- Mamdūḥ ʿAdwān (1941 – 2004, Syria) – al-Abtar (‘Flawed’, 1970) in which the sixty-year-old hero, Idrīs, resists Israeli occupation of his village Qunaytra, even though his fellow villagers left. He offers such a resistance to the Israeli attempts at establishing a kibbutz, that they eventually destroy his village and kill him (reference).
- Ḥaydar Ḥaydar (1936 – 2023, Syria) – al-Zaman al-Muwaḥḥash (‘A dreary time’, 1973). This novel depicts a group of people moving from Syria’s impoverished countryside to Damascus and shows their disillusion with the city as they move through a maze of “confused religious ideologies, thwarted social aspirations, competing brands of nationalism and simplistic versions of Marxism” (reference). The novel, written through a stream of consciousness narrative, is a reflection on the state of the Arab world, specifically the secular Arab intellectual, after the great defeat of 1967 (also in C: Cities: Syria: Damascus).
- Saʿadallah Wannūs’s (1941 – 1997, Syria) play Ḥaflat Samar min ajl Khamsat Ḥuzayrān (1968, English trans. ‘An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June’ can be found in Sentence to Hope: A Sa’dallah Wannous Reader, 2019 and in Four Plays from Syria: Sa’dallah Wannous, 2014).
In this play, Wannūs launches a blistering attack on the official policies and propaganda that accompanied the 1967 Arab Israeli war. He forces the audience to confront the issues surrounding the defeat through a wholesale condemnation of societal values and a search into the minds and souls of Arabs (reference). The play starts with a delay and the director coming on the stage apologizing for the inconvenience saying he has withdrawn his play because of its propagandist and untrue nature. He gives the audience a summary of his play, to which some spectators, a group of actors that is intermingled with the audience, protest by giving their own account of the Six Day War (reference). The play ends with some the police intervening and arresting some of the spectators.
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Roger Allen. 1992. “The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 193-223, p. 202
- Sabry Hafez. 2000. “The Novel, Politics and Islam: Haydar Haydar’s ‘Banquet for Seaweed’.” New Left Review 5, p. 128
- Ali al-Raʿi. 1992. “Arabic Drama since the thirties.” In Modern Arabic Literature. eds. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 358-404, p. 393 and EAL, p. 804