In search of Arab authors
By Khaled Diab
The
Arab world is in desperate need of more novelists in the English language to
bring home the realities of the region through fiction.
April 2008
In Six characters in search of an
author, a half dozen creations of the celebrated Italian playwright Luigi
Pirandello muscle their way on to the stage and demand that they be allowed
to tell their own stories. I sometimes have similar sentiments when it comes to
English literature about the Arab world.
In English, there is an overabundance of
political and historical non-fiction about the region, but little in the way of
novels or other fiction, especially written by Arabs or in which Arabs are not
more than incidental characters used as exotic background colour.
Of course, there are exceptions. Among the most
successful is the Egyptian novelist and short story writer Ahdaf Soueif. I have only read one of her works, The Map of Love
which was shortlisted for the Booker prize and shares
its title with a collection of poems by Dylan Thomas published on the eve of
the second world war.
The book, which is well-crafted and cleverly
weaved together, offers an insight into Egyptian society rarely available in
the English language. However, the romantic parallel storylines – one contemporary,
the other at the turn of the 20th century – and the syrupy
sentimentality of the prose robbed me of the will to go on and I abandoned the
book half way through. I have still not regrouped sufficiently to attempt any
other of her novels, although Aisha
sounds promising.
Tony Hanania, the
London-based Lebanese novelist, is another example of an Arab writer who has
been relatively successful in English. His novel Unreal
City takes the reader into the depressing Wasteland-esque
depths of war-torn
Despite its insight, sensitivity and humanity,
the novel, like so much non-fiction about the Arab world, revolves around conflict
and violence, whereas I yearn to see fiction about the more mundane aspects of
the region, about the universal human experience in an Arab shell.
Interestingly, Hanania
continues a well-established tradition of Lebanese Christian writers in English.
In the early 20th century, a number of Lebanese-American writers
left a fleeting mark on English-language literature. They formed the New York Pen League,
a dynamic and vibrant Arab-American literary movement in the 1920s and 1930s.
However, its pan-Arabist members, who wrote in both
Arabic and English, were to have a more lasting influence in the Arab world
than in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Most notable among them was the poet and artist
Khalil
Gibran whose poetry was mostly written in parable
and dealt with philosophical themes. His most famous work, The prophet, was one of the bibles of the 1960s
counterculture and helped elevate him to become the third bestselling poet in
history, after Shakespeare and Lao Tse.
Nevertheless, most Arab literature in English
is translated from Arabic. The king of the roost here is undoubtedly the late
Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, most of whose
works are available in English. Other translated novelists with a certain
following in English include the Sudanese master of post-colonial fiction al-Tayeb
Saleh, the Egyptian and Lebanese feminists Nawal
el-Saadawi and Hanan
al-Shaykh, as well as the late Saudi dissident Abdel-Rahman
Munif, seen by many as the most important Arab
author of recent decades.
However, the drawback of translated Arab literature
for a non-Arab reader is that, owing to significantly different writing
conventions, many works do not make the journey across the language barrier
smoothly and the reader often needs to be well-versed in Arab societies and
cultures to follow the narrative. One exception to this is the
dentist-turned-novelist Alaa
al-Aswany, widely credited with giving the Arab
novel back its teeth with the sharp social commentary and risqué politics of
his novels, which tend to transfer well into English.
Compare this dearth of Arab literature written
in English with the legion of successful writers who hail, either directly or
indirectly, from south
So, what is behind this sparseness?
Part of the reason is a question of intimacy.
The British colonial experience in
Being an avid and dedicated reader of ‘Indi fiction’, I can only wish that something remotely
similar will one day emerge to show the Arab world in all its cultural and
social wealth. And the situation for Arab fiction could change if more
determined writers come along to tap into the fascination with the
I have embarked on my own novel about the
contemporary Arab world. Set in the surreal, ultramodern cityscape of
There is also the ageing expatriate manager who
cannot bear to be separated from his wife – the last living member of his
family – when she dies in her sleep and decides to cover up her death, with
unforeseen consequences, until he can come to terms with it. A refined academic
struggles with the private hell of his rootlessness
as a Palestinian and the trauma of living through the civil war in
This column appeared
in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 22 March
2008. Read the related
discussion.
ã2008 K. Diab.
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