- ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAlūllah’s (1939 – 1994, Algeria) play Ḥumq Salīm (‘Salim’s Madness’, 1972). Based on Gogol’s short story ‘Diary of a Madman’, this monologue play portrays the daily life of its hero, Salīm, whose work is sorting papers and sharpening pencils for his boss (reference). Salīm, in love with his boss’ daughter, believes that her dog is sending out messages and when he intercepts and reads the messages, he discovers the details of the boss and his daughter’s bourgeoisie life (reference). The play reflects on Salīm’s inability to realize his ambitions and express his emotions, and his subsequent decline into insanity, while it also offers a view on Algerian society and the injustices that it is confronted with (also in L: Cultural and Literary Heritage: Philosophical heritage: Russian authors and philosophers).
- Ḥassan Awrīd (1962-, Morocco) – Rabāṭ al-Mutanabbī (‘The Mutanabbi Rabat’, 2019). In the aftermath of the Arab spring, the narrator of this novel meets the great classical poet al-Mutanabbi, who has come to Rabat, Morocco (reference). While the narrator hides the poet in his apartment urging him not to leave, al-Mutanabbi does so anyway and is imprisoned by the security forces. The narrator visits him regularly and they discuss the different facets of Arab culture, comparing modern Morocco to the time of al-Mutanabbi (reference). Yet it becomes clear that the narrator is himself suffering from hallucinations (also in L: Cultural and Literary Heritage: Classical Arabic Poets and Poems).
- Rachid Boudjedra (written elsewhere as Rashīd Būjdirah, 1941-, Algeria) – L’Insolation (‘Sunstroke’, 1972). In this experimental novel dream and reality are blurred. It centers the couple Mehdi and Nadia. Nadia is a nurse, and Mehdi enters the clinic after a sunstroke, although he himself wonders if it was a suicide attempt (reference). He is put in isolation, where he, in delirium, describes the sick around him who have been traumatized by the Algerian war (see 1954 – 1962 French Algerian War and Algerian Independence) and emigration. The sun, in the novel, is made representative for the main cause of insanity, and insanity is used by the text to denounce oppression imposed by customs and traditions (reference).
- Ahmed Bouanani (1938 – 2011, Morocco) – L’Hȏpital (1990, English trans. The Hospital, 2018). Narrator of this novel describes his stay in the hospital as increasingly resembling a prison stay or a strange nightmare. He starts seeing the living as dead and hallucinating about other patients and himself, such as turning into a spider (reference). The novel is based on the author’s own experience suffering from tuberculosis and having to spend six months in quarantine in a Moroccan hospital (also in this section in: Illness: Tuberculosis).
- ManṣūrahʿAz al-Dīn (1976-, Egypt) – Matah Maryam (2004, English trans. Maryam’s Maze, 2009). Reality, dreams, and memories are intertwined when heroine of this novel, Maryam, wakes up in her grandmother’s old flat from a nightmare one day to find that her entire reality has changed. Feeling as if she is ‘reduced to nothingness’, Maryam needs to find her place in the world anew by recalling scenes of her childhood and the Egypt of the past and present. Through Maryam’s story, the novel also reflects on the relationship between individuals and their bodies (reference).
- Ilyās Khūrī (1948-, Lebanon) – Abwāb al-Madīnah (1981, English trans. City gates, 1993). In this novel, a man seeks to gain admission into an anonymous gated city and once admitted wanders around in a confused daze in its labyrinthine streets. He meets mysterious old women and statues, but his perception of them is interrupted by hallucinations and amnesia, which leaves even the reader uncertain (reference). The man ends up hearing many stories, but not knowing his own.
- Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s novella (1911 – 2006, Egypt) al-Shahhadh (1965, English trans. in the collection of novellas titled The Beggar, 1990) is set in Cairo and centres the lawyer ʿUmar, a former socialist and poet who lost all meaning in life and seeks psychological renewal (reference). He goes to see a childhood friend who became a doctor to find a cure, but his illness won’t disappear. When his state of being starts to affect his marriage, he seeks solace in relations with a succession of women. When this also does not help, he retreats to the countryside where he eventually enters delirium. Though the character of ʿUmar, the novel reflects on the state of Egypt post the 1952 revolution and the irrelevance and alienation that affected many of Egypt’s youth (also in 1952 Revolution in Egypt: Before and After the Revolution).
- Ibrāhīm Naṣrallah (1954-, Jordan / Palestine) – Barārī al-Ḥummā (1985, English trans. Prairies of Fever: A Novel, 1993). This novel portrays the alienation of the exiled teacher Muḥammad Ḥammād, who lives a state of continuous wandering in an isolated village in the feverishly hot empty quarter region of Saudi Arabia. The fever in the title also refers to the mental state of the novel’s hero, who suffers from a nightmarish combination of hallucinations, visions, dreams, and strange occurrences as he searches for his own identity (reference). Muḥammad is confronted with police officers, for example, who claim that he is dead, forcing him to pay his funeral expenses and making him doubt his whole existence (reference) (also in V: Village and Rural Life).
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- ʿAzūz Hanī Ḥayziyah. 2020. “Sīmāʾiyah al-Khiṭābah al-Masraḥī Qirāʾah fī Masraḥiyyah ‘Ḥumq Salīm’ li-ʿAbd al-Qādir ʿAlūllah” Majallah Sīmiyāʾiyāt 16(2): 348-338, p. 341, 342
- Al-ʿArabī Shabābīk, interview. 2019. “‘Rabāṭ al-Mutanabbī’.. Riwāyah ḥayn Awrīd ʿan Wāqiʿa al-ʿĀlim al-ʿArabī.” 20 October 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEbz2mVe5as (last accessed 19 February 2023)
- Rabah Ayad. 1990. A Passage to the North: the West as seen through the works of some African novelists with particular reference to the theme of the outsider (Doctoral Thesis, University of Glasgow, UK) Retrieved from https://theses.gla.ac.uk/77271/1/10987048.pdf, p. 86 (last accessed June 29, 2022)
- Samira Souilah. 2010. “Les voix et les voies de la folie dans ‘L’insolation’ de Rachid Boudjedra,” Synergies Algérie 11: 167-178, p. 169, 170
- Ursula Lindsay and Maria Lynx Qualey, hosts. 2018. “Writing to Remember” Bulaq Podcast, The Arabist,1 December 2018. https://arabist.net/bulaq/24.html (last accessed 17 January 2025)
- Zuzana Kratka. 2007. “Book Reviews: Dreams and Reality, Memory and Forgetting.” Banipal 30, https://www.banipal.co.uk/book_reviews/36/maryams-maze-by-mansoura-ez-eldin/ (last accessed 29 June 2022)
- Roger Allen. 1992. “The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt.” in Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Badawī. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 193-223, p. 204
- Ali Dakhil Naem and Lajiman Bin Janoory. 2020. “Existential protagonist in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel ‘The Beggar’.” International Journal of English, Literature and Social Sciences 4(4): 1211-1216, p. 1212
- Roger Allen. 1992. “The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muḥammad Muṣṭafā Badawī. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 193-223, p. 215
- Ayşegül Boyalı. 2019. “Wanted Dead or Alive: Bare Life, Non-Grievability and Spectrality in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s ‘Prairies of Fever’, Critique.” Studies in Contemporary Fiction 60(5): 576-584, p. 577