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Passage of Tears – a novel from Djibouti

Friday, January 6th, 2012

A returning ex-pat, an espionage mission, a mysterious Islamist counter-intelligence figure locked away in Djibouti’s Devil’s Islands, a palimpsest of letters written to Walter Benjamin appearing through the notes a scribe is taking from “The Master,” a rageful twin brother who plans the death of his twin, devotion to the great African pianist and singer Abdulla Ibrahim.  All these are woven up in a small, intriguing novel, Passage of Tears, by Abdourahman A. Waberi, in an excellent translation by David and Nicole Ball.  First published in French in 2009, the English version comes to us in a nice Seagull Books edition, in 2011.

In alternating chapters by the narrator, Djibril, and the scribe, Djamal, the setting and story unfold, at once two biographies — which may be one–, a situation report of the Horn of Africa, and an appreciation of Walter Benjamin who died decades before, an immigrant in flight, but who created a new kind of history, much admired by the narrators:

…a conception of history, which was not theoretical or arid in the least.  It appealed to me [Djibril] because it seemed as sensitive to human beings as the stories my Grandpa Assod used to tell.”

Djibril, having lived in Canada for many years, has returned as an employee of one of the new private security firms to which nations are outsourcing their intelligence work.

“I returned to Djibouti for professional reasons, not to feast at the table of nostalgia or open old wounds.

…My mission consists in feeling out the temperature on the ground, making sure the country is secure, the situation is stable and the terrorists under control.”

The problem is, he is in fact, caught up in his nostalgia; an old wound is opened, wide.

The chapters from Djamal, are titled with letters of the Arabic alphabet.  Alif, Ba, Ta  to Ya, and so, far less indicative than those from Djibril:  The Scent of the Father; Revolt in the Desert.  Though apparently deep inside the prison, Djamal and the Master are intimately aware of Djibril’s presence.  Many of his notes, intended to be transcriptions of the Master’s sermons and homilies, are directed to him — as though he were the auditor, or reader.

So what do you know…you trickster from McGill, you wanted to get close to us !  And to do what?  To look through your binoculars  and take snapshots of our jail from every angle?

…We are closely monitoring your every move.  We know all about you, the cover of your bedside book and the brand of your toothpaste.  Every word you say is reported back to us, all the way to this watertight cell.

(more…)

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Anatomy of a Disappearance: A Novel by Hisham Matar

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

Hisham Matar’s second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance,  easily matches the promise of his first, In The Country of Men, [reviewed here] and is lovelier in image and language, though less obviously of Libya, the country of his origins.  In both the memories which compromise the story are of  a young boy.  In both the boys have exceptionally strong relationships to their mothers, both mothers are often sick — with intimations of depression, while their fathers are often away.  In both, their lives are shaped, in different degrees by political terror.

In the Country of Men, the young boy, Suleiman,  is in the country — Libya– of the terror.  His father disappears.  He and his mother wait and pray for his return; she tries to make deals with the security man across the street; she tells him to destroy all his father’s books.  The normalcy of childhood is metamorphosed into something most of us can not imagine.  Finally, the father is returned:

His eyes were closed, full of air or water or blood, like split rotten tomatoes, and his lower lip was as fat and purple as a baby eggplant.”  

Suleiman is sent to Cairo to be out of  danger and to finish his education; the story has come to an end.

In Anatomy of a Disappearance, Nuri, the narrator, is a young man in his twenties at the time of the story’s telling.   Though born in Paris of an English mother and Arabic — probably Libyan, though never said–father, he has returned to Cairo, where he had spent his younger life, and to the love of the family servants.  Most of the narrative, and by far the most powerful, is of his adolescent years — from age 10, the death of his mother, to 22 when he finishes University.  Though the father disappears when Nuri is 14, there is none of the close violence of the earlier book.  Perhaps some moments of tension as we wonder whether Nuri, or his father’s new wife, Mona, might be abducted by the same mysterious forces but these are minor in the lush exploration of memory, loss, desire and growth,  maturing away from the early love and into a knowledge of his father he might otherwise never have had.

