Literature
Our Fate, Our House
Many Palestinian stories are the stories of sons: heroes or victims, Everyman or Superman. In the intifada, the rebellious young men, the shabab, have become the sons of all the people and their exploits legendary.
Sahar Khalifeh’s stories, like her own life, are the stories of daughters, mothers and self. This story about Umm Samih resumes Khalifeh’s exploration of characters from the northern West Bank town of Nablus which figure in her three novels, Wild Thorns, The Sunflower and the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of an Unreliable Woman.
Sacrilegious Discourse
More than a quarter of a century after independence, the Maghrib’s Francophone literary output is flourishing. If one adds to this the Beur literature produced by second and third generation immigrants of North African heritage, Maghribi literature in French appears to be the single most important literary and aesthetic phenomenon permeating French culture today. One of the most important exponents of this literature is Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Moroccan recipient of the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 1987. The warm critical reception of his two novels, The Sand Child and The Sacred Night (translated by Alan Sheridan, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1987 and 1989), epitomizes the increasing popularity and success of Maghribi literature in French.
Toward a World Literature?
The Prix Goncourt, always the biggest literary event of the year in France, became even more so in 1987, when the venerable Goncourt Academy named Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun as its eightieth laureate. In French literary circles, reaction to the selection of Ben Jelloun’s novel, La Nuit saerde, contained an unmistakable current of relief, as if to say that the situation of the Arab community in France really could not be so bad if a North African received the Prix Goncourt. Within that Arab community, the optimism was somewhat more guarded (about the book as well as the prize), but certainly no one regretted the increased visibility that the award brought to French-language North African literature.
Harlow, Resistance Literature
Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen Press, 1987)
Resistance Literature is a wide-ranging and impressive critical study of the literatures of contemporary “Third World” liberation movements as they confront and alter the literary and political categories of the “West.” It is not only an introduction to Third World literature, although that function is ably accomplished by Harlow’s text. Resistance Literature also argues for the crucial political significance of literary texts and, by extension, for the necessity of an informed political commentary on those texts.
Editor’s Bookshelf (July/August 1988)
The defeat of the Arab states in the June 1967 war was more than a military setback. It was also a blow against the radical nationalist project and its modern and secular cultural orientation which bonded the Arab world and the West even as it provided a framework for resistance to Western economic, political and cultural domination. Since 1967, only the Palestinian national movement has continued to advance the flag of radical nationalism. Elsewhere, a romantic Islamism, brandishing the slogan of cultural “authenticity,” has posed the most consistent challenge to continuing Western domination of the Middle East.
When I Found Myself
This story first appeared in Arabic in the Paris-based Kull al-‘Arab, September 3, 1986.
The men in our unit branded me “the intellectual,” a term that connoted for them more sarcasm than conviction. They pronounced it in mincing tones, and played comically with its derivatives. This ought not, of course, be imputed to intrinsic dislike among the well-meaning fighters for intellectuals. Rather, I suppose, to their belief in the futility of making oneself attend to matters other than the tangible tasks of fighting or getting ready for combat. And being, as they said, a bookworm, I had only myself to blame.
Letters (March/April 1986)
Nuclear Dumping in Sudan and Somalia?
Ghalem, A Wife for My Son
Ali Ghalem, A Wife for My Son (trans. G. Kazolias) (Chicago: Banner Press, 1985).
Habiby, Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist
Emile Habiby, Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).
Sulayman, al-Masalla
Nabil Sulayman, al-Masalla [The Obelisk] (Beirut: Dar al-Haqa’iq, 1980).
Kemal, Anatolian Tales
Yaşar Kemal, Anatolian Tales (trans. Thilda Kemal) (London: Writers and Readers, 1983).
As the problems of Third World countries have intensified, modern Third World writers, committed to a realistic literary style, have been playing an important role in providing a more comprehensive view of their societies to readers worldwide. Yaşar Kemal, whose novels and short stories deal primarily with the social relations in Turkish villages, is among these writers. Born in a village in southern Anatolia, Kemal struggled to learn to read and write, and he knows firsthand the conditions under which the characters of his stories live.
Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl
John Le Carre, The Little Drummer Girl (Random House, 1983).
Le Carre has forsaken the world of the Circus and its post-imperial wiles to explore the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, particularly that between the underground agencies of the two sides. The central character is a young English actress named Charlie: At first sympathetic to the Palestinians, she is elaborately “turned” by the Israeli agents. After many weeks of interrogation and briefing, and several identity changes, she leads the Israelis to their Palestinian prey in southern Germany.
Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose
Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose (trans. Georgina Kleege) (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1982).
West Bank Journal
Raja Shehadeh, The Third Way: A Journal of Life in the West Bank (London: Quartet Books, 1982).
My problem with the newspapers is that I can’t settle on the right time to read them. In the morning they darken the day, at noon they kill my appetite, after lunch they make me sick, and in the evening they set the pattern of my nightmares.
