BULAQ | بولاق

Inspired by a fiery essay by an Egyptian professor, Ursula and MLQ discuss cosmopolitanism, nostalgia, and literary representations of the city of Alexandria. Marcia also talks about three new books – from Iraq, Southern Sudan and Lebanon/London. She loved two of them.

Show notes:

• May Hawas’s essay How Not to Write on Cosmopolitan Alexandria takes as its starting point Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and particularly the first book, Justine.
• The renowned poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy has shaped Alexandria’s literary image and aura. Ibrahim Abdelmeguid is perhaps Egypt’s best-known Alexandria-focused author (read his No One Sleeps in Alexandria, for instance, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab), although Naguib Mahfouz’s Miramar may the best-known book set in the city. Other major Alexandrian writers include Alaa Khaled and the late Edwar al-Kharrat. Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s St. Theresa, trans. Chip Rossetti, is, in part, about the 1960s expulsions from Alexandria. MLQ admits to not being a fan of Youssef Ziedan’s Azazeel, sorry.
• Marwan Hisham’s memoir-reportage Brothers of the Gun, with art by Molly Crabapple, came out May 15. It details life under the Islamic State in Raqqa and covers, from a quite different point of view, some of the same ground as DunyaMikhail’s The Beekeper, which we discussed in Episode 8.
• Hanan al-Shaykh’s The Occasional Virgin, trans. Catherine Cobham, comes out June 15.
• Stella Gaitano’s Withered Flowers, trans. Anthony Calderbank, is available in bookshops in Juba, South Sudan. We’ll also see if we can convince them to make it more widely available.

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We discuss Marcia’s recent interviews with professors teaching Arabic literature in translation; an essay by Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine’s in which he picks apart “world literature” and foreign writers – such as himself – who act as “tour guides”; and a book that is an ambitious overview of modern art in the Arab world.

Show notes

• An overview of the “Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation” series appeared on the website al-Fanar. The whole series – which will consist nineteen interviewsas of May 21 – can be found on ArabLit. The series will go on hiatus over the summer, but will hopefully be spun into a stand-alone resource.
• Rabih Alameddine’s“Comforting Myths: Notes from a Purveyor”and takes us from Superman to Joseph Conrad to “the cute other,” with stops at Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, Hisham Matar’s The Return, and one of Alameddine’s own novels, which a 2008 New York Times reviewcalled “a bridge to the Arab soul.” As Alameddine has said elsewhere: “What the fuck is the Arab soul?”
• Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, co-edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, is forthcoming June 5 from Duke University Press. The selection of texts, many appearing for the first time in English translation, includes “manifestos, essays, transcripts of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments[.]” Some can be read online.

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Ursula and Marcia talk about the novel Tales of Yusuf Tadros – about a Coptic Christian and aspiring artist living in the provinces -- and the playful, genre-bending Kayfa Ta (“How To”) series. They also discuss sexism in literature and whether we can do without the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Show notes

• The Center for Translation Studies at The American University in Cairo will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2020, and to commemorate nine years of CTS lectures—MLQ gave one in 2013—the head of the center, Dr. Samia Mehrez, is bringing together an anthology of essays. The book will be coming out from AUC Press in English, and an Arabic edition will follow.
• The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction was Palestinian-Jordanian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Dog War II. MLQ had predicted a win for Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of ‘K,’ so her streak of incorrect IPAF predictions is unbroken. You can read excerpts from all six shortlisted books in English translation and an additional one from Dog War II from Wen-chin Ouyang.
• The Naguib Mahfouz Medal-winning Tales of Yusuf Tadros, by Adel Esmat, tr. Mandy McClure, is available from Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an extract of the translation online.
• The Nobel Prize for Literature has been cancelled for 2018. Tim Parks suggests “The Nobel Prize for Literature Is a Scandal All by Itself” and Ron Charles, at the Washington Post, suggests “The Nobel Prize in literature takes a year off. Let's make it two.” Also: “Junot Díaz withdraws from Sydney Writers' festival following sexual harassment allegations.”
• You can find the Kayfa Ta project’s Arabic originals and English translations at kayfa-ta.com. That’s where you can download a PDF of Haytham al-Wardani’s How to Disappear translated by Jennifer Peterson and Robin Moger, or in the Arabic. Iman Mersal’s How to Mend: On Motherhood and Its Ghosts is also available in Arabic. Robin Moger’s English translation should be forthcoming somewhere this year.

