Category Archives: Arab
Gazelle Tracks by Miral Al-Tahawy, translated by Anthony Calderbank
The slim, startling volume begins with an aged, family photograph which essentially contains the contents of the pages that follow … that is, the single picture holds the thousands of words that circumscribe Muhra’s story, past and present.
Muhra, a young woman of Bedouin descent, is one of the last of a sprawling family who for centuries once controlled vast holdings throughout the Egyptian Delta, including slaves whose descendants are still referred to by older family as “the slave of Clan Minazi,” regardless of the generations-ago abolition of human ownership. With political and cultural shifts, the Minazi family that once enjoyed the company of the powerful and royal, has dwindled to but a few members, some scattered, some lost.
With the remaining photographs that tenaciously hang on the walls of her grandfather’s ancestral home, and later her mother’s, Muhra tracks her own history through the voiceless faces of her ancestors. She shares the tragedy of her enigmatic mother, who is perhaps not the woman who gave birth to her, and to her estranged father whose memories of glory and influence as a world-class expert on birds of prey become both myth and tragedy.
To read Gazelle Tracks is a lyrical experience of discovery on at least two levels: its sparseness belies an important historical glimpse into a little-known (especially in the West) once-powerful Arab society, as well as a delicate unraveling of a family saga preserved in printed photographs but mutely trapped in dying memories.
Miral Al-Tahawy’s latest title, Brooklyn Heights (scheduled for publication in English translation in January 2012), recently won the prestigious 2010 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, and is currently shortlisted for the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, also known as the Arab Booker and considered the most important literary prize in the Arab world. Without a doubt, Al-Tahawy is a major Arab voice to play close attention to, and surely one we will be lucky to (need to) continue to hear from in the West.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2008 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Arab, Egyptian
Maryam’s Maze by Mansoura Ez Eldin, translated by Paul Starkey
Here I go again starting with a book backwards … in the ending “Translator’s Note,” Paul Starkey writes, “Readers of Maryam’s Maze who are already familiar with the author’s short stories will quickly feel themselves at home in this more extended work, which again reveals the author’s preoccupation with the relationship between dreams and reality, and by the influence of the past on the present.” So what that seems to suggest is that to read Mansoura Ez Edin’s earlier stories might better illuminate this, her debut novel. Perhaps that’s where I went wrong … because reading the novel alone was neither familiar nor illuminating.
Two related narratives are intertwined here. Each chapter is preceded by an epigraph-like short paragraph on its own page, presented in a different font. Woven together, these mini-pages reveal an elliptical story about a wealthy, mythic figure named El Tagi who builds a remarkable palace, the construction of which causes the suffering and death of many others.
The chapters comprise Maryam’s story, who wakes up one day after a violent dream of her own murder, only to find herself in a strange bed in a Cairo apartment, seemingly living a life not her own. Desperate for answers, she seeks out her journalist boyfriend in his office, only to find he doesn’t work there – even his bylines have disappeared from the newspaper. She next rushes to the girls’ hostel where she is convinced she went to bed the night before, where she shared a room with another young woman, only to find all traces of their life together completely vanished.
Moving abruptly from Cairo to an unnamed village, the next chapter begins to unravel Maryam’s past as a descendant of El Tagi. Her childhood was spent in that blood-stained palace, overshadowed by extended family, so many of whom had disturbing personalities and self-complicated lives. Told through disjointed flashbacks, Maryam’s enigmatic past is surely maze-like, populated by both the living and dead, although which is which is not always clear.
“What the woman had said meant she had either lost her memory or her reason. How could time have become so horribly confused?” Maryam asks herself, still unable to distinguish between past and present, dream and reality. Indeed, both Maryam and the reader must work equally hard to construct her multi-layered, uncertain story.
The slim volume is not without memorable, beautifully-rendered passages – about gardens redolent with heady fragrances, fickle young love that begins with air kisses and ends in betrayal, the mourning of lost innocence, and so on. But even in spite of Starkey’s supplemental explanatory notes at novel’s end, Maryam’s Maze ultimately remains lost in translation.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Arab, Egyptian
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
If, like me, you don’t like to know the whole story before you read the book (!!), then skip the family tree in these opening pages. Don’t even glance at it. You can always go back to it after.
