12,99 TL 69,99 TL 69,99 TL 1.

299,99 TL 339,99 TL 164,99 TL 69,99 TL

News Opinion Video The Big Story  Search  

Now Sudan Protests Israeli Elections Khashoggi US Politics

Français   

Discover | Books

Apocalypse now: Why Arab authors are really writing about the end
of the world
Dystopian books may have a higher profile – but it’s down to Western media, not the Arab Spring

A collage inspired by novels about Egypt, including Using Life, Otared, The Second War of the Dog and The Queue (illustration Aaya al-Shamahi)

By Lina Mounzer
1 April 2019 07:13 UTC | Last update: 2 weeks 6 days ago


A city built in accordance with an architectural conspiracy, designed to bring about the apocalypse.

Surveillance cameras rigged to shoot at any sign of wrongdoing. 

A state, run by a bureaucracy so ruthless that dying patients must wait in line for official permission to be seen by a doctor. 

A group of female crime bosses waging war on each other above and below ground through a network of tunnels and sewers.


A mysterious disease that seals the face up into a lump of flesh, leaving only two nasal holes through which to breathe. 1296

A monstrous creature stitched together from the parts of bodies torn asunder by car bombs, now animated by a vengeance to kill those
responsible for its own death(s).

These worlds, imagined in various books* published in Arabic (and relatively soon thereafter translated into English) during the last several
years, give a general impression of how some Arab novelists are processing the current state in which they live: by exploring the abyss of a
possible future, looming darkly through the fissures of the present.

Recommended
Arabic poetry: 10 writers, classic and
modern, you need to read
Visa denied: Sudanese author is blocked by
UK authorities
Death of a writer: Murder casts shadow
over Baghdad's literary scene

An Egyptian protester protects his face from tear gas during clashes with riot police near Tahrir Square, Cairo, in November 2011 (AFP)

The general narrative has it that Arab writers, disillusioned by the failures of the Arab Spring and the renewed plunge into disorder and
authoritarianism, have spawned a new literary movement of late, turning to speculative fiction - dystopian in particular - to make sense of
the nightmarish present.

The Anglophone media has embraced these books, as well as this narrative: that they have all been born out of a post-revolutionary
landscape and, although they deal with futuristic societies, use metaphorical approaches to speak about the current dystopia of the "Arab
world". 

Different fruits, same soil

But that would be to simplify a complex moment and movement, as well as to discount the vastly different political landscapes from which
these books have emerged.

The Arab world covers an enormous territory. This movement

of dystopian fiction is largely an Egyptian phenomenon, although the two
genre entries that have actually won the International Prize for Arabic
Fiction (more commonly known as “the Arabic Booker”) hail from Iraq
(Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, winner in 2014 and published in
English in 2016) and Palestine by way of Jordan (Ibrahim Nasrallah’s The
Second War of the Dog, which won in 2018 and has yet to be translated into
English).

Zeina G. Halabi, assistant professor of Arabic Literature at the American

University of Beirut, says that even when it comes to Egypt, “it would be
inaccurate to attribute all this writing to ‘the revolution,’ as though it were
some sort of Big Bang before which none of this existed.”

Among other things, Halabi is interested in how social and political

movements influence literary ones and vice versa. But she is quick to point out
that the current spate of dystopian fiction coming out of Egypt can, in part,
trace its roots as far back as a century, to a time when Arab writers such as Jurji
Zeidan and Hafez Mahmoud were trying to imagine what a perfect, utopian
society might look like.

Nael el-Toukhy, a translator and novelist, agrees. One of his own

novels, Women of Karantina, is often grouped together with works by fellow
Egyptians, including Ahmed Naji’s Using Life and Mohammad Rabie’s Otared.

All three are used as evidence for this new generation of younger Egyptian
writers turning to dystopia to air their frustrations with present-day Egypt.
The French edition of Nael el-Toukhy’s Women of Karantina
But of the three, only Otared has the relentlessly grim quality usually (Actes Sud)
associated with the genre, with Rabie’s future Cairo a divided city, its eastern
half presided over by a tyrannical group called the Knights of Malta. Much of the novel is narrated by the titular Ahmed Otared, a policeman
who spends his time methodically murdering people from a sniper’s tower, describing their death throes in agonising detail.

Using Life, by contrast, is light and bubbly in tone - even if it does end in a successful apocalypse. Sex, drugs and rock’ n’ roll abound as the
narrator uncovers the Society of Urbanists and their conspiracy to level the stinking, teeming city of Cairo so that it can be rebuilt from
scratch. The book landed Naji in prison for nine months, not because the authorities objected to his speculation about a possible conspiracy
from on high, but because a private citizen lodged a complaint against the explicit sexual content of the novel.

