A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (19 page)

15. Beirut during the Lebanese civil war

Recent works of fiction also illustrate marginal forms of sexual identity or minority regional or ethnic identities. There is, for example, the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany’s recent
The Yacoubian Building
, mentioned again in the Conclusion to this book, which presents sexual themes with what might be thought to be unusual frankness in today’s conservative atmosphere.
²⁸
There is also al-Shaykh’s
Women of Sand and Myrrh
, which presents homosexuality among women as a form of sexual manipulation against a background of ‘nothing but drinking, eating, telling silly stories, seeing who’s got the nicest clothes’. (There is little lesbian presence in modern Arabic literature, and what there is is not valorized; even feminist authors often produce surprisingly conventional representations of sexuality.) While Mahfouz’s novels had presented male homosexuality among the working classes (in
Midaq Alley
) and among the upper classes (in
Sugar Street
) as an ordinary part of the Cairene landscape, making contemporary frankness unexceptional except with regard to explorations of female sexuality, more recent works have been written against a different background in which explicitly gay identities have been developed along the lines of what has taken place in the West.

As a result, while neither Al Aswany nor al-Shaykh betrays much sense of the politics of gay identity, as opposed to the presentation of gay characters, identity politics nevertheless form a part of the background to their texts in a way that they do not to those of Mahfouz. This is the case because of the continuing prejudice against men and women who admit homosexual preferences or adopt a gay
identity in many Arab societies
²⁹
and because of the development since the 1980s of a politics of gay identity in western societies. It might be added that Mahfouz’s presentations of male homosexuality are unapologetic in a way that Al Aswany’s are not, and there is no sense in Mahfouz’s novels that homosexuality is a foreign contagion, as there is in
The Yacoubian Building
. Indeed, Arab critics have noted the homophobic presentation of gay sexuality in Al Aswany’s novel and its conservative ‘moral’ tone, which is entirely absent from the works of Mahfouz.
³⁰

Debate on these issues has been set out in a recent book by Brian Whitaker,
³¹
the terms of which recall debate over women’s rights in Arab societies. Is the campaign to bring the treatment of gay and lesbian people into line with international norms guaranteeing non-discrimination and equal rights part of an attempt to force alien standards onto Arab societies, ones which may seem to conflict with the traditions of those societies themselves? One author quoted by Whitaker certainly seems to think so, and he fulminates against the ‘Gay International’, which is trying to ‘impose a European heterosexual regime on Arab men.’ Prior to ‘the advent of colonialism and Western capital’ such men had been content to live their sexual lives spontaneously, unworried by political or identity conceptions about who was ‘gay’ and who was ‘straight’. Hidden behind the ‘universal’ discourse of human rights that insists on non-discrimination there is an ‘orientalist impulse’ and an attempt to ‘impose’ western conceptions of heterosexual or homosexual identity on non-western societies. In reply, Whitaker points out that whatever the theoretical positions involved, what is ‘often presented as a choice between cultural authenticity on the one hand’, which apparently requires heterosexuality, ‘and the adoption of all things Western on the other’, which does not, in fact concerns individuals who are often considered either as sinful or as suffering from psychological illness in their own societies. There is also a background of sometimes harsh penal codes.

16. The Yacoubian Building, Cairo, setting for Alaa Al Aswany’s novel of the same name, now an international bestseller

The whole question is complicated by the fact that male homosexuality, though stigmatized in contemporary Arab cultures, is represented as a ‘natural tendency’ and entirely unexceptional in classical Arabic literature, an attitude reflected in the earlier works of Mahfouz. This makes it difficult to see male same-sex desire as culturally inauthentic, or the result of the influence of the West.
³²
The real question, Whitaker concludes, is one of individual freedom and of the freedom of both individuals and cultures to develop. This debate seems likely to rumble on and on.

