Literature & Literary Criticism

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2002 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2002 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America
Dear Mr. Kawabata, by Rashid Al-Daif. Translated by Paul Starkey. 166 pages. Northampton, MA: Interlink, 2000. $12.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-7043-8113-3

In this lyrical, epistolary roman à clef, a narrator addresses questions of language, death, and identity to the deceased Japanese novelist and Nobel Laureate Yasunari Kawabata, who killed himself in 1972 at the age of seventy three. With respect to genre, this work—as a postmodern novel of ideas with a heavy investment in politics and autobiography—participates in a major tendency in contemporary Arabic narrative. This smoothly-rendered translation, however, is one of only a handful of representatives of this tendency to have made its way to publication in the English speaking world, perhaps because publishers in the US and England prefer the Arab’s more traditional face. Even within its Arabic context though, this novel is unique, for how often is one exposed to the story of a Maronite from a Lebanese village who becomes involved in an armed struggle promoting Marxism, pan-Arabism, and Palestinian rights?

The protagonist enters the world of ideas at an early age and with only begrudging approval from his father and other village elders. As a grade school student, he comes into contact with a visionary (at least in the context of the village) geography teacher who exposes students to the radical notion that the world is round. This datum is viewed with more than open suspicion by the father and other men of the village, and as young Rashid becomes increasingly outspoken about it, his parents and their generation, who embody Arab traditionalism, grow just as emphatically—even violently―opposed to the scientific secularism of Rashid and the other geography students. As he matures, Rashid is briefly pulled out of school to learn a trade, returns to study literature, begins to make trips to Beirut, and ultimately falls under the sway of an armed movement for Arab Marxism that flies in the face of the increasingly sectarian values of his family and village. Meanwhile, Gagarin orbits the earth, Rashid’ father loses his youthful vigor, and his clan devolves into a seemingly endless series of blood feuds. First Rashid’s father is killed, then Rashid himself is injured while fighting in the Lebanese civil war. His brush with death at the moment of his most acute isolation dramatically frames the questions he has struggled with since he walked into the geography class as a young boy.

This climactic moment is also the inspiration for the long monologue he addresses to the Japanese novelist. There is nothing obvious about the choice of Kawabata as an imagined interlocutor, but perhaps the secret to his selection lies in its very strangeness. As a writer who could not find congruity between a celebrated career as a nobel laureate and a tortured inner life, Kawabata can understand the Borgesian split between Rashid the author and Rashid the protagonist; as a Japanese he may consider the interconnected struggles between Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Palestinians and Israelis; the Arabs and the West on the existential, ‘scientific’ plane that the protagonist strives for; and finally, as a victim of suicide he may see most clearly the relationship between the narrator’s brush with death and his quest for a real world certainty.

Hosam Aboul-Ela
University of Houston

The Adam of Two Edens: Poems, by Mahmoud Darwish. Edited by Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. 206 pages, glossary of Arabic terms. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. $16.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-8156-0710-5

The Adam of Two Edens represents the first attempt by a major North American University Press to devote an entire volume in English to the most charismatic and accomplished living Arab poet. In the face of so daunting a task, even a perfectly done edition might disappoint fans, followers, and critics already familiar with Darwish’s work, but no one can question the service performed by this volume in jump-starting the process of educating the English-speaking world about Darwish’s powerful verse.

The volume focuses on Darwish’s later period, selecting exclusively poems whose first publication in Arabic was after 1990. One of the major developments of this period is an emphasis by the poet on myth―especially myths that can be related to a lost paradise, or lost paradises that can be mythologized. Thus, the fourteen poems collected here are replete with references to Babylon, Andalusia, Pre-Colombian America, the eponymous Eden, and, of course, Palestine. Placing the latter (long the focus of Darwish’s œuvre) in such a list has an intriguing double-effect, both of elevating the tragedy of Palestine to a cosmic level, and of humbling it in the context of such a history of loss that seems to form the foundations of our universe.

The reader should not take too seriously the claim made in the acknowledgments that all fourteen translations in this book are “just short of miraculous” (p. 9), nor should she or he be too put off by the gregarious introduction. This book is only an initial, imperfect effort at forcing the inspiring project that is Darwish’s poetry into the consciousness of anglophone readers. What is miraculous, however, is that through a veritable platoon of eight translators and two editors, several basic components of Darwish’s art still come forward. The reader will be struck by images like the insouciant, smartly-dressed “enemy” from the first poem who behaves as though he’s a guest; or by concrete objects like “shirt buttons we lost” and “the scent of apricot sweat” (p. 166) recalled by the narrator of the poem “Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky.” Devices recur, as in the frequent use of reversals within couplets: “One day, tragicomedy/Next day, comic tragedy” (p. 195). At a general level, the most compelling aspect of Darwish’s work, forcefully presented by this collection, is his simultaneous commitment to political action and the highest of aesthetic ideals. Capturing this pairing―perhaps the most foreign aspect of Darwish’s work to the American reader of poetry―is certainly no small accomplishment.

Hosam Aboul-Ela
University of Houston

The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Nathalie Handal. 378 pages. Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing Group, 2001. $22.00 (Paper) ISBN 1-56656-374-7

The Poetry of Arab Women is a wide selection of intellectually and culturally diverse poems intended as a contemporary anthology of Arab women’s poetry. Handal is to be commended for introducing us to some of the most promising talents in the Arab World and North America and making a multinational body of poetry accessible to an English-speaking audience. She also provides a useful biographical sketch of the poets at the end of her work. Many of the poems translated from Arabic into English preserve the rich imagery, and remain faithful to the vigor and restless mood of the original poems. Handal’s choice of poems is excellent. Some of the pieces transport effectively complex feelings of agony, despair, and individual triumph.

