[Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. Each installment highlights a trending topic in the MENA publishing world and includes excerpts from the selected volumes.This installment involves a selection from Hoopoe on the theme of New Fiction from the Middle East. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
By Ibrahim al-Koni
Translated by Nancy Roberts
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated by Humphrey Davies
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Ihsan Abdel Kouddous
Translated by Jonathan Smolin
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Basma Abdel Aziz
Translated by Jonathan Wright
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Ibrahim al-Koni
Translated by Nancy Roberts
About the Book
International Booker Prize finalist and "one of the Arab world's most innovative novelists" (Roger Allen) delivers a brilliant retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa
The year is 693 and a tense exchange, mediated by an interpreter, takes place between Berber warrior queen al-Kahina and an emissary from the Umayyad General Hassan ibn Nu'man. Her predecessor had been captured and killed by the Umayyad forces some years earlier, but she will go on to defeat Ibn Nu'man's forces.
The Night Will Have Its Say is a retelling of the Muslim wars of conquest in North Africa during the seventh century CE, narrated from the perspective of the conquered peoples. Written in Ibrahim al-Koni's unique and enchanting voice, his lyrical and deeply poetic prose speaks to themes that are intensely timely. Through the wars and conflicts of this distant, turbulent era, he addresses the futility of war, the privilege of an elite few at the expense of the many, the destruction of natural habitats and indigenous cultures, and questions about literal and fundamentalist interpretations of religious texts.
Al-Koni's masterly account of conquest and resistance is both timeless and timely, infused with a sense of disaster and exile—from language, the desert, and homeland.
About the Author/Translator
Ibrahim al-Koni was born in the northwest of the Sahara Desert in Libya in 1948 and learned to read and write Arabic at the age of twelve. He has been hailed a magical realist, a Sufi fabulist, and a poetic novelist, and his more than eighty books contain mythological elements, spiritual quests, and existential questions. His books have been translated into thirty-five languages and include Gold Dust, The Animist, The New Oasis, The Puppet, and many more. Among the many literary prizes to his name, he has been awarded the Sheikh Zayed Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. He currently lives in Spain.
Nancy Roberts is an award-winning translator of a number of Arabic novels including Salwa Bakr's The Man from Bashmour, for which she received a commendation in the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Translation, and Ibrahim Nasrallah's Time of White Horses, The Lanterns of the King of Galilee, and Gaza Weddings, for which she was awarded the 2018 Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding. She lives in Wheaton, Illinois.
In the Media
Read a Q&A with the author on Middle East Monitor
Additional Information
August 2022
$18.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781649031860
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
1
Scripture
The Aurès Mountains, AH 78/700 CE
The dispute had arisen over Scripture. And if prior experience was any indication of what was to come, the parties to the dispute would be hard pressed to prevent it from ending in bloodshed.
“Akad nakkanid anla attahlil!” the woman declared.
“We have our own Scripture!” said the interpreter, addressing himself in Arabic to the Muslim general’s envoy. The messenger sat crouched across from the imposing woman, looking as though he were watching for the chance either to lunge at her or to jump up and flee.
The woman studied her guest quizzically before adding in her lyrical tongue, “Attahlil kud yajmad ifassan nanagh. Ilmad sinning iha awlawan nanagh!”
Following close on her heels, the interpreter chanted, “Although we may no longer hold the Scripture in our hands, we have preserved it in our hearts!”
The guest scrutinized his hostess with an expression that betrayed an impatience ill befitting of his station as an envoy.
Meanwhile, the woman chanted, “Bashshan attahlil nanagh yazzar!”
Hastening to convey the message to the venerable courier, the interpreter intoned, “Besides, our Scripture preceded yours!”
The guest’s features trembled.
“That may be so,” he said after looking away momentarily. “However, the last word spoken by God dwells in the last religion to be revealed, which means that the last religion revealed abrogates what came before it.”
Speaking in his melodic gibberish, the interpreter conveyed the argument to the majestic woman, who leaned toward him lest she miss the slightest point in the troublesome messenger’s logic. After all, she was certain that, should they be misunderstood, his words had the potential to exacerbate this fateful conflict, an eventuality that would lead inevitably to bloodshed that might well sweep her people away as had happened in the days of yore with Jugurtha, or in the more recent past with Kusaila.
