeding of the Stone. Trans. M. Jayyusi and C. Tingley (New York: Interlink Books, ). ———. W¯aw al-s. ughr¯a (Beirut: MADN, ). Lane, Edward William. The Thousand and One Nights. Ed. Edward Stanley Poole (London: Bickers, ). ¯ ab, Al-Mad¯ın¯ı, Ahmad. Hik¯ . . ayat wahm (A Tale of illusions; Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ). ———. Wardah li-l-waqt al-Maghrib¯ı (A Rose for the Moroccan time; Beirut: D¯ar al-Kalimah, ). Mahf¯ . uz, . Naj¯ıb. Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ; ); English translation: Arabian Nights and Days. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (New York: Doubleday, ); also (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). ———. Malh. amat al-h. ar¯af¯ısh (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The h. ar¯af¯ısh. Trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Doubleday, ). ———. Al-Lis. s. wa- al-kil¯ab (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The Thief and the Dogs. Trans. M.M. Badawi and Trevor LeGassick (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). ———. Al-Shah. h. ¯adh (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: The Beg-

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gar. Trans. Kristin Walker Henry and Nariman Warraki (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). ———. Thartharah fawqa al-N¯ıl (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Adrift on the Nile. Trans. Frances Liardet (New York: Doubleday, ). ———. M¯ıram¯ar (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Miramar. Trans: Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). ———. Al-Q¯ahirah al-jad¯ıdah (Modern Cairo; Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ). ———. Zuq¯aq al-Midaqq (Cairo: Maktabat Mis.r, ); English translation: Midaq Alley. Trans. Trevor LeGassick (London: Heinemann, ; and Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, ). ———. Ibr¯ah¯ım al-K¯atib (Cairo: D¯ar al-Taraqq¯ı, ); English translation: Ibrahim the Writer. Trans. Magdi Wahba (Cairo: GEBO, ). M¯ınah, Hannah. Al-Mas. ¯ab¯ıh. al-zurq (Blue lamps; Beirut: D¯ar al-Fikr al-Jad¯ıd, . ). ———. Al-Shir¯a# wa- al-#¯as. ifah (The Sail and the storm; Beirut: Maktabat Raymond al-Jad¯ıdah, ). ———. Al-Shams f¯ı yawm gh¯a"im (Damascus: Mansh¯ur¯at Wiz¯arat al-Thaq¯afah, ); English translation: Sun on a Cloudy Day. Trans. Bassam Frangieh and Clementina Brown (Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiata Press, ). ¯ ab, ); English Mostag¯anam¯ı, Ahl¯ . am. Dh¯akirat al-jasad (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ translation: Memory in the Flesh. Trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). Mun¯ıf, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an. H¯ . ına tarakn¯a al-jisr (When we left the bridge; Beirut: MADN, ). ———. Al-Ashj¯ar waightiy¯al Marz¯uq (The trees and the assassination of Marz¯uq; Beirut: D¯ar al-#Awdah, ). ———. Sharq al-Mutawassi.t (East of the Mediterranean; Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal . ¯ı#ah, ; Baghdad: D¯ar al-Rash¯ıd, ). ¯ ab, ); English translation: Endings. ———. Al-Nih¯ay¯at (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ Trans. Roger Allen (London: Quartets, ). ¯ Mun¯ıf, #Abd al-Rahm¯ bi-l¯a-khar¯a"i.t (A . an and Jabr¯a, Jabr¯a Ibr¯ah¯ım, #Alam ¯ World without maps; Baghdad: Al-Maktabah al-#Alamiyyah, ). M¯us¯a, Sabr . ¯ı. Fas¯ad al-amkinah (Cairo: Mu"assasat R¯uz al-Y¯usuf, ); English translation: Seeds of Corruption. Trans. Mona N. Mikhail (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ). M¯us¯a, Sal¯amah. Tarbiyat Sal¯amah M¯us¯a (Cairo: Kh¯anj¯ı, ); English translation: The Education of Salama Musa. Trans. L.O. Schuman, (Leiden: Brill, ). Al-M¯usaw¯ı, Muhsin. Awt¯ar al-qas. ab (Reed strings; Baghdad: D¯ar al-Ma#rifah, . ). Nas.rall¯ah, Ibr¯ah¯ım. Bar¯ar¯ı al-h. umm¯a (Beirut: MADN, ); English translation: Prairies of Fever. Trans. May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed (New York: Interlink Books, ). Al-Nu#aym¯ı, Khal¯ıl. Tafr¯ıgh al-K¯a"in (Emptying of being; Cairo: Sharqiyy¯at, ). Al-Qa#¯ıd, Y¯usuf. Al-Harb f¯ı barr Mi¸sr (Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ; English .

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translation: War in the Land of Egypt. Trans. Olive and Lorne Kenny and Christopher Tingley (London: Saqi, ). ———. Yah. duth f¯ı Mis. r al-¯ana (It is happening in Egypt now; Cairo: GEBO, ). ———. Dif¯a# al-bulbul fi al-qafas. (The Defense of the caged bulbul; Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ). ———. Shak¯aw¯a al-Mis. r¯ı al-fas.¯ıh. (The Eloquent Egyptian’s complaints; Beirut: MADN. ); pt. . Nawm al-Aghniy¯a" (Slumber of the rich; Cairo: GEBO, ). Rab¯ı#, Mub¯arak. Burj al-Su#¯ud (The Tower of good fortune; Casablanca: AlNaj¯ah. Press, ). ¯ Rash¯ıd, Fawziyah. Tah. awwul¯at al-f¯aris al-ghar¯ıb f¯ı al-ard. al-#Aribah (The Strange knight’s transformations in the Arabized lands; Beirut: MADN, ). Al-Razz¯az, Mu"nis. Sultan al-nawm wa- Zarq¯a" al-Yam¯amah (The Sultan of sleep and the legendary Zarq¯a" al-Yam¯amah [Who Can See from far away]; Amman: MADN, ). ———. Mudhakkir¯at dainas¯ur (Memoirs of a dinosaur; Beirut: MADN, ). Al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, Naw¯al. Suq¯ut al-Im¯am (Cairo: D¯ar al-Mustaqbal al-#Arab¯ı, ); English translation: The Fall of the Imam, by Nawal El Saadawi. Trans. Sherif Hetata (London: Methuen, ). ¯ ab, ); English translation: The ———. Jann¯at wa-Ibl¯ıs (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ Innocence of the Devil. Trans. Sherif Hetata (Berkeley: Univ. of California, ). ¯ ab, ; English translation: ———. Mudhakkir¯at Tab¯ . ıbah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ Memoirs of a Woman Doctor. Trans. Catherine Cobham (San Francisco: City Lights Books, ). ———. The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (New York: Zed Books, ). ¯ı, Mut.a¯ #. Th¯a"ir muh. tarif (Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal Safad . ¯ı#ah, ). . ———. J¯ıl al-qadar (Beirut: D¯ar al-Tal . ¯ı#ah, ). S¯ Mawsim al-hijrah il¯a al-sham¯al (; Beirut: D¯ar al-#Awdah, . al-Tayyib. . . alih, ); English translation: Season of Migration to the North. Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, ). Al-Sayyid J¯asim, #Az¯ız. Al-Zahr¯u al-shaqqiyy¯u (The Suffering primrose; Cairo: GEBO, ). Al-Sayyid, Mahm¯ Jal¯al Kh¯alid (), in Al-A#m¯al al-k¯amilah (Bagh. ud Ahmed. . dad: D¯ar al-Hurriyah, ). . Al-Sharq¯aw¯ı, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an. Al-Ard. (Cairo, ); English translation: Egyptian Earth. Trans. Desmond Stewart (London: Heinemann, ). ¯ ab, ); English translaAl-Shaykh, Han¯ . an. Misk al-ghaz¯al (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ tion: Women of Sand and Myrrh. Trans. Catherine Cobham (London and New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, ). ———. Hik¯ . ayat Zahrah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Nah¯ar, ); English translation: The Story of Zahra. Trans. Peter Ford (London: Quartet Books, ). Soueif, Ahdaf. The Map of Love (New York: Anchor Books, ). T¯ . ahir, Bah¯a’. Al-Kh¯alah S. afiyyah (); English translation: Aunt Safiyyah. Trans. Barbara Romaine (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). Al-Takarl¯ı, Fu’¯ad. Al-Raj# al-ba#¯ıd (Distant echo; Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, );

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English translation: The Long Way Back. Trans. Catherine Cobham (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). ———. Al-Masarr¯at wa-al-awj¯a# (Damascus: Al-Mad¯a, ). ———. Al-Wajh al-’¯akhar (The Other side, Baghdad, ). Al-Tikr¯ıt¯ı, N¯aj¯ı. Ab¯u Zayd al-Qahram¯an¯ı (Beirut: D¯ar al-Andalus, ). Wat.t.a¯ r, al-T¯ . ahir. #Urs baghl (A Mule’s wedding; Beirut: D¯ar Ibn Rushd, ). Al-Zayy¯at, Lat.¯ıfah. Al-B¯ab al-maft¯uh. (Cairo: Al-Maktabah al-Anglu¯ -Mis.riyyah, ); English translation: The Open Door. Trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: The American Univ. in Cairo Press, ). Zifz¯af, Muhammad. Al-Tha#lab yazhar wa- yakhtaf¯ı (The Fox appears and disap. . pears; Al-D¯ar al-Bayd¯ . a’: Mat.ba#at al-Kit¯ab, ).