In her attempt to comment on a century of Arab women’s intellectual history, Handal risks writing an oversimplified and descriptive introduction to this anthology. She briefly discusses the rise of feminism and literary salons, highlighting the motifs that dominated women’s intellectual production in the middle of political upheavals and human tragedies. She also highlights the reasons for the ascendancy of Arab women poetry and the international recognition it received particularly during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Tracing the ‘cultural evolution’ of Arab societies to Western education she undermines the internal social and economic realities of these societies. 

Although Handal discusses women’s poetry in the introduction on the basis of its geographical ‘origins,’ she actually arranges the poetry in an alphabetical order. She does not succeed, however, in convincing the reader that the poet’s country of origin had “the greatest influence” (p. 3) on her thought and being. Even in the selective links which an emigrée Arab poet has with her ‘native’ society she does not live the daily transformation of that society. Such a poet chooses from the images and perceptions of her childhood and family background what is meaningful to her now in a society organized around Arab-Western perceptions or ways of being. I would suggest that a more meaningful and comprehensive categorization must account for the complex and diverse character of the poetry. It is misleading to assume that poetry produced by Arab women is simply and mechanically informed by the racial ‘Arab’ label, or country of origin or the culture rather than the historical developments within the new home or hosting country (whichever way the immigrant perceives this new place). Two criteria must be taken into account when categorizing women's poetry: namely, women's primary language of poetic expression and the country or countries they have lived in when they wrote their poems. Indeed, if Handal were to integrate these dimensions, she would have to sacrifice sharply-defined classifications for a more realistic and well-balanced anthology. Poets like Nadia Tuéni, Amina Said, Andrée Chedid, Etel Adnan, Amira al-Zein, Rawiya Morra, and D. H. Melham defy categorization in that they do not live in Arab countries anymore, write in languages like English, French, and Swedish and are thus part of a rich and complex picture of ‘Arab’ women’s poetry. For instance, Nadia Tueni from Lebanon and Amina Said from Morocco articulate distinct notions of self and the world shaped by local rather than French experiences. As to the second generation American Arab poets, they use the ‘native’ material as instruments of tension, a domain of restlessness from which the American experience can be discovered or ‘invented.’ The actual Arab society does not seem to be a generative or definitive force of being.

As Handal reflected, several poets in this anthology have resisted geographical categorizations. The works they produced during the last few decades of the twentieth century amplify this feature by recasting conventional experiences of home, regionalism, identity, and self. Each geographical location emerges in the poetry either as a real lived historical space or as a place in constant need of redefinition in relationship to a distant place of native experience.

Rula Abisaab
University of Akron

The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by Maria Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells. (The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature) 507 pages, index. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000. $150.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-521-47159-1

The editors of this installment of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature are to be commended for their broad and inclusive view of the languages and literatures of Andalusia. Covering the ninth to early seventeenth centuries, they trace some of the creative intersections and confluence of Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish, as well as of architecture and music. They declare at the outset that The Literature of al-Andalus is not only for Arabic specialists, but also for a larger audience including scholars of Islam, graduate students in European medieval studies, and more.

The volume is divided into five parts, with a short excursus on architecture. The five articles in Part One, “The Shapes of Culture,” suggest the tangled web of relations in Andalusia with an overview of “Language” (Consuelo Lopez-Morillas) outlining the many peoples and languages living together there. The vibrancy of this culture is elegantly conveyed in Dwight Reynolds’s “Music,” which notes important relationships between music, poetry, and patronage. Courtly traditions are later contrasted with more popular concerns in Michael Sells’s essay “Love,” which traces this central theme over a variety of poetic forms both Arabic and Hebrew, while touching on some of love’s mystical, bacchic, and popular forms. The articles in Part Two, “The Shapes of Literature,” echo many of these themes, paying particular attention to literary forms, especially the distinctively Andalusian “Muwashshah” (Tova Rosen). Still, classical Arabic forms are not ignored, and Beatrice Gruendler’s incisive essay “The Qasida,” insightfully analyzes the changing roles of this genre in Andalusia.

Part Three consists of nine separate entries on “Andalusians,” ranging from Jewish poet Moses Ben Ezra (Raymond T. Scheindlin) to the master of Arabic muwshshah, Ibn Quzman (Amila Buturovic), to the Christian ‘translator’ Ramon Llull (Gregory B. Stone), to the Arab polymath Ibn al-Khatib (Alexander Knysh). Essays in Part Four, “To Sicily,” address related issues of Muslim-Christian interaction, loss, and nostalgia among Muslims from Sicily, while Part Five, “Marriages and Exiles,” details the hybrid communities of Mozarabs, arabized Jews, and the Moriscos. Sells’s fine translation of a poem by Ibn Zaydun concludes this eclectic volume.

Surprisingly, there is no separate entry for Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to match the fine articles on Ibn Hazm (Eric Ormsby) and Ibn Tufayl (Lenn Goodman). The editors acknowledge Ibn Rushd’s “overwhelming importance” as one of Islam’s greatest philosophers, but still choose to ignore him, because he has been written about extensively by Arabists and non-specialists alike (p. 19). This is a lame and unacceptable excuse. Further, this volume’s mission could have been better served by adding a glossary defining such terms as taifa, qawwad, piyyut, and kalam, terms familiar to some sections of the volume’s intended audience, but not to others. More useful still would have been a succinct chapter covering the political and dynastic history of Andalusia, ideally accompanied by a series of maps, since a sense of place is so central to the literature of Andalusia and Sicily. These omissions undermine the usefulness of this volume, which, nevertheless, contains a number of excellent individual essays.

Th. Emil Homerin
University of Rochester