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  • On the Way to the WindContemporary Writing from the Middle East and North Africa
  • Salar Abdoh (bio)

A few years ago, the chief censor at the film department of the Ministry of Culture and Guidance in Iran happened to be a blind man. This was neither a joke nor a rumor. What it was, was the end of irony. And perhaps it said something, too, about the conditions under which not just Middle Eastern/North African writers, but artists of every persuasion from the part of the world represented here, have often had to labor. Censorship, imprisonment, and exile, not to mention limited or non-existent printing runs, are the common lot of many writers of the region. Add to that the scarcity of serviceable translations into international languages and a usually indifferent public—at home and abroad—and the blind censor becomes just another snag in a world of hurdles.

At the same time, it is always tempting to write of a flowering of this art or that literature. And a not unbiased observer will usually manage to find the renaissance he is intent on digging out from under the earth. Is there truly a blooming of book culture in the Middle East today? I can’t give a definite verdict. What I can say, however, is that with the catapulting onto the scene of, say, Egyptian best selling authors like al-Aswany and al-Khamissi, the adequately financed book fairs in the Gulf region, the riches of translated works in the bookshops of Tehran (despite the censor’s icy frown), and the avalanche of poetry and prose—particularly in English and French—from writers of Middle Eastern/ North African background scattered about the world, the floodgates have been thrown open. The censor may frown, but the deluge is unstoppable.

But why this selection of writers? One aim was to present a cross-cut of contemporary writing rather than an evolution. Another was to introduce some lesser known writers along with those who are better known and have already been anthologized. The sampling, then, is meant to be a portal. For how could one claim to definitively show the progress of the modern Arab novel without the looming presence of Naguib Mahfouz? Or speak of the Arab short story without mentioning Yusuf Idris? Similarly, is any talk of modern Hebrew or Persian poetry complete without the names of Yehuda Amichai and Ahmad Shamloo?

Caveats aside, a segment in Callaloo on Middle Eastern/North African contemporary works seems timely and natural—as natural as including an excerpt from Basrayatha, Mohammed Khudayyir’s book-length meditation/lover’s discourse on his native city of Basra, Iraq, a city recently devastated, but one where the great Arab writer of African descent, al-Jahiz, also began his career in the ninth century A.D. Equally apt are Florence Marfo’s scholarly work on the memoirs of African Muslim slaves in America, Maymanah Farhat’s charged essay on the convergence of race, identity, and politics vis-à-vis western representations of contemporary Arab art, as well as the visual artist Y. Z. Kami’s magisterial [End Page 1082] invocations on canvas, and the tender remembrance of the noted poet D. H. Melhem about her lifelong friendship with African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

The strong sense of place, even in displacement, is the current that runs through nearly all of these pieces. Take, for instance, the excerpt from the novel My Thousand & One Nights, novelist Raja Alem’s tale of women’s lives in the Mecca of bygone days, or Ibrahim al-Koni’s use of his native North African Tuareg folklore to write a dream-like sequence about a boy’s desert search for his father in Anubis. In yet another excerpt, Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib digs deep into the various socio-political phenomena in the Syria of the 1980s, while in Maryam Mortaz’ short story, “Charge Me Double for the Ride,” a simple taxi ride in Tehran becomes a vehicle for depicting a young man’s daydreams and disappointments in a city where everything is a hustle.

Place means economy and it means struggle for survival—themes that Ibrahim Abdel Megid portrays in...

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