Her body garbed in black and her soul in mystery, the majestic woman retreated into a prolonged silence. Escaping the confines of the place, she roamed freely in the gracious open spaces that lay beyond the impregnable fortress walls. It was as though she were searching in the desert expanse for a prophecy. At length, she chanted as she was wont to do in her eerie-sounding gibberish, “Anhi nanagh yanna, ‘Awkasad itasammaskaland annamusnak sannamus hadn!’”
Rushing to convey the proclamation to the one who himself had come to deliver a proclamation, the interpreter intoned, “Our Scripture commands us, saying, ‘Beware of replacing one religion with another!’”
There ensued another long silence during which the interlocutors sat solemnly, wordlessly searching one another’s features for clarity.
Putting an end at last to the muffled contest of words, the guest queried, “What harm would it do Her Majesty to recite two confessions1 which, simple though they are, hold the power to spare both peoples the ravages of war?”
A smile of derision flickered across the stately woman’s features. From the lofty height of her throne, ensconced within her magnificent stronghold, she stalked the scattered remnants of a mirage still roaming the desert expanse.
Then, speaking out of her transcendent Realm, she rejoined, “Aydagh addubigh itatnannagh annar wajjigh ihitajim awajjum ay middan wizzaranin!”
Relaying the content of her words, the interpreter declared, “I would not hesitate to utter confessions that would so easily roll off the tongue were it not for my certainty that if such words truly spared people the ravages of war, they would have spared the heroes who went before me!”
The envoy sought clarification with a gesture. Receiving no reply from the interpreter, however, he had no choice but to replace the gesture with speech: “Of which heroes does the revered monarch speak, might I ask?”
The interpreter warbled the import of the query, whereupon the venerable dame warbled in reply, “Tattawim awajjum ay Aksayila? Migh tattawim awajjum ay mghar in jarmat awkalammannit?”
“Have you forgotten what you did to Kusaila?” chimed in the interpreter without delay. “Have you forgotten what you did to the ill-fated leader of the Garamantes?”
The envoy’s face was darkened by a cloud of melancholy. However, he countered the anguish with a question.
“What did we do to the leader of the Garamantes?” he asked.
The interpreter took a deep breath before commencing his sing-song, and when he had finished, he drew several more breaths, then proceeded to hold them in as if he were saving them up for the next round. Meanwhile, the august dame veiled herself in speechless indignation. At last, after returning from her flight into the wilderness, she threw down the gauntlet.
“Awadum wa sharran, yusiyawn imannit us darannit, yarmast mghar nawan walayassan, yankadas timazzujin stakuba asasinna mghar an jarmat ‘mas awa’? Yannahas mghar nun: ‘Awagh annin waritnamanaghghid daraban atakkid taddarad!”
A stillness descended over the castle courtyard as the interpreter caught his breath again in preparation for the next feverish leg of the race.
“After coming to you as an old man of his own accord, the leader of the Garamantes suffered a treacherous assault by your leader, who cut off his ears with the edge of the sword. When he cried out in protest, your leader retorted, ‘This is to ensure that never again will you dare take up the sword against the Arabs!’”
The mountain chain to the north exhaled chill winds, driving before them somber clouds at which the unyielding woman’s features brightened. In these clouds she saw an answer to her tireless supplications in the temple after a drought that had lingered over the region for years on end.
Smiling inscrutably, she replied with a question: “Anta akuniniyusan yayaway takuba, migh kunid attinyusan tiwayim tikubawayn?”
The interpreter closed his eyes like someone inviting slumber. Then he reeled, imploring the words for the sought-after inspiration before intoning, “Was it he who came upon you brandishing a sword, or was it you and your company who came upon him with swords unsheathed?”
The envoy simpered, biting his lips with half-rotten teeth before murmuring, “It would be difficult to explain to you, O leader of your people, the kinds of acts that might be committed by those obsessed with what we term religious duty.”
