A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (10 page)

Idris’s writings, in their frustrations as well as in their impatience for change, are typical of a strand of Arabic literature in the 1950s and 1960s that insisted on literature having a clear social message and its authors a clear ‘commitment’ to change. In this respect, Arabic literature was within the international mainstream (this was the decade of the ‘Angry Young Men’ in Britain), and ‘committed’ writers like Idris had little time for their elder peers, for whom ‘literature is an end in itself’.
¹⁷
A typical novel of the period is Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s
Egyptian Earth
, well translated by Desmond
Stewart, which focuses on the lives of Egypt’s peasant farmers, the
fellaheen
, and protests against their ill-treatment.
¹⁸
The poetry of the period displays similar qualities, as explained below.

Outside Egypt, prose writers such as the Sudanese Tayib Salih and the Saudi national Abdelrahman Munif are among the most important writers of the post-war period. Salih came to prominence in the 1960s, and Munif’s writing career began in the 1970s, only ending with his death in 2004. Salih’s best-known novel, at the time of writing the only work by a modern Arab author to appear in the ‘Penguin Classics’ series of world literary works, is
Season of Migration to the North
, already referred to above. Other works include a collection of short stories set in Wad Hamid, the same village in the Sudan that features in
Season of Migration
, brought together in English in a volume entitled
The Wedding of Zein
. There is also
Bandarshah
, a later, longer work that represents a development from the world presented in
Season of Migration
and that is Salih’s most recent published work.
¹⁹

Born in 1929 in northern Sudan, Salih’s professional career led him to posts in various international organizations in Europe and elsewhere, as well as to a great deal of journalism. In his literary writing, he has focused on the relationship between a poor and swiftly developing post-colonial society, in this case the Sudan, and the European society that contains both the former colonial power and represents the promise, or threat, of change. This theme of the meeting of cultures, dramatized through the experiences of either an Egyptian man travelling to Europe, or of Europeans coming to the Arab world, had been mined by others long before Salih turned his attention to it, notably by al-Hakim in
Return of the Spirit
, in which Egypt is compared positively with Europe, and Hakki in
The Lamp of Umm Hashim
.
²⁰
However, Salih’s novel, published in Arabic in 1966 ten years after Sudanese independence, gives a new, harder edge to this relationship in its examination of two characters,
the anonymous narrator of the novel whose journey to Europe takes place at the beginning of the post-colonial period, and the older figure of Mustafa Sa’eed, who made a similar journey in the 1920s during the period of Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule. Whereas the works of both al-Hakim and Hakki suggest that anxieties raised by the encounter of Europe and the Arab world can be laid to rest in a kind of ‘higher synthesis’, there being no necessary conflict between traditional ways of thinking and new and foreign ideas, Salih’s work is altogether less sanguine. Though written at a time of optimism at the possibilities held out by development in the immediate post-colonial period,
Season of Migration
might nevertheless be understood as a rather bleak, pessimistic work.

One recent critic has suggested that Salih’s novels may be seen as ‘episodes in a continuous narrative … that gives full expression to the state of dissolution experienced throughout Arab societies’ as a result of European influence, something in the manner of what the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe achieved in his
Things Fall Apart
, which describes the decay of traditional society in West Africa following British incursion. All Salih’s works show a ‘progression from an initial state of peace and being at home in the world to one of profound estrangement or crisis,’ often coming about as a result of the impact of foreign rule or ideas. This estrangement has to do with a wider crisis of ‘Arab ideology’, polarized between a ‘vain attempt to mimic the West’, broadly speaking the aim of the writers and thinkers associated with the
nahda
, and more recent ‘nostalgic call[s] for a “return” to tradition’, associated with various ‘fundamentalist’ thinkers arguably concerned to re-establish what they see as certain basic values after a period of foreign domination.
²¹