Meanwhile, el-Toukhy’s  Women of Karantina is a maniacal picaresque with the scope of an epic. It begins with two lovers, Ali and Inji who,
on the run after “accidentally” committing a murder in Cairo, settle down in Alexandria and proceed to beget and enlist an entire criminal
empire.

But el-Toukhy is uncomfortable with his work being classified as dystopian. "I
have two problems with this," he says. "First, it is something that Western
critics do, because all they have to go on are the novels in Arabic that have
been translated into English, and they know nothing about Arabic literature
except that which has been translated into European languages.

"Second, because they always connect the revolution to dystopia, as

though searching for evidence of the revolution's effect on new Egyptian
literature, they found what they were looking for in this word 'dystopia':
young Egyptian writers are writing dystopia because they're disillusioned by
the results of the Arab Spring."

Women of Karantina, el-Toukhy says, “was 90 percent complete by the time

the Arab Spring came about, and so it has nothing to do with the revolution,
and even less to do with its disappointments.”

Instead, the authory posits a more interesting and more nuanced assertion:
that what these books have in common, rather than their "dystopian"
imaginings, is that they all arise from having “shed the fear of
addressing politics or political events through literature,” marking what he
says is a significant departure from the 1990s, when writers either ignored
politics in their work or else wrote ideological tomes.

Regarded as such, this new spate of Arab literature and the revolution have
their origins in the same place, with both emerging out of the same
conditions. They are not cause and effect, but different fruits of the same soil. The Arabic edition of Mohammad Rabie’s Otared (Hoopoe)

What he does see in common with Naji’s, Rabie’s and his own novel is this “ability to deal with politics without succumbing to ‘ideological
writing'."

The same frustrations that culminated in the fearless act of taking to the streets to demand a better life and a better society are those that
also motivated writers to begin speaking out on the page; to imagine alternate worlds or futures that, for all their nightmarish qualities,
represent the bold impulse to let one’s imagination run onwards as wildly, manically and savagely as possible.

Lost in translation
It might be going too far to say that because Egypt roused itself to the possibility of a better future, it has produced a body of literature
concerned with engaging with the future as an imaginative space, with narrating alternate “future histories”, a phrase el-Toukhy uses to
describe his own novel.

But it is interesting to consider this idea alongside Ahmed

Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which not only won the Arabic Booker but
was also shortlisted, in its English translation, for the 2018 Man
Booker International Prize.

Part crime thriller, part sci-fi horror, the book fuses numerous narratives to tell
the story of a monstrous creature inadvertently created, initially as an act of
mercy, by a junk dealer who stitches together pieces of various corpses to give
a widow - whose husband was ripped apart by a car bomb - a full body to bury.
The resultant creature disappears before any burial can take place: soon there
is a spate of murders across Baghdad, with many witnesses describing a
hulking giant - alternately referred to as “Frankenstein,” “Criminal X,” or most
often, “Whatsitsname” - fleeing the crime scenes. 

But Frankenstein in Baghdad isn’t dystopian or future history: its events take

place in 2005, after the American invasion of Iraq. As a metaphor, the creature
is an apt representation of a country rent asunder by violence and unable to
cleanly identify who is guilty and who is innocent.

It’s also interesting to consider that there have so far been no entries from
Syria in the dystopian or speculative fiction genre. That said, if we reduce the
contents of some books to a blurb - such as Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard
Work, where a group of siblings drive a microbus across a blasted landscape,
transporting their father’s corpse for burial as it decays and putrefies in the
back – then we would be hard-pressed to consider them as anything but. 

This is probably because, as Halabi says, “people are too busy documenting the The US edition of Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad
(Penguin)
horrors of the actual reality they’re still experiencing".

One might be forgiven for thinking, given the attention that these books have received in the English-language press, that they form a
movement, a vast tide of new releases marking a shift in Arabic literature.

But in reality, says Marcia Lynx Qualey - writer, editor, and the mastermind behind Arab Lit, the seminal website on all things Arabic-
literature-in-translation -  while there has been a relative “surge in something you could call dystopian literature, [it’s] not been as big as the
amplification it’s gotten in translation”.

Part of this is because genre books, says Qualey, “are much more sellable than
a historical novel about 1950s Algeria and France, or Cairo in 1973, or
Palestinian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.”