The interpreter warbled the narrative, whereupon the leader of the people sought clarification with a censorious gesture. The envoy shifted uncomfortably, the edge of his turban slipping to reveal his left temple. Stating his intent more clearly, he said, “It was you who forced us to draw the sword in your faces by refusing to go to God’s holy precinct of your own accord.”
The wind whistled noisily through the trees as the interpreter intoned the translation in a melodious voice.
“Massinagh iyan, bashshan ibraqqatan wayttakkanin ijjatan!” Her Majesty cried.
“The Deity is one,” crooned the interpreter, “but the ways leading to Him are many.”
Then, without giving her interlocutor a chance to respond, the woman added, “Akkat massinagh sabaraqqa nawan, tayyamanagh nakkanid itanak sabaraqqa nanagh!”
As the mad autumn winds sent leaves falling liberally about the castle courtyard, the interpreter stammered, “You take your path to the Deity, and allow us to take ours!”
After a momentary silence, the envoy declared, “I fear we will not be able to do that, since God has authorized us to bring the likes of you into His religion in droves. Otherwise, He would not have sent people messengers!”
A slight tremor passed over his sun-drenched face, causing his mustache to twitch visibly. He felt himself reeling once again as if he were struggling valiantly to master some suppressed emotion. The contagion spread to the bare, brawny forearms that he had wrapped around his knees.
The queenly figure intoned, “Awasasaligh iyannin wattusimad tijmayam danagh massinagh, bashshan tusamad ful ayyattajarawam ammahatan!”
The interpreter bowed his head so low that his veil touched his lap as he struggled mightily to recover his store of a language whose fields he had once roamed with ease. After joining Kusaila’s ranks, he had fallen into the hands of the invading army and had lived among them for years. Yet now he found himself straining over every word and breaking his spirit at every turn. In order to pick up that subtle, magical tone, bathed in the breaths of the Unknown, he now had to go against the grain. This tone, which had been mastered by those who chanted their poignant, mournful hymns in the vastness of sacred places of worship, was one the interpreter felt helpless to master himself. However, when the spirit of chivalry is quickened in the lowly muscle to which we refer as the tongue, then conveyed to those of another tongue without losing its innocence, it is transformed by the lords of verse into an ode through which generation upon generation can embrace the legacy of its timeless precepts.
At last he crooned, “I have been told that you come to our lands, not in search of the One worthy of worship but rather in search of the trifles of this decaying realm.”
Then, without waiting for her guest’s response, Dahiya added at once, “Urgh!”
“Gold!” cried the interpreter, repeating the word enthusiastically after her, like a pupil reciting a lesson.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Hamdi Abu Golayyel
Translated by Humphrey Davies
About the Book
Abu Golayyel’s gritty tale of two men’s ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East and the cities of Europe is pure storytelling
Two Bedouin men from Egypt’s Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. One—the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi—gets no further than southern Libya’s fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousin—the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider—makes it to the fleshpots of Milan.
The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi’s rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where “the Leader” fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin.
Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony, The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.
About the Author/Translator
Hamdi Abu Golayyel born in Fayoum, Egypt, in 1967, is a writer and a journalist. He is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including Thieves in Retirement and A Dog with No Tail which was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2008. He is editor-in-chief of the Popular Studies series, which specializes in folklore research, and writes for Arabic news outlets, such as al-Ittihad and al-Safir.
Humphrey Davies (1947-2021) translated some thirty book-length works from Arabic, including The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany, and was a two-time winner of the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
In the Media
Additional Information
May 2022
$18.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781649030948
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
The Vermin of Africa
I traveled for the same dream, to make the same gearshift (which wasn’t in the end really so much a dream or shift as a hideous mistake or shambles) just to scrape together a few pounds to get married so they wouldn’t say, “Bu Hamid’s boy couldn’t afford to get married, the old buzzard couldn’t raise her own children.” “Buzzard’s about right!”—the last bit of the sentence, or charge, being added by my paternal uncle, with emphasis. And even though my uncle had his own old buzzard on his back, his words were like a sword blade to my mother, who was the only person I have ever seen wince, shudder, ache, and moan at what he said, and not just at what he said but also at what my other paternal uncles or paternal aunts or maternal uncles or maternal aunts or anyone else said. A word would lift her to the highest heavens, another cast her into the bowels of the earth, and at the descent of that blade, we fell to pieces fell to pieces fell to piyiyiyeeeces—which I have to sing, I swear to God, because we really did fall to pieces fall to piyiyiyeeeeeeeeeces. There wasn’t a man or a woman among her relations who hadn’t poked her in the eye, or whom she hadn’t poked in the eye, with a word. But that’s another story.