Thus, in
Season of Migration
Salih’s characters, the one the ‘prize pupil of the English’, the other a specialist in English literature marooned in his own society, are confronted by problems of identity
and belonging. Mustafa Sa’eed, a ‘westernized’ intellectual, is ‘a lie’, neither truly western, nor, as a result of his ‘migration to the north’, truly Sudanese. He bricks up his English books and English past in a room of his house, forbidden to visitors in a twist of plot reminiscent of ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, and attempts to live the life of a simple farmer, apparently eventually committing suicide. The narrator, for his part, is at first convinced that he, at least, is not ‘a lie’ and that there need be no conflict either between the two sides of his personality, or between traditional society and the new ideas coming from outside. Slowly, however, he identifies himself more and more with Sa’eed, eventually entering the latter’s forbidden room. In a striking illustration of the ‘crisis’ afflicting this society as it attempts to hold together western and traditional ideas, a young woman, Hosna Bint Mahmoud, kills the elderly husband forced on her by her family, leading to a general sense of catastrophe. ‘It’s the first time anything like this has happened in the village since God created it. What a time of affliction we live in,’ comments the narrator’s grandfather.

While Salih introduced a new tone to Arabic writing hailing from the rural areas of the Sudan, Munif, too, has focused almost exclusively on the history and society of his own native country, in this case Saudi Arabia. In his best-known work, the multi-volume work published in Arabic in the 1980s as
Cities of Salt
, three volumes of which have been translated into English (
Cities of Salt
,
The Trench
and
Variations on Night and Day
²²
), Munif describes the history of an unnamed society bearing a family resemblance to those in the Gulf or to Saudi Arabia, which in the space of just a few decades has gone from being a partially nomadic society based around desert oases to something like what can be seen today, all thanks to oil. The novels paint a thinly veiled portrait of the history of Arab Gulf society from the 1920s to the present. Before his recent death, Munif was considered to be one of the most controversial
Arab novelists, not only because of the importance of his subject matter, but also because Munif himself was not afraid to offend powerful interests in his presentation of it. He was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and lived most of his later life in Syria, Lebanon or Iraq.

Born in 1933 in Amman of mixed Saudi and Iraqi parentage, Munif worked for much of his life in the oil industry, first in Syria and then in Iraq, experience that stood him in good stead in writing his novels. He was also involved in politics. The first of his literary works, the strangely named
Trees and the Assassination of Marzuq
, appeared in 1973, and in it Munif announced the twin themes that dominate the rest of his fiction: the ‘destruction of a rural community and its way of life that had become the experience of so many ordinary Arabs’, notably as a result of the coming of the oil industry, and the ‘exposure of the rampant corruption and lies that dominate public life in the Arab world’. Trees and villages are destroyed, together with the ways of life that they have sheltered, with corruption and lies emerging to take their place. A second novel,
East of the Mediterranean
, followed in 1976, and in it Munif exposed the use made of torture in some Arab countries at the time, particularly against political prisoners. According to the Egyptian critic Sabry Hafez, from whose essay on Munif the above quotations are taken,
East of the Mediterranean
should be compared to a whole body of work in modern Arabic literature that takes imprisonment and torture as its theme.
²³

However, it is the first of Munif’s major themes, the destruction of a rural or nomadic community and its way of life, that marks out
Cities of Salt
, at least its first volume. A short novel,
Endings
,
²⁴
had already moved onto this terrain, focusing in its reconstruction of traditional life in the village of al-Tiba on what its translator describes as the ‘values which have survived the passage of time and the events of history, at least up till now’. These traditional values
include both a keen sense of the village’s ecology and a sense of its communal history, orally transmitted from generation to generation in traditional narrative forms. However, it is precisely these aspects of village life – communal storytelling, remembering, the close relationship with nature – that are most at threat from modern developments. The villagers ‘hear the sound of axes smashing into the trunks of dessicated trees, and the whole thing makes them feel as though they are the ones being throttled.’ Younger people, returning to the village from the expanding cities nearby, give the villagers ‘the impression that they are listening to someone else’, not a member of the community, ‘or that the city has managed to corrupt them completely and made them talk that way’. One might say that in
Endings
Munif the novelist writes al-Tiba’s epitaph, doing much the same thing at greater length for the community of Wadi al-Uyoun in
Cities of Salt
.

