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Fiction
Leila Sebbar: I Do Not Speak My Father's Language
![[Leila Sebbar. Image from Author]](/content_images/3/sm_Sebbar.jpg "[Leila Sebbar. Image from Author]")
From Leila Sebbar's Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. I Do Not Speak My Father's Language A few useful dates so as not to get lost in the maze of memory: My father is born in 1913 in Tènès. From 1932 to 1935, he studies at the teachers’ college in Bouzaréah, in Algiers, where he meets Mouloud Feraoun, assassinated in March 1962 by the OAS. He will be a schoolteacher and school principal: from 1935 to 1940, in El-Bordj from 1940 to 1945, in Aflou from 1945 to 1947, in Mascara from 1947 to 1955, in Hennaya, near Tlemcen from 1955 to 1960, in Blida (in 1957, he is imprisoned at Orléansville; ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon Longlisted for Arabic Booker Prize
Sinan Antoon’s third novel, Ya Maryam (Ave Maria) (Beirut/ Baghdad: Dar al-Jamal, 2012), was longlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, otherwise known as the “Arabic Booker.” The novel, Antoon’s third, explores the conflicting views of two generations of an Iraqi Christian family. The sixteen books on the longlist were selected by a panel of five judges, whose names will be announced in Tunis on Wednesday 9 January 2013, at the same time as the 2013 shortlist of six novels.
Keep Reading »بعد ما بعد الحداثة: مقالات في الأدائية وتطبيقات في السرد والسينما والفن
[“كتب” هي سلسلة جديدة على صفحات “جدلية” نستضيف فيها المؤلفين والمؤلفات في حوار حول أعمالهم الجديدة ونرفقه بفصل من الكتاب.] "بعد ما بعد الحداثة: مقالات في الأدائية وتطبيقات في السرد والسينما والفن" تأليف: راؤول ايشلمان. ترجمة: أماني أبو رحمة. عن دار أروقة. جدلية: كيف تبلورت فكرة الكتاب وما الذي قادك نحو الموضوع؟ أماني أبو رحمة: بدأت فكرة الكتاب منذ عامين تقريباً وأثناء بحثي عن موضوعات كتاب “ما وراء القص: دراسات في رواية ما بعد الحداثة”، كنت أقرأ وأبحث كثيراً لاختيار الموضوعات المناسبة. ولفت انتباهي أثناء البحث حديث منظري ما بعد الحداثة البارزين من أمثال ليندا هتشيون وإيهاب حسن ووليم غاس عن نهاية ما بعد الحداثة ـ وأن تطبيقاتها ...
Keep Reading »October Culture
![[A Butterfly in New York City. Image from Sinan Antoon]](/content_images/3/sm_Butterfly.jpg "[A Butterfly in New York City. Image from Sinan Antoon]")
Jadaliyya's October culture bouquet features: Marilyn Hacker translates Five Poems by Rachida Madani. Maymanah Farhat introduces Helen Zughaib's "Stories My Father Told Me." Mai Serhan writes on "Huda Lutfi: The Artist and the Historical Moment". Andre Naffis-Sahley translates "Glory to Those Who Torture Us" a poem by Abdellatif Laabi. All previous culture posts can be accessed here. To contribute, comment, or complain: culture@jadaliyya.com
Keep Reading »An Excerpt from Salam Ibrahim's "The Attic"
![[Salam Ibrahim. Image from Salam Ibrahim]](/content_images/3/sm_sibrahim.jpg "[Salam Ibrahim. Image from Salam Ibrahim]")
[Salam Ibrahim was born in 1954 in Iraq, and started his political and literary activities early in his life, which caused him to be arrested and detained more than four times between 1970 and 1980, during which he endured physical and psychological torture. He took part in the war with Iran as a reserve soldier, and then deserted and joined the rebels in north Iraq. He moved with the Kurds to the northernmost part of Iran during the al-Anfal campaign in 1988. He sought asylum to Denmark in 1992, where he still resides. Ibrahim started writing short stories in the early 1970s, and published more than fifty short stories by 1984. His writings—narrative and critical ...