And I was a good boy. Anyplace you chucked me, I stuck, and what was going to Libya if not getting chucked? Though that’s another story too.
What matters is that the Phantom Raider made that same gearshift but by going to Europe, where the gears really shift, while I decided to do it by going to Sabha, which was one of those decisions that cost me my future. I don’t know whether it was a decision, inborn stupidity, or just a unique imbecility.
In the nineties, I’d just come out of the army. It was the year Yasser Arafat’s plane crashed in the desert near Sabha. I was close by, in Sabha itself. The brotherly Libyan Army was flailing around lost in the southern desert and had failed completely for two whole days to locate Arafat and his plane. Then some Mediterranean asset of the American navy pointed them out. All the same, when the Leader visited Arafat after he’d been found and taken to the hospital in Sabha, he said, “They’re saying the Americans led us to you in the desert! It was our courageous army that got you back!”
“You’re not living up to your potential,” my mother used to tell me.
I’d answer angrily, “If I lived up to my full potential, I’d be asleep. I’d probably be sleeping like a log. I wouldn’t even be moving!”
She’d reply, with annoyance and covert disdain, “Why? You’re from the Bu Jalil family and everyone knows it!!” followed by a double exclamation mark for good measure and of course I couldn’t tell her that the outer limit of her beloved Bu Jalil family’s world was the bridge at the entrance to the village. Sometimes I’d say it was all because of my father. He’d been a government night watchman, which was normal among Bedouin, with most of our relatives being watchmen to begin with, and with all the village heads, without exception, putting their older sons to work as watchmen. My late lamented father, though, used to make out like he was an air pilot or something and was ashamed of it all, poor dear. On occasions when he couldn’t get out of having it with him or had to have it inspected by some official, he’d be so embarrassed at carrying a night watchman’s rifle he’d hire someone else to carry it for him. Despite which he never left the job. He joined when he was going on fifty and gave up. All he ever wanted to do was sit in a dark room, which I decided must be the grave or something, but I have a friend who whenever I tell him this story says it was depression—”Your father suffered from depression!”— and laughs, I have no idea why, so in the end I got sick of the whole thing.
I’d studied, of course, for about sixteen years, but I hadn’t learned anything. I’d taken over the farming from my mother and even though it was the only thing I did well and liked I was a failure at that too, and a resounding failure to boot, unfortunately, which is a story in its own right that I ought to call The Imbecilities of Agriculture on Thin Soil—“bad soil,” as the peasant who sold me the palm trees that I planted there had said, with the utmost contempt. First off, it was very salty, and when you removed the salt, you found huge rocks, stuck fast and stretching all the way to the end of the holding. But, with my unique stupidity, I insisted on farming it. Enough with the excuses! The truth is, the problem wasn’t my studies or my education or even whether I gave things a proper go or not: the problem was my reckless enthusiasm and the way I threw myself into subjects and projects and tasks that I’d never even heard of a moment before.
Though sometimes I feel that failure—in the absolute and quite apart from my personal train-wreck—goes back in the end to options: options for nothing, options for failure; what my first teacher, Mustagab, used to call “the mark of poverty,” the same thing that made him, personally, wallow in the pleasures of “red stew.” You know red stew? It’s the potatoes-in-tomato-sauce that was all most of our mighty people could hope for. It’s the red mark of poverty that makes one slog around blindly in the mud. I mean it, I swear! In the mud! Though what is life anyway if not slogging around in mud? He’d give anything for the big prize but reaches only for the small. He’d give anything for a front-row seat but makes his way to the back. The easy thing, the thing that’s absolutely guaranteed to be within his grasp without his being teased or having to compete or even with anyone else having to be there. At school, the kids would quarrel over who got to sit at the first desk while he’d keep going, shame-faced and a little anxious, to the back row. In Cairo, for example, the easy thing to do was work selling clothes in el-Ataba.
