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Writing

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  • Taos Amrouche (1913 – 1976, Algeria) – L’Amant imaginaire (‘The imaginary lover’, 1975) centers a thirty-year old female narrator who, like the author, is a writer and an ethno-musicologist (reference). It is written in a diary-style in which the narrator writes to an ‘imaginary lover’, and covers the years 1952 and 1953, after the writer, who is a Christian, exiles into Tunisia. She describes her unhappy marriage to a bohemian painter and her one-sided love for a writer 20 years her senior, which, in addition to her expulsion from Algeria due to her religion, leave her with a feeling of rejection. Writing, in this novel, is for the narrator a means to relief and to fantasize (reference).
  • Muḥammad Al-Aṣfar (1960-, Libya) – Wizārah al-Aḥlām (‘Ministry of dreams’, ?). The narrator of this novel enters dialogue with a childhood picture, through which he escapes the Libyan reality before the 2011 revolution (reference). The narrator often switches his style of discourse and interacts with and criticises the foregoing style. The novel is a satirical take on political discourses that claim to have ‘a complete’ solution, as well as a reflection on the art of writing with its compositions and methods (reference).
  • Réda Dalil (1984-, Morocco) – Best-Seller (2016). This French-language novel, which is set in Casablanca, narrates the attempts of an author, Bachir Bachir, to publish a second novel that matches the success of his first two. Bachir’s writers block is enhanced when his wife leaves him for an affair with his editor, but he is also a victim of a system that prioritizes appearances and the market value of a novel over its literary value. However, his life and luck are turned upside down when he finds a manuscript at a party of his rival writer.
  • Jabbūr al-Dawīhī (1949 – 2020, Lebanon) – Ṭabʿa fī Bayrūt (2016, English trans. Printed in Beirut, 2018). The novel of a young writer, Farīd, is refused by a publishing house, but he later discovers that the refusal is a scam. The publisher offers him a job as a copyeditor, and he starts to walk around continuously with his notebook until he discovers that the content of his notebook is published on beautiful paper by the same publishing house! The novel depicts the problems that Arab writers face a publishing industry that shares similarities to a capitalist commercial company and the lack of value that is often ascribed to literature (reference).
  • Maysalūn Hādī (1954-, Iraq) – Ikhwah Muḥammad (‘The brotherhood of Mohammed’, 2018). The female protagonist, a writer herself, moves into a new neighbourhood, and her neighbour is the aspiring writer Urshīnā who asks her to read her first novel which she just completed. Although reluctant at first, the protagonist agrees. Urshīnā’s novel is set in the alley in Baghdad that they live in, where all the men are called Muḥammad, and describes the issues that her generation are confronted with (reference). The two end up discussing the interplay between reality and writing.
  • Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm (1937 – 2025, Egypt) – Bayrūt… Bayrūt (1988, English trans. Beirut, Beirut, 2011). This novel focusses on the publishing industry and comments on the profession of writing in the Arab world. The nameless protagonist of the novel travels to Beirut where he searches for a publisher for his book while he writes about the Civil War in Lebanon and socializes with writers and scholars (reference) (see 1975 – 1988 Lebanese Civil War). The result is a story that combines fiction with journalistic elements. The novel also contains a marginal lesbian love-story (see in L: Love, Lust and Relationships: LGBTQ+: Lesbian relationships).
  • Muḥammad al-Marghūṭ’s (1953 – 2006, Syria) play Khārij al-Sirb (‘Outside the herd’, 1999). This is a play within a play. Its hero is writing an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, but outsiders keep interfering. First, the theatre’s cleaner demands that Romeo’s character is modified so he can act the role. But soon also the minister of culture, the government, and foreign institutions such as UNESCO demand changes to the play so that their ideas are represented (reference). Khārij al-Sirb criticizes external interference, even in a classical work such as Romeo and Juliette, to propagate biased ideas (also in L: Culture and Literary Heritage: Philosophical heritage: British authors and philosophers).
  • Azīz Muḥammad (1987-, Saudi Arabia) – al-Ḥālah al-Ḥarjah lil-Madʿū ‘K’ (2017, English trans. The Critical Case of a Man Called K, 2021). After reading Kafka, the narrator of this novel, ‘K’, an employee of a petrochemical company, decides to write a diary but is frustrated by his boring life, privacy issues, and a lack of imagination and ideas. He is also limited by the news that he has leukaemia, which is described in the novel in relation to his family and colleagues. His disease presents him with the means to escape his writers block, and he eventually travels to Japan in search for a better cancer treatment (also in D: Disabilities, Illness and Psychological disorders: Illness: Cancer).
