Egypt's January 25 revolution was 11 years ago. Since then many of its young leaders have been persecuted and the history of what happened distorted or denied. We look at writing that remembers and resists. 

Alaa Abd El-Fattah's You Have Not Yet Been Defeated was translated by a collective, and is out from Fizcarraldo Editions in the UK. A US edition is forthcoming in March 2022 from Seven Stories Press. There is also an Italian translation by Monica Ruocco.

Ahmed Douma's second poetry collection, Curly, was set for release in September 2021 by Dar Maraya. But on the eve of its publication, state security officials confiscated copies of the book. Read Elliott Colla and Ahmed Hassan's co-translations of a poem from this collection, and an excerpt from Douma's “Blasphemy,” on ArabLit. 

Basma Abdelaziz's Here is a Body, which chronicles the Rabaa massacre and its aftermath, was published in Jonathan Wright's translation by Hoopoe Fiction. You can read an excerpt on the Hoopoe website.

Also, join our #bulaqbookquiz for a chance to win a release from one of ten participating publishers. Send your answers to [email protected].

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The Book of Ramallah collects stories set in and around Palestine's administrative capital, which, Maya Abu Al-Hayat writes in her introduction, “represents this mirage, this glimmer of hope that isn't real, to many writers.”

Show Notes: 

Book of Ramallah, edited by Maya Abu Al-Hayat, is available from Comma Press. You can read “Love in Ramallah” by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Mohammed Ghalaieny, at Bookanista. An excerpt from the introduction is available at The Irish Times.

An excerpt of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah, in Ahdaf Soueif's translation, is available at Penguin Random.

An except of Raja Shehaheh's Palestinian Walks is available through PBS.

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” by Nathan Thrall, is at the New York Review.

The Present, directed by Farah Nabulsi and co-written by Nabulsi and Hind Shoufani, is streaming on Netflix.

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Raph Cormack is author of Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring ‘20s, which chronicles the lives of many of Egypt's biggest stars of the early twentieth century. 

Show Notes: 

The Amar Foundation has an archive of Mounira al-Mahdiyya songs such as the one we end the show with, "اسمع اغاني المهدية"  

Raph also wrote about “Queer Life in Cairo in the 1920s” for the Gay and Lesbian Review.

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An abbreviated version of The Nights will be coming out in Fall 2021, in Seale's translation for W. W. Norton. The fuller Nights is currently set for 2023. You can follow the Nights Bot, with which Seale shares fragments of her translation, on Twitter. 

You can watch a recording of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2020 The Bookseller Webinar -The global influence of the Arabian Nights, with Richard van Leeuwen, Marina Warner, and Yasmine Seale, on YouTube.

You can read Seale's talk with Veronica Esposito, “Wild Irreverence”: A Conversation about Arabic Translation with Yasmine Seale,  in World Literature Today.

At the beginning of the episode Seale reads an excerpt from Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi's Ta'tir al-anam fi tafsir al-ahlam, which is featured in the DREAMS issue of ArabLit Quarterly, released December 15.

Seale also reads her poem “Conventional Wisdom,” which won the poetry category of the 2020 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. The Book of Travels by Ḥannā Diyāb -- the Syrian writer who related the Aladdin tale to Antoine Galland -- will be out from the Library of Arabic Literature, in Elias Muhanna's translation, in May 2021. Seale has written the foreword to the first volume.

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For our end-of-year book list, we made up our own categories -- from “best poet I hadn't heard of before” ” to “best book about cannibalism” to “best book that lived up to the hype” -- and added a few more along the way. It's a journey through 10 books that struck us and stayed with us this year. 

Show Notes

Best literary cookbook for children (MLQ): Arab Fairy Tale Feasts, Karim al-Rawi, ill. Nahid Kazemi. Read the review by Marcia and her 10-year-old.

Best book I've been waiting for years to see published (Ursula): Ahmed Bouanani's La Septieme Porte, a history of Moroccan cinema from 1907 to 1986. Bouanani was a writer, poet and film-maker who was censored and blacklisted; the manuscript of this book was nearly destroyed in a fire, and was painstakingly put back together by his daughter, Touda Bouanani. 