Without knowing Matar’s origins and background one would read Anatomy, unlike In the Country,  as simply a fine European novel,  playing out in Geneva, upper middle class Cairo and London, but without any sense of reading an “Arabic” novel.  Reference to the father’s background, and earlier life are confined to mention of “our country,” or that he was the “most trusted adviser to our king.”  Cairo and Alexandria figure strongly in the story but this has been true of  fine British novels and don’t necessarily “mark” them as Arabic.  Although I came across Matar in a search for Libyan writers, he is not an “Arabic” writer in the pure sense of that notion.  We are not reading a translation.  He writes in English. He was born in New York City and lived in Libya with his parents from age 3 to 9, when the family fled to Cairo from Gaddafi’s violent persecutions.  His education has been almost entirely in English. He is one of a new breed of internationalist writers — as Ahdaf Soueif [and here, here] — comfortable in two or more countries, life lived and families still living in different cultures from which to draw upon; emotional, linguistic, imagistic ties to many parts.   Perhaps he could be called Anglo-Libyan, or Anglo-Arabic, or the reverse.  In any case he is a fine writer,  about whose allegiances there should be no quarrel: to men and women, to children, in their varieties.

The disappearance of the father is the event around which the telling revolves, but the novel is not an investigatory piece, or a mystery in the usual sense.  It is less an anatomy of the disappearance, than of the life and lives interrupted by it.  In the end it is the story of the young man discovering home, and himself, not in the country his father and mother fled but in Egypt, where they put their deepest roots, and with the Cairene maid/mother who brought him up.

Matar evokes nostalgia and memory with a fine sense of description and detail — the glow of a bathing suit strap across the arched ripples of a backbone, the imprint of a foot in the creamy instep of a shoe, the misted outline of a woman’s body behind a shower curtain.  The first awakening of sexual desire in the 13 year old Nuri, and jealousy of his father, is so palpable we are at times uncomfortable.  A sort of Death in Venice in reverse as a young man is obsessed with an older woman, who leads him on, disturbs us, both by the separation of their ages and the sense of kind of incest  setting in.  Our caution alarms ring in our throats..

In both books we are treated to such evocative and unexpected images we have to pause and let them seep inside.  We want to return to them, to gaze as on jewels against the ordinary dross of language.

In The Country of Men we have such marvelous images as

“I couldn’t leave her side, wondering if, like one of those hand puppets that play dead, she would bounce up again, light another cigarette,

and

in the faint glow I saw him on top of her, moving back and forth the same short sad distance, like one of those old ladies mourning the dead.

Anatomy opens with

“There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.”

Later, describing the hotel in Alexandria where Nuri and his father meet Mona, he says

You could hear the waves lapping lazily against the shore like a snoring guard dog

After extracting a speck of brown thorn “from the soft pink flesh” of her toe, in an act of self-assurance he has never again felt, Nuri looks at her:

I watched her without restraint. I wanted to wear her, as you would a piece of clothing..to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth…

These are both marvelous books, connected in their conception and execution but siblings who are completely their own persons.  Don’t waste a minute in getting acquainted with their author. Anatomy may be a more compelling entry point for many, with its familiar themes of adolescent love, and the mystery of the man, whose disappearance is never solved even as hidden years of his life are discovered and  Nuri finds himself becoming more and more like the man he had been searching for.

 

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Arabic Novels from the Younger Generation

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

I was pleased to see strong attention in the New York Times Book Review of September 11, 2011 being paid to young Arabic writers. A second novel by Libyan, Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance is reviewed by Robert Worth.  Matar’s first novel, In The Country of Men greatly impressed me [reviewed here] so I am pleased to see Worth praising the second one.

*

“Ever since a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire last December, people around the world have been asking how a new generation of Arab rebels learned to do what their parents could not: resist and even defeat a brutal police state. But a darker corollary soon arose. Why did it take so long? Why did the earlier rebellions fail? And how much damage has been done to the fabric of the societies that are now struggling, at the cost of so much blood, to reinvent themselves?

