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    ArabLit Quarterly: Fall 2018: ArabLit Quarterly
    ArabLit Quarterly: Fall 2018: ArabLit Quarterly
    ArabLit Quarterly: Fall 2018: ArabLit Quarterly
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    ArabLit Quarterly: Fall 2018: ArabLit Quarterly

    By Zakariya Tamer, Stella Gaitano, Asmaa Azaizeh and

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    About this ebook

    The first-ever issue of ArabLit Quarterly brings together short stories and poetry by exciting Arabic-language writers translated into English such as South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano, Syrian short-story writer Zakariya Tamer, Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh (translated into English, French, and Dutch), Lebanese poet Wadie Saadeh, Egyptian writer Muhammad Abdelnabi, Saudi writer Raja Alem, and others. Also: An open letter from novelist Sofia Samatar to deceased writer Tayeb Salih. A playlist to go with Mohamed Rabie's apocalyptic novel "Otared." A talk between graphic novelist Zeina Abirached and Olivia Snaije. With translations by award winners Marilyn Hacker, Yasmine Seale, Robin Moger, and more.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherM Lynx Qualey
    Release dateNov 30, 2018
    ISBN9781386595670
    ArabLit Quarterly: Fall 2018: ArabLit Quarterly

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      Book preview

      ArabLit Quarterly - Zakariya Tamer

      cover-image, ArabLit Quarterly Fall 2018 Beginnings NO LINKSimage.png

      

      The Illusion of Beginning While the World Goes on Spinning

      ‘It’s Getting Very Hot’

      Stella Gaitano, translated by Anthony Calderbank

      ‘Dragonflies’ in Three Languages

      Asmaa Azaizeh in English, French, and Dutch

      Drawing the Bilingual Piano

      Olivia Snaije talks to graphic novelist Zeina Abirached

      ‘The Flower’

      Zakaria Tamer, translated by Marilyn Hacker

      Dear Tayeb Salih

      By Sofia Samatar

      Mood Music for the Apocalypse

      David Kanbergs on ‘Otared’

      Lamia Ziadé’s Ode to a Bygone World

      By Olivia Snaije

      ‘Many Pass Through the Crossroads’

      Wadie Saadeh, translated by Suneela Mubayi

      The 2018 ArabLit Story Prize

      ‘The Boa’

      Raja Alem translated by Rana Ghuloom

      A Story of a City

      Layla Azmi Goushey on Abdul Rahman Munif

      A Homeland in Language

      Hanan Natour talks to Munsif al-Wahaybi

      Two Poems

      Munsif al-Wahaybi, translated by Hanan Natour

      ‘How to Swim the Backstroke with a Shilka Missile’

      Rasha Abbas, translated by Fatima El-Kalay

      ‘Autumn of Freedom’

      Sania Saleh, translated by Marilyn Hacker

      ‘Our Story’

      Muhammad Abdelnabi, translated by Robin Moger

      Contributors

      

      logo_arablit_web_hi.pngimage-1.png

      Introduction

      The Illusion of Beginning While the World Goes on Spinning

      The reader should, preferably, on opening this book, go through it page by page, from the beginning to the end, including the footnotes and page numbers. - Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, tr. Humphrey Davies.

      One question endlessly appears and reappears in my inbox. It wears different words each time it’s asked, like a fairy tale in motion: first cloaked in Chinese silks, and then in cotton gallabiyas, and later in stiff English trousers. But if I were to translate all these queries into a single meta-question, it would be, I’m interested in Arabic literature, where do I start?

      The questioner is usually looking for a single magic gateway, one book that will make the scales fall from their eyes, take their hand, and guide them inside a hushed world that contains all the force, knowledge, and wonder of a fifteen-hundred-year literary tradition; a tradition that is regularly renewing itself; a tradition that’s spread across tens of countries; a tradition that’s mixed with tens of other languages.

      Spoiler: It’s a fine question, but I don’t have a good answer.

      Of course I want all of us to crowd into the magic cavern of Arabic literature, where jewels hang from the trees like fruit and the air rustles with the discordant musics of poetry and prose. But if literature is an endless jabbering conversation, how do we jump into the middle (and in an unfamiliar cultural and semiotic landscape at that)?

      It is tempting to answer any damn place you like, although not particularly helpful. But what other answer is possible? If you were to come into the theatre and drop down beside me, fifteen hundred years into a production—and if I had arrived only a few short years before you—what would I whisper into your ear?

      I would probably gesture toward some of the things I’d been finding most interesting in that moment: the startling and deeply sympathetic imagery of South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano; the wildly inventive narrative-making of Saudi writer Raja Alem; the construction of the body in the poetry of Wadie Saadeh. I’d elbow you and nod over at critics who were spotlighting interesting details: as Sofia Samatar speaks to Tayeb Salih from beyond the grave; as David Kanbergs illuminates the visceral, fiery anger in Mohammad Rabie’s Otared; or as Olivia Snaije introduces us to graphic novelists Zeina Abirached and Lamia Ziadé. I might hiss some scattered biographical and historical details, and I’d try to let you know who was paying for (and manipulating, and benefiting from) this or that part of the production. I would try to emphasize fun, experiment, delight.

      And then maybe we’d be hushed for a while, side by side, watching as, for us, everything began.

      -M Lynx Qualey

      Short Story

      ‘It’s Getting Very Hot’

      Stella Gaitano, translated by Anthony Calderbank

      Part One: Time to Die, Or Go to Prison

      The place: a poor quarter, or, to be more precise, a slum

      The location: as far from the capital city as the righteous are from Hell

      The period: the time of flight, the time of war, the war that is either against you or against you

      The inhabitants: miserable wretches

      The smell: excrement and cheap booze

      The streets wind like snakes, and always lead to a dead end. The locals know best the twists and turns. The first time you wander down them you think you’re in a normal street then you end up in somebody’s bedroom.

      You live here having left all you own there. You dream of returning soon so everything you do is temporary. That’s why you struggle each day for something to eat and drink. Clothes don’t worry you too much. You collapsed recently. You support a family and you collapsed. Now you’re confined to your bed, fully aware of your uselessness. You lie there while the TB gnaws at your innards like termites in a stick. Your words have turned into a spluttering septic cough and your protruding bones are like fever ridden pipes. There are bed sores on your back from all the lying down, but between you and me no one knows about them yet. All you do is stare at those around you. You have become an eye observing everything, even sounds. Huddled in your room, the single room that is home to you, your wife and your twins, you clock everything that goes on in the street of your slum, or to use a more appropriate term, the refugee camp. You can see naked barefoot children playing in the filth, chasing dogs. There are others and fathers who will invariably end up dead, imprisoned or insane. Every day from where you lay you observe episodes from people’s lives: the arguments, the fights with sharp implements and the dances, which tend to outnumber the other episodes: a dance because someone got married, a dance because someone got promoted, a dance because someone had a kid, a dance because someone died.

      The reason you don’t miss a thing that happens in the street is because basically you’re living in the street. You can hear a drunk urinating against your wall, and another throwing up in front of the door and one staggering along trying to

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