Amir Tag Elsir’s The Grub Hunter

January 15, 2020 by Tasnim

Amir Tag Elsir’s The Grub Hunter is a novel about who gets to write novels, and the impact of surveillance on literature. In its opening lines, the protagonist tells us “I’ll write a novel. Yes, I will. This is a really strange idea for a retired police agent like me” (1). This is the story of a former secret service agent, Abdallah Harfash, also known as Farfash, who, has retired after an accident in which his leg is amputated.  He […]

Categories: Literature, Notes • Tags: Amir Tag Elsir, Sudan

The Other Americans

March 24, 2019 by Tasnim

Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, out next week, begins as a murder mystery and grows into a larger story about fear, anger and resentment, about the meaning of love and the finding of home, exploring the grey zones of human behaviour and the schisms in society that allow us to mark people as other. The narrative opens with music composer Nora Guerraoui learning of her father Driss’s death and returning to her Moroccan immigrant family in California. The sudden death […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Anglophone-Arab, Arab-American, Laila Lalami, migration, Morocco

On Memory: An Evening with Palestinian Writers at the Arab British Centre

October 30, 2018 by Tasnim

On October 29th, the Arab British Centre hosted Selma Dabbagh, Jehan Bseiso, Farah Chamma and Ahmed Masoud, who came together to talk about what memory means to them as Palestinian writers. Behind the headlines and milestones and tweets, there are people and stories and morning rituals. There are memories and details so resilient they pass from one generation to another, they cross borders and traverse checkpoints to be captured in poems and plays, novels, art pieces and a whole tableau of […]

Categories: Art, Literature, Poetry • Tags: Ahmed Masoud, Farah Chamma, Jehan Bseiso, Palestine, Selma Dabbagh

Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys

September 24, 2018 by Tasnim

The Watermelon Boys is the debut novel of Iraqi-Welsh journalist Ruqaya Izzidien. Set between 1915 and 1920, the novel tells a first world war story with a difference: in this novel, the main protagonists, Ahmad and Carwyn, are Iraqi and Welsh. The novel focuses most on the story of Ahmad and his family, though it spirals out to include a large cast of characters including a number of Ahmad’s friends and colleagues as well as his Jewish neighbour Dawood and […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Review, Ruqaya Izzedin, The Watermelon Boys

Leila Aboulela’s Short Story Collection Elsewhere, Home

July 7, 2018 by Tasnim

Leila Aboulela has been on a book tour recently with her short story collection  Elsewhere, Home which includes some of her earliest stories, like “Coloured Lights,” as well as stories written more recently such as “Circle Line.” Aboulela read from her new book at a book launch at the Migration Museum on July 4th. She was in conversation with Chibundu Onuzo, who asked her, among many other things, to talk about the secret is to her staying power: what does it […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Leila Aboulela, Scotland, Sudan

MFest 2018

April 30, 2018 by Tasnim

This weekend was MFest, “UK’s first festival of culture and ideas dedicated to Muslim communities,” which took place at the British Library between the 28th-29th April. The programme included several panels relevant to this blog. I was particularly interested by the panel “Spicing Up Sci-fi: The Dunes Strike Back” featuring Emirati writer Noura Al-Noman, author of the young adult scif-fi novel Ajwan, as well as Soren Lind, who has co-directed a number of sci-fi inspired works related to Palestine with filmmaker and […]

Categories: Art, Events, Literature • Tags: British Library, British-Arab, British-Muslim, MFest

Banipal Book Club discusses Frankenstein in Baghdad

April 26, 2018 by Tasnim

Yesterday The Banipal Book Club met at the Rosetta Stone Bookshop to discuss Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. There was quite a crowd at the store, reflecting the book’s popularity both in the original Arabic and — perhaps even more — in translation. The unprecedented success of this particular book in translation did come up as a topic during the discussion. The translator, Jonathan Wright, suggested that it was in part due to the time Penguin had invested in promoting […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Ahmed Saadawi, Banipal, Iraq, Jonathan Wright

Speaking in Tongues, Night Terrors in Arabic

October 18, 2017 by Tasnim

“Night Terror,” the first story in the short story collection Double Dutch by Laura Trunkey begins with the following passage: “He was speaking Arabic in his sleep. Her son — who could barely manage three words in a row in English — had an incredible fluency in a language she recognised only from television news clips.” The story focuses on the mother’s reaction to this strange phenomenon as she grows to believe that Jasper, her “problem child” is not only a […]

