I thought my work this week would be easy but it turned out to be very hard. Since I have no interest in writing a summary of books on the history of Arabic literature (even though I’ve studied it for several years I’m not even scratching the surface) and since judging it by Nobel Prize Winners would be unfair, I decided to write about the lesser-known writers who are now accessible thanks to projects translating their work into English or other European languages.
The truth is that Arabic literature in western languages is very important to modern literature. Arabic scholars and Arabic society as a whole were deeply influenced by western literature. When I studied children’s stories from 19th century Egypt, I learnt that the first children’s stories in the Arab world were poorly translated from English and French in an attempt to embrace modern ideas. But at the same time the stories were neutralized of their deadly charge of despising tradition and re-written to keep the old social order of respecting the elderly. I remember one story that told of a ship that was burning and a child aboard the ship stood on it and remained until the ship exploded and he was blown to bits, all because his father told him to. I remember that I was amazed to discover that this story actually came from a Christian book.
Still on that matter, I remember one literary festival when I talked with a Palestinian writer from the Galilee and I asked him what it takes to be a writer. He thought that I was asking him how I can become a writer and he suggested that I read Guy de Maupassant and O Henry stories, but he didn’t or couldn’t point out a single Arab writer to learn from. I was always puzzled why that was. I’m the first to admit that in most cases, selective translations from Arabic to Hebrew are being made in the media everyday to prove that you can’t believe the Arabs. But then again great writers like Naguib Mahfouz (the Cairo trilogy) were translated to great success.
Several days ago I came across an anthology of modern prose and verse from the Arab peninsula that was published in 1988 called The Literature of Modern Arabia, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. I felt relieved reading something that didn’t have post-modernism all over it. The thesis in the base of this anthology was that Arabic poetry moved from the need to keep the Arabic tradition intact, to more bold and revolutionary poems in free verse and with modern metaphors. It is still open to debate whether these Arabic poets are truly effective and are being read today, but the prose that was exposed to western literature in its beginning is now finding a balance between the old and the new. If I wish to give one thing that could be learnt from this anthology, it is that one doesn’t have to give up his ideas and tradition in order to write. The best thing for writers is to mix the old and the new. Furthermore, I would like to recommend this anthology as an introduction to Arabic literature and towards a modern understanding of the Arab Peninsula.