A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (2 page)

For the Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, for example, while ‘learning to write’ meant ‘learning to write in French’, where writing in Arabic is concerned the giants consist of Egyptian authors familiar across the Arab world, such as ‘Tewfik El Hakim … Youcef As-Soubai, Hafed Ibrahim, Najib Mahfoud’ and Taha Hussein.
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Similarly, when growing up in Morocco in the 1950s the young Mohamed Berrada, later a well-known novelist and critic, dreamt of going to Cairo, the centre of Arab national aspirations and Arabic literature and culture at the time. When he finally had the opportunity to leave Morocco as a student, he chose Cairo above Damascus because ‘his head was filled
with scenes from [Egyptian] films such as
Vive l’amour
,
Love is Forbidden
and
Passion and Vengeance
, with the songs of Mohamed Abdel-Wahhab, Farid el-Atrache, Asmahan and Umm Kulthoum, and with the names of writers like Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Manfalouti and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayyed.’
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Over more recent decades Egyptians have provided much of the intellectual manpower for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries: Egypt’s brain-drain, long a feature of that country, has in recent decades tended to go eastwards rather than westwards as a result of the superior economic resources of the latter-named countries.

This book reflects the importance of Egypt’s writers in modern Arabic literature, while also trying to give other countries their due. This is particularly the case in the discussion of modern Arabic poetry, where other Arab writers have arguably been more important than Egyptian. It is the case, too, in the extended treatment given to modern Palestinian literature in
Chapter 4
. Marked by dispossession, diaspora and ongoing occupation, modern Palestine has given rise to a literature that is in certain respects unique in the Arab world, and Palestinian writers and intellectuals have enjoyed an influence in Arab letters out of all proportion to the country’s size, matching the role that Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has played in Arab affairs since the end of the Second World War.

That being said, while for some purposes it is useful, or even essential, to emphasize a writer’s local affiliations, seen in a larger perspective those affiliations may not tell the whole story. Mahfouz, for example, while a very ‘Egyptian’ writer who wrote throughout his life about his native city of Cairo, is also an author who has an audience across the Arab world, and any literate Arab is likely to have read his works (or to have seen the films made from them). Indeed, owing to its use of a common language and its references to shared cultural and historical experiences, Arabic literature, like the Arab world, can be viewed in a double perspective, being at once all of a piece and divided
up into local, ‘national’ parts. Arab writers tend to address both their immediate countrymen and the wider readership provided by the Arab world, and for this reason, it makes sense to speak of Mahfouz as being as much an ‘Arab writer’ as he is a local, ‘Egyptian’ one.

Finally, modern Arabic literature, like other literatures, can be read with various aims in mind. One of the main reasons, traditionally, has been linguistic, as part of the learning of Arabic; though because of the way in which Arabic studies have sometimes been organized one may get the impression that students of Arabic, who are among the people most qualified to enjoy the modern literature, may actually be among those least likely to do so. All too often, enjoyment has been drummed out of them by a long process of linguistic initiation. The kind of memories that sometimes remain from the learning of Latin at school, or of struggling through Anglo-Saxon and the Middle English dialects as part of an English degree, sometimes also linger from learning Arabic. Sometimes such memories remain even for the Arabs themselves, for special reasons mentioned in
Chapter 1
. One hastens to add that this book mostly discusses works that are available in English translation, and no knowledge of Arabic is required.

Another reason for reading modern Arabic literature is sociological, the literature serving as a source of information on the societies that produced it. It is natural to read literary material in this way, and the ways in which such material is discussed at school or university on the whole tends to reinforce it. Students everywhere are perhaps familiar with the kind of essay that asks them to consider what might be learned from a work of literature about attitudes to gender, or class, or ethnicity in the society that produced it. Modern Arabic literature, too, can be read in this way, and indeed this book to an extent does so.

However, it is as well to strike a note of caution at the outset. While modern Arabic literature can of course be read sociologically, this
approach naturally does not exhaust its interest. Indeed, one of the prime purposes of this brief introduction is to show that modern Arabic literature can be read for pleasure and enjoyment, like any other kind of literary writing (with allowance made for the fact that it is read in translation). One does not only go to it in search of material for academic study or for information that can then be used for other purposes. Indeed, there are reasons why this attitude has in the past been met with by suspicion, again for reasons mentioned in
Chapter 1
. Like all imaginative literature, modern Arabic literature is perhaps best read for its own sake, as part of a process of imaginative expansion that culminates in enhanced understanding.

Clearly, the choices that translators and publishers of modern Arabic literature make when presenting it to western readers also determine the picture that those readers form of it, and the sometimes controversial issues of translation and cultural exchange are discussed in more detail below. In concluding this section, however, it may be as well to say something about the
variety
of modern Arabic literature, something which is not always evident to western readers. Arabic literary writing can serve as a vehicle for reflection on questions of history, identity and individual life-options. But it also contains works that interpret the role of literature differently, pushing it towards linguistic or formal experiment rather than towards realism, or that see literature as a vehicle for the expression of minority identity or sexual difference. While some Arab writers have an official status within their countries of origin and are familiar faces on international conference circuits, others are oppositional figures. While some authors, like many authors everywhere, seek to reach the widest possible audience, others are writers’ writers and write primarily for their peers.

