Twenty years after the disastrous and mendacious US invasion of Iraq, we take a look at writing from Iraq: memoirs, poems and blog posts. Shalash the Iraqi is a collection of such posts – a satirical, surreal, and affecting panorama in life in a Shia suburb of Baghdad in the early years of the occupation. 

Show Notes:

An excerpt from Gaith Abdul-ahad’s memoir A Stranger In Your Own City ran recently in the Guardian

Shalash The Iraqi, trans. Luke Leafgren, is a collection of blog posts written in 2005-2006 

An excerpt from Faleeha Hassan’s memoir War and Me, tans. William Hutchins ran on Arablit.org.

The Book of Trivialities, by Majed Mujid, trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

The only English-language collection of Sargon Boulous’ self-translated poetry is Knife Sharpener from Banipal Books. You can find a list of his poems available online here. 

You can make a donation to support BULAQ's 2023 season here: https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq

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We wandered through Arabic poetry and prose to talk about many different forms of literary love: regretful love, unreciprocated love, bad love, vengeful love, liberating love, married love. 

We read this poem by Núra al-Hawshán: 
“O eyes, pour me the clearest, freshest tears
And when the fresh part’s over, pour me the dregs.
O eyes, gaze at his harvest and guard it.
Keep watch upon his water-camels, look at his well.
If he passes me on the road
I can’t speak to him.
O God, such affliction
And utter calamity!
Whoever desires us
We scorn to desire,
And whom we desire
Feeble fate does not deliver.”

The Núra al-Hawshán poem, translated by Moneera al-Ghadeer, has a modern musical adaptation on YouTube produced by Majed Al Esa.

Yasmine Seale’s translation of Ulayya Bint El Mahdi. This poem and others were set to music on the album “Medieval Femme.”

Do’a al-Karawan (“The Nightingale’s Prayer”) by Taha Hussein

I Do Not Sleep, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, trans. Jonathan Smolin

The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz (1956-57)

Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door) Latifa al-Zayyat, trans. Marilyn Booth (1960) 

All That I Want to Forget, by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Michele Henjum.

Rita and the Rifle, Mahmoud Darwish, made into a song by Marcel Khalife. 

Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck

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It’s literary prize season! When the Sawiris Cultural Awards were announced at the start of 2023, novelist Shady Lewis Botros turned his novel award down, launching a storm of criticism, defense, and discussion. Is it bad manners or good politics to turn down a prize? How do different prizes affect the literary landscape? How is the 2023 prize season shaping up?

Show Notes: 

Mada Masr published “A conversation with Shady Lewis Botros on the genealogy of literary refusal”

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction recently announced their 2023 longlist, with a historically high number of women writers (half).

Also in Jan 2023, Banipal Prize judges announced that two novels had won their 2022 prize. By coincidence, we did a joint episode on those two novels.

PEN America recently announced their lit-prize longlists. Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell, made the poetry-in-translation longlist.

In December 2022, Fatima Qandil’s Empty Cages won the Naguib Mahfouz medal, and she said it was the first time she’d won a prize.

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Egyptian graphic novelist Deena Mohamed talks about her debut urban-fantasy trilogy Shubeik Lubeik (“Your Wish is My Command”). A product of playful self-translation, it’s coming to English as a single volume. It will be unbottled by Pantheon (US) and Granta (UK) on January 10, 2023. 

Show Notes: 

While the US edition keeps the title “Shubeik Lubeik,” the UK edition will use a literal translation: “Your Wish Is My Command.”

Find more of Deena’s work at http://deenadraws.art and on Twitter and Instagram as @itsdeenasaur.

The Arabic originals were published by Dar Mahrousa and are available in the US through Maamoul Press.

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El-Rifae’s book Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution tells the story of a movement that mobilized in Egypt to protect female protesters from mob sexual attacks in 2012 and 2013. Based on interviews with friends and comrades, the book explores memory, truth, gender, violence, political organizing, trauma, and possible futures.

Show Notes

You can order the book directly from @VersoBooks.

Read an excerpt at Granta.

The book launches October 24 in New York City; there will also be events in Philadelphia and D.C. 