  • Nabīl al-Mulaḥam (1953-, Syria) – Khammārat Jabrā (‘Jabra’s café’, 2017). In the year 1940, in a small town in Syria, the young nurse Zamarradah cares for a newborn baby after its mother dies giving birth. She takes the baby, who is called Jādd al-Ḥaqq, and leaves for Damascus where she finds a place to stay in a storehouse near a café where she also finds a job as a dancer. Jādd grows up reading writing and is scouted by a newspaper editor. He spends his adult life writing revolutionary editorials from the café, observing the life around him, through which the reader views the developments in the city from the Syrian independence to the revolution of 2011 (reference) (also in C: Cities: Syria: Damascus).
  • ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf (1933 – 2004, Jordan / Saudi Arabia) and Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā (1920 – 1994, Palestine) – ʿĀlim bi-la Kharaʾit (1982, English trans. A World Without Maps, 1983). The main character of this co-authored novel is in the process of writing a novel and discusses this process at length. Politics and the personal intertwine as the period of Arab defeat in the 1970s is reflected in the narrator’s intense search for the truth surrounding the death of his long-time lover, who he might have murdered himself. The title of the novel refers to a world of uncertainty (reference) (also in 1967 al-Naksah).
  • Yūsuf Rakhā (1976-, Egypt) – al-Timāsīḥ (2012, English trans. The Crocodiles, 2014). This novel is structured in prose-poem like paragraphs and is narrated by a man looking back at his revolutionary years in Egypt, filled with drugs, passive politics, and intellectual bravado, when he started a secret poetry club, The Crocodiles Groups for Secret Poetry, in 1997. The novel explores the relationship between literature and politics in Egypt from the 1990s until the Arab Spring of 2011 (reference) (also in 2011 Arab Uprisings: Egypt).
  • ʿAlī Sālim’s (1936 – 2015, Egypt) one-act play al-Būfīh (1969, English trans. The Buffet, 1991) is set in an upstairs office and includes three characters: a theatre manager, a playwright and a waiter who brings food up from the buffet downstairs. While the manager at first seems content with young playwriter and orders food for him from the buffet, he gradually starts to request more revisions, until their conversation eventually turns into an interrogation by the manager. While the play depicts a playwright pressured to change his work, it is also about the corruptive effects of power. It is available in the translation The Buffet and The Well of Wheat: Two plays.
  • Amīr Tāj al-Sir (1960-, Sudan) – Ṣāʾid al-Yarqāt (‘Hunter of Chrysalises’, 2010). This satirical novel describes the story of a secret service agent, ʿAbdallah Farār, who is forced to retire due to an accident. Suffering from loneliness, he decides to write a novel on his work experiences. After all, he does have experience writing reports. But just as he was instructed to keep an eye on writers during his years in office, he soon discovers that he is himself a topic of police scrutiny. The title of the novel refers to the fact that writers and intellectuals in general are both the hunter and the prey, with the chrysalises symbolizing a writer’s ability to bring something beautiful to life on paper (reference) (also in: G: Dysfunctional Governance: Militarism, Secret Services, and the Police State).
  • Khalīl Ṣuwaylīh (1959-, Syria) – Awrāq al-Ḥubb (2008, English trans. Writing Love, 2012) centres a womanizing aspiring novelist based in Damascus, Syria. Disliking other people’s novels that focus on history and war, he aims to avoid these topics in his own literature, presenting at times a surreal picture of Syria which is symbolic for the gap between Syrian reality and the intellectual elite (reference). The narrator has a strong relationship to the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, whose character’s names are used to describe the narrator’s own Syrian past (reference). Other than Márquez the novel also refers to the Sufi and Classical Arabic literary tradition (also in L: Cultural and Literary Heritage: Philosophical heritage: Latin American authors and philosophers).
  • Nihād Sīrīs (1950-, Syria) – al-Ṣamt wa al-Ṣakhab (2004, English trans. The Silence and the Roar, 2013). Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern police state, this satirical novel describes the moody and irreverent writer-journalist Fatḥī, who has been backlisted for refusing to write in favour of the regime. Protests take an important role in the novel and are described by Fatḥī, who observes them carefully (reference). The novel’s political and social setting resemble that of Syria after the transfer of power from Hafez al-Asad to his son Bashar in 2000, when intellectuals who hoped for change became disillusioned (reference) (G: Dysfunctional Governance: Militarism, Secret Services, and the Police State and 2000 Bashar al-Asad Syria).
  • Mays al-ʿUthmān (?, Kuwait) – Ṣundūq al-Arbaʿīn (‘Forty boxes’, 2018) is a partially auto-biographical novel in which a woman nearing her forties reflects on her life, both her personal upbringing, as well as the political and social developments in Kuwait that she has witnessed since 1977, such as the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq (see 1990 Iraq Invasion of Kuwait and 1991 Gulf War: The Kuwaiti Side) and the introduction of internet in the country (reference). The narrator also reflects on her relationship with writing as a means of expression, a coping mechanism, and as a profession, as well as her environment’s reaction to her being a writer (reference).

