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Father and Child

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  • Aḥmad Amīn (1886 – 1954, Egypt) – Ḥayātī (1950, English trans. My Life, 1978). This autobiography, written by the Egyptian historian, among others describes the conflict between the author’s father, a pious and severe man concerned with his children’s religious upbringing, and the author, who could only appreciate his father when he liberated himself from his paternal authority (reference) (also in A: Autobiography).
  • ʿAmrū ʿAzzat (?, Egypt) – Ghurfah 304: Kayf Ikhtabʾatu min Abī al-ʿAzīz 35 ʿĀman (2018, English trans. Room 304: How I Hid From my Dear Father for 35 Years, 2020). This autobiographical novel focusses on the relationship between a father and a son at a time of revolution, that of the 2011 Arab Spring in Egypt (reference). The developments of the revolution are chronicled next to the protagonist’s process of becoming independent from his parents, especially his father, and his participation in the protests. As the nation goes through turmoil, the narrator reflects on the relationship with his father in the different phases of his life in a fashion that is representative for his generation (reference) (also in 2011: Arab Uprisings: Egypt).
  • Rachid Boudjedra (written elsewhere as Rashīd Būjdirah, 1941-, Algeria) – La Répudiation (1969, English trans. The Repudiation, 1995). In this novel, a son seduces his father’s younger lover as a form of revenge against his father and his father’s generation who deny the younger generation a change in life. The novel, depicting a rebellion against the family patriarch and the sexual frustration of the youth, was banned in Algeria until 1980 (for more information see in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Patriarchism).
  • Driss Chraïbi (1926 – 2007, Morocco) – Succession ouverte (1952, English trans. Heirs to the past, 1971). In this novel, the author’s alter ego, Driss Ferdi, is reconciled with estranged deceased father after fifteen years of exile in France (reference). The novel centres the same family as in Chraïbi’s Le Passé simple (1954, English trans. The Simple Past, 1991, 2019), the Ferdi family (see for description S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Patriarchism). The reconciliation with the father and reunion with his family at the father’s funeral is symbolic for Driss’ reconciliation with his homeland, Morocco, after its independence struggle from France, and the disappointment of with his experience in Europe.
  • Mohammed Dib (1920 – 2003, Algeria) – Neiges de marbre (‘The snows of marble’, 1990). This novel treats the divorce of Nordic-Maghribi couple and their young daughter Lyyl. While being hospitalized, the father reflects on his loss, as he reminisces of the time spent with his daughter and his relationship with her Russian mother (reference). Among others, the narrator reflects on how his daughter’s identity, being raised in a Nordic country in the Finnish language, differs from his Algerian cultural identity, and how it affects their relationship (reference). The novel is part of a trilogy that also includes Les terrasses d’Orsol (‘Orsol terrace’, 1985) and Le sommeile d’Ève (‘Eve’s slumber’, 1989) (see in W: Outside of the Arab World: Europe: Scandinavia).
  • Abdelkader Djemaï (1948-, Algeria) – Le Nez sur la vitre (2005) and Un Moment d’oubli (2009). These two novels have been translated to English as Father/Son: Two Novellas: Nose Against the Glass and Blind Moment (2015). The two novellas treat the relationship between an Algerian father and his French son, which is characterized by a the cultural and communications gap resulting in their alienation from each other.

In Le Nez sur la vitre, an aged father travels to France by car to search for his son who stopped responding to their letters. The novella describes the details of the father’s trip while also reflecting on the memories he has of earlier road trips with his son (reference). When he finally arrives, he finds his son engaged, an event which potentially provides an opening for their relationship to get closer.

 

Un Moment d’oubli centers a murder in a small village, and the middle-aged former police officer Jean-Jacques Serrano, who suspects himself and started interrogating himself in an auto-narration (reference). What follows is the story of his life, such as is upbringing, his marriage, and the birth of his son. As the story progresses, Jean-Jacques, who is from Italian roots, becomes more and more isolated, until the story unravels his connection to the death of his son.