An ‘outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert’, life in Wadi al-Uyoun is disrupted too, this time by the arrival of foreigners, Americans, who ‘certainly didn’t come for water’. At first, these newcomers pose no obvious threat: ‘the
wadi
has seen and heard more people come through than there are grains of sand’ comments Mitel al-Hathal, a leading member of the community, ‘and none of them ever left a trace.’ However, this time they return, bringing machines, ‘huge yellow hulks [that] move along and roar,’ with them; watching from the
wadi
’s edge, ‘deep inside him[self]’ al-Hathal ‘knew, when the thunder stopped, that the world had ended.’ The villagers are expelled and the village obliterated. Anyone ‘who remembers those long-ago days,’ the narrator comments, ‘when a place called Wadi al-Uyoun used to exist, and a man named Miteb al-Hathal, and a brook, and trees, and a community of people used to exist,’ will remember ‘the tractors which attacked the orchards like ravenous wolves.’ ‘How is it possible,’ he asks himself, ‘for
people and places to change so entirely that they lose any connection with what they used to be?’

Later novels in the series leave the rural environment and focus instead on politics. The part played by foreign interests in the transformation of traditional society has been noticed in
Cities of Salt
, and in his following novels,
The Trench
and
Variations on Night and Day
, Munif turns his attention to the ways in which these interests operated. In the latter novel, for example, he begins by remembering the ‘dawn of the [twentieth] century – the opening decades’, when ‘the great powers,’ specifically Britain, ‘did not … have the time to deal with the huge number of small emirs and sheikhs’ then ruling the region and therefore put one of them, Khureybit, in charge of the others. In due course the latter becomes a British client, charged with ‘protecting the caravan roads, and … keep[ing] a watchful eye on the neighbours, the Turks and the eastern coast.’ Used by the British to further their interests, he prospers and takes over neighbouring territories in a series of wars. In all of this he is tutored by the sinister Hamilton, a British agent, who talks of ‘how Britain thought and how people of the desert thought. What Britain wanted … and what the Sultan wanted. The rest of the time they talked about horses, history, tribal genealogy and the battles of yesteryear,’ obscuring political interests behind reassuring clouds of orientalism.

The parallels between the fictional history presented in Munif’s novels and the real history of Arabia and the Gulf are explored in detail by Hafez in the essay quoted from above, together with the part Britain, and then the United States, played in it. Both Khureybit and Hamilton have historical parallels. In his final works, Munif turned his attention to Iraq, examining the country’s nineteenth-century history when it was a province of the Ottoman Empire in the novel
Land of Darkness
and focusing on what for him was the nefarious role played in it by the British. In
Notes on History
and Resistance
, a non-fiction work, he explored twentieth-century Iraqi history from the 1917 British occupation to the present day. In this book he also criticizes the actions of the United States in the country and those of the post-2003 Iraqi governments, in his view ‘a collection of stalls selling lies and illusions.’
²⁵
Munif is also the author of a memoir of a childhood spent in the Jordanian capital Amman.
²⁶

As well as seeing major achievements in the novel and short story, post-war decades also saw a revival and transformation in the fortunes of Arabic poetry. However, while prose writing was dominated by Egyptian writers, developments in poetry tended to take place elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Lebanon.

Poetry, as suggested in
Chapter 2
above, has long been considered the
diwan al-‘arab
, the ‘record of the Arabs’, and it did not remain aloof from the changes sweeping the Arab world at the time of the Arab renaissance, or
nahda
. Yet, if the post-war period saw widespread demands for the root-and-branch renovation of Arab societies, leading to political change in many of them and a new conception of prose literature in the vanguard of that change, such demands were perhaps all the more keenly felt in poetry. Whereas prose literature had at best a limited rhetorical role, poetry could be used to address mass audiences directly (though novels, suitably adapted, could still reach large audiences when adapted for films). Partly as a result of this, post-war Arabic poetry saw innovation both in formal terms, leading to the eclipse of traditional metres and verse forms, and in terms of diction, which now became less elaborate and closer to the language that people actually spoke, if still not identical with it. Both these changes reflected changing conceptions of the role of the poet in society and the nature of the poet’s audience. Moreover, they reflected, too, a greater openness to European poetry and particularly to the kind of innovations that had earlier been made in it, some Arabic poetry from the 1950s
onwards being influenced either by the fragmentation and wide-ranging cultural reference to be found in the works of T. S. Eliot, or by the dislocations of language – Rimbaud’s
dérèglement de tous les sens
– familiar from modern French poetry.