BULAQ | بولاق

“Writer, criminal, and ex-journalist” Ahmed Naji released two books in 2020: the speculative fiction novel (والنمور لحجرتي) And the Tigers to My Room (2020) and the nonfiction work (حرز مكمكم) Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison (2020).

Show Notes:

Find more about Ahmed's books, short stories, and essays in Arabic and in English translation at ahmednaji.net/

An excerpt of Rotten Evidence appeared in The Believer in Katharine Halls' excellent translation.

Another excerpt appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review.

He spoke about the book in July 2019 at an event in New York City.

Read a brief history of the court case against Ahmed at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP).

Ahmed's “Re-Writing the Future: The Tanta Museum of White History” appears in Arts of the Working Class. It too was translated by Katharine Halls.

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Raph Cormack is author of the soon-to-be-released 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:

Midnight in Cairo is coming from WW Norton on March 9, and Saqi Books and AUC Press on May 6.

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

You can take an online class with Raph about “Cairo in the Roaring ‘20s” in April 2021.

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

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Emma Ramadan translated two Moroccan novels in 2020: A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa & Straight from the Horse's Mouth by Meryem Alaoui. They are very different books but they both feature sex workers.

Show Notes:

Find more about Emma's current and forthcoming translations at emmaramadan.com/translations-1

The Moroccan film Much Loved was released in 2015. You can read more about it from Aida Alami: Moroccan Film About Prostitution Creates Uproar.

Najat Bensalem starred in the film Raja in 2003 and was the subject of Abdellah El Jouahary's documentary Raja Bent El Mellah, which came out in 2015.

Emma's co-translation, with Chris Clarke, of Abdellah Taïa's "The Rain"

Also Taïa's "A Garden, While Waiting," which Emma translated for the PEN World Voices Translation Slam

“Crossing Boundaries: 10 Moroccan Writers” - the special section Emma put together for Words Without Borders

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We take a look at a new book about the architecture of twentieth century Cairo, and discuss the Egyptian capital's past, present and future, and the way writers have shaped our view of it.

Show Notes:

Mohamed Elshahed's architectural survey Cairo Since 1900: An Architectural Guide is newly released from AUC Press, with a foreward by Mercedes Volait.

Elshahed's longtime blog, Cairobserver, is a must-read for anyone interested in the built world.

Another recent book that maps Cairo is Humphrey Davies and Lesley Lababidi's A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo; N.A. Mansour recently wrote about both A Field Guide and Cairo Since 1900 in “Two New Books Preserving Cairo's Urban Landscape.”

Tawfiq al-Hakim's The Prison of Life: An Autobiographical Essay, in which he describes his father's time as an amateur architect, was translated by Pierre Cachia. Other Egyptian literary works that feature architects include Reem Bassiouney's novel Mortal Designs, translated by Melanie Magidow, and Naguib Mahfouz's play The Legacy.

Also discussed in this episode are Hamdi Abu Golayyel's novels Thieves in retirement (trans. Marilyn Booth) and A Dog With No Tale (trans. Robin Moger).

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Our guest this week was once told there were no Algerian crime novels. She begs to differ. We discuss the many examples of the genre and its evolution in Algeria, Morocco and Egypt.

Show Notes:

Nadia Ghanem regularly covers Algerian and Moroccan literature -- particularly crime fiction -- for ArabLit. She has a wonderful crime-lit overview, "The Story of 50 Years of Algerian Crime Fiction in 60+ Books," and also a short translation of a work by Chawki Amari, ‘Murder at Algiers' Book Fair'.

A few of Nadia's favorite Algerian crime novels: Adel s'emmele by Salim Aissa (ENAL editions, 1988), Kharidj el-Saytara (خارج السيطرة) by Abdelatif Ould Abdellah (El-Ikhtilef editions, 2016), Sakarat Nedjma (سكرات نجمة) by Amel Bouchareb (Chihab editions, 2015), 1994 by Adlene Meddi (Barzakh editions, Algeria, also released in France by Rivage editions in 2018), La prière du Maure by Adlene Meddi (Barzakh editions, 2008), Le casse-tête turc by Adlene Meddi (Barzakh editions, 2002).

Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Algerian writer Mohammed Moulessehoul. He has written many books, including a series of brilliant detective novels, which have also been translated into English.

The Moroccan writer Driss Chraibi's Inspector Ali is the hero of his acclaimed detective novels.

The 2017 Egyptian noir film The Nile Hilton Incident take place just before the outbreak of the Arab Spring in Cairo.

Nael Eltoukhy, author of Women of Karantina (tr. Robin Moger), wrote "Some Advice on Avoiding Censorship" for the Summer 2020 crime-themed issue of ArabLit Quarterly.