Categories: Art, Literature • Tags: Arabic language, Gulf War, Laura Trunkey, poetry, Robert Westall

Hisham Bustani’s The Crossing

October 6, 2017 by Tasnim

Hisham Bustani’s short story “The Crossing”  has been translated into English by Maia Tabet and appears in the current issue of Newfound.  The short story was originally published in Arabic in Bustani’s The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (2010). In Newfound, it appears in both Arabic and English, as in Bustani’s previous work, The Perception of Meaning, previously reviewed here. The story is framed by the description of crossing a series of checkpoints “in the long succession beginning with the one right […]

Categories: Art, Literature • Tags: Egypt, Gaza, Hisham Bustani, Palestine, Rafah, Translation

World Literature and the Vernacular

October 2, 2017 by Tasnim

  While doing some research on writing in Egyptian ‘ammiya recently,  I came across a satirical cartoon from the 20s featuring a peasant woman (or literally, bint-el-balad, daughter of the land),  and what might be called the Egyptian New Woman, described in the cartoon as al-fata al mustarjila sa’iqat al-automobile — the “mannish” girl who drives an automobile. The peasant woman is turning her back to the other woman, believing her to be a Western man, or a “khawaga.”  Responding to […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: ammiya, conference, dialect, fusha, vernacular, world literature

Egyptian Arts Festival D-Caf (March 31- April 22)

March 6, 2016 by Tasnim

D-Caf (Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival)  returns for its fifth edition on March 31 running until April 22. “Egypt’s only international multi-disciplinary contemporary arts festival,” D-CAF has everything from literature readings to concerts, to film and theatre, comedy stand up and a puppet show. Dina El Wedidi and Khansa Batma open the show with a concert at Horreya Garden. The music program focuses on North Africa, and features Egyptian composer Bahaa El Ansary, Arabstazyfrom Tunisia, Ahmed Elseweasy and Abdelbaset Hammouda.    In the performing arts section, Egyptian […]

Categories: Art, Dance, Film, Literature, Music, Theatre • Tags: Arabstazy, Bahaa El Ansary, Danya Hammoud, Ezzat Ezzat, Fouad Nafili, Hassan El Greatly, Laila Soliman, Shaymaa Shoukry, Tania El Khoury, Youness Khoukhou

Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life

February 16, 2016 by Tasnim

Sayed Kashua’s new book Native: Dispatches From an Israeli-Palestinian Life is a collection of reflections written between 2006 and the summer of 2014, when Kashua left Israel and moved to the US to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Native was originally published in Hebrew as Ben Ha’aretz. As Adam Kirsch writes, this “title that contains an untranslatable pun. Literally, it means “son of the land,” and coming from Kashua, an Arab Israeli who writes in Hebrew, it implies a claim to nativeness that carries a […]

Categories: Art, Literature, Television • Tags: Hebrew, Israel, Naguib Mahfouz, Palestine, Sayed Kashua

Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies

February 15, 2016 by Tasnim

Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies, her fifth novel, explores the complexities of loyalty, religion and  nationalism, and the human yearning for belonging. The story is structured as two parallel narratives, a third person historical narrative set during the 19th century Caucasian war, and a contemporary narrative narrated in first person by Natasha Wilson, a thirty-something academic born to a Russian mother and a Sudanese father. Natasha describes herself as “a failed hybrid, made up of unalloyed selves” resenting both […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Anglo-Arab, Anglophone-Arab, Chechnya, Dagestan, Georgia, Imam Shamil, Leila Aboulela, Russia, Scotland, Sudan, Sufism, terrorism, War on Terror

International Prize for Arabic fiction shortlist

February 10, 2016 by Tasnim

This year, the shortlist for the IPAF (International Prize for Arabic fiction) includes “a Syrian novel about Islamic State’s occupation of Raqqa to an Egyptian dystopian thriller” among other novels that “address the tragedy of the present-day Middle East.” The Syrian novel is A Sky Close to Our House by Shahla Ujayli,  although since we are told it “spans the second half of the 19th century to the present” it is presumably about more than the Islamic state’s occupation of […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Ahmed Khaled Taufiq, Egypt, George Yaraq, Iraq, Lebanon, Mahmoud Shukair, Mohamed Rabie, Nabka, Palestine, Rabai al-Madhoun, Shahla Ujayli, Sinan Antoon, Syria