Keep Reading »The Last Friday Film Review: DC Premiere at DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival
Youssef leans over his salmon-colored cement balcony overlooking Amman’s poorer neighborhoods. The houses in the distance are stacked one over the other like a bland-colored Lego city covered in smog. He sips his coffee alone, listening to the sound of the call to prayer. The scene is so grand and the solitary man is so central that the call to prayer fades into the background, ricocheting off the buildings in the distance. It seems little more than an echo in his ears. Some movement below captures Youssef’s eye and his attention shifts from the city before him to his son Imad as he attempts unsuccessfully to talk to the girl next door. In the next scene Youssef tries to ...
Keep Reading »An Excerpt from The Penguin's Song by Hassan Daoud
![[Lebanese novelist, Hassan Daoud. Photo from arabicfiction.com]](/content_images/3/sm_HassanDaoud2.jpg "[Lebanese novelist, Hassan Daoud. Photo from arabicfiction.com]")
[Born in the village of Noumairieh in southern Lebanon in 1950, Hassan Daoud moved as a child to Beirut, though like so many Lebanese families, his retained strong links to the village and returned there every summer. Daoud was educated in Beirut and studied Arabic literature at university. He embarked on a career as a journalist and worked as a reporter throughout Lebanon’s civil war. From 1979-1988 he wrote for the daily al-Safir, and then joined the staff of the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat. He has focused on cultural reporting as well as on social issues. He is the editor of the ‘Nawafidh’ cultural supplement of the Beirut daily al-Mustaqbal. His work ...
Keep Reading »قصائد
قصائد أمامة حميدو كعب حذائي ينسدل كعب حذائي من شمس عين ثاقبة يتمايل في عباءة سرمدية تحيط به فراشات الوادي الزرقاء يحوم يتخبط في قدسية منمقة متتالية إيقاعها على ضفة أنهار أخرى ألمح ظلالك المتمايلة منتشية كالقبلات المنطبعة على سطح الماء متشكلة كآثار أقدام صغيرة مبتدئة متطفلة رائحتها حبوب زيتون مذاقها جليدي
Keep Reading »Hoda Barakat: Kingdom of this Earth
![[The cover of Kingdom of this Earth. Image from www.lahamag.com]](/content_images/3/sm_barakatbook.jpg "[The cover of Kingdom of this Earth. Image from www.lahamag.com]")
[With her latest novel, Kingdom of this Earth, Hoda Barakat enriches Lebanese literature with a gem of a novel, and, as other critics have noted, inaugurates a new aesthetics in novelistic writing in Arabic literature. Kingdom of this Earth relates the lives of the people of Bsharri, a small Maronite community in Mount Lebanon, during the period spanning from the beginning of the twentieth century until the eve of the Lebanese Civil War. The readers follow the life of these mountaineers who have such a fierce pride in "their own" Gibran, their land, their many saints, and in the Cedars, God's Cedars, that after a group of German scientists diagnose the trees ...
Keep Reading »Vénus Khoury-Ghata: The House of Nettles
![[Photo by Sue Tortoise, Flickr]](/content_images/3/sm_tortoise.jpg "[Photo by Sue Tortoise, Flickr]")
Tireless mother, worthy descendant of a line of peasant women working as long as daylight lasted, as long as night permitted them to tell a lentil from a pebble. Only sleep could still the hands that washed, sewed, cut, peeled, kneaded, cradled. Sleep vertiginous as a stone hurled into a well. Hands that resisted winter, pain, even snakebites from the serpents they trod upon barefoot. Peasant women and ladies at once, taking control of everything, except their fear of the bus, a devilish invention, created to shame the horse and his cousin the donkey. They would not get on it except in situations of great necessity: the sudden death of a relative in the city, or ...
Keep Reading »The City of Images by Luay Hamza Abbas
![[Luay Hamza Abbas. Image from Author]](/content_images/3/sm_Luay.jpg "[Luay Hamza Abbas. Image from Author]")
[Madinat al-Suwar (The City of Images, Amman: Dar Azmina, 2011) is the latest novel by Iraqi author Luay Hamza Abbas (b. 1965). It is narrated in flashback by a boy growing up in Basra through the seventies and eighties before and during the rule of Saddam Hussein with memories of his childhood and the people he grew up with. The political developments that he lived through and their impact on those around him are blended in with the travails of adolescence and memories of everyday events, both amusing and painful, that stand out in the narrator’s memory. The narrative is a nonlinear one based on the narrator’s associations and accordingly jumps back and forth in time. ...