Criticism A. In Arabic Ab¯u #Auf, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an. Interview with Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Qad. ¯ay¯a #Arabiyyah,  (), pp. –. Ab¯u Shabakah, Ily¯as. Raw¯abi.t al-fikr bayna al-#Arab wa al-Franjah (Intellectual contacts between the Arabs and the West; Beirut: D¯ar al-Maksh¯uf, ). Adham, Ism¯a#¯ıl. Tawf¯ıq al-Hak¯ . ım. Ed. Sam¯ı al-Kayy¯al¯ı (; Alexandria, ). Am¯ın, Ahmad. Al-S. a#lakah wa-al-futuwwah f¯ı al-Isl¯am (Vagabondage and futuw. wah in Islam; nd print; Cairo, ). Bat.t.¯ı, Ruf¯a’¯ıl. “#Iraq al-mustaqbal,” (Iraq of the Future) Majallat al-kutt¯ab, Vol. , Pt.  (Cairo, Dec. ), pp. –. Daywa"ch¯ı, Sa#¯ıd. Al-Futuwwah f¯ı al-Isl¯am (Baghdad, ). Al-Dulaym¯ı, Naz¯ıhah Jawdat. Nam¯udhaj min Mash¯akil al-Mar"ah al-#Arabiyyah (A Sample from the ordeals of the Arab woman; Tunis: ). Faraj All¯ah, Bahiyyah. “Al-Mar"ah al-#Iraqiyyah,” Al-K¯atib al-Mis. r¯ı (The Egyptian writer), vol. , no.  (April ), pp. –. Fus. ¯ul,  vols. –, . Al- Hak . ¯ım, Tawf¯ıq, “Athw¯ab al-Adab al-#Arab¯ı,” Garbs of Arabic literature, in ¯ ab, ). Fann al-Adab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Ad¯ ¯ı, Yahy¯ Haqq . . a. Fajr al-Qis. s. ah al-Mis. riyyah (Dawn of the Egyptian story; Cairo: GEBO, ). Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. Mudhakkir¯at f¯ı al-siy¯asah al-Mis. riyyah, Vol.  . . (Memoirs of Egyptian politics; Cairo, ). Husayn, T¯ . . ah¯a. Had¯ . ıth al-Arbi#¯a" (Cairo: D¯ar al-Ma#¯arif; Print , n. d.), vol. . Ibn Ab¯ı Diy¯ Ith. ¯af al-zam¯an bi-akhb¯ar mul¯uk T¯unis wa-#ahd al-am¯an . af, Ahmad. . (Tunis: al-Mat.ba#ah al-Rasmiyyah, –). ¯ ab, ). Idris, Sam¯ah. . Al-Muthaqqaf al-#Arab¯ı wa -al-s. ul.tah (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ¯ #Izz al-Dın, Y¯usuf. Al-Riw¯ayah f¯ı al-#Ir¯aq: Ta.tawwuruh¯a wa-athar al-fikr f¯ıh¯a (Cairo: Ma#had al-buh¯ . uth wa-al-dir¯as¯at al-#Arabiyyah, ). Jabr¯a, Jabr¯a I. “Al-Dharwah f¯ı al-riw¯ayah,” Al-Ad¯ıb (Feb. ), pp. –. ———. “Al-Riw¯ayah wa-al-ins¯aniyyah,” Al-Ad¯ıb (Jan. ), pp. –. Jaw¯ad, Mus.t.af¯a. Ed. Kit¯ab al-Futuwwah: Ibn al-Mi#m¯ar (Baghdad: Maktabat alMuthann¯a, ).

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Kas¯uhah, Mur¯ad. Al-Manf¯a al-siy¯as¯ı fi al-riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah: Haydar Haydar, . . . Hannah M¯ınah (Damascus: D¯ar al-Ha . . s.a¯ d, ). Mahm¯ud, M¯ayiz. Tays¯ır Sub¯ul: al-#Arab¯ı al-ghar¯ıb (Amman: D¯ar al-Karmal, ). Mahr¯an, Fawziyyah. La.t¯ıfah al-Zayy¯at (Cairo: Qus.u¯ r al-Thaq¯afah, ). Al-M¯usaw¯ı, Muhsin J¯asim. Al-Nukhbah al-fikriyyah wa-al-inshiq¯aq (Beirut: D¯ar al. ¯ ab, ). Ad¯ ———. Mujtama# alf laylah wa-laylah (Tunis: Markaz al-Nashr al-J¯am#¯ı, ). ———. Infir¯a.t al-#iqd al-muqaddas: Mun#a.taf¯at al-riw¯ayah ba#da Mah. f¯uz. (Cairo: GEBO, ). ———. Sardiyy¯at al-#as. r al-#Arab¯ı al-Isl¯am¯ı al-was.¯ıt (Beirut: al- Markaz al-Thaq¯afi al-#Arab¯ı, ). ¯ ab, ———. Tha"r¯at Shahraz¯ad: fann al-sard al-#Arab¯ı al-h. ad¯ıth (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ). ———. Al-Istishr¯aq f¯ı al-fikr al-#Arab¯ı (Beirut: MADN, ). ¯ ab, ———. Al-Riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah: al-nash"ah wa-al-tah. awwul (Beirut: D¯ar al-Ad¯ ). ———. Adab al-h. arb al- qas. as.¯ı f¯ı al-#Ir¯aq,  vols. (Baghdad: al Thaq¯afiyyah, ). ———. “Hawla mafhumay al-shakhs.iyyah wa-al-but.u¯ lah f¯ı al-riw¯ayah al-#Ara. biyyah al-mu#¯as.irah,” Al-Mawqif al-adab¯ı (Dec. –Jan. ), pp. –. ———. Al-Mawqif al-thawr¯ı f¯ı al-riw¯ayah al-#Arabiyyah al-mu#¯as. irah (Baghdad: Mansh¯ur¯at Wiz¯arat al-I#l¯am, ). Najm, Muhammad Y¯usuf. Al-qis. s. ah f¯ı al-adab al-#Arab¯ı al-had¯ıth f¯ı Lubn¯an (, . ; Beirut: D¯ar al-Thaq¯afah, ). Al-Naqq¯ash, Raj¯a’. Qis. s. at riway¯atayn: dir¯asah naqdiyyah wa-fikriyyah li-riw¯ayat Dh¯akirat al-jasad wa-riw¯ayat Wal¯ımah li-#ash¯ab al-bah. r (Cairo: D¯ar al-Hil¯al, ). Qalam¯aw¯ı, Suhayr. Alf laylah wa-laylah (Cairo: ; D¯ar al-Ma#¯arif, ). Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı, Wid¯ad. Ins. ¯af al-mar"ah (Cairo, ; Damascus: Tl¯ . as, ). Al- S¯amir, Fays.al. Thawrat al-zanj (The Black Slave revolt, ). Al-Sayyid J¯asim, #Az¯ız. “Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim: #Adad Kh¯as.s.,” A Special issue on his writings, Al-Aql¯am, July , no. . Al-Shib¯ıb¯ı, Muhammad B¯aqir. “Editorial.” Al-Fur¯at, Najaf, Iraq,  Aug. . Al-Siy¯asah al- usb¯u#iyyah, May , . Al-T¯ajir, Jack. Harakat al-tarjamah bi-mis. r f¯ı al-qarn al-t¯asi# #Ashar (The move. ment of translation in Egypt in the nineteenth century; Mis.r: D¯ar alMa#¯arif,). Taym¯ur, Mahm¯ . ud. Dir¯as¯at fi al-Qis. s. ah wa-al-masrah. (Cairo, n. p., n. d). ———. “Al-Qis.s.as. f¯ı Adab al-#Arab,” Al-Ad¯ıb (Cairo, ). ———. Ittij¯ah¯at al-adab al-#Arab¯ı f¯ı al-sin¯ın al-m¯a"ah al-akh¯ırah (Cairo:Maktabat al¯ ab,). Ad¯ Th¯amir, Fadil. . Review of Awt¯ar al-qas. ab. Jar¯ıdat Al-Q¯adisiyyah,  (Baghdad, April ). Al-Tur¯ath al-sha#b¯ı, no. , . Zayt¯un¯ı, Lat.¯ıf. Harakat al-tarjamah f¯ı #as. r al-Nahd. ah (The translation movement . during the Nahd. ah Beirut: D¯ar al-Nah¯ar, ).

