Halim Barakat, The Crane

The Crane by Halim Barakat is a short autobiographical prose work, its tone fluctuating between realism, interior monologue, poetic passages and political rhetoric. It begins as the narrator looks back on his childhood in the village of Kafrun in Syria and moves on to describe his travels and experiences as a student in the US …

The Crisis of History in Jabra’s Novels

In an interview in 1990, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra commented on the need for “a change of vision…a new way of looking at things" in an Arab world "betrayed by thousands of years of decay” (Nasrawi). This sense of impasse has been a long-standing theme in Arab literary and cultural contexts, addressing what is seen as …

The Ship

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's The Ship (Al Safina 1970) is narrated by two characters taking a trip on a cruise ship from Beirut to Italy: Isam Salman, an architect from Baghdad who has studied in London and Wadi Assaf, a Palestinian buisnessman who lives in exile in Kuwait. There's a cast of Arab and European characters …