Ahdaf Soueif‘s 1999 Booker Prize finalist (J. M. Coetzee took his second Booker with Disgrace that year) is a cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-generational saga about two pairs of lovers a century apart. While Map traverses time, the story’s ‘now’ is 1997 Egypt … pre-9/11, pre-Tahrir Square which, read in 2011, adds another compelling layer to its already epic scope.
Soueif makes the intriguing choice to narrate the lovers’ courtships with a fifth, omniscient voice: Amal, recently separated from her British husband, leaves her London life to return to her native Egypt. At the behest of her world-famous, globe-trotting conductor brother ‘Omar, Amal is visited by Isabel, an American journalist from New York. Isabel arrives with a large trunk filled with letters, diaries, artifacts, memories that once belonged to a bold Englishwoman, Lady Anna Winterbourne, who outlived her own riveting love story.
Just before the turn of the 20th century, Lady Anna arrived in Cairo as a grieving widow, a member of the British elite in colonial Egypt. Unwilling to accept the limitations of being female, she donned men’s clothing to expand her explorations. Her independence led to mistaken abduction, which surprisingly led her to the gallant (and powerful) Sharif, the love of her life. The remnants of her Egyptian adventures preserved in that leather trunk will bring together her great-granddaughter Isabel with her beloved ‘Omar.
“[T]his is not my story,” Amal insists, and yet she immediately recognizes both pairs of lovers: “… if I come into [the story] at all, it is only as my own grandmother did a hundred years ago, when she told the story of her brother’s love.”
The core of Soueif’s novel is undoubtedly Anna and Sharif’s defiant relationship, which Soueif infuses with captivating details, judiciously revealed to keep the reader turning the pages. Her attempts, however, to weave in the politics then and now, feel clumsily intrusive. Without minimizing the grave importance of historical context – Anna and Sharif’s love story surely would not have been nearly as memorable without the tumultuous political backdrop – the combination of politics and romance stalls more often than not. That said, “unpacked, unwrapped, unravelled” through Amal’s fifth lens, Anna and Sharif and Isabel and ‘Omar prove to be an enigmatic foursome.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1999 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Arab, Egyptian
Harbor by Lorraine Adams
According to her official website bio, Lorraine Adams left her Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper career in 2000 “to recount the lost stories of Algerians she knew without the strictures of journalism, and the conventional sentiment of the moment.” Even before 9/11, Adams well understood about “ambiguity” and terrorism.
Journalism’s loss proved to be literary gain: Adams’ award-winning 2004 debut novel is stunning, sly, devastating, and not a little condemning of the forces supposedly engaged to keep America safe. Adams’ superb investigative skills clearly come in handy, as she unravels a nuanced story of two brothers from Algeria and their uncertain American lives.
Aziz rises from the waters of Boston Harbor more dead than alive, his body festering from 52 days trapped in the hold of a tanker. Barely human when he reaches land, only the initial kindness of strangers saves him until he can join his childhood friends, fellow illegal aliens sharing a crowded makeshift existence.
Aziz’s younger brother’s American entry bears no resemblance: “Mourad had a green card. He had checked luggage. He had a one-way ticket on Air France. His aisle seat was next to an empty window seat for the entire eight-hour flight. He had slept comfortably with three pillows and two blankets.” In spite of his near-effortless immigration, Aziz instantly knows Mourad “‘does not want to be here.’”
Seemingly quiet and detached, Aziz is a young man of many secrets. Amidst a cast of dubious companions with more bravado than brains, more testosterone than caution, Aziz is a wondrous character who seems to be both sage and desperado. As his story is revealed, layer by layer, you will gasp at the final realization of why he can never rest.
“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the Statue of Liberty beckons from another harbor. But this post-9/11 America, as Adams deftly shows, is a complicated maze in which anyone can get lost, anyone can be hunted, and anyone can disappear. Follow Aziz on his dazzling journey and bear witness to his bewildering, elusive search for freedom.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African, Arab
Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, translated by Sherif Hatata
Writer/playwright/activist/psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi is one of those women who seem to scare men – especially those who purport to have something called ‘authority.’ She’s been fired, banned, accused, threatened, imprisoned because of what is ultimately her simple belief that all women are worthy human beings deserving respect and equality.