For Western readers, what often seemed lacking — as in Iraq in years past — was an authentic interpreter and witness, someone who could speak across cultures and make us feel the abundant miseries that fueled the revolt. “No one plays this role, in my view, as powerfully as Hisham Matar, a novelist who left Libya at the age of 9 and later emigrated to Britain …

Matar writes in English, in extraordinarily powerful and densely evocative prose; he seems uniquely poised to play the role of literary ambassador between two worlds that have long been locked in mutual suspicion and ignorance.”  Worth

 

Nuruddin Farah, from Somalia and now living in Minneapolis and Capetown  has released his 11th novel, Crossbones, reviewed by Hirsh Sawhney, with some cautions about difficult plotting and some verbosity.  It looks like very political, and contemporary novel, and is the third in a trilogy titled “Past Imperfect.”  Farah hadn’t been on my radar of Arabic language writers as I’ve become a student and a fan of them lately.  He certainly goes to the top of my read-next list now with, if not Crossbones, one of the other in the trilogy.  Actually, he is incredibly prolific and this would seem to be the third trilogy!

Before Malik’s  a [half Somali, half Indonesian war correspondent] arrival, the city was controlled by “armed clan-based militiamen high on drugs,” intent on threatening those who refused to “do their bidding.” Now “religionists” have enforced a precarious order. Malik learns that many of these white-robed men, members of the ruling Union of Islamic Courts, are former militia members currently inflicting a different kind of trauma. They oppress women, assassinate dissidents and form alliances with pirates. But these zealots aren’t single-mindedly demonized by the author, who takes great pains to illuminate the roots of Somalia’s turmoil in a nuanced manner.

Farah demonstrates how war profiteers make lucrative careers out of chaos. The bloody Ethiopian invasion, which received significant backing from the United States, not only foments anti-American sentiment, but also makes the most secular Somalis sympathize with the religionists.

Sawhney”   (more…)

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Emerging Arab Voices: A Bilingual Reader

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

I’ve been immersing myself in translated Arabic writing these past months, from novels, to movies, to short story and poetry collections. The latest is Emerging Arab Voices and is, in fact, a bi-lingual edition!  Not that I have the smallest hope of ever reading Arabic but it is interesting to see it on the page, and even to work at a title or the page numbers.  Peter Clark is the editor and translator of three of the eight offered stories. The authors are Tunisian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Egyptian (2), Saudi, Yemeni, and Emirati.  Five of the translations were done by Britians, and the others by a Moroccan, a Tunisian and a Sudanese — all in very fluid English.

I mention the latter because it is almost an article of faith that translations should be done into the mother tongue, the native language of the translator. Almost always, an astute native reader will catch certain infelicities popping up in translations by those who acquired the target language — in this case, English– later in life. There are a few such weeds in these otherwise well tended beds, but not limited to non-native speakers. What is one to make of the phrase “groping baffled bosoms or hidden bums” ? Of course it is highly informative that all the covering in the world doesn’t keep prying male hands off of women’s bodies in crowds, but “baffled bosoms?”

On the other hand one of the most imaginative beginnings comes from a Sudanese author in the hands of a Sudanese translator.  From “The Ghosts of Fransawi:”

Fransawi was hovering with foggy wings over the isthmus between this life and the next. From here, all journeys begin, journeys to the isthmus, earthly journeys , as well as journeys of no return, no sleep, no rest, nothing…  There was no past or no future, no you and no I.”

But then a nasty weed pops up. “Look for loose threads, my son, and mark them with post-its.” Very odd, very odd. Of course I have no idea what the original Sudanese Arabic image was, or if  ”loose threads” is an image roughly corresponding to a phrase in Arabic.  In any event you don’t mark loose threads with post-its. Maybe, “look for wandering pages…” or “look for loose threads and keep good account of them…”

The volume is made up of 8 stories, 8 authors and 7 countries: Tunis, Lebanon, Sudan, Egypt (2), Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Emirites.

The story from Sudanese author Mansour el-Sowaim caught my attention most strongly on the first read through;  not only by the imaginative beginning, but the sort of floating modernism, where the reader has to work to piece the story line together.  The opening is addressed to the reader, or listener:   “…remember, in his time Fransawi was part of this story.”  But then it pivots to address Fransawi, himself.  “D0n’t forget, don’t… don’t let yourself be distracted, son.  Keep on going.”  Then, back to describing his journey:  “Guided by the call of the isthmus, the boy went away overwhelmed by exhaustion and flashbacks of broken roads ….” Then, back to addressing the, long departed boy: ” Where do we go from here, Fransawi?”