Hisham Bustani’s The Perception of Meaning

February 9, 2016 by Tasnim

Hisham Bustani’s The Perception of Meaning is an eclectic collection of texts, ranging from one sentence flash fiction to poetic passages to retellings of fairytales and longer works, including “History will not be made on this couch“. Throughout, the original Arabic is mirrored on the opposing page by the translation into English by Thoraya El-Rayyes. As with any bilingual text, to read the Arabic and the English is to experience two different texts. The original text forces fusha into shapes that “feel […]

Categories: Art, Literature, Poetry • Tags: Hisham Bustani, Jordan

“It’s Much More Than A Pause”: The State of the Arts in Libya Today

October 15, 2015 by Tasnim

Today in The National, Nick Leech writes about the Fergianis, the Libyan family whose name has become synonymous with books. He talks to Ghassan Fergiani, the managing director of Darf Publishers, about the history of the Fergiani bookstores, and how the current situation is impacting their new publishing ventures. As with Rim Taher’s article from a few weeks ago about the state of Libya’s art scene, the Fergiani brothers talk about the difficulties facing them, given the turmoil the country […]

Categories: Art, Literature • Tags: Darf Publishers, Ghassan Fergiani, Libya, Najla Shawket Fitouri, Najlaa Elageli

Ghada Karmi’s Return: A Palestinian Memoir

September 30, 2015 by Tasnim

In Return: A Palestinian Memoir, Ghada Karmi frames her reflections on being a Palestinian in exile with an account of her “return” during a 2005 UN assignment as a consultant to the Palestinian National Authority, during which she travelled to “places she hasn’t seen since her childhood; places that now have to live with the grim reality of occupation.” As she retraces the places of her childhood,  she reflects on her life as someone “fairly integrated and at ease in my adopted country” but […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Ghada Karmi, Palestine

Dia Batal and Selma Dabbagh: “I Am From There”

September 27, 2015 by Tasnim

Dia Batal‘s work, currently on display in the exhibition Tracing Landscapes, “uses Arabic calligraphy as a vehicle to explore notions of identity, memory and migration.” In her unique script, Batal brings words to life in various forms, including writing on silk screens, and creating the words out of powder coated metal. I am from there, for example, takes a line from Mahmoud Darwish and casts into a shape “inspired by compasses and other navigational tools.” This work “creates an object that points to home, […]

Categories: Art, Literature • Tags: Dia Batal, Palestine, Selma Dabbagh

Suheil Badi Bushrui Passes Away, 1929-2015

September 10, 2015 by Tasnim

Palestinian poet, translator and scholar Suheil Badi Bushrui has passed away in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at the age of 85. Professor Bushrui was the founder and current Director of UM’s Kahlil Gibran Research and Studies Project and the first holder of the Bahá’í Chair for World Peace. He published and edited many works, including the first annotated edition of Gibran’s The Prophet (1995); The Ethical Dimensions of Science, Art, Religion, and Politics (1996, co-edited with Miles Bradbury), The Spiritual Heritage of the Human Race: An Introduction to the World’s Religions (with […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Suheil Badi Bushrui

Brazilian Literature and the Arab Culture

September 7, 2015 by Tasnim

Moema Olival’s recent book, Brazilian Literature and the Arab Culture, examines the “influence of traditions of Arab countries, especially Lebanon, in novels, poems and essays of six Brazilian authors of Arab descent.” Those authors are: Milton Hatoum, Raduan Nassar, Miguel Jorge, William Argel de Mello, Salim Miguel and Carlos Nejar. I’m not sure about the translation of the title, but I hope it’s not actually “the Arab culture,” singular. Here’s an article on Milton Hatoum and the “Arabs of Brazil” – although […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Brazil, Carlos Nejar, Miguel Jorge, Raduan Nassar, Salim Miguel, William Argel de Mello

Review of Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories

September 6, 2015 by Tasnim

Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories is a collection of eleven contemporary short stories from Jordan translated and edited by Ibtihal Mahmoud and Alexander Hadded, with a foreword by Samir Al Sharif which provides a very brief overview of the Jordanian short story for the reader unfamiliar with the literature. As this anthology is aimed to introduce the reader to the Jordanian short story, it could have benefited from a little more of this framing. The stories are presented […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Ahmed Abu Hleiwa, Asmaa al-Mallah, Basma el-Nsour, Elias Faroukh, Jordan, Julnar Zain, Khalid Yousef Abu Tamaa, Magdalene Abu el-Rub, Manal Hamdi, Musa Abu Rayah, Samir Al Sharif