The Egyptian-born El Saadawi writes in Arabic; her husband, Sherif Hatata, who is also a novelist and doctor, has translated a number El Saadawi’s works (and his own) into English. The prolific El Saadawi with dozens of title to her name, has written six memoirs thus far; she wrote her first from a jail cell on a roll of toilet paper and a smuggled-in eyebrow pencil, aptly published as Memoirs from the Women’s Prison.
Prison looms large in Woman at Point Zero, considered to be El Saadawi’s best-known novel internationally. While conducting research on neurosis in Egyptian women in the early 1970s, El Saadawi made regular visits to hospitals and outpatient clinics, but she was especially interested in “what prison life was like, especially for women,” she reveals in the book’s 1983 preface. “Perhaps this was because I lived in a country [Egypt] where many prominent intellectuals around me had spent various periods of time in prison for ‘political offences,’” including her own husband. “Little did I know that one day I would step through the same gates, not as a psychiatrist, but as a prisoner arrested with 1,035 others under the decree issued by Sadat on 5 September 1981 [which called for the imprisonment of all opposition activists].”
“This is the story of a real woman,” the novel begins. That woman whom El Saadawi met almost four decades ago was called Firdaus. It is the night before Firdaus’ execution for having committed murder. And throughout the night, Firdaus reveals her story.
“Let me speak. Do not interrupt me,” Firdaus insists – most of her life has been spent unheard and unseen as a thinking, feeling human being. Born to peasant parents, she is eventually raised by an uncle who takes her to Cairo, who recognizes her intellect, who sends her to school, but who also thinks nothing of treating her as a sexual plaything. He marries her off to a decrepit old man, who in turn violently abuses the still teenage Firdaus. She escapes, only to be lured into one abusive relationship after another. Her attempt to live a ‘respectful’ life ends with a betrayed, broken heart, and she re-invents herself as a highly-paid, sought-after, seemingly independent prostitute … at least for a short time.
Firdaus speaks without remorse, without pity. She recognizes that death is the only escape from her debased, shattered life. In spite of her devotion to learning and knowledge – as soon as she has the financial means, she enshrines her love of books in a library room she does not allow any others to enter – she cannot escape the oppressive cycles of power and abuse.
“This woman,” writes El Saadawi, “… evoked .. a need to challenge and to overcome those forces that deprive human beings of their right to live, to love and to real freedom.” That is what makes too many so-called ‘authorities’ afraid. Almost a half-century since her encounter with Firdaus, even as she approaches the age of 80, El Saadawi continues her fight for women’s freedom. Her books continue to provide remarkable testimony … as well as the not-to-be-ignored call to join in.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1975; 2007 (latest English edition) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Arab, Egyptian
Sharing Our Homeland: Palestinian and Jewish Children at Summer Peace Camp by Trish Marx, photographs by Cindy Karp
Too often, media headlines are filled with Arab/Palestinian and Jewish/Israeli conflict and tragedy. Here’s a resonating anecdote filled with images of real-life kids from both sides of the religious/political/historical borders, enjoying a real-life camp where “… they will have the chance to meet and come together – not as enemies, but as campers, as children, and maybe as friends.”
Alya lives in the Arab village of Meiser in north-central Israel; she and her Muslim family are Israeli Palestinians. Yuval, a young Jewish boy, lives in the Jewish community of Maor just a short distance from Meiser. “Alya and Yuval are like children who go to camp anywhere. But in other important ways they are different. They are from two separate ethnic and religious groups who share the same land but who have been in conflict for the past one hundred years.”
For two weeks, children “who live in the midst of this ongoing conflict” will gather at Menashe Summer Peace Camp, sponsored by Givat Haviva, an educational organization that promotes Jewish-Arab Peace. “[N]o matter what language he or she speaks – [everybody] just calls it Peace Camp.” Friendship is hoped for, but the one thing all the children will learn is to respect each another.
Based on writer Trish Marx‘s visit to Peace Camp in 2005, this inspiring title alternates between glimpses of both Alya and Yuval’s everyday lives at home with their families, with key elements of their shared Palestinian/Israeli history, and most importantly their experiences at Peace Camp. In addition to the expected swimming, special crafts, and sleepovers, Peace Campers have some uniquely (surprising!) shared events, including an emergency rescue re-enactment complete with police, ambulance, and bomb squad in attendance!