There were opportunities in journalism, even, but he refused to consider being anything but a construction laborer. Is it the incontestable way-things-are, or is it stupidity, or is it brute force?
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Ihsan Abdel Kouddous
About the Book
A story of betrayal, desire, and family drama, written by a giant of Egyptian popular fiction who shocked readers in the 1950s when this Lolita-esque novel first appeared and whose work has never before been available in English
Sixteen-year-old Nadia had been raised by her father, after her parents divorced when she was only a baby. Indulged and petulant, she remained the only female in her father’s life. But when she returns from boarding school to find that he has remarried without her knowledge, she conspires to restore her rightful place, creating misery, confusion, and a flood of unexpected consequences in her wake.
Written as a letter, a confession, by now twenty-one-year old Nadia, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s classic novel of revenge and betrayal challenges patriarchal norms with its strong female characters and brazen sexuality, and continues to speak to the complex human condition. It dives into middle-class life, and lays bare the repressed desires, seething jealousies, and complicated dramas of family.
Abdel Kouddous’s masterpiece I Do Not Sleep was adapted into a classic of Egyptian cinema in 1957, and its publication for the first time in English is an international publishing event.
About the Author/Translator
Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919-90) was one of the most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction of the twentieth century. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Abdel Kouddous graduated from law school in 1942 but left his law practice to pursue a long and successful career in journalism. He was an editor at the daily Al-Akhbar, the weekly Rose al-Yusuf, and was editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram. The author of dozens of books, his controversial writings and political views landed him in jail more than once.
Jonathan Smolin is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College in the US. He is the author of Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture (2013), and the translator of several works of Arabic fiction. He lives in Hanover, NH.
In the Media
- Irish Times Roundup
- ArabLit Smolin Q&A, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous excerpt
- NYT Daily
- LitHub review
Additional Information
January 2022
$19.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781649030986
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Where do I begin my story?
I’m confused. Every day could be a beginning and every day an end. But there’s one day in particular that I can’t forget. A day when I felt like my life began moving violently; when I felt that events started driving me instead of me driving events, and that I was no longer master of the world but the world had become master of me.
I was sixteen, and I’d been making the rounds at a number of Arabic, English, and French schools until I got to Madame Orly School in Maadi as a boarder.
My father came to school one afternoon. I remember it was a Tuesday. He asked for permission from the school director to take me home.
He seemed nervous. His face was so flushed that I smelled his breath as he was kissing me to check that he hadn’t been drinking. It was as if he were suffering from a crisis of shame or was hiding something in his chest that he didn’t know how to reveal or shake off. I walked next to him silently until we were out of the school and got in the car. I sat next to him in the front seat. We were both quiet as he drove toward Cairo.
I tried to break the silence and encourage him to talk. I asked him about Nanny Halima.
“She’s good,” he responded curtly, with a stiff smile.
I asked him about Abdou, the butler.
“He’s good,” he responded with the same curtness and smile.
I asked a third question, this time about the farm.
“It’s great,” he responded in the same tone.
I then decided to keep quiet. I turned to the window and bided my time, watching the road until I heard him clear his throat like he was gathering his will to talk. He cleared his throat a second time.
“You know, Nadia,” he said, “I’m not happy with you living at that boarding school.”
I turned to him. He didn’t look at me but his eyes were not on the road; they wandered as if he were searching for something inside himself.
“Why, Daddy?” I asked, coming to life and moving closer to him. “It’s a good school.”
“Even so,” he said, his eyes still avoiding me. “No matter how good it is, I don’t like that my daughter is being raised in boarding schools. You know, I put you there against my better judgment. But, when you became a teenager, you couldn’t stay home alone with me and live in a house without a woman to take care of you.”
He fell silent for a bit.
“Nanny Halima is great,” I said. “She loves me like a mother and more.”
“But she’s a maid,” he said, his eyes fixed in front of him. “She doesn’t know how to make a woman of you.”
He turned to me quickly, and then went back to looking in front of him.