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INDEX #Abd al-Maj¯ıd, Ibr¯ah¯ım: No One Sleeps in Alexandria, ; ironic sites, –; laughter vs. hierarchy, –. #Abd al-N¯as.ir, Jam¯al: recollected, . #Abd al-Qudd¯us, Ihs¯ . an: . #Abd al-Sab¯ . . . ur, Sal¯ . ah: #Abduh, Muhammad: the Egyptian . enlightened Shaykh, ; argument for a modern Islam, ; Islam and the West, ; women emancipation, . #Abduh, T¯ . anius: translating sensational novels, . Ab¯u Jadrah [Boujedra], Rash¯ıd: Struggle in the straits, –; postmodernist poetics in, ; trope of the strait, ; questioning history, ; vs. colonialist platitudes, . Ab¯u al-Sa#¯ud, Fakhr¯ı: in support of The Thousand and One Nights, . Ab¯u Shabakah, Ily¯as: on translations and creativity, ; Arabs and the West, . Ab¯u Sh¯awar, Rash¯ad: God never sleeps on the seventh day, a novella, . ¯ ab: –; editorial, , Al-Ad¯ –. al-#Adaw¯ı, Shaykh Muhammad Q: . proof-reading the B¯ul¯aq edition, ; as a scholar, , . Adham, I: Orientalist platitudes, . al-Ad¯ıb: . Ad¯un¯ıs, #Al¯ı Ahmad Sa#¯ıd: Western . modernity and Arabic poetry, –. al-Afgh¯an¯ı, Shaykh Jam¯al al-D¯ın:

the Islamic reformer and thinker, . Ahmad, Aijaz: on postmodernism, , . Algeria: fight for identity, ; invaded in , ; Nedjma, , ; in D¯ıb’s Trilogy, ; war of independence, ; veil and its meanings, ; Algerian women, –. al-#Amar¯ı, Muhammad #Abd al. Sal¯am: Disembark in Egypt, –; colony for the divorced, –. Americans narrated: al-K¯uni, . Am¯ın, Q¯asim: debt to #Abduh, –; Liberation of Women, ; The New Woman, ; ; women emancipation, , . #An¯an, #Abdall¯ah: attitude towards The Thousand and One Nights, ; on women emancipation, . Anti-colonial literature: . Ant.u¯ n, Farah: . –; and women, . Anxiety of authorship: applied to feminist writings, . al-#Aqq¯ad, #Abb¯as Mahm¯ . ud: early opposition to fiction, –; preference for poetry, ; suspicion of vogue, ; on al-M¯azin¯ı, . al-A#raj, W¯as¯ın¯ı: use of Dunyazad, ; as critique of the post-independence state, ; revisionist reading of the frame tale, ; prioritizing Dunyazad of The Thousand and One Nights, –. Arab culture: ; in narrative, ; vs. Eurocentric representations, , , ; diversity, –, ; mul-





tiplicity, ; and language, ; neo-patriarchy, ; women’s role, ; and language, –; power relations, ; since the awakening, –; ideological temper, ; rupture in, –; role of the intellectual, ; popular culture, ; AN as index, ; canons of the classical, –; the West, –; and discontents, ; ideological contexts, . Arab intelligentsia: ; and competing agendas, ; nationalist discourse, ; Nahd. ah, ; native intellectuals, ; the awakening, –, relocation in Cairo, ; modern ideology, ; women and national independence, ; and the West, , , ; and exile, ; rhetoric, ; and repression, –; Fanon on native intelligentsia, ; post-independence discontents, ; readings, ; applying Fanon, , . Arab Marxists: on women, –; and feminist perspectives, – ; male feminism, –. Arab women: fight for independence, ; gender in context, ; in the Date Palm, ; in classical literature, ; random critiques of classicism, ; as ideological pawns, ; feminist tropes, ; Scheherazade exoticized, ; vs. patriarchy, ; identity, ; madness, , ; bodies, ; female symbolism, ; in Stone of Laughter, ; the blame rhetoric, ; vs. custom, ; Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s women, –; elopement, ; sexist texts, ; in the awakening agenda, ; in national and Islamic terms, ; emancipation in national context, ; in Egypt, , ;  demonstration, ; H¯ . afiz. Ibr¯ah¯ım on, ; British use of force against, ; in Lebanon, ;

Syria and Lebanon, ; in Iraq, , –; fight for independence, , ; vs. patriarchy, ; Gibran on, ; debating revolutionary rhetoric, ; feminist offerings, ; on war, ; revisionist reading of Scheherazade, , ; in tradition, –; voicing bewilderment, , ; women in Islam, ; social and political struggle , –; in fiction, –. Arabic language: –; and the colonial question, ; classical rhetoric, ; the French in Algeria, ; and identity, , –; after World War II, ; and multivoiced discourse, –; registers of exile, . Arabic metafiction: ; as revitalization, ; coverage, –; used for evasion, ; transgression, , –. Arabic novel: in context, ; and the AN, ; encounter with modernity, ; genesis, –; gradation, –; in comparison to Western fiction, ; the urban and the indigenous, ; discussed, ; in relation to postmodernism –; novelistic patterns, ; and colonial encounters, –; evasive strategies, ; phases and stages, ; as verbal constructs, ; realism criticized, . Arabs and the West: ; regaining the AN, ; journey to the metropolis, ; narrative encounter, ; and imperialism, ; since the awakening, ; contact and consciousness, , traces of encounter, ; neo-colonialism, ; AN as index of relations, , ; literary comparison, , ; translations, –; French culture, ; encounter with the West, –; in poetics, ; the feast

 of exploitation, ; al-Tayyib . S¯ . alih. on Arabs and the West, ; the colonial referent, –; –; Jabr¯a on, –; reading Western writers, ; Fanon on natives and the West, , ; explosive contacts in East of the Mediterranean, ; Sartre on acculturation and assimilation, ; acculturation and response, –; Idr¯ıs’s novels, ; and colonial legacy, ; the counter journey in veiled autobiographies, –. #Ash¯ur, Radw¯ . a: Trilogy, ; women in resistance, –. As.l¯an, Ibr¯ah¯ım: The Heron, ; existentialist thought, –; subverting the Shakespearean tradition, –; postmodernism, ; the unsaid through metafiction, –. Auerbach: . #Aww¯ad, Tawf¯ıq Y¯usuf: Death in Beirut, –; women, ; prototype for Story of Zahra, , . Ayy¯ub, Dh¯u al-N¯un: postcolonial politics, –; anticipating Memmi and Fanon, –; native elite, –; on mimicry, –; Dukt¯ur Ibr¯ah¯ım, ; characters as ideas, ; as early metafictional text, –; cursing Zola, ; its realistic subtext, ; textualizing social dissent, ; acquaintance with Zola and the naturalists, ; metafiction, . al-Azd¯ı, Muhammad Ibn Ahmad . . Ab¯u al-Mut.ahhar: Hik¯ . ayat Ab¯u al-Q¯asim, ; mercantile classes in, , . Bachelard, Gaston: poetics of space applied, ; unforgettable house, memory and dream, ; tropes



and narrative, ; history and space, . Bagehot, Walter: Greco-Roman applications to Arabic, . Bakhtin: ; in application to Farm¯an’s Date Palm, ; folklore images, ; on the chronotope, , , ; a complex site of meanings, ; heteroglossia, – ; language dynamics, ; on the dialogic, ; ; carnival, ; hybrid construction, ; discourse and its comic double, ; parodic stylization, ; words and speakers, ; dialogization and the novel, ; carnival, , ; language supremacy, ; the historically concrete, ; ideologues of aestheticism, . Bar¯adah, Muhammad: The Game . of Forgetting, –; in-between game, postcoloniality and postmodernity, –. Barak¯at, Hal . ¯ım: Days of Dust, ; and , ; search for identity, ; use of analogy, –, . Barak¯at, Hud¯a: the Lebanese civil war, ; Stone of Laughter, ; treatment of women, –. Barak¯at, Sal¯ım: use of Arabic, , ; the mythical and real, ; Kurdish saga, –; Feathers, , memory of the Kurds, ; Jurists of darkness, –; the life of the Kurds, –; the fantastic and the real, , the miraculous and the natural, ; memory, ; collective consciousness and space, ; return of the dead, ; dislodgement of time, ; fusion of time, ; Kurdish and Islamic beliefs, –. Barth, John: use of the Scheherazade trope, , ; postmodernist poetics, –, sexual symbolism, ; claiming the fabulist, .