 
  • Ramziya Abbas Al-Irayani’s (?, Yemen) short story ‘Heir Apparent’ in Arab Women Writers: an Anthology of Short Stories (2015) describes the grief husbands feel when their wives give birth to female babies. The anthology contains a number of additional short stories on the topics of childbearing and marriage.
  • Sayed Kashua (1975-, Israel / Palestine) – Aqob Aḥar Shiynwyim (2017, English trans. Track Changes, 2020). The hero of this novel, Saeed, a ghostwriter mostly writing for elderly Israelis, who lives in Illinois, receives news that his father who he hasn’t spoken to in fourteen years is on his deathbed (reference). He embarks on a journey back to his home in Tira, Israel, leaving his family in the USA. But upon arrival he feels more displaced and alienated from his family than ever. By his father’s hospital bed, he remembers buried traumas of family clashes and thinks of his own strained relationship with his children (see also in M: Movement: (E)Migration, Refugee and Return: Return: Return to Palestine).
 
  • Hisham Matar (1970-, Libya) – The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between (2017). This memoir portrays the author’s return to Libya in 2012, together with his mother and wife, where his father went missing twenty-two years before. The memoir begins in England, from where Maṭar describes the horrors of the Ghaddafi regime and Britain’s political relationships with the regime. But the novel is about family, loss, and love, as the author searches for the truth about his father, a prominent opponent of the Ghaddafi regime (reference). It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017, which hailed the novel as “a first-person elegy for home and father”. It also won the 2017 PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award and the 2017 Folio Prize (also in M: Movement: (E)Migration, Refugees and Return: Return).
 
  • Māzin Maʿrūf (1978-, Palestine) – Nukāt lil-Musallaḥīn (2015, English trans. Jokes for the Gunmen, 2019). This collection of fourteen surreal, interlinked short stories set in a conflict-ridden country resembling Lebanon and is told from a child’s dark-humoured point of view (reference). The father-son relationship is an important element in this narration of war. The novel won the Almultaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story in 2016.
 
  • Malika Mokeddem (1949-, Algeria) – La siècle des sauterelles (1992, English trans. Century of the Locust, 2006). Set in Algeria in the first half of the twentieth century, this novel focuses on the destruction of Bedouin life and the pain of exile that its characters face at the hands of settler colonialists. Life of the heroin, Yasmine, is written to correspond with that of the Swiss explorer Isabella Eberhardt and describes her and her father’s, Mahmoud, quest to return her grandmother’s bones to their tribe and avenge the rape and murder of the mother (reference). Yasmine, who resorted to silence after the death of her mother, is supported by her father to follow an education and he shelters her from the conventional expectations of tribal life (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Tribes and Ethnicity)
 
  • Muḥsin al-Ramlī (1967-, Iraq) – Tamar al-Aṣābiʿ (2008, English trans. Dates on My Fingers, 2014). The story starts with a scene in which the father of the protagonist, Salīm, stuffs two bullets in the anus of a driver who harassed his daughter while they walking to a medical center in Tikrit, an act which results in a feud between the family and the government for whom the harasser works (reference). Salīm decides to flee from the violence and the strict hierarchy of the family and builds a new life in Spain. But then he runs into his father, who is now the proprietor of a nightclub in Madrid, confronting Salīm with his father’s new life and his own relationship with him (also in W: Outside the Arab World: Europe: Spain)
 
  • Ṣaqr al-Rashūd (1941 – 1978, Kuwait) wrote a series of plays in which he tackled the relationship between fathers and children in changing Kuwait (reference). Examples include al-Makhlab al-Kabīr (‘The big claw’, 1965), in which a father and son discuss the meaning of parenting, and al-Ḥājiz (‘The barrier’, 2005), in which the father, Ḥamūd al-ʿAwd, tries to defend his social status in the face of skepticism by his children about the tribal traditions of family life (reference).
 
  • Nawāl al-Saʿadāwī (1931 – 2021, Egypt) – Suqūṭ al-Imām (1987, English trans. Fall of the Imam, 1988). The novel tells the story of a woman who discovers that she is the illegitimate daughter of the Imam, a political leader who exploits religion for his own ends. Being a young woman, whose father has wronged her, she was forced to grow up in poverty with her mother. This led her to resent her father in a later stage and her campaign against him is framed in the novel as an attack on patriarchism (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Patriarchism).
 