“You don’t know how I’ve spent my whole life worried about you,” he continued in a tender voice as if his heart were beating on his lips. “There are many things in your life that I want to be sure about, but I can’t because I don’t know how to talk to you about them or how to ask you about them. Things only a woman can talk to you about. But when I put you in boarding school, I started worrying about you more. I’d stay up all night wondering if you were sleeping or not, if you ate dinner or not, if you were happy or not. I went crazy, always missing you. I’d gotten used to beginning each day saying good morning to you and ending each day kissing you goodnight. With you gone, I felt the entire world had become empty. I hated the house and I hated the farm. I started drinking more, drinking without eating. Every time I thought about taking you out of boarding school and bringing you back home, I’d get worried about you living with me, about you living in a bachelor’s house, in a house without a woman.”
I wasn’t moved by the affection overflowing from my father’s words. Instead, I felt that he was aiming at something he hadn’t revealed; something that was making him uncomfortable.
“But I’ve never complained about anything, Daddy!” I said, the words going dry on my tongue. “I’ve never felt that I’ve been deprived of anything. When I miss you at school, I know everything you’re doing is for the best.”
My father stopped the car by the side of the road, under the shade of a thick tree. He turned fully to me and started playing with my braids, as usual. He tried to give me a big smile.
“It’s in your best interest and mine that we live together from now on,” he said, giving me a sad look as if pleading with me. “The day you get married, I’ll make it a condition for your husband that he marries us both!”
He tried to laugh, but it fell flat, as if it had dropped into a shallow well.
I too tried to laugh, but I couldn’t even fake it. My heart began to get tighter and everything inside me was trembling as if I were standing on the edge of an abyss, afraid of someone pushing me forward.
My father was silent, swallowing his laugh. “There was no way for you to live with me and for me to have peace of mind about you unless I got married,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder tenderly, trying to bring me closer to him.
My eyes widened as if I’d seen a ghost.
“You got married?” I asked, cutting him off.
“Yes, Nadia,” he said, avoiding my gaze. “For fourteen years I’ve lived without a wife, for you. But now I had to get married, for you as well.”
I was almost in tears.
“The only condition I had for the woman I picked was that she could take care of you and look after you in your youth, that she could help me make you happy. I’m sure you’ll love her.”
“What’s important is that you love her,” I said in an almost sarcastic tone.
“If you love her,” he said sincerely, “I’ll love her too.”
“Congratulations.”
“That’s it?” he said, tugging my braid.
I got closer to kiss him.
“All I care about is your happiness, Daddy.”
“Merci,” he said, seeming to be in terrible anguish.
We were both silent as we drove back to Cairo.
I couldn’t interpret my feelings that day. It felt that at that moment, a fight between my emotions and my mind broke out. My emotions convulsed, writhing as if they’d touched a red-hot rod. My mind mocked my emotions, accusing them of egotism and denial.
I had to come down on the side of my mind. My father was thirty-nine, still young. He had the right to get married. I’d even asked myself many times why he didn’t get married. Whenever I saw a beautiful woman, I imagined her as his wife.
You don’t know what there was between my father and me. You don’t know that I wasn’t simply his daughter. I had all the rights of his wife.
I have no memory of my parents being together. They divorced when I was only two years old. My mother married another man and left me to my father.
I don’t know why they got divorced or why she left me to my father when I was so young.
Why did she forgo raising me? Why did she give up her right to me and take away my right to her?
I don’t know. My mother and my father both kept the story of their divorce to themselves. Members of the family would exchange surreptitious glances whenever the topic came up around me. I grew up with the story of the divorce whispered about behind my back. I rarely thought about it. If I did think about it, I felt that I was lost in the middle of a thick cloud or that I was before a locked box tossed into the house and I didn’t have the key.
All I knew was that my father married my mother for love and that it caused an outcry in the two families. Both families opposed their love and their marriage, so my father and mother had to elope, forcing their families to face a fait accompli. At the time, my father was twenty-three and my mother was seventeen.