Ahmed Mourad's Vertigo, also tr. Moger, follows a story of crime and corruption through a photographer-sleuth's lens.

Elias Khoury's White Masks is his only murder-mystery; it has been translated by Maia Tabet.

Several of Abdelilah Hamdouchi's crime novels have been translated and published by Hoopoe.

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In this episode we explore the relationship between cooking and writing. With special guest Anny Gaul, we talk about the origins of national dishes such as couscous and koshary; medieval Arabic cook books; and representations of kitchens and cooking in Egyptian literature.

Show Notes:

Anny Gaul's writing and recipes, including the one on “bad translations” of hummus are online at cookingwithgaul.com. She wrote about Egyptian koshary as the dish we need right now for Eater. Her article on Abla Nazira's famous cookbooks is here. Her analysis of the depictions of cooking, kitchens and happiness in Egyptian writing can be found in the anthology Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond. The essay on couscous from which she reads at the beginning of the episode can be found in the last issue of Arab Lit Quarterly.

Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table: A Fourteenth-Century Egyptian Cookbook, ed. and translated by Nawal Nasrallah and Scents and Flavors: A Syrian Cookbook, tr. Charles Perry, are both out in paperback this year.

Many adapted recipes are available at Nawal Nasrallah's website, nawalcooking.blogspot.com.

The Library of Arabic Literature offers free Arabic-only PDFs of their works, including Scents and Flavors.

This episode mentions the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's Zaat, in which the kitchen is a site of mishaps, set-backs and middle-class aspirations.

Here are links to further recent writing in Arabic on food:

CIC Collective Workshop, Taste of Letters

A historical essay in the Al Jazeera Culture Section

Novelist Nael El Toukhy in Mada Masr

An essay on food in Ottoman era poetry

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Poet, artist and translator Yasmine Seale is at work on a fresh translation of the Thousand and One Nights.

Show Notes:

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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The adaptation of the Egyptian writer Ahmed Khaled Tawfik's hugely popular horror/fantasy series into the Netflix show Paranormal has excited and in some cases disappointed the writer's avid fan base.

Show Notes:

Here is the trailer for Netflix's Paranormal series, and an article about Tawfik, a hugely prolific writer of sci-fi, horror and fantasy stories who passed away in 2018.

We discuss this review by Ahmed Dia Dardir on the site 7iber and this one by Osama Youssef on MadaMasr.

We also mention Tawfik's novel Utopia, the only one of his books to have been translated into English so far.

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By listener demand, we re-read Season of Migration to the North, the 1966 classic by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih. Its unnamed narrator returns to his village “on a bend of the Nile” after being educated abroad -- and confronts the enigmatic figure of Mustafa Sa'eed, who also once emigrated North, and whose string of sexual relationships with Western women ended in tragedy. This iconic novel was instantly acclaimed in Arabic and in the 1969 English translation by Denys Johson-Davies. But it's the only one of Salih's works that have achieved a wide readership in English. What is it about this novel that resists interpretation and demands re-reading? What makes it iconic? And why have his other books received so little attention?

Show notes:

Sofia Samatar's ‘Dear Tayeb Salih'

Denys Johnson-Davies on ‘Season of Migration to the North': Acclaimed for the Wrong ReasonAdil Babikir on ‘Mansi': A Rare Book, and a Joy to Translate

Raja Shehadeh on the ‘Book Of A Lifetime: Season of Migration to the North'

Questions:

Why is this book so iconic, and why does it overshadow all Salih's other work, such that his great Bandershah seems to be out of print?

What do you think of Denys Johnson-Davies' assertion that people are reading this novel all wrong?

What's the function of Mustafa Saeed's story? Is he real?

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We're re-running one of our favorite episodes. In 1993, the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal picked up an unknown novel by a forgotten writer from the 60s. And so began her long wanderings in search of Enayat El Zayat. El Zayat killed herself in 1963, four years before her book “Love and Silence” was finally published. Mersal's portrait of El Zayat is a remarkable work of research, empathy and imagination.

Show Notes:

This episode focuses on Iman Mersal's In the Footsteps of Enayat al-Zayyat (في أثر عنايات الزيات), published by Kotob Khan Books in late 2019.

The author Enayat al-Zayyat (1936-63) finished one novel, which was published in 1967.

Love and Silence ‫(الحب و الصمت) ‬ was recently republished and is available on Google Play.

Al-Zayyat was also working on a second novel, based around the German Egyptologist Ludwig Keimar; you can read Isolde Lehnert on Keimar.

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