Few, if any, Arab authors manage to make a living from their writings alone, and probably there are none that reach the kind of audiences that a writer of a western bestseller can expect to reach. There is no
Arab J. K. Rowling, and some western critics have even accused Arab writers of being insufficiently commercially minded.
⁹
Almost none of them benefit from the kind of promotion routinely available to successful writers in the West, and on the whole the Arab publishing industry does not have access to the impressive production, distribution and promotion techniques available to its western peers. While there are now more pan-Arab publishing ventures than there once were, thanks to the improved distribution made possible by the Internet, and there are substantially more literary prizes, some of them highly lucrative, in general terms the publishing industry in Arab countries is still under-developed, and this has negative impacts on authors’ careers. Despite the high esteem in which literature is generally held in the Arab world, it often finds few readers.
¹⁰

Some of these sociological issues are touched upon in what follows in the discussion of individual works and authors. A final note concerns spelling conventions and references. For ease of reference in this book the names of Arab authors have been given according to their published English versions (e.g. Naguib Mahfouz). A book in itself could be written on Arabic personal names, which are constructed more along the Russian lines of given name, patronymic name, and family name than on the first name-family name pattern familiar in the West. The situation is complicated by the fact that by no means every Arab will use a family name, called a
nasab
or
laqab
, constructing a three-part name instead that consists of a given name followed by the father’s and grandfather’s given names. No Arab writer would refer to the Egyptian intellectual Taha Hussein as ‘Hussein’, for example, as this book does, since Hussein is the author’s father’s name. As in the case of spellings, however, western conventions are followed in this book for ease of reference. On the few occasions where Arabic words or phrases are given in the text these are spelled more or less as they sound. Translations from French are by the author. Translations from Arabic are from published English translations, sometimes
slightly modified. To avoid cluttering the text, references have been kept as brief as possible. While space has been saved by omitting many page references, the sources of all quotations have been given.

Orientalism
, a well-known work by the late Palestinian-American critic Edward Said, develops the thought that a particular way of seeing has historically vitiated relations between the Arab world and Europe. This way of seeing, dubbed ‘orientalism’, has been present in various European representations of the Arab world and the Arabs, whether literary, artistic, academic or in the media, and these have circulated widely in western societies, European representations giving way to North American ones. ‘Orientalism’, Said writes, is ‘a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience’, that ‘special place’ being as Europe’s ‘other’, everything Europe is not. Whereas Europeans have sometimes considered themselves to be ‘rational, virtuous, mature, [and] “normal”,’ among other things, the Orient has been seen as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, [and] “different”,’ particularly in the period after 1800 and in the ‘discourse’ of orientalism.
¹

While Said’s book has been controversial and continues to generate debate,
²
its contribution lies in drawing attention to the ways in
which the Arab world has been represented in Europe and the purposes such representations have served. It drew attention, for example, to a class of intellectual middlemen, the writers, painters, photographers, professors and officials whose views the book examined in detail, as well as to the less-celebrated work of journalists and translators, who file reports on the Arab world or translate materials from one set of societies into forms that can be understood by another. The work of all these people has helped to determine the picture that Europeans and perhaps westerners more generally have been able to form of the Arab world and of Arab history and culture. ‘Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself
vis-à-vis
the Orient,’ wrote Said, ‘which add[s] up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf.’

While it would be too much to suggest that there is any ‘correct’ way of seeing the Arab world, either in absolute terms or in terms uninfected by the considerations pointed to by Said, it may be possible to arrive at a more informed picture than the one criticized in
Orientalism
. That, at least, is the aim of this book, which seeks neither to ‘represent’ the Orient nor to ‘speak in its behalf’ but rather to survey works by men and women who have contributed to modern Arabic literature, and, it is hoped, to allow them to speak through their works available in translation. Nevertheless, Said’s work can be helpful in suggesting ways into reading modern Arabic literature, as well as in thinking about ways in which it has sometimes been read. These concern the manner in which this literature has been approached by western readers, in other words the issues of reception and translation pointed to in
Orientalism
; the features of it that present particular challenges to non-Arabic-speaking readers, such as unfamiliar cultural references and the special character of the Arabic language; and the geographical spread of the Arab world and its own
internal divisions that should be borne in mind when approaching its literature.

These themes naturally lead to consideration of the conditions under which modern Arabic literature circulates in its countries of origin, as well as to examination of it as a form of ‘postcolonial’ or ‘world’ literature, when seen from Europe, and reflection on its present situation. Having begun early in the last century as a new form of expression, based – at least for works in prose and drama – in some measure on European models, it has now become a flourishing component of Arab societies.

Translators of modern Arabic literature have sometimes stressed how difficult it is for works by modern Arab writers to sell in western countries. Denys Johnson-Davies, for example, probably the best-known translator of modern Arabic literature into English, has pointed to the demands that determine which texts get translated and the ways in which they are marketed and, presumably, to some extent read. There is no point in doing a translation that will not be published, but many translations have nevertheless ended up in the drawers of translators’ desks because they have failed to find western publishers. And there are also other issues. Literary translators from Arabic into English have sometimes possessed what Johnson-Davies describes as ‘excessive power’, since they play a ‘pioneering role in uncovering and furthering writing’ they believe to be valuable, with English or other foreign publishers not necessarily being well informed about the Arab literary scene.
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They have also had to respond to pressures in the target market, notably for works that answer either to a particular conception of what Arab societies are like, whether ‘picturesque’ or ‘repressive’, or to existing western interests, with regard to women’s experience, for example, or the experience of minorities. Basic to a translator’s choice of works to translate is whether or not these will find a publisher, and this tends to mean that translators choose material they consider will sell in
western countries, a commercial choice, or material that answers to their conception of literary ‘talent’, an aesthetic or even a political one.