Follow Yasmin for updates about more events at @yasminelrifae.

More writing by Yasmin El-Rifae is available on Mada Masr.

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In this sponsored episode, we talk to Sheikh Zayed Book Award winner Dr. Muhsin Al-Musawi about his life-long scholarship on the 1001 Nights. 

Show Notes:

This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the Arab world’s most prestigious literary prizes, showcasing the stimulating and ambitious work of writers, translators, researchers, academics and publishers advancing Arab literature and culture around the globe.

Today’s guest, Professor Muhsin Al-Musawi, was awarded the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2022 in the category of “Arab Culture in Other Languages,” for his book “The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures.” Al-Musawi is a professor of classical and modern Arabic literature, comparative and cultural studies at Columbia University. He is the author of 39 books and the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature. 

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award Translation Grant is open all year round, with funding available for titles that have won or been shortlisted for an award in the Children’s Literature and Literature categories. Publishers outside the Arab world are eligible to apply - find out more on the Sheikh Zayed Book Award website at: zayedaward.ae

Professor Al-Musawi’s biography and a description of his book can be found on the SZBA website.

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We’re back to talk about books we read over the summer and books we’re looking forward to this fall. Including poetry from Iman Mersal, Hadiya Hussein’s novel about looking for a lover disappeared in Saddam’s Iraq, and Mohamed Alnaas’ novel about the pressure to be a certain type of Libyan man. 

Show Notes:
Iman Mersal’s The Threshold, trans. Robyn Creswell, is a selection from four of her poetry collections, forthcoming from McMillan. 
Hadiya Hussein’s Waiting For The Past, trans. Barbara Romaine, is forthcoming from Syracuse Press. 
Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table, by Mohamed Alnaas, won the 2022 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.  

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In Aziz Muhammad’s The Critical Case of a Man Named K, an unnamed narrator is diagnosed with leukemia. His 40-week journal, shaped by his readings of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, sarcastically and movingly documents his alienation from his body, his surroundings and even, eventually, from books.

Show Notes: 

An interview with translator Humphrey Davies.

We also talked about a few other works where protagonists are diagnosed with cancer:Shahla Ujayli’s A Sky So Close to Us, translated by Michelle Hartman (Interlink Books); Radwa Ashour’s Heavier than Radwa (Dar Al Shorouk), although this is a memoir; Haifa al-Bitar’s A Woman of This Modern Age (Dar Saqi); Hassan Daoud’s No Road to Paradise, translated by Marilyn Booth (Hoopoe Fiction).

We also mention some Saudi books that have won awards or attracted international attention, such as Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea and The Dove’s Necklace by Raja Alem.

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An earthquake inspired Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Agadir, published in French in 1967 and translated to English by Jake Syersack and Pierre Joris. Part playtext, part novel, part political essay, part poem, this insurrection of a book takes as its starting point the devastating 1960 earthquake that struck the Moroccan city. 

Show Notes: 

We also talked about a few recently published and forthcoming poetry collections.

Mohamed Stitou’s Two Half Faces, translated by David Colmer (Phoneme Media)

Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for This Unseen Thread, translated by Mona Kareem (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Ibn Arabi’s The Translator of Desires, translated by Michael Sells (Princeton University Press)

Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger’s Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press).

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We talk to scholar Elias Muhanna about translating a magical, delightful eighteenth-century travelogue. In 1707 Hanna Diyab journeyed from his native Aleppo as translator to a rapacious and sometimes ridiculous Frenchman. He survived a shipwreck and a pirate attack, met King Louis XIV, and gave The Thousand and One Nights translator Antoine Galland a dozen new stories. Cheated out of a promised job in Paris, he eventually returned to Syria, where he wrote it all up in his old age. 

Show Notes

You can download a free Arabic PDF of the Book of Travels on the Library of Arabic Literature website.

You can read more about Diyab (and speculation about whether he was the “real Aladdin”) in Paolo Lemos Horta’s Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights.

You can read Yasmine Seale’s stand-alone translation of Aladdin, introduced by Lemos Horta, or get her new Annotated Arabian Nights, edited and introduced by Lemos Horta, out this month from WW Norton.

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