Best collection of poetry by a poet previously unknown to me (MLQ): Except for This Unseen Thread, Ra'ad Abdulqadir, tr. Mona Kareem, published by Ugly Duckling Presse

Best book I'm reading even if I haven't gotten far (Ursula): Ahmed Naji's prison memoir حرز مكمكم; read an excerpt in English translation at the University of Michigan website, translated by Khaled Mattawa.

Best book about cannibalism (MLQ):  Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years, by Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, ed. & tr. Tim Mackintosh Smith

Best book I've ordered someone for Christmas (Ursula): The Annotated Arabian Nights, ed. Paulo Lemos Horta, tr. Yasmine Seale

Best gift book for under $20 (MLQ): Midnight in Cairo, by Raphael Cormack, which reminded Marcia of Zeinab Zaza's “يتامى الإسكندرية,” a historical police procedural set in 1930s Alexandria that focuses on the precarious lives of women.  

Best book that actually lived up to the hype (Ursula): The Book of Sleep, by Haytham al-Wardani, translated by Robin Moger. 

BONUS CATEGORY: Best Arabic-language list in translation in 2021, Seagull Books

Best introduction to a novel (MLQ): Balqis Sharara's introduction to the re-issue of her late sister Hayat Sharara's When Darkness Falls. You can read it, tr. Hend Saeed, on ArabLit.

Best book about the “Syrian refugee crisis” (Ursula): The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine 

We also say goodbye to Humphrey Davies (1947-2021). There is a digital memorial in progress at arablit.org/humphrey/.

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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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We look at new writing from Syria and about the experiences of Syrian refugees, including Ramy Al-Asheq's Ever Since I Did Not Die, a book he categorizes not as poetry or prose but as “pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag.”

Show Notes

Ramy Al-Asheq's Ever Since I Did Not Die was translated by Isis Nusair and edited by Levi Thompson.

Samar Yazbek's Planet of Clay was translated by Leri Price and is on the shortlist for this year's National Book Award, in the Translation category.

Rabih Alameddine's The Wrong End of the Telescope follows a Lebanese-American trans woman's journey to the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece.

Haya Saleh's Wild Poppies won the 2020 Etisalat Award for Arabic Children's Literature in the YA category and follows two young Syrian boys, Omar and Sufyan, as they struggle to come-of-age during wartime.

We finished on a reading of an untitled poem by Ramy Al-Asheq, published in Transference, translated by Levi Thompson.

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We read from the work of Palestinian poets Maya Abu Al Hayyat, Fady Joudah, Asmaa Azaizeh and Najwan Darwish, who writes: “Death has liberated me/ from the shackles of our small jailers,/ just as poetry has liberated us/ from the greatest jailer–time.”

Show Notes

In Palestine these days, the olive harvest is under assault from Israeli settlers. Six prominent Palestinian human rights and civil socierty NGOs have just been designated terrorist organizations. 

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's You Can Be The Last Leaf, Trans. Fady Joudah, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions

Najwan Darwish's Collection Exhausted On the Cross, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is out from New York Review Books. 

Fady Joudah curated The Baffler's series of lyric dispatches from Palestine, from which Marcia read Asmaa Azaizeh's Reflection. 

We read Fady Joudah's poem Dehiscence, from his new collection Tethered to Stars. 

And if you are interested in hearing much more Arabic poetry, check out the podcast Maqsouda, another Sowt production.

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The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers. 

Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women's Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire. 

The Radical Books Collective and the Adabiyat Book Club are holding an online master class on El Saadawy's famous novel Woman At Point Zero on November 20, with academic and translator Samah Selim. 

Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books. 

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Sonallah Ibrahim's Warda is the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim's most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.” 

Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela's translation, from Yale University Press.

Hosam also writes about Warda in his Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, and the Postcolonial Lens.

Hosam's translation of Sonallah Ibrahim's Stealth is available from New Directions.

Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat, in Tony Calderbank's translation, is, unfortunately, out of print.

Hosam Aboul-ela is also the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher. One of the first books it published was The Stillborn by Arwa Salih. Forthcoming titles include Salim Barakat's Come, Take a Gentle Stab, co-translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen; Akram Musallam's The Dance of the Deep-blue Scorpion, translated by Sawad Hussain, and Hussein Barghouthi's Among the Almond Blossoms, translated by Ibrahim Muwahi.

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