But their tempestuous love couldn’t protect their marriage, and after three years it dissolved in divorce. I was the only remaining trace of it.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Basma Abdel Aziz
Translated by Jonathan Wright
About the Book
"An unflinching and deeply humane masterwork by a writer of astounding talent and courage."—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
Mysterious men are rounding up street children and enrolling them in a so-called “rehabilitation program,” designed to indoctrinate them for the military-backed regime’s imminent crackdown on its opponents. Across town, thousands of protesters encamp in a city square demanding the return of the recently deposed president.
Reminiscent of recent clashes in Egypt and reflective of political movements worldwide where civilians face off against state power, Abdel Aziz deftly illustrates the universal human struggles between resisting and succumbing to an oppressive regime.
Here Is A Body is a courageous and powerful depiction of the state cooptation of human bodies, the dehumanization of marginalized groups, and the use of inflammatory religious rhetoric to manipulate a narrative.
About the Author/Translator
Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning writer, sculptor, and psychiatrist, specializing in treating victims of torture. A weekly columnist for Egypt's al-Shorouk newspaper, she was named a Foreign Policy Global Thinker, and a Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute top influencer in the Arab world. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the winner of the Sawiris Cultural Award, the General Organization for Cultural Palaces Award, and the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel The Queue won the English PEN Translation Award and has been translated into Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. She lives in Cairo.
Jonathan Wright is a British literary translator and former journalist currently based in London. His numerous translations into English most recently include, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, winner of International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He studied Arabic, Turkish and Islamic civilization at Oxford University and served both as Reuters' Cairo bureau chief and as Reuters' U.S. foreign policy correspondent based in their Washington, D.C. office.
In the Media
"An unflinching and deeply humane masterwork by a writer of astounding talent and courage."—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
- New York Review of Books review
- The World Today, Chatham House (UK) review
- World Literature Today review
- Fall/Winter 2021 Banipal (UK)
- Foreword review
- Arab News review
Additional Information
September 2021
$18.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781649030818
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
I sat down when my turn came. They wrapped a white towel around my neck, almost strangling me, and I felt an urge to vomit. An old man with smooth hair picked up a pair of scissors and started cutting my hair without even combing it first. There was no way a comb could have untangled it anyway: even my fingers couldn’t have done it. The hair fell to the floor and covered it like coarse black grass that had just sprouted. I couldn’t see my face while I was having my hair cut, because I didn’t have a mirror in front of me. I knew what I used to look like from my reflection in shop windows and car windows. I had often played a trick on people in cars in order to get a good look at myself. I went up to them enthusiastically, holding a dirty rag in my outstretched hand as if about to clean their windscreen. They would look in the other direction and quickly wind up the window, maybe in disgust or horror at the way I looked. Some of them pressed their phones to their ears as if they were off in another world, while some pretended to be lost in thought and that they hadn’t seen me. In the meantime, I moved in and stared, not at them but at the distorted reflection of my face in the glass.
The barber soon finished my hair. My ears and the tip of my nose felt cold, like an animal that has lost its fur. I looked forward with pleasure to him applying some cologne, but he didn’t and I thought I must have done something wrong. I stayed where I was, hoping he would forgive me. Surprised I was still waiting, he told me to leave. He had no reason to begrudge me the cologne. I hadn’t moved when he was cutting my hair and I hadn’t annoyed him in the way I used to annoy Sayed Halawa, the most popular barber near our garbage dump. Sayed’s shop was well-known in the area, and we were also well-known there. I had often stopped outside the shop with Emad, staring at the customers passively having their scalps massaged. We used to stick our tongues out and play mind games with them. Sometimes we’d slip in through the door and watch them blocking their noses irritably because they expected us to stink. Once the barber shouted at us and flew into a rage when he saw us. When his shouting didn’t deter us, he gave Emad some money so that we would leave his customers alone, but by doing so he created a bond with us, maybe unwittingly. We used to pass by his shop whenever we wanted some money, when the people in cars were ignoring us, for example, and we didn’t have any other way to raise it. He had to pay a price to make us go away.
***
“Bend. Stretch. Jump. Press. Get down, boy! Get up, quickly! Your arms are like a girl’s. There’s no point making an effort with you. How did you sleep on the street on your own? I bet the other kids pushed you around. Push the weight forward! Push as if you were fighting off an infidel!”