Barthes, Roland: stereographic space, . al-Bay¯an: . al-Bay¯at¯ı, #Abd al-Wahh¯ab: . Benhadouga, #Abd al-Ham . ¯ıd: AlJ¯aziyah and the dervishes, – ; use of the mythical and the folkloric, ; occult time, . Body politic: ; dissent, ; land as, ; and political consciousness, ; body inscription, –; in war, ; vs. tradition and dismissives, ; veil as marker, ; tearing the veil, ; and desire, ; in colonial referents, – ; in context, ; in war, – ; body as site of power, ; complexity, ; . Boullata, Issa: Returning to Jerusalem, –; selfhood, ; ; fusion of time spots, . Bourdieu, Pierre: relational mode, ; authority in discourse, . Bourgeois epic: ; and desert narrative, ; novel and consciousness, ; Mahf¯ . uz’s . narrative as, – ; the novel proper, ; cities and urban life, ; the novel as, ; debated, –; the urban novel, –; deviations, . British colonialism: ; and Anglophone narrative, –; imperial arrogance, ; the awakening discourse, ; S. M¯us¯a on, ; double fight, ; Sykes-Picot, ; neo-colonialism, ; in Ahdaf Soueif ’s Map, –; and the national uprising in Iraq, –. Buj¯ah, Sala . h. al-D¯ın: ; use of tradition, ; The Slaver as metafictional, –; al-Qayraw¯an tradition, . B¯ul¯aq Press: established in , ; edition of The Thousand and One Nights, . Buqayl¯ı, F¯ar¯uq: al-H¯ulah, , ; .

Burton, Richard: The Perfumed Garden, . al-Bust¯an¯ı, But.rus: supporter of women, , . al-Bust¯an¯ı, Sal¯ım: use of history, ; female names, . Camus: ,, , , , ; and Sartre, , , , . Censorship: ; narrative strategies of evasion, –; and the police state, . Césaire: , . Chesterton, G. K: on The Thousand and One Nights, , . Classical tradition: disregard for the popular, ; reference to The Thousand and One Nights, , – ; legacy in early th century, . Coloniality: as referent, ; in narrative, ; manipulation of Scheherazade, ; the colonial encounter, , ; the awakening discourse, ; colonialist discourse, ; women’s emancipation rhetoric, ; contaminating the national, ; colonialism, , – ; writers’ subservience, ; in application, –. Colonialism: ; in narrative, – , –; Fanon on, ; platitudes, ; greed and desire, –. Colonialist discourse: ; contamination, ; political underpinnings, ; legacy, ; and the imperial, ; its dichotomies, ; prototype for post-independence rhetoric, ; transposition, ; claiming history for the rest, – ; Kitchener and Macaulay, ; manifested in neo-colonialist concerns, ; Cromer in The Map of Love, ; enterprise, –; and the post-independence state, ;

 sites of greed, ; and knowledge, . Conrad, Joseph: and Season of Migration, . Counter-Orientalist discourse: ; sites of opposition, . Cromer: education in Egypt, ; undermining Islamic culture, ; his platitudes and pretensions to knowledge, , n. ; impositions on Islamic culture, ; on Islam, . Culler, Jonathan: poetics of the novel, , n. . al-Dabb¯agh, Gh¯anim: Din in the alley, as sequential narrative, ; , . al-Dam¯ır¯ı, Muhammad Ibn M¯us¯a: . literature is male, . Damm¯aj, Zayd M: The Hostage, . Darw¯ısh, Usaymah: Love tree, ; mimicry, ; duplication of Western travel accounts, ; use of epistolary form, . De La Mare, Walter: on The Thousand and One Nights, , . Derrida: and naming, ; . D¯ıb, Muhammad: Trilogy, – . ; –; historiography and national issues, . Discourse analysis: Foucauldian applications, ; power and, –; use of land, ; Mahf¯ . uz’s . identification of, ; Foucault, ; Marxist dynamism, ; relational mode, ; language and power, ; diversity in Nahd. ah (awakening) discourse, ; imperial discourse, ; nationalist, –; descriptive vs. philosophical, ; language dynamics, ; in application to al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, ; power relations in, ; images, ; and dissent, – ; production of meanings, .



Dissent: in narrative, ; elusive nature, ; and oral tradition, ; root in the awakening, ; exile, ; vs. patriarchy, and police state, ; in Munif ’s East of the Mediterranean, – ; and creativity, –; vs. institutionalization, ; forms, ; destabilizing strategies, –; –, ; and censorship, ; in Ayy¯ub’s writing, ; dissident politics, . Djebar, Assia: Ombre sultane, ; Algeria feminized, , ; compared to Naw¯al al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, l; veil, ; compared to other writers, ; Eurocentric, . al-Dulyam¯ı, Naz¯ıhah Jawdat: on Iraqi women, . Dunlop: on Egypt, . Dunyazad: as trope, –; the peripheral as central, –. al-Dur¯ub¯ı, S¯am¯ı: translating Fanon, . Egypt: fight for independence, –; the awakening, ; Mahf¯ . uz’s . on, –; the national bourgeoisie, ; liberated, –, Versailles Peace Conference, ; Sa#d Zaghl¯ul, –; Edward William Lane, –; in al-Qa#¯ıd’s novels, ; national struggle in The Map of Love, ; in The Open Door, . Empire: neo-colonialists, ; imperial culture, ; documentary record, ; legitimacy, ; challenged in the awakening, ; confusing the social and the religious, ; colonial assignments, ; and the colonial referent, –; enterprise, –; in Season of Migration, ; its discourse, ; al-K¯uni, . Enchanted palace, the: joint novel as metafiction, –; , .





Exile: poets and writers, ; a scriptory stance, ; complexity, ; hybridity, ; register, . Existentialism: in fiction, ; revival in Arabic, ; ; as an ironic outgrowth, ; and micropolitics, –; ,–, and Sufism, , –; ; displacement, . Fais.al: King of Iraq, ; on veil, . Fanon, Frantz: on colonialist discourse, ; Wretched of the Earth, ; Black Skin, ; central to postcolonial theory, ; terminology, ; honest intellectuals, , ; reading of history, ; mimicry, –; native elite, – ; on native intelligentsia, ; assimilation, ; three-stage discourse, –; application to Arabic narratives, , , , , , ; S¯ . pos. alih’s sible use of Fanon, ; further application to Season, , , ; seething pot, ; applied to al-Hak . ¯ım’s Bird from the East, ; Algerian war, ; on veil, , ; Algerian women, – . Farm¯an, Gh¯a"ib Tu#mah: Date . Palm and the neighbors, , as polyphonic, ; women in, ; micro-politics, ; critique of master narratives, ; logical narrative, ; individualism and social commitment, ; poetic justice, ; Shadows on a window, the novel as metafiction, –. Faraj All¯ah, Bahiyyah: On Baghdadi women in the forties, . Faww¯az, Zaynab: . Fayd. ¯ı, Salm¯an: the awakening novel, ; call for modernization, ; .

Feast and festivity: banquet as language, ; and bond, –; use in The Suffering primrose, –; Hegel on, ; Freud on, ; Hegel and Freud on Bedouin Arabs, . Female body: . Feminism: voicing, ; in women’s writings, –; use of thee Arabian Nights, ; Scheherazade feminist, –; feminist poetics, –; in The Story of Zahra, –; male feminism, –; Zahrah in Memoirs of a dinosaur, –. Forester, E. M: on The Thousand and One Nights, , . Foucault, Michel: discourse analysis and technologies of power, ; History of Sexuality, ; force-power relations, ; on literature, ; notions of the threshold, ; on poetry, ; in application, ; in war narratives, –; crucial role of discourse, . France, Anatole: introducing the Voice of Egypt, , ; in A Bird from the East, ; . French colonialism: ; Francophone narrative, –; anti-colonial Algeria, ; Algerian uprising, ; French expedition to Egypt, ; in Syria and Lebanon, – ; Sykes-Picot, ; in Hannah . M¯ınah’s novels, , –; in M. D¯ıb’s Trilogy, ; Fanon on, ; the Tunisian struggle against, . Frontier situations: Foucault on, ; as counter discourse, ; as literary strangeness, ; application to novels, –. Futuwwah: –. Gh¯anim, Fath. ¯ı: The Elephants, ; mind and psychological time, .

