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 …

When Absurdity Becomes The Form

The two works of art above, by Lebanese artist Youssef Shawki, are described in an article in The National as at the centre of his exhibition, Acid Fields, "a collection of abstract works featuring tormented and distorted figures." The only two paintings that veer from illustrating bodies are the maps: Arab World Map Construct / …

Days of Dust

The scene of the destruction of Dayr al-Bahr that Halim Barakat leaves us with at the end of his novel Six Days returns in The Return of The Bird to the Sea, translated as Days of Dust. The novel takes place during the six day war of 1967, over the course of which we follow …

Halim Barakat: Six Days

Halim Barakat's allegorical novella Sitat Ayam (Six Days, 1961) depicts the struggle of a fictional city (Dayr al-Bahr) under siege. The inhabitants of the city are confronted with an ultimatum to surrender or be wiped out. They choose to defnd the city, and the six days of battles  end in the burning of the city. …

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 …