Bøger i The Arab List serien

This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names--and many traits--of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world. Sensual, rich in allusion, yet at the same time focused on the struggles of today, Where the Bird Disappeared is a powerful novel of both connection and dispossession.

On the eve of the 2007 general elections in Morocco, writer, academic, and former cabinet minister Abdallah Saaf embarked on several road trips across the country to get a feel for how its citizens had fared since Mohammed VI's accession to the throne. A Significant Year is the result: an analysis of the political and sociological state of the Moroccan nation on the eve of a crucial moment in the post-Hassan II period, but also a travelogue that describes what the author saw and heard on his travels in the summer months leading up to the epochal vote. Through Saaf's eyes, we see the country's varied regions and its urban and rural landscapes. We meet Moroccans from all walks of life, such as a waiter at a favorite cafe, a car-park attendant who recognizes the author from TV, and fellow writer and intellectual Abdelkabir Khatibi. Behind the deceptive simplicity of the book's narrative structure, readers will find in A Significant Year an insightful and nuanced portrayal of modern Morocco's many complexities.

The year is 1973. An Egyptian historian, Dr. Shukri, pursues a year of non-degree graduate studies in Moscow, the presumed heart of the socialist utopia. Through his eyes, the reader receives a guided tour of the sordid stagnation of Brezhnev-era Soviet life: intra-Soviet ethnic tensions; Russian retirees unable to afford a tin of meat; a trio of drunks splitting a bottle of vodka on the sidewalk; a Kirgiz roommate who brings his Russian girlfriend to live in his four-person dormitory room; black-marketeering Arab embassy officials; liberated but insecure Russian women; and Arab students' debates about the geographically distant October 1973 War. Shukri records all this in the same numbly factual style familiar to fans of Sonallah Ibrahim's That Smell, punctuating it with the only redeeming sources of beauty available: classical music LPs, newly acquired Russian vocabulary, achingly beautiful women, and strong Georgian tea. Based on Ibrahim's own experience studying at the All-Russian Institute of Cinematography in Moscow from 1971 to 1973, Ice offers a powerful exploration of Arab confusion, Soviet dysfunction, and the fragility of leftist revolutionary ideals.

In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha's abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women's lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife. In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity--both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large--will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

Alawia Sobh's acclaimed Arabic novel of the Lebanese Civil War is a rare depiction of women's experience across class, sect, and generation in this region-defining conflict. Rich with everyday detail, uncovering the collusions of ordinary and extraordinary violence, and mixing female voices of different ages and beliefs, Sobh's work is not only an illumination of an important historical period at a new scale. It is also a unique meditation on the nature of storytelling. In The Keeper of Stories, stories struggle to survive the erasures of war and to rescue the sweetness of living, and connect the tellers and their audience in sometimes welcome, sometimes maddening ways. The transformation of pain and love into art is both the subject and substance of this necessary new book, sensitively brought into English by a translator who shares aspects of Sobh's background and worked with the author on the translation.

"Originally published in Arabic in 1995"--Title page verso.

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, which was founded in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War and the Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party and left political life--and published shortly after she committed suicide--the book offers a poignant look at, and reckoning with, the Marxism of her generation and the role of militant intellectuals in the tragic failure of both the national liberation project and the communist project in Egypt. The powerful critique in The Stillborn speaks not only to and about Salih's own generation of left activists but also to broader, still salient dilemmas of revolutionary politics throughout the developing world in the postcolonial era.

An experimental novel that explores the complexity of Palestinian identity through extended metaphor and dark humor. On a plastic chair in a parking lot in Ramallah sits a young man writing a novel, reflecting on his life: working in a dance club on the Israeli side of the border, scratching his father‿s amputated leg, dreaming nightly of a haunting scorpion, witnessing the powerful aura of his mountain-lodging aunt. His work in progress is a meditation on absence, loss, and emptiness. He poses deep questions: What does it mean to exist? How can you confirm the existence of a place, a person, a limb? How do we engage with what is no longer there? Absurd at times, raw at others, The Dance of the Deep-Blue Scorpion explores Palestinian identity through Akram Musallam‿s extended metaphors in the hope of transcending the loss of territory and erasure of history.

A poetically written and bitterly sweet memoir about nature, death, life in Palestine, and the universal concept of home. Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi was in his late forties when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He had feared it was HIV, so when the cancer diagnosis was confirmed, he left the hospital feeling a bitter joy because his wife and son would be spared. The bittersweetness of this reaction characterizes the alternating moods of narration and reflection that distinguish this meditative memoir, Among the Almond Trees. Barghouthi's way of dealing with finality is to return to memories of childhood in the village of his birth in central Palestine, where the house in which he grew up is surrounded by almond and fig orchards. He takes many healing walks in the moonlit shadows of the trees, where he observes curious foxes, dancing gazelles, a badger with an unearthly cry, a weasel, and a wild boar with its young-a return not only to the house but to nature itself. The author decides to build a house where he would live with his wife and son, in whom he sees a renewal of life. The realization of his impending death also urges him to vocalize this experience, and he relates the progress of the disease at infrequent intervals. And, ultimately, he details the imaginative possibility of a return to life-to the earth, where he would be buried among the almond trees.

"A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War."--

A chilling poetic reflection on the world we have inherited and the destructions that made it.   To confront time, pre-modern Arabic poems often began with the poet standing before the ruins, real and imagined, of a beloved‿s home. In Postcards from the Underworld, Sinan Antoon works in that tradition, observing the detritus of his home city, Baghdad, where he survived two wars‿the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 and the First Gulf War of 1991‿and which, after he left, he watched from afar being attacked during the US invasion in 2003.  Antoon‿s poems confront violence and force us not to look away as he traces death‿s haunting presence in the world. Nature offers consolation, and flowers and butterflies are the poet‿s interlocutors, but they too cannot escape ruin. Composed in Arabic and translated into English by the poet himself, Postcards from the Underworld is a searing meditation on the destruction of humans, habitats, and homes.

Lyrical and powerful poems that serve as a powerful reminder of the human cost of war. "Those who believe in the currency of patience / Were burned out in the alleyway."The Screams of War is a visceral collection of poems that confront the realities of contemporary Syria. Akram Alkatreb's verses capture the sense of the quotidian during war. His words, mere "murmurs engraved on stones," long for and despair over an irrevocable past. At the heart of Alkatreb's work lies a preoccupation with trauma and the profound burden of alienation that accompanies exile. Nascent memories are shrouded by the "scars of sleep," and words find themselves nostalgic for destruction. The ubiquity of violence that Alkatreb channels into his poetry does not tolerate enclaves of innocence. The Screams of War is an unforgettable testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a stark reminder of the harsh realities faced by those trapped in conflict.