 al-Ghif¯ar¯ı, Ab¯u Dharr: . al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Jam¯al: Sha.th. al-Mad¯ınah, ; as narrative of alienation, ; critique of revolutionary rhetoric, , vs. cultural hegemony, ; and metropolitan politics, ; fleeting time, ; alienation,  ; selfhood as postcolonial assertiveness, ; the elite of Khi.ta.t and Hik¯ . ay¯at, ; Cairo in, ; use of medieval history, , ; Tales of the foundation, ; its relational context, , – ; micro-politics in, –; dialogic principle, ; Al-Zayn¯ı Barak¯at, –; as multiple critique, ; ; critical of the police state, –; Enriching time, –; sites of discontent, ; history and narrative, – ; difference from Jabr¯a, ; Kit¯ab al-tajalliyy¯at, . Gibb, H.A.R: on the need for story writing in Arabic, . Gibran, Khalil Gibran: ; vs. clergy, ; defense of women, ; a reward for the best story, ; in The Suffering primrose, . Goldmann, Lucien: , . Gramsci: . Grunebaum, von: Greek originary root, . Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, Im¯ıl: ; irony in the Secret Life, ; dynamics of exposure, ; ; the Israeli officer in, ; belletristic and popular, ; the marginalized in, ; history claimed by conqueror, . al-Hab¯ Sa#¯ıd: Iraqi . ub¯ı, Muhammad . poet and national leader, ; fight against the British, . al-Hak . ¯ım, Tawf¯ıq: ; Return of the Spirit, ; encounter with the West, n. ; anxiety, ; ambivalence, , ; Versailles Peace Conference, ; early



opposition to story-telling, – ; criticized by feminists, – ; the play Sharaz¯ad, , ; The Enchanted palace, – , –; fear of women, ; A Bird from the East, –; Scheherazade as resourceful, ; constructs of the past, – ; as cross-fertilization, ; the metafictional, –; and metafiction, . Halas¯a, Gh¯alib: role of public intellectuals, –;The Question, . al-Hall¯aj, Mans.u¯ r: ; in The Suffering primrose, , n. . ¯ı, Yahy¯ Haqq . . a: on writing fiction, ; contacts with the West and Russia, . Harb, Tal#at: . . . H¯ashim, Lab¯ıbah: . H¯ . aw¯ı, Khal¯ıl: . Haykal, Muhammad Husayn: social . . consciousness in Zaynab, , ; subversive narrative, –, ; impact on Taym¯ur, ; characters and ideas, ; argued in The Enchanted palace, . Hed¯ . ad, M¯alik: used in Memory in the Flesh, . Hegemony: ; proliferation of practices in Egypt, ; cultural applications, –, ; and power relations, ; the journey against, . Hifn . ¯ı Nas.if, Malak: . al-Hil¯al: support for fiction, ; Orientalists, . ¯ısh, Ben S¯alim: changing Himm . time, ; Obsessed by power, a novel, ; use of history, ; the burden of rule, . Historiographic metafiction: Linda Hutcheon on, . History: ; deconstructed, ; revisionism, , –; exclusion in official historiography, , ;





and Arab tradition, ; Palestine, ; readdressed in the Nahd. ah, ; Sykes-Picot, ; claimed by conquerors, ; Fanon on, ; in Arabic narrative, ; Fanon anticipated by Ayy¯ub, –; history debated by Sa#d Zaghl¯ul, –; revisionism, , in The Map of Love, ; colonialism and the Arabs, –; imperial historiography, ; debated, ; idealizations, ; Bachelard on, ; debated by the empowered, –. Human agent, the: in the relational nexus, ; as an outsider, ; in Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı, ; regained, ; neutralized, –; in history, . Husayn, T¯ . . ah¯a: ; on written Arabic, ; impact on novelists, – ; in postcolonial narrative, ; Egyptian Childhood, –, ; Man of letters, ; accused of sexism, ; on women, ; and Sa#d Zaghl¯ul, –; meaning of history, –; introducing Qalam¯aw¯ı’s Alf laylah, ; and the Nights, ; introducing al-Zayy¯at’s Werther, ; as indicative of the spirit of the age, , –; and French culture, ; a joint novel, ; The Enchanted palace, – , –; use of the frame tale, ; advocate of the nation-state, ; Mediterraneanism, ; AlAyy¯am as architext, , as retrospective, , and introspection, ; Scheherazade’s resourcefulness, ; and metafiction, . Hutcheon, Linda: historiography and narrative, ; peripheral poetics, ; provisionality, ; textual referentiality, –; on historiography and metafiction, .

Ibn #Al¯ı, al-Husayn: ; in The . Suffering primrose, , and n. . Ibn Y¯asir, #Amm¯ar: . Ibr¯ah¯ım, #Abd al-Fatt¯ah: . Iraqi Columbia graduate, ; populism, ; leading the People party, . Ibr¯ah¯ım, Sun#all¯ ah: The Committee, . ; critique of the post-independence state, , ; sarcasm, ; Coca-Cola civilization, , ; S¯ad¯at’s policy, ; and barrier time, –. Identity: decolonized communities, ; encounters, ; postcolonial narratives, ; the human agent, ; and land, ; al-K¯un¯ı’s The Bleeding of the Stone, ; body as identity, ; the challenge of the modern, ; intellectuals as leaders, –; in war, ; grand rhetoric deconstructed, ; and war situations, ; complexity in Nedjma, ; and location, ; exile and émigré, ; dissipated, ; Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Sha.th. alMad¯ınah, postcolonial selfhood, . Idlib¯ı, Ulfat: . Idr¯ıs, Suhayl: –; The Latin Quarter, ; –; existentialist prototypes, –, – ; Our burning fingers, ; Arab intellectuals, ; Sartre ¯ ab, and Camus, –; Al-Ad¯ –; editorial , –; retrospection in narrative, ; and Sartrean engagement, . Iraqi women writers: . al-Is.bah¯an¯ı, Ab¯u al-Faraj: on women poets and singers, –; popularity of The Book of songs, . Islam: women in ; ; as faith, ; and the underprivileged, .

 Islamic discourse: ; and warfare rhetoric, ; Muhammad . #Abduh’s Islam, , ; impact, ; Rash¯ıd Rid¯ . a, ; compatibility discussed, . Israel: the  war, ; use of massive force depicted, ; victory, ; Im¯ıl Hab . ¯ıb¯ı on, ; Zionist program, , ; enforced history, ; in Men in the Sun, –. Italian colonialism: occupation of Libya, , ; in al-K¯un¯ı’s The Bleeding of the Stone, , , . al-Jabart¯ı, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an: ; edition of The Thousand and One Nights, ; E.W. Lane on, . Jabr¯a, Jabr¯a I: comparing The Thousand and One Nights to European fiction, –; refined narrative, ; space, ; The Ship, ; In Search of Walid Masoud, ; rebels and intellectuals ; and the Palestinian cause, ; Arabs and the West, –; and the joint novel, A World without maps, ; use of The Enchanted palace, -; metafictionality, –; fictional intertext, – ; in relation to early writings, –; A Cry on a long night, a novella, ; view of history and representation, . Jal¯al, Muhammad: Trial at Midnight, . ; as narrative of bewilderment, ; Love in Copenhagen, –. Jones, Sir William: Orientalist legacy, . Kam¯al, H¯alah: revisionist reading of Scheherazade, . Kanaf¯an¯ı, Ghass¯an: Men in the Sun, ; the functional and the allegorical, –; Israeli occupation, ; the Palestinian ordeal, –;sequential narrative, – ; passive aliens compared, .



Karam, K. M: issued Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, ; criticizing the sensational, . K¯ateb Yac¯ıne: Nedjma, ; Algeria the woman, , ; the name as unitive, ; the novel’s double bind, ; heroism dispersed, ; eclipse of the hero, ; Nedjma as national catalyst, , ; ; Algeria scarred and enriched, . al-K¯atib al-Mis. r¯ı: . al-K¯azm the Iraqi . ¯ı, #Abd al-Muhsin: . poet, ; association with alAfgh¯an¯ı, ; settlement in Cairo, . Khal¯ıfah, Sahar: . Memoirs of unrealistic woman, ; undermining family discourse, ; feminist willfulness, ; Wild Thorns, ; multivoiced narrative, . al-Kharr¯at., Idw¯ar: ; fragmented narrative, ; postmodernist poetics in Girls of Alexandria, ; verbal virtuosity, ; vital space for women, ; Other time, ; Ramah and the dragon, –; Boubillo stone, ; The End of the line, –; Times for pride, ; Certainty of thirst, –; patriarchy undermined, ; male desires and ideology, ; Amazon woman, –; sites of the postcolonial, . Khmir, Sabiha: Waiting in the Future, –; women’s phase, ; memory and site, ; , –; and the anti-colonial Tunisian movement, ; metafictional postmodernist poetics, . Kh¯ur¯ı, Ily¯as: Kingdom of Strangers, . Kierkegaard: on time, . Kitchener: claiming Sudan as his own, ; . Kratschkowsky, Agnaz: on modern Arabic writing, .