A writer sometimes left out of this discussion is Hoda Barakat. In a series of novels including
The Tiller of Waters
and
The Stone of Laughter
, this Lebanese author resident in Paris has imagined the lives of male homosexuals in Arab societies from within, the first-person narrators of both these works being attracted to men. In
The Tiller of Waters
,
³³
for example, the narrator struggles to recreate a familiar
space amid the destruction of the Lebanese civil war. Safe in the basement of the destroyed family fabric store, he spreads out the surviving fabrics, rolling in them luxuriantly as he remembers his mother’s world, ‘composed as it was of a very few windows, all of them firmly closed,’ but nevertheless at odds with the masculine hustle of the city outside. In
The Stone of Laughter
the narrator, Kahlil, stares longingly at Naji, a neighbour’s son, his ‘very black, tangled hair, gleaming beautifully, like his looks’.
³⁴
Conventional styles of Lebanese masculinity, business for the rich, militias for the poor, are closed to Khalil, and, unable to leave his flat because of the snipers on the streets outside, he retreats into obsessive cleaning rituals, trying to construct some sort of haven in the midst of the violence. Barakat has explained that her interest in both novels is in individuals who are ‘orphaned’ in their own societies, having tried and failed to find a place for themselves outside their communities. Where can such people ‘find a place in a world that is split between extremism and moral disintegration,’ she asks, as is the case in contemporary Lebanon.
³⁵
From the evidence supplied by these two novels the answer seems to be nowhere.

Contemporary writing has also explored regional identity, two authors in particular, Idris Ali and Haggag Hassan Oddoul, putting Nubian identity onto the literary map in works such as
Dongola
and
Nights of Musk
, respectively.
³⁶
The Nubians, inhabitants of the southernmost areas of Egypt and the northern portions of the Sudan, have their own culture and languages, though most are bilingual in Arabic. They were moved off their lands when these were flooded after the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s. Other casualties were the Pharoanic temples at Abu Simbel, also moved to prevent inundation. However, as Awad al-Shalali, protagonist of Ali’s novel
Dongola
, reflects, while ‘the world helped to save the temples’ through an international campaign, the Nubian ‘people [were left] to their fate’. For men like him this meant menial employment in Egypt’s
northern cities. Now part of the Nubian diaspora, al-Shalali returns to what is left of Nubia full of bitter memories at the prejudice and exploitation met with in the north. However, once there he discovers that experience in the north has changed him, and that he is accepted only reluctantly by the community.

Oddoul’s
Nights of Musk
, a collection of stories, is a more frankly nostalgic, less political work. It too dwells on the loss of Nubia (‘Where is our old village? Where is our Nile? Where are our palm trees and our spacious houses?’), with the tone sometimes veering on the folkloric (‘long, long ago, south of the rapids, the nights exuded incense and oozed musk’). Nevertheless, Oddoul’s stories also ask questions about Nubian identity. Is this simply a matter of looking impotently back on the past and at a community that has all but disappeared, or do Nubians have a future outside their traditional homeland? Both authors write stories of return, and though returning to Nubia can be identity-reinforcing, allowing al-Shalali access to his ‘roots’ for example, it can also be frustrating because the culture of origin is backward-looking and unable to move forward. These issues dwell somewhere beneath the surface of the first story in Oddoul’s collection, for example, in which a boy recounts a visit to his Nubian grandmother. According to her, he is ‘gorbatiya’, non-Nubian, since though his father is Nubian, his mother is Egyptian, and he is insufficiently black (the Nubians ‘are dark, dark, dark, for our sun shines upon our faces’). Yet, who, in reality, is ‘a real Nubian’, now that ‘[we’ve been] pulled up by our roots, and we’ve become like brushwood’? Part of the answer may depend on extending the limits of Nubian identity, whether in what is left of traditional Nubia or outside it.