Head Salem soon took us in hand. He set about dividing us into groups according to age, or rather height, fist size, and chest size. He pointed at me and I took off my undershirt. He examined my body for a moment and then consigned me to the second group, the middle-height group, not the weaklings or the big guys. Some of the children in the camp limped in one leg or had old injuries: Head Salem put those kids in a separate group and didn’t look at their chests or their fists.
I ran with my group until I was out of breath. I jumped twenty times to touch the sky, as he had ordered, and then I hung onto a pole stretched between two posts. I climbed a tree and jumped to the ground from the top. I picked up one of the other boys and carried him, and then we reversed roles. We repeated the exercises, and then the first group took our place and we went to do what they had been doing. Head Salem watched over us and bellowed in a voice that almost deafened us. In his notebook he wrote down things we couldn’t see. I think he was measuring our strength and sometimes he would insult one of us or throw a stone at someone if he tried to avoid doing what he’d been told to do. All that mattered to me at the end of the day was to survive and still be standing on my wobbly legs, so that he wouldn’t mark me down as a failure and a weakling. At the end he made us sit on the floor and he walked around shaking his head.
“Your bodies aren’t tough enough. They should be hard like real men. You’re no longer children, so don’t expect us to feel sorry for you. None of you will be men until you can do what you have to do without complaining.”
He paused, looked around at us and then roared: “Get up, you bodies, and run some more! We’ll make men of you despite yourselves, as long as I’m in charge. Run to the dining hall and don’t leave anything on your plates. Anyone who stops running before they arrive won’t get a meal until tomorrow. And don’t imagine you’re ever out of my sight, however far you go!”
I was nodding off between one mouthful and the next. I came round several times to find my head bowed so low it almost fell onto the plate. The training exhausted me and I could hardly walk to the dormitory. My whole body was in pain. The pain wouldn’t go away and it didn’t diminish with time. As soon as the bedding arrived, I threw myself down on it, a complete wreck. I felt bloated with all the food I had stuffed down my gullet without chewing it. My head slipped off the pillow and my eyelids drooped, but I didn’t fall asleep. My mind was full of all the things that had happened since the morning. General Ismail’s face constantly appeared, and the words of Head Allam and Head Salem echoed in my head like a recording.
They said we’d come to the camp to save our lives. They’d done us an invaluable favor and were going to give us an opportunity we would never have dreamed of. We’d learn new things, find out how things worked behind the scenes. People would treat us with respect. All we had to do was listen carefully, remember as much as possible, and do what was required—nothing more and nothing less.
They’d designed the program especially for us. They said it would take several months of intensive training, and we would apply what we learned carefully and faithfully. And then?
“Then we set you free, qualified for a better life.” That’s what they said.
“When you graduate from the camp, you’ll still report to us. We won’t abandon you. You’ll get a regular salary and when you reach the age of majority you’ll be given identity cards with an address and a profession. Most importantly, it will be a step up for you—you’ll be respected in a way you never knew in your earlier life. From now on, no one will remind you that once you were street kids.”
We were the children of General Ismail personally, children of the System. We would serve the country honorably and responsibly, like important, respectable people. We would defend the national interest and the security and stability of the country. There was nothing better than that. They were really interested in us, but would they give us a choice? Would it be possible to walk away and go back to the street?
I dreamed of General Ismail. He looked like my father and I had the same feelings toward him: discomfort, disgust, and an urge to disobey his orders and break the rules he laid down. In the dream I punched him on his red cheek. He soon recovered and didn’t punch me back. In fact, he invited me to punch him again and, when I told him he was a stupid idiot, he drew a sword and made a cut in my neck. The blood poured out and I woke up. I could still feel the pain. I started twisting and turning in bed and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I stared at the ceiling a long time in the hope that my insomnia would wear off, but it didn’t. I sat up and cursed the fact that I had woken up so early when all the other children were asleep. I was tired and drained and my limbs were sore. I felt like I’d been given a nasty beating and couldn’t stand up. I looked around at the faces of the sleeping children. We were still as we had been the day before—one person short. The boy, Rice Grain as I called him, hadn’t come back yet.
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