Kundera, Milan: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, . al-K¯un¯ı, Ibr¯ah¯ım: ; use of Am¯az¯ıgh¯ı Berber language, ; cultural dynamics in, –; The Bleeding as anti-colonial, ; blend of the real and magical, ; the mother and the land equation, ; vs. aggressor, , ; native tradition, ; vs. extinction, ; focalization of desert life, ; nomads, ; magical realism, ; Sufism, ; wilderness, ; restoration of life and tradition, –, land and memory; and colonial intrusion, ; W¯aw the smallest, , –; the postcolonial, –; homeland and identity, ; mythological topography, ; the poet and rites of passage, –; inversion of tradition, ; the mythical and the cyclical, . LaCapra: on irony and parody, – . Land: as nation, ; object of desire, –r; as actor in narrative, ; as mother, ; feminized in revolutionary rhetoric, – ; in colonialist discourse, ; idealization revoked, ; M. alRazz¯az on, ; War in the Land of Egypt, ; in Nedjma, ; collapsed with women in Memory in the Flesh, . Lane, Edward William: translating The Thousand and one Nights, –, ; commenting on al-Jabart¯ı; . Laroui (#Abdallah al-#Arw¯ı): on #Az¯ız al-Sayyid J¯asim, . Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah: Naj¯ıb Mahf¯ . uz, . Arabian Nights and Days, , – , ; use of the realistic and the supernatural, – ; genuine enrichment to the genre, , ; and the novelistic

tradition, ; its postcoloniality, ; Sufi time, –; relevance to postcolonial fiction, –; narrative structures and patterns, –. Lyotard: use in Memory in the Flesh, , . al-Mad¯ın¯ı, Ahmad: A Tale of illu. sion, –; as metafiction, ; The Funeral as intertext, ; critique of the police state, –; discontinuity and fragmentation, ; A Rose for the Moroccan time, ; as metafictional critique, ; vs. realism, . Magic realism: ; in relation to the brutal, , ; unsettling reality, , ; Mahf¯ . uz, . in Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah, –. Mahf¯ . uz, . Naj¯ıb: as a novelist, women bodies, ; canonized, –; urban and bourgeois, ; impact, ; institutionalized, –; on the rise of the novel, ; on the scientific spirit, ; democracy, –; as bourgeois epic, , the spirit of the age, ; alter-ego, ; resisting totalizing classification, –; Arabian Nights and Days, , –, ; use of the realistic and the supernatural, –; genuine enrichment to the genre, , ; and the novelistic tradition, ; its postcoloniality, ; Sufi time, –; inverted time, ; relevance to postcolonial fiction, –; analysis of its narrative structures and patterns, – . Thief and the Dogs, inwardness in ; , –; and dissent, –, –; aliens in, –, , time dimensions, , ; Chatter on the Nile, ; multi-voiced, –; the esoteric in AND, ; Modern Cairo,

 , , , –, ; Miramar, , –; Midaq Alley, , , , , ; debating omniscience, –; emphasis on individual freedom, – ; Trilogy, –, , ; The Beggar, ; discussing the anti-novel, ; The Search, ; views on traditional novels, ; distrust of the materialistic, ; Autumn Quail, ; The h. ar¯af¯ısh, ; Sufism and dissent, –; The h. ar¯af¯ısh as an epic, –; and experimentation, . Mahjar: ; defined, , n. ; impact on socio-political issues, . al-Mal¯a"ikah, N¯azik: ; pioneering poetics, ; on women, . Male feminists: use of the mythical and the magical, . Mannoni: and Césaire, . Maq¯amah: as medieval narrative, ; a celebrated genre, –. al-Maqr¯ız¯ı: history of Egypt, ; on destruction of oppositional texts, . Margins: marginalized groups, ; foreigners, ; marginalized genres, –. Market economy: in Sun#all¯ ah . Ibr¯ah¯ım, The Committee, ; as a critique of the post-independence state, , ; Coca-Cola civilization, , ; S¯ad¯at’s policy, ; Jam¯al al-Gh¯ıt.a¯ n¯ı, Sha.th. alMad¯ınah: monstrous cities, ; criticized, –. al-Mars.af¯ı, M: issued Scheherazade, . Marvels: special use as tales, ; Mahf¯ . uz. in Lay¯al¯ı alf laylah, . Marx, Karl: Das Kapital, . Marxist ideology: , , collapsed in a version of Sartre, , ; discoursing women, ; in Ayy¯ub’s writing, .



al-Mas#¯ud¯ı: Mur¯uj al-dhahab, ; critique of The thousand and One Nights, . al-M¯azin¯ı, Ibr¯ah¯ım: veiled autobiography, ; Ibr¯ah¯ım the Writer, , , as retrospective, ; advised against fiction, ; translating Sanine, ; Ibr¯ah¯ım the Writer debated in The Enchanted palace, . Mediterraneanism: as a trend, . Metropolis: and globalization, ; dissipation of identity, . Middle Eastern Studies: . Mimicry: . M¯ınah, Hannah: The Sail and the . storm, ; struggle against the French, –, ; Sun on a Cloudy Day, ; social conflict, –; allegory, ; social classes, –; –. Mostagh¯anam¯ı, Ahl¯ . am: Memory in the Flesh, and the male narrative tradition, , , ; nation and women collapsed, –, ; narratee idealized, –; debating revolutionary rhetoric, –; anticipated, ; memory and home, ;unforgettable house, ; thresholds, ; the narratee’s metafiction, –. Mub¯arak, #Al¯ı (Basha): . al-Mudarris, Fahm¯ı: Iraqi thinker, . Muhammad #Al¯ı (Basha): ruler of . Egypt, . Mun¯ıf, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an: Endings, ; eccentrics in, ; legendary lore, –; When we left the bridge, ; The Trees and the assassination of Marz¯uq, ; East of the Mediterranean, –; repression in the postindependence state, ; metafictional intertext, ; prison narrative, ; Long distance race, ; honest intellectuals, ; and





the joint novel, A World without maps, ; use of The Enchanted palace, –; metafictionality, –; fictional intertext, – . Mus¯a, Sabr . ¯ı: Seeds of Corruption, ; political consciousness, . M¯us¯a, Sal¯amah: ; double fight for women, , vs. the British and the veil, ; contaminated discourse, ; on Cromer and Kitchener, . al-Musaw¯ı, Muhsin: Awt¯ar al. Qas.ab, as metafiction, –; anti-colonial, ; the marshes in Sumerian Iraq, –; Sabians and Muslims, –. al-Mutanabb¯ı, Ab¯u al-Tayyib: used . in narratives, –, . al-Muwaylih. ¯ı, Muhammad Ibr¯ah¯ım: . –. al-Nad¯ım, Muhammad Ibn Ish¯ . . aq: Fihrist, ; mention of The thousand and One Nights, ; compared to European neo-classicists, . al-Nafz¯aw¯ı, Shaykh #Umar Ibn Muhammad: The Perfumed Garden, . . Nahd. ah (awakening): defined,  n. ; mixed discourse, ; role of the elite in, ; contestation, ; encounter with the West, ; as compared to the present, ; bearing on postcolonial episteme, ; national discourse, –; exiles, ; and the French expedition, ; understanding of culture and imperialism, ; elitism, –; classical canons, –, ; subsequent discontents, ; exuberance, ; regeneration, –; early fabulists, –; later change, . Naming: significance, ; female names as titles, . Napoleon: in Egypt, ; as the neopatriarch, .