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In this episode, we talk about debates surrounding Western military intervention in Syria; about Arab American writer Randa Jarrar and her Twitter rant against the late Barbara Bush; and about whether there is any alternative to the term “Arab world.” Also Ursula has a squeaky chair.

Show notes

• At the recent Yale symposium on translation, Samah Salim discussed the relationship between translator, text, and paratext in “Paratext and Political Translation,” with a focus on the introduction, footnotes, and glossary of her translation to Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn. Kamran Rastegar talked about “Translational Infidelity: Paul Bowles’ notes on For Bread Alone.”
• If you are near Princeton on April 23 at 4:30, do come hear MLQ speak about “Shifting Local, Regional, and International Pressures on Arabic Literature.”
• The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction will be announced Tuesday, April 24. MLQ’s prediction of Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of K as the winner will almost certainly not come true.
• A Tree Whose Name I Don't Know, by Golan Haji,tr. Haji & Stephen Watts, was a favorite of MLQ’s that did not make the recent Best Translated Book Award poetry longlist.
• Tales of Yusuf Tadros, by Adel Esmat, tr. Mandy McClure, has just been released in English and MLQ was hoping it will receive some prize attention.
• Leila al-Shami, co-editor of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, is author of “The Anti-Imperialism of Idiots.”
• Randa Jarrar is the author of A Map of Home (2008), Him Me Muhammad Ali (2016) and a handful of tweets about the late Barbara Bush’s legacy that were turned into a major trolling campaign and news story. She teaches at Fresno State, where President Joseph Castro has suggested the university is investigating her tweets, which, he has alleged, “wasn’t just a free speech issue.”
• In “Can Muslim Feminism Find a Third Way?” Ursula writes about the resignation of Asma Lamrabet, a well-known Moroccan feminist, from her position at the Mohammedan League of Scholars. Lamrabet was also discussed in Episode 2.

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We spend most of this episode talking about two books: the late Arwa Salih’s Stillborn, a memoir of and reckoning with her time as a leftist student militant in Egypt in the 1970s; and Rabai al-Madhoun’s novel Fractured Destinies -- about lives constrained, conflicted and divided in Palestine.

Show notes

• Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn, tr. the brilliant Samah Salim and published by Seagull Books as part of their “Arab List,” curated by Hosam Aboul-ela.
• Rabai al-Madhoun’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning Fractured Destinies (published in Arabic as called Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba), tr. Paul Starkey, and extends the universe of Walid al-Dahman who first appeared in IPAF-shortlisted The Lady from Tel Aviv, tr. Elliott Colla.
• The claustrophobia was reminiscent of Mohammed Sabaaneh’s collection of political cartoons White and Black.
• For books in a constellation around The Stillborn, we mentioned: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile, tr. Frances Liardet, Youssef Rakha’s Crocodiles, tr. Robin Moger, and Mohammed Rabie’s Otared, tr. Moger.

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In which Marcia talks about her difficulties being interviewed; we discuss genre (sci-fi, fantasy, and especially noir) writing in Arabic; and we question whether translation into English “empowers” women writers from the Arab region.