But beyond that, she says, there are important questions to be asked about
what is being translated - and why. “I think Anglophone publishing is actively
looking for these sorts of works and is also actively creating them, through
commissioning anthologies such as Baghdad Noir, Iraq + 100, Palestine + 100,
etc.”

Ghenwa Hayek, associate professor of Modern Arabic Literature at the

University of Chicago, who teaches Arabic literature both in its original Arabic
and in English translation, voices a darker answer about where this interest
might come from. “It’s not far-fetched to think,” she says, “that part of the
fascination [in the English-speaking world] for this dystopian fiction is due to
the fact that it somehow fulfils people’s expectations of what they think the
Arab world is like: a place of chaos, authoritarianism, and violence.”  

El-Toukhy, himself a translator, expresses similar concerns, albeit about the

way these books are being interpreted as “a trend,” in the Anglophone press.
“The English-language critic, wishing to convince himself that he’s read more
than a book or two from the Arab world, is happy to imagine that he has in
fact read an ‘entire new trend’ in Egyptian literature,” he says, with
characteristic black humour.

Certainly, it is imperative to keep such questions in mind when reading

translated literature: the politics of translation are never not, well, political.
The NZ cover of Death Is Hard Work (Faber & Faber)
But if this enthusiasm for genre fiction serves as a gateway drug, bringing
readers to literature translated from Arabic and then enticing them to stick around for more; to read other books by Nael El-Toukhy,
Mohammad Rabie, or Ahmed Saadawi; and from them to then branch off into other writers, other genres, through which to get a bigger,
more complex, more multitudinous view of the Arabic-speaking world - then no one is complaining.

To encounter a place through its literature: in a world beset by dystopias, it is the best sort of utopia that one could hope for.

* These snippets, are, in order, taken from:

Using Life by Ahmed Naji (published in Arabic in 2014, in English translation, by Ben Koerber, in 2017)
The Second War of the Dog by Ibrahim Nasrallah (published in Arabic in 2016; certainly forthcoming in English as part of the IPAF
prize, which provides a subsidy for translation)
The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (published in Arabic in 2013; in English translation, by Elizabeth Jaquette, in 2016)
Women of Karantina by Nael El-Toukhy (published in Arabic in 2013; in English translation, by Robin Moger, in 2015)
Otared by Mohammad Rabie (published in Arabic in 2015; in English translation, by Robin Moger, in 2016);
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (published in Arabic in 2013; in English translation, by Jonathan Wright in 2018)

Read more

Film Books Culture

Horror in Beirut: Maskoon film festival triumphs against Arabic poetry: 10 writers, classic and modern, you need to For Palestine sci-fi film, a fictional future is easier to
the odds read imagine than reality

0 Comments MiddleEastEye 
1 Login

 Recommend t Tweet f Share Sort by Best

Start the discussion…

LOG IN WITH
OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?

Name

Be the first to comment.

ALSO ON MIDDLEEASTEYE

Sudan investigates ousted president Bashir for money laundering What if al-Aqsa Mosque caught fire?
2 comments • 2 days ago 1 comment • 3 days ago
asad — In any country there is no freedom of press ,the leaders are all corrupted . Wizard Kagdan — So the reason that the Western world would not react that strongly is because we
Avatar Avatarare "US-dominated"? Not because, say, people react more strongly if something happens related to
their own cultural history or religion? Or maybe because the Notre Dame has been in a movie like …

US denies entry to Palestinian rights leader, BDS co-founder Israeli delegation cancels visit to Bahrain conference after outcry
1 comment • 11 days ago 1 comment • 8 days ago
Vinegar Hill — Berry hit the nail on the head when she wrote . "When you can't win the debate, you try breaks0 — Bahrain is a US-Saudi puppet state, so none of this really means anything given that their
Avatarto silence it," Avatar(and the UAE's, Saudi's and Egypt's) alliance w/Israel is already in place.

✉ Subscribe d Add Disqus to your site 🔒 Disqus' Privacy Policy

News Opinion Video The Big Story

Français     Top

COUNTRIES ABOUT

Algeria Lebanon Sudan About us

Bahrain Libya Syria Privacy
Egypt Mauritania Tunisia Terms and conditions
Iran Morocco Turkey Contact Us
Iraq Oman United Arab Emirates
Israel Palestine Yemen
Jordan Qatar
Kuwait Saudi Arabia

© Middle East Eye 2019 - all rights reserved. Only England And Wales jurisdiction apply in all legal matters.