Keep Reading »Morbid Symptoms: The Omar Yussef Mystery Series
The Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 264 pp, 2006, ISBN 978 1 84354 603 0 The Saladin Murders by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 340 pp, 2008, ISBN 978 1 84354 648 1 The Samaritan’s Secret by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 324 pp, 2009, ISBN 978 1 84354 650 4 The Fourth Assassin by Matt Rees Atlantic Books, 264 pp, 2010, ISBN 978 1 84887 203 5 Frequently written off as an inferior literary form by traditional academic literary critics, for whom it is often seen as no more than popular “entertainment,” to use Graham Greene’s haughty self-putdown, detective fiction is often dismissed as a depthless and fleeting tale of imaginary adventure. ...
Keep Reading »مقابلة مع الروائية رجاء عالم
[رجاء عالم كاتبة سعودية من مواليد مكة. حصلت على جائزة البوكر العربية عام 2011 عن روايتها “طوق الحمام”، بالمناصفة مع الكاتب المغربي محمد الأشعري عن روايته “القوس والفراشة". صدرت لها ثلاثة عشر رواية بالعربية. ترجمت بعض أعمالها إلى الإنجليزية والإسبانية ولغات أخرى.] ابتسام عازم: كيف أثر حصولك على جائزة البوكر العربية عام 2011 على حياتك؟ رجاء عالم: لقد حصلت في الماضي على العديد من الجوائز، ولكن ما يميز جائزة البوكر، هو تمويلهم لترجمة الكتاب إلى الإنجليزية وهذا يريح الكاتب بعض الشيء. كما يضعك تحت ...
Keep Reading »A New Mohawk
Most of the Mohawks in America are unincorporated territories, areas that lie outside of any municipality or township. I didn’t even know these places still existed. Apparently, unincorporated territories are either so small, destitute, or isolated that no city, town, or respectably incorporated area has seen reason to claim them; neither have the people who live in these unincorporated territories seen fit to claim themselves. I still can’t figure quite why these places would all be named Mohawk, but ...
Keep Reading »مقطع من رواية التماسيح
ومع أننا ظللنا نتعامل بطريقة عادية... يخطر لي الآن أن مساحة وجودنا المتقلصة تلك – الأماكن التي ضاقت علينا في التسعينيات – هي نفسها أماكن التظاهر التي تحاصرنا فيها قوات الأمن إذا خرجنا، ولا يكفي ألف وخمسمئة شهيد أو أكثر وعام كامل لجعلها تتسع... في المساء أفكر في مون من حيث تصلني أخبار الأحداث وأضحك من أن الاحتجاجات مازالت سلمية. أهنّئ نفسي على فتح حاوية "التماسيح" ولا أشعر بالذنب. لا يستهويني الجري في الشوارع واستنشاق الغاز؛ وبالمنطق الانهزامي ذاته الذي أعانني على الحياة في مصر منذ ٢٠٠١ – ...
Keep Reading »September Culture
Jadaliyya's September culture bouquet is out with sumptuous fiction and art from Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt: * Shadow Sites: Recent Works by Jannane al-Ani by Maymanah Farhat * An Excerpt from Salam Ibrahim's "The Attic" translated by Ghada Mourad * An Excerpt from Bilge Karasu's "A Long day's Evening" translated by Aron Aji * (a(version)s) interviews: Mohamed Abdelkarim and Rough Americana by Joe Namy All previous culture posts can be acessed here. Questions, ...
Keep Reading »An Excerpt from Bilge Karasu's "A Long Day's Evening"
[Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) was born in Istanbul. Often referred to as "the sage of Turkish literature," during his lifetime he published collections of stories, novels, and two books of essay. Karasu is an influential reference point in the progress of Turkish fiction writing. A perfectionist, a philosopher, and a master of literary arts, he left behind a body of work which, although intricately woven and at times obscure, skillfully outlines a world unmatched in its crystal clear transparency. ...