Al-Naqq¯ash, M¯ar¯un: . Narrative: topographical, ; popular ; engagements, , ; postcolonial, ; sarcastic, r; Kurdish, ; Am¯az¯ıgh¯ı, ; Sufi, ; narrative space, ; place in the novel, –; compared to poetry, ; and language, ; story writing recommended by Arabists, ; terrains, ; omniscience, –; multi-voiced vs. unitary discourse, –; epistolary form, ; postmodernist fragmentation, –; eluding censorship, ; discontinuity, ; desire as, –; cryptic narrative, –; satire, . Narrative strategies: ; dislodging hegemony, ; challenging homogeneity, ; in Mamluk period, ; parody and irony as subversion, ; Arabic narratology, ; affirmative post-structuralism, ; in identity formation, , ; comedy, irony, foolery and satire as, ; fragmented narrative, , ; travesty and transgression, ; beyond intellectualized response, ; use of names, ; French fictional discourse, ; discursive mechanisms, ; generic and discursive, ; chronotope, ; writing women, ; humor in Aunt Safiyyah, –; strategies of erosion, ; Shi#ite rituals, ; and Sufism, ; in The Bleeding of the Stone, ; rhetorical inversion, ; combined poetics, ; postcolonial discourse, ; language dynamics, ; allegory, ; debating omniscience, ; stream of consciousness, – ; polyphony, ; epistolary narrative, –; revisionism, ; use of ideology, –; carnivalesque, ; retrieval of the unsaid, ; details to counteract

 essentials, ; reconstructing the real, ; indirection, ; diversion, . Narrativity: and liminality, ; and multi-voiced heteroglot, . Nas.rall¯ah, Ibr¯ah¯ım: Prairies of Fever, ; as narrative of alienation, . National discourse: in Egypt, ; and imperial discourse, , ; its ideology, ; patriarchal norms, ; liberatory jargon, r; since the awakening, ; revolutionary rhetoric, ; master narrative mechanism, ; reductionist, ; totalitarian practices, ; manipulated, ; destabilized, ; the beloved and the homeland equated, ; as anti-colonial, – . Nationalist discourse: as different from the national, ; rhetoric of war, ; women as sacred, ; equated to nation, –; challenged, –; criticized by M. al-Razz¯az, –. Neo-patriarchy: ; authoritarian discourse, , ; and manipulation of tradition, ; unitary discourse, –; the only leader, ; and patriarchy in Nedjma, ; in The Story of Zahra, ; in Khi.ta.t alGh¯ı.t¯an¯ı, ; the master, ; undermined, ; neo-patriarchal ways and habits, ; subservience to colonizers, ; heroic discourse, ; provoking peripheral dissent, ; in al-Razz¯az’s writings, , , –; in the post-independence state, ; and the police state, –. New World Order: power and erosion, ; in Mu"nis al-Razz¯az’s writings, . Nu#aymah, Mikh¯a"¯ıl: . al-Nu#aym¯ı, Khal¯ıl: existentialist voice in Emptiness of being, ; female partner, ; vs. male

 textual monopoly, ; voicing women, –; as multiple critique, –; dislocation and fragmentation, –; thresholds of ambivalence, .

Orientalism: . Palestine: ; impact on narrative, ; political complexity, ; significance, ; double narrative venture, ; massive force against, ; Israeli occupation, ; mandated, ; cultural symbolism, ; and Nasserism, ; its history, ; in the novel, –. Popular culture: and elitism, ; aspects of, ; and fiction, – ; and elitism, ; classical suspicions, –. Post-capitalist metropolis: ; . Postcolonial, the: identity; individuality; episteme, ; reclamation of popular culture, ; politics and poetics; ; gender and race, ; polyphonic texts, ; Scheherazade as decolonizing trope, ; motivational dynamics, ; the spatial and the temporal, , the land in time, –; and the modern episteme, ; selfhood amid diversity, ; the subversive in, ; postcolonial discourse, ; coping with colonialist discourse, ; decomposing constitutive power, ; postcolonial inventory, ; and desire, ; focused dialogue, ; combined poetics, ; intertextuality, ; and discursive experimentation, ; amalgam with postmodernism, ; three aspects of narrative terrain, –; complexity, – ; intertext in Season, ; time changing perspectives, ; the metafictional; –; selfhood, .





Post-colonial rhetoric: . Post-independence state: criticized, –; and narratives of alienation, ; coercion, ;  defeat, ; jargon, ; exposed, ; since the awakening, ; arbitrary nature, ; complexity of rhetoric, ; fossilized rhetoric, ; neo-patriarchy, ; bureaucracy criticized, ; corruption, –; as police state, , ; use of popular culture, ; in N¯aj¯ı alTikr¯ıt¯ı’s novel, ; in Qa#¯ıd’s War in the Land of Egypt, ; repression in East of the Mediterranean, –; discontent with, ; shifting loyalties, ; ideology criticized, –; despots, ; its apparatus, . Post-Mahf¯ . uz. novel: , ; beyond canonization, –; characteristics, –; combined poetics, ; transgression, ; acculturation, ; language dynamics, ; density, ; ruptures and disjunctions, ; experimentation, ; revolt and change, ; inverted poetics, ; before and after, . Post-modernity poetics: and the postcolonial, –; in Girls of Alexandria, ; relation to the postcolonial, –; John Barth, ; convergence to postcoloniality, ; and post-independence state, ; narratives of, ; and discontents, ; disjunctions, ; in war narrative, ; critiques of ideology, ; aspects, – . Pre-independence state: compared to post-independence; ; nature of narratives, –. Prévert, Jacques: ; quoted in The Latin Quarter, . Prison narratives: The Suffering primrose, prison, –; Inno-

cence of the Devil, patriarchal regeneration, ; East of the Mediterranean, . Qabb¯an¯ı, Niz¯ar: in Memory in the Flesh, –. al-Qa#¯ıd, Y¯usuf: ; unveiling liberatory jargon, ; War in the Land of Egypt, , ; as multivoiced, ; al-S¯ad¯at’s rule, ; The Eloquent Egyptian’s complaints, ; as political critique, ; outspoken, –; graveyard situations, ; fahlawa, ; The Defense of the caged bulbul, ; as metafiction, ; and the controversy of , ; It is happening in Egypt now, a novella, ; metafictional, . al-Qalam¯aw¯ı, Suhayr: Alf laylah, ; My Grandmother’s anecdotes, . Qarmat., Hamd¯ an: –, . . Qut.b, Sayyid: on fiction, . Rab¯ı#, Mub¯arak: Burj al-Su#¯ud, ; time and space, –. al-R¯afi#¯ı, Must.af¯a S¯ . adiq: on Arabic language, ; against storytelling, –; why not writing fiction? ; use of classical theory, . al-R¯ahib, H¯an¯ı: existentialism in The Routed, . Ramad¯ . an, Sumayyah: revisionist reading of Scheherazade, . Rash¯ıd, Fawziyyah: use of history, ; male and female characters, ; The Transformations of the knight, , –; women, ; use of history, –; valorization of rebels, –; Sufism, –. al-Razz¯az, Mun¯ıf: the Ba#thite ideologue, ; his book on nationalism, . al-Razz¯az, Mu"nis: Confessions of a hit man, ; the polyphonic in,

 –; exposing the police state, ; Memoirs of a dinosaur, ; challenging nationalist ideology, –; as cryptic narrative, ; Sultan of sleep, –; romanticization ridiculed, – ; censorship, . Regionalism: as ideology in the s, . Representation: novel as, –; and the modern episteme, ; Arab writers and economics, ; and social protest, ; and political consciousness, ; divorce from, ; the rise of the novel, –; the presentational, –; and the poetic, –; debated in The Enchanted palace, ; and poetry in The Beggar, ; criticized by al-Mad¯ın¯ı, ; redrawn by al-Razzaz, Sultan of sleep, –. Revivalist discourse: ; and the fight fort independence, ; the role of women, ; the challenge of the West, ; counter emphasis on the veil, ; on equal opportunity education, ; vs. colonialist opposition, ; distrust of fiction, –. al-Ris¯alah: writings by Orientalists, . al-Riw¯ayah (The Novel): a journal, . al-Rubay#¯ı, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an: The tattoo, ; ; protagonists, . al-Rus.a¯ f¯ı, Ma#r¯uf: Iraqi poet, ; as exile, ; discontent with the post-independence state, . Sa#¯adeh, Ant.u¯ n: Nationalist Syrian Party, ; presence in The Story of Zahra, . Sab#, Muhammad Sh¯akir: al-Qabr . as epistolary novel, –. al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı, Naw¯al: vs. patriarchy, ; defiant women, –; taking



issue with T¯ ; new . ah¯a Husayn, . leaders and ideologues criticized, ; and Innocence of the Devil, , , –; Innocence of the Devil, vs traditional views of honor and sex, –; biology, ; analyzed, –, –; use of the AN, ; as a feminist on The Thousand and One Nights, ; mad time, ; patriarchal regeneration, ; memory vs. present time, ; The Fall of the Imam, , , ; her revisionist [negative]reading of heritage, –; deliberate neglect of heritage, ; politics and poetics of subversion, ; paradigms, ; critique of neo-patriarchy, –, –; biological denominator, . ¯ı, M: vs. party machinery, , Safad . ; protagonists, . Said, Edward: on space, ; culture, ; imperialism, ; narrative and identity, ; on Orientalism, . Sa#¯ıd, Ham . ¯ıd: , , n. . Sak¯ak¯ın¯ı, Wid¯ad: Syrian feminist, ; reading Scheherazade, ; vs. patriarchy, –; use of Scheherazade trope, –; critique of al-Hak . ¯ım, ; on collapsing women and fiction, . Sal¯am, #Anburah:  women conference in Syria, ; double fight, –. S¯ Season of Migration, . . alih, al-Tayyib: –; fight for identity; –; vs. Kitchener’s colonial desire, ; view of history, , ; as writing-back discourse, ; Season analyzed, –; causality and psychological time, . al-Samm¯an, Gh¯adah: civil war, . Sarr¯ . uf, Ya#q¯ub: Sal¯amah M¯us¯a on, .