Such is the children’s reality today … but a future of hopeful change is certainly in their hands: “In a country filled with tension and conflict, the campers have learned to take the first steps toward sharing their ancient homeland. And it happens every year, year after year, at Peace Camp.” Now if only we could get the adults – especially the so-called leaders – to spend a few weeks learning with/from the children …
Readers: Children, Middle Grade
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, ..Middle Grade Readers, .Nonfiction, Arab, Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian
Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun, translated by Linda Coverdale
In spite of his prestigious college degree which should have guaranteed him a bright future, Azel is unable to find meaningful work in his native Tangier, a city in northern Morocco. Mired in self-absorbed disappointment, he spends his days and nights lost in women, wine, and song, living off the hard earnings of his older sister, Kenza. When he meets Miguel, a wealthy Spaniard, Azel recognizes a chance for escape. Although he adamantly denies being a homosexual, Azel nevertheless allows Miguel to buy him a luxurious new life in Barcelona.
Azel’s sister Kenza soon follows as Miguel’s legal “wife,” but insists on remaining independent. Unable to come to terms with his exploited sexuality – not to mention his dissolute existence – Azel falls victim to his own sense of trapped failure.
Already a bestseller in France where it was first published (Jelloun is a Moroccan transplant who immigrated to France in 1961), Leaving adroitly explores the complicated issues of immigration, contrasting two cultures separated merely by the few miles of the Straits of Gibraltar, and yet so vastly distanced by socio-economic differences.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, Arab, European, Moroccan
Santa Claus in Baghdad and Other Stories about Teens in the Arab World by Elsa Marston
Eight stories about eight teens from eight different countries coming of age during a time of uncertainty and tumult in their native Middle East countries. In the title story, young Amal of Baghdad, Iraq, must find the very best gift for her departing literature teacher even while watching as her family’s already depleted resources continue to dwindle. In “Faces,” Suhayl of Syria comes to terms with his parents’ divorce, desperately hoping to make his mother happy once again.
Aneesi watches in horror when her beloved father is accused of theft in the wealthy Lebanese home in which they both work in “The Hand of Fatima.” When Mujahhid is sent away from Bethlehem and the constant shootings that already claimed his older brother’s life to stay with relatives in a remote village in “The Olive Grove,” he learns new ways of struggling for his people’s rights against the controlling Israelis without having to become yet another martyr.
An Egyptian city girl learns first hand about village life in “In Line,” a young Tunisian boy who sells his mother’s hats befriends a famous artist in “Scenes in a Roman Theater,” two brave girls in Jordan help save another from an honor killing in “Honor,” and a young Palestinian boy living in a refugee camp in Lebanon helps his isolated older brother possibly find real love.
While the circumstances of these young lives might first seem unfamiliar to a western audience, universal truths about what all children want soon emerge. Differences that all too often get magnified by the media fall away as the children in these pages come of age, sharing their lives with friends, dealing with the occasional conflict with parents, and trying to fit into their communities – all the while surviving war, deprivation, political uncertainty, and imminent dangers.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2008 Continue reading
Muhammad by Demi
Based on traditional Islamic sources, award-winning children’s book maestro Demi creates a book specifically for children about the life and teachings of Muhammad. The book underscores that Muhammad’s message is the same message the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus brought to Earth: peace be upon us all. Muhammad is an especially timely title, with almost a quarter of the world practicing Islam, not to mention the unfortunate – though current – Western fear (and denigration) of the Muslim world.
Review: “New and Notable,” AsianWeek, October 17, 2003
Readers: Children
Published: 2003 Continue reading
Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Biography, .Nonfiction, Arab, Middle Eastern
Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day Jordan by Norma Khouri
Khouri writes hauntingly about the life and death of her childhood best friend, Dalia, who was murdered by her own father for falling in love with the wrong man. Khouri exposes the insidious laws of her native Jordan (as well as other parts of the Arab world) that condone so-called “honor killings” of young women by their own brothers, uncles, and even fathers for allegedly “shaming” the family– even in the case of rape! The last four pages which recount a handful of these murders add to the horrifying tragedy.
Review: “New and Notable Books,” AsianWeek, April 25, 2003
Readers: Adult
Published: 2003 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Arab, Jordanian, Middle Eastern
Facebook
Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