  • Ghādah al-Sammān (1942-, Syria) – al-Riwāya al-Mustaḥīla: Fusayfusaʾ Dimashqiyyah (‘The impossible novel: Damascene mosaic’, 1997). This novel chronicles Damascene life and society at mid-19th century through the story of a cheerful teenager by the name of Zayn (reference). It contains autobiographical elements and describes the death of her mother during childbirth, the single parenthood of her father, and her family ties to her grandmother, aunts and uncles, and cousins, all of whom visit her old Damascene house (reference). It also describes Zayn defining and negotiating her gender identity within the context of her traditional environment and her single father who desperately desired a son (reference) (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Gender issues).
 
  • Ibrāhīm Ṣamūʾīl’s (1951-, Syria) short story ‘al-Ziyārah’ (‘The Visit’) in the collection Rāʾihat al-Khawt al-Thaqīl (‘The Stench of the Heavy Step’, 1988) depicts a father, Saʿad, who was imprisoned in Syria while his wife was pregnant. The short story shows the first family visit in which he meets his son, Khaldūn, who is reluctant to interact with him, leaving him to return to his cell with a somewhat disappointed feeling (reference).
 
  • Muḥammad ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Tāzī (1948-. Morocco) – al-Mabāʾah (‘Invisible’, 1988). Set in Fez, Morocco, this novel portrays the life of Qāssim, who, after fighting in Indochina for the French, works as a prison director for seventeen years while living inside the prison with his family. His work is opposed by his son, Munīr, causing tensions between the two. One evening, when Munīr returns home in a miserable state after participating in a student demonstration, Qāssim stands up for him and ends up losing his job and his house. He becomes mad and moves to a cemetery where he takes care of cats.
 

Refrences:

In order of appearance

  1. Thomas Phillip. 1993. “The Autobiography in Modern Arab Literature and Culture.” Poetics Today 14(3): 573-602, p. 592
  2. Bilāl Khabīz. 2021. “Riwāyah ‘Ghurfah Raqm 304’ … Fī an al-Thaqrah Shʾan Wirthat Mutakhaffīn.” www.ultrasawt.com, 18 April 2021 https://www.ultrasawt.com/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%BA%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%A9-%D8%B1%D9%82%D9%85-304-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A3%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AB%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%B4%D8%A3%D9%86-%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%AB%D8%A9-%D9%85%D8%AA%D8%AE%D9%81%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86/%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%AE%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%B2/%D8%A3%D8%AF%D8%A8/%D8%AB%D9%82%D8%A7%D9%81%D8%A9 (last accessed 1 June 2023)
  3. Wiʾām Mukhtār. 2019. “‘Al-Ghurfah 304’, aw Kayf Ikhtabʾanā Jamīʿan min Ābāʾina.” www.7iber.com, 29 July 2019, https://www.7iber.com/culture/%D8%BA%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%A9-304/ (last accessed 1 June 2023)
  4. Luica Larissa-Daiana. 2013. Écriture autobiographique et pseudo-autobiographique dans l’œvre de Driss Chraïbi. (Doctoral Thesis, Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France) Retrieved from https://theses.hal.science/tel-00984272 p. 85-86 (last accessed 3 June 2023)
  5. Jonathan Adjemian. 2016. To Hold the World Visible: Writing and History in the Work of Mohammed Dib. (Doctoral thesis York University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada) Retrieved from https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/32246/Adjemian_Jonathan_2016_PhD.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y (last accessed 3  January 2021) p. 8
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  9. Priyanka Lindgren. 2020. “‘Track Changes’ by Sayed Kashua.” World Literature Today 94(4): 4, p. 4
  10. Rachel Cooke. 2016. “The Return by Hisham Matar – exquisite pain of a fatherless son.” www.theguardian.com, 3 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/03/hisham-matar-the-return-review (last accessed 25 December 2018)
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  14. Ali al-Raʿi. 1992. “Arabic Drama since the thirties.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 358-404, p 397
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  16. EAL, p. 686
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  18. R. Shareah Taleghani. 2021 Readings in Syrian Prison Literature. Syracuse University Press: Syracuse, New York p. 44
 

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