Refrences:

In order of appearance

  1. Clarissa Zimra. 2003. “Amrouche, Taos”, in Encyclopaedia of African Literature. eds. Simon Gikandi, Routledge: New York, p. 31
  2. Afifa Bererhi. 2020. “‘L’amant imaginaire’ ou la quête inalterable de l’impossible.” www.algeriecultures.com, 20 June 2020, https://algeriecultures.com/art-lettres/lamant-imaginaire-ou-la-quete-inalterable-de-limpossible/ (last accessed 4 May 2023)
  3. Ibrāhīm al-Ḥajarī. 2012. “‘Wizārat al-Aḥlām’ … Tamarud ʿalā al-Kitābah wa al-Wāqiʿa.” www.aljazeera.net, 23 August 2012, https://www.aljazeera.net/culture/2012/8/23/%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%AD%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AF-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%A9 (last accessed 15 May 2023)
  4. Alkalimah. 2021. “Wizārat al-Aḥlām (Riwāyah).” Majalah al-Kalimah 63, http://www.alkalimah.net/Articles/Read/4617 (last accessed 15 May 2023)
  5. Ursula Lindsay and Marcia Lynx Qualey, hosts. 2018. “Sacred Cows.” Bulaq Podcast, The Arabist, 6 January 2018.  https://www.sowt.com/episodes/bulaq-bwlq—sacred-cows (last accessed 4 February 2025) 
  6. Rashā al-Rabiʿī. 2019. “Riwāyah ‘Ikhwah Muḥammad’ li-l-Kātibah al-ʿIrāqiyyah Maysalūn Hādī.” www.alnaked-aliraqi.net, 30 July 2019 https://www.alnaked-aliraqi.net/article/65130.php (last accessed 4 May 2023)
  7. David Tresilian. 2008. A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature. London: Saqi, p. 118
  8. ʿAbd al-Muḥsin al-Shimrī. 2006. “Lisān Ḥāl al-Muwāṭin al-ʿArabī al-Mazūm.” www.al-qabs.com, 5 April 2006 https://alqabas.com/article/177513-%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%B7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%87%D8%B2%D9%88%D9%85 (last accessed 26 October 2021)
  9. Khalīl Ṣwīlīh. 2017. “Nabīl al-Mulaḥam ‘Karkhānah’ Ismuha al-Waṭan.” www.al-akhbar.com, 10 January 2017 https://al-akhbar.com/Literature_Arts/224519 (last accessed 5 November 2021)
  10. Bashir Abu-Manneh. 2015. “Tonalities of Defeat and Palestinian Modernism.” Minnesota Review 85: 56-79 p. 69
  11. Maha El Dahan. 2015. “Rakha sees Egypt through poet’s eyes in ‘The Crocodiles’.” www.reuters.com, 16 July 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-books-authors-rakha-idUSKCN0PQ19020150716 (last accessed 8 January 2019)
  12. Mūsā Ibrāhīm Abū Riyāsh. 2017. “al-Farīsah wa al-Ṣiyād fī Riwāyat ‘Ṣāʾid al-Yarqāt’ li-Amīr Tāj al-Sir” www.alquds.co.uk, 11 January 2017 https://www.alquds.co.uk/%EF%BB%BF%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%B3%D8%A9-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%AF-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%B5%D8%A7%D8%A6%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%82/ (last accessed 14 November 2021)
  13. Anne-Marie McManus. 2014. “The Contemporary Syrian Novel in Translation.” Arab Studies Journal 22(1): 322-333, p. 333, 332
  14. Anne-Marie McManus. 2014. “The Contemporary Syrian Novel in Translation.” Arab Studies Journal 22(1): 322-333, p. 329, 328
  15. Ibrāhīm ʿĀdil. 2018. “Kitāb ‘Ṣundūq al-Arbaʿīn’: min Sīrah al-Ḥayāh ilā Sīrah al-Kitābah”, www.ida2at.com, 27 December 2018, https://www.ida2at.com/book-forty-box-biography/ (last accessed 4 July 2021)
 

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