Sartre: on colonialism, ; introducing Fanon, ; existentialism, , and Marxism, –, ; in Arabic novels, , – . al-Sayyid, Ahmad Lut.f¯ı: . . al-Sayyid J¯asim, #Az¯ız: as an IraqiArab intellectual, , Suffering primrose, ; protagonists in, ; Iraqi scene, ; prisoner of conscience, ; The militant, , ; ; , ; The Suffering primrose, –; Camus’s presence in, –; and Marx, , –; male feminism, –; ; multivoiced narrative, ; memory and the unforgettable house, –; as critique of postcolonial rhetoric, ; use of spatial tropes, –; site as narrative inversion, –; and Sh¯ı#ite rituals, –; carnival inversions, –; prison, –; protagonists, ; the fluid and the dense in narrative, . al-Sayyid, Mahm¯ Iraqi . ud Ahmad: . novelist and journalist, ; against vogue of The Thousand and One Nights, ; Jal¯al Kh¯alid, , – , as retrospective, ; on utility and literature, ; full participation of women, ; struggle against the British, – ; anti-colonialism, . Scheherazade: as trope, ; and narrative, –; historical framework, ; resourcefulness of women, ; as feminist prototype, –; as Arabic fiction, ; decentering strategy, , ; feminist accentuations, ; stylization and historical reconstruction, ; destabilizing hegemonic discourse, ; unveiling the blame rhetoric, ; and colonial desire, ; postcolonial shades, –; globality, ;

and postmodernist pronouncements, ; John Barth’s use, , –; as index of encounter, ; as journal title, ; as frame tale, –; use by Arab writers, – ; as feminist, –; the wise female in Mahf¯ . uz, . –; under revisionism, –; as fabulist, , . Secular discourse: since the awakening, ; Marxist, ; nationalist, ; Fabian, ; Saint-Simonian, ; double bind, –. al-Sharq¯aw¯ı, #Abd al-Rahm¯ . an: Egyptian Earth, ; ideology as narrative,  sequential narrative in The Peasant, . al-Shaykh D¯aw¯ud, Sab . ¯ıhah: an Iraqi pioneer in the twenties and the thirties, ; her book Awwal al-Tar¯ . ıq il¯a al-nahd. ah al-niswiyyah f¯ı al-#Ir¯aq (), . al-Shaykh, Han¯ . an: The Story of Zahra, , ; micro-politics, ; women in, ; critique of custom, ; Beirut in, ; war as freedom, ; identity regained, ;spatial tropes for women’s bodies, , ; anxiety of belonging, ; feminist poetics, –; Women of Sand and Myrrh, as Orientalized account, –; use of the lesbian tradition, – ; multiple critique, , ; madness, . al-Shib¯ıb¯ı, Muhammad B¯aqir: . leader in  revolution, ; exposing British colonialist politics, ; editing a newspaper, . al-Shib¯ıb¯ı, Muhammad Rida: . . Iraqi poet, Shaykh, leader, . al-Shidy¯aq, Ahmad F¯aris: ; . . Sh¯ı#ism: ; –. Showalter, Elaine: feminist poetics, . Shumayyil, Shibl¯ı: . S¯ırah: , ; transmission, .

 Sontag, Susan: place and language, . Soueif, Ahdaf: ; Map of Love, ; postcolonial consciousness, – ; epistolary form, –; on Cromer, , ; Egyptian national struggle, . Spatial poetics: Said on, ; examples in Arabic narratives, ; Stallybrass and White on, ; tropes, –; and poetics of narrative, . Stallybrass and White: poetics of transgression, , . Sub¯ul, Tays¯ır: You as of today, ; as an early experimental text, . Sufism: in narrative, –; vs. imperial greed, ; ; in alK¯uni, ; in The Suffering primrose, ; Mahf¯ . uz, . –, . T¯ . ahir, Bah¯a": Aunt Safiyyah, –; local discourse, ; love for N¯as.ir, . al-Takarl¯ı, Fu"¯ad: existentialism in fiction, ; revival in Arabic, ; The Long Way Back, –; Baghdad in, ; incest, ; absurdity, –; complexity of the social and the individual, ; a body politic, ; Gladnesses vs. unitary discourse, ; existentialism, ; The Other side, , ; male protagonists, ; irony, ; appropriation of speech, ; non-Sartrean figures, . T¯amir, Zakariyy¯a: criticism of the nation state, ; Al-Ra#d, . al-Tawh. ¯ıd¯ı, Ab¯u Hayy¯ an: apologet. ics for story-telling, ; Scheherazade’s role, ; feminists on, . Taym¯ur, Mahm¯ . ud: on fiction, ; AN, ; gradations of genres, ; apprenticeship, –.



al-Tha#¯alib¯ı: the Tunisian intellectual, . The Thousand and One Nights (Alf laylah wa-laylah): ; relevance to Arabic novel, ; vs. elitism, ; Mahf¯ . uz’s . use, , , –; reception, Arab and European, –; revisionist readings, ; frame tale, , –; its use by T¯ ; and by . ah¯a Husayn, . al-Hak . ¯ım, ; gender crossing in, ; woman-black alliance, ; al-Sa#d¯aw¯ı’s revisionism, , –; summing up history of Arabic novel, ; reclamation, ; classical tradition, , and its canons –; Nahd. ah journals on, –; Jesuit expurgated AN, ; Nahd. ah mixed responses, – ; shift in writers’ positions, , ; B¯ul¯aq edition, ; journals issued under the title, ; vogue, –; used as referent, – ; the frame tale manipulated, . al-Tif¯ash¯ı, Shih¯ab al-D¯ın Ahmad: . Nuzhat al-alb¯ab, . al-Tikr¯ıt¯ı, N¯aj¯ı: Ab¯u Zayd al-Qahram¯an¯ı, ; as allegorical critique of the post-independence state, . Time: past and present reconstructed, –; retrospective, –; process, –; textual density as time, –; time flux, ; time schemes, –; Sufi time, –; mad time, ; dead time, ; and localization, –; time inbetween, –; clock time, –; vertical and horizontal, . Todorov, T: poetics of narrative in the AN, –; poetics of the fantastic, . Veil: use as marker of backwardness, ; in colonialist discourse, ;

 tearing the veil in Iraq, – ; Sal¯amah M¯us¯a on, ; the French, ; and orthodoxy, ; Fanon on , ; for Assia Djebar, ; Baghdad of the forties, . Versailles Peace Conference: ; in Stream of Days, –; and in Bird of the East, .

 Wat.t.a¯ r, T¯ . ahir: ; space in #Urs baghl, ; futuwwah in, –; the h¯ız¯ı, ; use of literary and political history, ; recreated time, –. White, Hayden: Foucauldian articulations, ; discontinuity in narrative, . al-Y¯azij¯ı, Nas.¯ıf: .

Wafd Party: in Egypt, . War: , ; the nation state, ; War in the Land of Egypt, ; civil war, ; a liberating politic, ; Stone of Laughter, ; fighting the British, ; war rhetoric, ; women writers of, ; female take-over in Lebanon, ; Iraqi male and female writers on war, –; loneliness and sexual frustration, ; strife, –; No One sleeps in Alexandria, ; women in war discourse, ; characteristics of war writing, –; women’s identity, – . al-Ward¯ı, #Al¯ı: The Myth of elite literature, ; The Sultan’s counselors, ; literature and change, ; elitism ridiculed, .

Zaghl¯ul, Sa#d: leader of Wafd party, ; meeting T¯ – . ah¯a Husayn, . ; view of history, –; on the Versailles Peace Conference, – ; in Autumn Quail, ; The Map of Love, . al-Zayy¯at, Ahmad Hasan: trans. . lating Werther, ; introduced by Husayn, ; as indicative of the . spirit of the age, ; al-Ris¯alah, . al-Zayy¯at, Lat.ifah: –; door of commitment, ; on women, ; The Open Door, the national and the personal, –. Zifz¯af, Muhammad: The Fox ap. pears and disappears, ; as fragmented record, . Ziy¯adah, Mayy: salon in Cairo, . Zurayq, Qust.ant.¯ın: on women, , ; and nationalist discourse, .

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