I don’t know of this change of addressee is part of native Sudanese story telling but it joins modern fiction writing with filmic sensibility, cutting from scene to scene and relying on the active participation of the audience to hold pieces of a puzzle and match them with those later to come.

We read on to learn of Seargeant Bashir and the proofreader Muhammad Latif, haunted by Fransawi’s ghost, 25 years after his brutal killing:

He sees you in his brief interrupted naps!  He imagines you hanging from the branches of the neem tree with your feet tied.  Someone wearing kakhi approaches you and cries, “Now, ready!”  Then he pushes you with both hands and springs back as you swing like a cradle upside down with your eyes closed.  He sees the khaki-covered bodies of many men standing nearby with Kalishnikov rifles on their shoulders.  The thundering sound of bullets off stone is deafening.  They laugh and shout as your slim body hangs helpless, swinging.

 The selection then goes on to follow Bashir, working for a mad Colonel in a rural outpost, with more traditional themes of corruption, evasiveness, love of ease and escape from work.  We don’t know where it goes from here, or how Fransawi re-enters the narrative, as this is an excerpt from a novel which, as far as I can determine, hasn’t been translated yet.  I’ll be very interested to read it when it does.

Déjà Vu ” by Egyptian, Mansoura Ez-Edin, with a novel, Beyond Paradise, [not yet in English] to her credit, brings a modern Egyptian woman to our attention.

Samiha, taking a wrong turn off the ring-road around the city, finds herself in a working-class district she has never been in before — much like an area her lover has described to her.  Then,

She started to feel uneasy, and slowed down. Suddenly she felt she had been here before — it was as if she was not really in this place, so much as remembering that she had been there in the past. … she felt that this place she was seeing for the first time had opened a door on a region of darkness inside her, on a life that she had possibly lived in the past.  She saw herself apparently trying to escape from the wreckage of a horrific accident.

The story unfolds mysteriously, as she imagines she has killed her maid, and after talking to her lover about this strange vision, goes out, to come back earlier than planned and finding lover and maid together — not in delicto, but clearly comfortable and familiar, across social lines. Driving with the maid as the story comes to an end, what had been déjà vu now seems to be happening in real time; her maid is in the car; Samiha is driving too fast; the wheel turns… Very well done.  As well, to read an Arab woman author writing of love-making:

She looked at him and recognized that look of his when he desired her.  She wished he would make love to her now… Even when making love, she never let go of the smile that was carefully drawn on her lips. She would close her eyes and seem to be in another world…

 ”The Beaver“, by Saudi, Mohammed Hassan Alwan, despite the inscrutable title, has some nice lines and, as we hope when we read about cultures and peoples distant from our own, revelations about those “others.”

“Alone, my family is mute; but in the presence of other people, they are very talkative.  We have created our own scandals under the cover of so deafening a silence that no one can tell what others are concocting in the next room.”

Describing his older sister, Hind, he says:

As a little girl, Hind, had cold eyes, void of everything eyes have, except the function of seeing.”

And and incident that cursed Hind’s first marriage:

It seems that the ugly fistfight Hind and I had in his presence had not helped to make her look beautiful , as he would have like his wife to be.  Nor had she shown the self-posession he expected.  As far as he was concerned, she was the sister of a foolish young man who must never be the uncle of his future children… they separated while she was still a virgin and half crazy.

 Fist-fights, indeed!

And who could resist a story that begins:

“The first time my grandfather died….” and goes on to tell of a foundling infant, with a full beard and a man-sized penis which, upon use, turns women younger? So it goes in “Temporary Death,” by Moahammed Salah al-Azab, of Egypt.

Some I didn’t like so much, but all in all, a book to introduce us all to some interesting young writers in Arabic, and to share with friends in exile here, who might like to read the Arabic of the bi-lingual edition.

 

 

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All This Belongs to Me: A Novel of Mongolian Sisters; Or Is It?

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

I decided to take a break from the run of Arabic fiction I’ve been reading to catch up with a novel that won the National Translation Award last fall  at the annual American Literary Translators’ [ALTA] convention — All This Belongs to Me.  Alex Zuker, the translator, read  some selections to a group of us; the English flowed nicely, the life described on the high steppes of Mongolia was intriguing.  He explained how he’d struggled to translate this or that concept for an American audience.  The kicker came — though we’d heard it previously– when it became apparent that the author was not Mongolian at all.  She had lived in Ulan Bator for a year!  Petra Hůlová is Czech.

