Book Review (Journal of Arabic Literature, Sonali Pahwa) (original) (raw)
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The Migrant in Arab Literature. Displacement, Self-Discovery and Nostalgia., 2022
One of the striking aspects of the so-called black decade (1990–2000) in Algeria was the public debate that arose between the intellectuals who chose to remain in the country and to confront terrorism and those who decided to leave the country and cross the border. Among the latter, Wasīnī ’l-A‘raj (Waciny Laredj) represents an exception, insofar as, although he left the country, he maintained Arabic as his language of writing. In this chapter, I will discuss two of his novels. In The Shadows’ (she)guardian: Don Quixote in Algiers (1996), the protagonist has his tongue and his penis cut as a symbol of the loss of speech and desire. After discussing this loss, I will outline the intellectual path of the author, who has chosen to trespass physically the border in order to maintain his “tongue”, and to migrate with it; then, I will discuss Shurafāt baḥr al-shamāl. Amṭār Amstirdām (North Sea’s Balconies: Amsterdam Rains), where the author deals with the intellectual’s manfā (broadly translated as “exile”) from his own country. ’l-A‘raj, in fact, succeeds in remaining an Arab writing author despite living abroad and avoids being inserted in the so-called migration literature discourse. In doing so, he turns the discourse about migration literature over and transforms his writing into a powerful tool to question the migration Western discourse.
Known for her black-and-white miniatures embedded with Arabic writing, Laure Ghorayeb is a fascinating if understudied figure of Beirut's cultural modernism. Her work occupied a liminal position between French and Arabic and intersected literature and visual art. This article argues that it is precisely this marginality, manifested in Ghorayeb's multifaceted cultural identity, that allowed her to move deftly across mediums, practices, languages, and genres, resulting in a uniquely inter-semiotic oeuvre. Close reading selections from her collections of poems, Noir … les bleus (Black … the Blues), 1960 and prose, Iklīl shawk h. awla qadamayhi (A Crown of Thorns Around His Feet), 1965, in relation to her civil war drawings Témoignages (Testimonies), 1985, this article reveals an inter-semiotic exchange on the page. It offers an interdisciplinary rereading of the modern cultural history of Beirut, revealing an interplay between literature and visual art, which allowed Ghorayeb to maneuver between aesthetic experimentation and political engagement at a time when nationalist and ideological divisions were being sown.