Keep Reading »August Culture
Jadaliyya's second summer bouquet features an essay by the new co-editor of the Culture Page, Maymanah Farhat, fiction from Lebanon, poetry from Egypt, a remembrance of the great Ghassan Kanafani, and an interview with two Kuwaiti filmmakers. Maymanah Farhat, "Portrait of America: Kehinde Wiley at the Jewish Museum" Marilyn Booth, "An excerpt from Hassan Daoud's "The Penguin's Song"" Suneela Mubayi, "Amal Dunqul's "Spartacus' Last Words"" Faisal ...
Keep Reading »Ghassan Kanafani: The Symbol of the Palestinian Tragedy
As I recall, the year was 1966. We ran to the Nasr Cinema hall in Gaza City to attend a literary seminar held during a conference for the Union of Palestinian Writers. A surprise would unfold whose beauty far surpassed the conference which came together to elect an executive committee and then adjourned. The conference MC announced that they had invited the young writer Ghassan Kanafani. A thin, handsome young man went to the podium to speak in a language that combined dream with reality in an ambiance ...
Keep Reading »حوار مع الروائي العراقي مرتضى گزار
[مرتضى گزار: روائي عراقي من مواليد ١٩٨٢، البصرة، تخرج من كلية الهندسة بجامعة بغداد سنة ٢٠٠٥، نشر روايته الأولى ”مكنسة الجنة“ سنة ٢٠٠٨، وصدرت روايته الجديدة ”السيد أصغر أكبر“ مطلع هذا العام عن دار التنوير، بيروت. حاوره سنان أنطون] جدلية: روايتك الأخيرة “السيد أصغر أكبر” رواية فريدة ومتميزة في موضوعها وأسلوبها. وبما أن أشجار النسب والسلالات ثيمة رئيسية فيها، فهلآ حدثتنا عن “نسب” الرواية؟ كيف تشكّلت الفكرة لديك وكيف تخمّرت؟ مرتضى گزار: يقال أن الروايات تولد من الشكوك والكوابيس وسوء الفهم، هذه ...
Keep Reading »As Though She Were Sleeping
[This excerpt is from Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping (Ka’annaha Na’ima) which was translated by Marilyn Booth and published by Archipelago Books this month. Marilyn Booth holds the Iraq Chair in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces and May Her Likes Be Multiplied: Biography and Gender Politics in Egypt. She has translated ...
Keep Reading »في أحوال الذئاب
رويَ: أنه في يوم القيامة ستهبُّ رياحٌ قوية، ستقلع الأشجار وتهزُّ أركان الجبال. لن يبقى إنسان ولا حيوان ولا نبات. ستزول الحياة وتندثر، إلا الذئب سيبقى متشبثاً بالأرض، غارساً مخالبه في التربة، مقاوماً، معانداً، حتى تسلخ قوة الرياح جلده من ذيله إلى فروة رأسه! *** سألوا الذئب: لماذا تغافل الرعاة وتنقضُّ على قطعانهم دون رحمةٍ؟ تعجَّب الذئب من السؤال مجيباً: الذنب ليس ذنبي، بل هو ذنب مخالبي القوية، وأسناني الحادَّة، وبطني الجائع. قَصُّوا له مخالبه القوية وكسروا أسنانه الحادَّة وملأوا ...
Keep Reading »The Sleep Thief
The Sleep Thief I will never forget that the interrogator called me “The Sleep Thief.” The name stuck in my mind whenever I used to steal a few seconds of sleep, to hold it together before them, even if for a moment. But this name never left me. I even started to dream about it. I had the same dream every night and would wake up drenched in sweat not knowing what to do. I cry every night until my eyes are puffy. My eyes become bigger than my face and cover it. Every night the gods descend tirelessly ...
Keep Reading »Two Sheikhs
[The following is an excerpt from Ibrahim Aslan's ground-breaking novel of the 1977 Bread Intifada, The Heron. Those who knew Aslan, who passed away on January 7, cannot help but to think of him every time they encounter the infamous blind and long-winded conman of his novel, Sheikh Hosni. We miss you. ] ---- Sheikh Hosni felt for the edge of the boat, bared his arm, leaned over a bit, and began to play with the water. As he splashed about, he announced, “Sheikh Genid, the water’s really ...
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