She has an advanced degree in Mongolian studies, speaks Mongolian, apparently fluently,  and knows more about the people, the life and modernity there than anyone else I know.  This is the first of 5 acclaimed books she has written, none of the others taking place in such an exotic locale as Mongolia, though one does unfold in New York City.  How could this be? I wondered.  Writing any work of fiction is, for most writers, a long and difficult task.  How much more difficult to invent characters in a culture not your own, and keep them true to thesmelves.  Unless you don’t.  Unless, these are actually Czech women and men in essence, transported to exist in a faraway land.

I had read another novel earlier in the year, also of a Mongolian people — The Tuvans instead of the Khalkhas of the current book; mountain people instead of steppe people; extremely rural instead of those with access and familiarity to the City –  Ulan Bator.  I didn’t know the difference when I began but I had been very moved by The Blue Sky: A Novel from the Tuvan People, by Galsan Tschinag; why not try another?

In addition, my interest  in Mongolian people has been stirred by the recent, and continuing, resistance to Han Chinese presence and rule in Northwest China, Xianjian,  particularly then cities of Urumqi, Kashgar and Hotan, where the people share many ethnic and actual family and clan ties with those across the border in Mongolia. (more…)

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Saqi Books: History, Fiction and Food from the Middle World

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

I’ve come across a very lively publisher of Arabic, Farsi and Turkish translations to English, histories of the region, biographies, cookbooks [The Axis of Evil Cookbook!], with a strong emphasis on women, writers and written about.  Saqi Books has offices in San Francisco and London as well as Beirut.

I’ve read Nawal el-Sadaawi’s Two Women in One, and am in the middle of The Devil You Don’t Know, an Iraqi memoir, journalistic reflection of returning to Iraq by Zuhair al-Jezairy.  I recommend them both.

AFSANEH: Short Stories by Iranian Women looks particularly intriguing.

“Whether negotiating often-treacherous paths through political and religious upheavals or threading their way through dreams and fantasies, the characters in these stories are vivid and compelling enough to challenge and surprise anyone unfamiliar with Iranian life and literature. Simin Daneshvar, perhaps the most renowned Iranian woman writer of all time, has as a recurring theme in her stories the oppressive atmosphere prevailing in Iran during the last two decades before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Goli Taraqqi’s stories are populated with sick, desperate people who lead lonely lives suffused with fear. The Shemiran Bus and A House in Heaven are virtuoso works of hers, and probably two of the best examples of contemporary prose in Iran. In the words of one critic: ‘If Taraqqi had not written anything but these stories, she would still be regarded as first-rate amongst Iranian writers.’ Others include Shahrnoosh Parsipour, Moniroo Ravanipour, Mahshid Amirshahi, Fereshteh Sari, and Fereshteh Molavi.”

As does Sufism and Surrealism, by the well known Syrian-Lebanese poet, Adonis.

Save a space in your summer reading for at least one writer from the mysterious Middle– neither East nor West but the heart of the great caravan routes from Acre to Cairo, Istanbul to Samerkand.  Learning more about water on the moon is fine.  We also need to learn about lives in the lands we so easily ignore.

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The Map of Love – Ahdaf Soueif, Egypt & England

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

Adhaf Soueif, of Egptian and British heritage and upbringing has set herself a formidable task in The Map of Love: to tell two cross-cultural love stories 100 years apart, both developing in our minds at the same time.  The older is being discovered through letters, journals and mementos from the early years of the 20th century, mostly of a life lived in Egypt, and mostly found in an old trunk.  The more recent love, 1997-98, much of which is also in Egypt, is that between the young American heir of her great grandmother’s trunk and the older brother, Omar, of the woman piecing the stories together, Amal.

Amal, it turns out is related by marriage to  the same owner of the trunk, Anna Winterbourne, who had come to Egypt after the death of her first, British, husband and falls in love with Sharif al-Baroudi, Amal’s great uncle.  The map of the title is not only the story of their unfolding loves, separated by a century, but of the unhappy marriage of England and Egypt at the turn of both centuries, as their lives are shaped by the events of the day.  The map is also of the family tree as we find it being constructed for us. (more…)

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