Show notes

• The Asymptote interview with MLQ, conducted by Claire Jacobson.
• On voices at various margins: Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz (recently re-translated by Humphrey Davies); Kamal Ruhayyim’s Muslim Jew trilogy (tr. Sarah Enany); the film Marock; The Others by Seba al-Herz.
• There is a video of Adam Talib's talk "Translating for Bigots" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aANKpO4zmGA
• Baghdad Noir, ed. Samuel Shimon, is forthcoming from Akashic Books later this year. You can already get Tehran Noir, ed. Salar Abdoh, who has a story called “Baghdad on Borrowed Time” in Baghdad Noir.
• More on noir: The Thief and the Dogs, Naguib Mahfouz, tr. M.M. Badawi and Trevor Le Gassick, revised by John Rodenbeck; Vertigo by Ahmed Mourad, tr. Robin Moger; Metro, by Magdy Shafie, tr. Chip Rossetti; the noir of Algerian-French author Jérémie Guez; Apartment at Bab el-Louk, by Donia Maher, ill. Ganzeer and Ahmed Nady, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette; the films The Nile Hilton Incident and Casanegra; Abdelilah Hamdouchi’s detective series, published by Hoopoe.
• You can also listen to Jonathan Guyer’s The Strange Case of the Arabic Whodunnit on BBC4.
• Iraq + 100, ed. Hassan Blasim, is available from Comma Press in the UK and Tor in the US.
• “Saudi discovers science fiction” or “L'Arabie saoudite découvre la science-fiction” appears on Orient XXI.
• See more about Osama Al Muslim’s Basateen Arabistan at GoodReads.
• The novel HWJN, by Yasser Bahjat and Ibrahim Abbas, is available in English and Arabic.
• You can read Maysaa Alamoudi’s Mimosa in Arabic.

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In which we discuss the validity and necessity of the negative review (or what we like to simply call critical engagement); how rare it is to find negative reviews these days; and the shift that has seen Western reviewers of Arabic literature move from one extreme to another. But is it more condescending to dismiss outright or to offer all-around encouragement?

Show notes

• Hisham Aidi's lovely portrait and critical re-evaluation of Juan Goytisolo was published by MERIP “Juan Goytisolo: Tangier, Havana and the Treasonous Intellectual.” For non-subscribers (and everyone should consider supporting this excellent publication!), a version can be found on academia.edu. And here is Aidi’s piece in The Nation: “Is Morocco Headed Toward Insurrection?”
• Ursula also recommends Aidi’s Rebel Music (2014) which she wrote about here.
• Rafia Zakaria penned “In Praise of Negative Reviews.” It references both Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which ran in Harper’s in 1959 and Kristina Marie Darling’s more recent “Readerly Privilege and Textual Violence: An Ethics of Engagement.”
• Marcia has written on Arablit about John Updike’s infamous dismissal of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, from a time when negative reviews of Arabic literature were more than common.
• The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (“Arabic Booker”) shortlist was announced on February 21. The biggest controversy was around the inclusion of Shahed al-Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock, which is forthcoming in translation by Luke Leafgren in May (US) and June (UK).

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Ursula and MLQ discuss a moving new book documenting the suffering and the resourcefulness of Yazidi women taken captive by Daesh, and the efforts to help them escape; and the perversely dull newspaper columns of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.

Show notes

• Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq is coming out in March 27, 2018 from US publisher New Directions and as The Beekeeper of Sinjar from the UK’s Serpent’s Tail in August 2018. Both were translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss.
• Les Revenants: Ils étaient partis faire le jihad, ils sont de retour en France was written by David Thomson and won the Prix du livre Albert Londres in 2017.
• Historian Omar Mohammed is the force behind Mosul Eye, an independent writer who documented what was happening in Mosul during Daesh’s occupation. He wrote anonymously for three years before revealing his identity in December 2017 and can still be followed at @MosulEye and @omardemosul. One of Mosul’s libraries re-opened this month.
• Omar Mohammed was interviewed by Al Fanar’s Gilgamesh Nabeel.
• The Casablanca International Book Fair is going on now through Feburary 18, with Egypt as a guest of honor.
• The shockingly dull collection Essays of the Sadat Era: The Non-fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz: Volume II was recently released by The Gingko Library and is being distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press.

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We discussed our recent readings. This includes some early foreign reporting on Morocco, which is both vivid and prejudiced; a moving account of the way Moroccan political prisoners clung to their memories and their words and refused to be fully “disappeared” during the country’s decades of repression; and a collection of beautifully translate and unusual folktales, shared by Lebanese women with each other. We also discussed the Cairo Book Fair, whose official theme this year is “Soft Power…How?”