Finally, there is Ibrahim al-Koni, a Libyan writer also relevant to the regional theme. In a series of texts of indeterminate genre, long short stories or short novels, al-Koni has presented the experience of the Tuareg people in the southern deserts of Libya and Algeria, spreading
into neighbouring Mali and Niger. In
The Bleeding of the Stone
, one of his best-known books,
³⁷
he describes the life of Asouf, a Tuareg herder, who is employed at the rock art sites of Msak Mallat in the southern Sahara guiding parties of ‘men and women, old and young, Christians of every sort’ on behalf of the state antiquities service. Tuareg society is linked to the desert caravans reaching the area from the south as much as it is to the northern coastlands, and over generations it has developed a relationship of respect mixed with fear with the surrounding desert. Part of this involves the
waddan,
a rare species of mountain sheep that figures as the Tuareg’s ancestor and a kind of totemic animal in traditional tales, representing the special covenant that links them with the desert. When two northerners arrive to hunt the
waddan
, Asouf refuses to help them, remembering the covenant that links him with the
waddan
and, through it, with the surrounding desert.

Al-Koni was born in 1948, and he is the author of over forty books, few of which have been translated. He left Libya for Moscow while still a student, and he has lived for many years in Switzerland. His novels interpret Tuareg culture for Arabic-speaking audiences much in the way that works by Ali and Oddoul interpret Nubian culture for them. Together, these three writers have broadened the scope of modern Arabic literature, while drawing attention to the different cultural and linguistic groups living within Arab countries. The Tuareg themselves speak Tamasheq, a kind of Berber, and to outsiders they are probably best known for their practice of male face veiling, Tuareg men wearing elaborate turbans complete with veils that leave only the eyes visible. Al-Koni’s novels about them chart the destructive impact of technology on the environment and the destruction of the traditional covenant that binds the human and non-human inhabitants of the desert together.

These ‘regional’ novels are part of larger trends in contemporary Arabic literature that have seen a turning away from the centre and
towards the margins, and from the politically committed literature of the post-war decades towards the experience of individuals, minority groups and women.

At the end of this brief introduction to modern Arabic literature, it may be useful to try to draw together some threads as well as to ask what the immediate prospects for literary writing might be in the Arab world, particularly in the light of developments alluded to earlier in this book and referred to again below.

The literature discussed in this book, and the conception of literature to which it mostly belongs, is a modern development, and the ‘pioneers’ of modern Arabic literature looked in part to European models, adopting the liberal idea of literature and the writer and producing the ‘first novel’, the ‘first play’ and the first examples of modern poetry drawing on modernist experiments that had been underway in Europe. Modern literature thus in some respects meant ‘foreign literature’, or foreign-influenced literature, and this equation of the modern with the foreign gave rise to debate in the works of Taha Hussein, Yahya Hakki, Tawfiq al-Hakim and others, as we have seen.

More recently, there has been a turning away from European models, and towards elements from the pre-modern literary heritage and
from the oral and popular culture. Gamal al-Ghitany has excavated the writings of the Arab historians and pre-modern literary or religious writers, for example, while Tayeb Salih and Naguib Mahfouz in the later part of his career have drawn upon oral traditions and the popular heritage, producing works of ‘magical realism’. This part of the story has been one of imitation giving rise to hybridization, as has perhaps been the case in other postcolonial literatures. Another part of it has been the extension of realist or modernist experiments, as in the works of Sonallah Ibrahim and Edwar al-Kharrat.

The contemporary Arab literary scene thus contains the results of various trends, the liberal nationalism of Mahfouz, and the ‘commitment’ of the post-independence period, giving way first to the growing sense of the autonomy of literature and its critical function in the work of the sixties generation, and then, today, to the various postmodernist, feminist, regional and other trends seeking to express the experiences of the previously marginalized. As is the case elsewhere, postmodernism has found literary expression in narrative fragmentation and an emphasis on self-expression, together with the abandonment of obvious political concerns. In this respect at least, modern Arab literature has found itself aligned with international trends.