Show notes

• Walter Harris’s (1866-1933) Morocco That Was is the book Ursula is considering “hate-teaching”. Harris was a British journalist and socialite who worked as a correspondent for The Times. The book can be read
• The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco by Susan Slyomovics looks at the words (literary and otherwise) that sent Moroccans to jail during the Hassan II years; the attempts to make peoples and their stories disappear; and the words that eventually exposed the terrible abuses of the “Years of Lead.”
• The Return by Hicham Matar explores secret prisons in Libya under Ghaddafi, in search of a trace of the author’s kidnapped father.
• Pearls on a Branch, by Najlaa Khoury, tr. Inea Bushnaq is forthcoming from Archipelago books March 2018. This ridiculously delightful folktale collection is based around work Khoury collected in Lebanon during the civil war, many of which became stage productions. A collection of them was published in Arabic in 2014, and soon they’ll be available in Bushnaq’s fun, luminous, inventive translation.
• Moroccan Folktales, ed. Jilali El Koudia, translated by Jilali El Koudia and Roger Allen with a critical analysis by Hasan M. El-Shamy, is newly available as a paperback from Syracuse University Press this February 2018.
• The Cairo Book Fair runs this year through February 10, 2018.
• “The Rise and Fall of Egyptian Arabic” can be found on The Economist.
• Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi’s ominous recent speech. Sisi is running for a second term against just one other candidate, who turns out to be a great fan of his.

"He had electoral tendencies and wanted to nominate himself.
But, thank God, he's back to feeling better!!"@abdalla_cartoon in today's Al-Masry Al-Youm, the privatey-owned Egyptian paper, where the jokes on the forthcoming presidential balloting have been riotous. pic.twitter.com/snyE7NKeqv

— Jonathan Guyer (@mideastXmidwest) January 30, 2018

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In this episode we discuss Moroccan literature about the country’s “years of lead” and its formidable and ruthless former king Hassan II; and about the relationship between humour, fear and power. We look at literary awards and what they are good for, and why Arablit has decided to create a new award. And we ask: how much contemporary Arabic literature is “dystopian”?

Show notes

• Youssef Fadel’s “Moroccan trilogy” will appear from Hoopoe Fiction. They have already brought out A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me (translated by Alexander Elinson) and A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me (translated by Jonathan Smolin), and Elinson is at work on the novel Farah, which would translate to Joy, but will instead be translated as A Shimmering Red Fish Swims with Me.
• Mahi Binebine’s Le Fou du Roi (The King’s Fool) is, like A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me, inspired by the figure of Hassan II’s court jester, Binebine’s father, as well as Binebine’s brother, who was imprisoned in the infamous Tazmamart prison. Aziz Binebine is one of a number of former Tazmamart prisoners to have written memoirs. His is Tazmamort.
• Yassin Adnan’s Hot Maroc was longlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and is currently being translated by Alexander Elinson.
• The ArabLit Story Prize is currently raising funds for its first edition.
• The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) released its 2018 longlist on Wednesday, January 17. Many of the novelists are well-known authors; eight have been on previous IPAF longlists. The longlisted novel The Baghdad Clock, by Shahad El Rawi, has already been translated by Luke Leafgren and will appear in April from Oneworld. Amjad Nasser’s Here is the Rose has been longlisted; his previous novel, Land of No Rain, was beautifully translated by Jonathan Wright. The shortlisted The Frightened Ones, by Dima Wannous, is already out in Italian translation, Quelli che hanno paura.
• Sonallah Ibrahim’s famous refusal of the Arab Novel Award from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture is discussed in this profile.
• Yasmine Seal’s article, “After the Revolution,” about three Egyptian novels she considers dystopian, in Harpers’ magazine.
• It was Robin Moger who asked us to stop describing so much Arabic literature as “dystopian.” The (maybe-sometimes-dystopias) discussed were Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; Ezzedine Choukri Fishere’s No Exit; Mohamed Rabie’s Otared, translated by Robin Moger; Ahmed Naji’s Using Life, translated by Ben Koerber; Nael El-Toukhy’s Women of Karantina, translated by Robin Moger; and Ahmed Khaled Towfiq’s Utopia, translated by Chip Rossetti.

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