In light of the current resurgence of interest in the geographical and spatial aspects of literary texts, this panel will address the issue of space in individual works of literature from Iran, al-Andalus, Egypt, and Tunisia. These papers do not limit themselves to written discourse, but rather employ charts, diagrams, and graphic recreations of space to show how visual constructions hold the potential to generate literary analysis. Franco Moretti has argued that mapping literature reveals the text's internal narrative logic, "the semiotic domain around which plot coalesces and self-organizes." The act of mapping in this critical paradigm is the starting point; the visual representation exposes the text's patterns that shape its plot. Through a focus on literary geography and/or geometry these papers demonstrate how the extraction of particular patterns from a text's narrative flow and their transformation into visual images allow us to see relationships in the text that would otherwise remain obscure. Maps here are analytical tools that provide a distinct and unusual type of legibility, showing the way in which geography shapes the literary text.
The papers in this panel will illustrate this method of literary inquiry by drawing from four different literary contexts, each using a distinct type of visual representation. By mapping absence in Iranian author Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's Missing Soluch, the novel's relationship to the introduction of land reform in the latter part of the 1960s and its catastrophic impact on the social and economic life of the village becomes clear. Through the mapping of eleventh century Cordoba as it is figured in the poetry of Ibn Zaydun, we find that the poet's nostalgia is sublimated into a project of exhaustive textual memorialization, his own personal misfortunes equated with the city's disintegration. The mapping of the spatial and temporal movements of the protagonist of Idris Ali's novel Beneath the Poverty Line from Nubia to Cairo, and through Cairo itself, shows how the author challenges the basis of Egypt's sanctioned, manufactured national narrative. Finally, the mapping of two recent Tunisian novels, Fadilah al-Shabbi's Justice and Fathiyah Hashimi's Maryam Falls from the Hand of God, show how resistance in the last decade of Ben Ali's rule was depicted through the dual tropes of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. By showcasing the efficacy of visual representation in discussions of literary space, this panel presents a critical method rarely used in the study of Middle Eastern literatures.
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Dr. Gretchen A. Head
This paper will address the issue of space in Fadilah al-Shabbi’s al-Adl (Justice) and Fathiyah Hashimi’s Maryam tasqut min yad Allah (Maryam Falls from the Hand of God), two representations of the Tunisian capital written in the final decade of Ben Ali’s rule. Like many authors working in countries peripheral to the world literary system, these writers are in the paradoxical position of being both consistently recognized as important literary figures in their home context of Tunisia while receiving little attention in the rest of the Arab world and beyond. For the most part, their works remain untranslated, and their choice of Arabic over French has undoubtedly served to restrict their novels’ potential for circulation. While it is regrettable that these works have not been read more widely, the limited readership of these texts allows us to interpret their content as a direct, if abstract, challenge to the Tunisian government designed for an unquestionably localized audience rather than foreign consumption. Al-Shabbi’s al-Adl, written in 2005 and banned for three years by Ben ‘Ali’s government before it was available to the public, is a merciless political invective veiled only by its use of direct allegory taken from traditional modes of storytelling; it is an accusation targeting both the State’s symbolic strategies of surveillance and its failure to bring justice to its people. Al-Shabbi, the cousin of revolutionary poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, uses the space of the city to show the severe restrictions of lived authoritarian rule. In Hashimi’s 2009 Maryam Falls from the Hand of God, the novel turns around a dialectic of division between a restricted outside space of protests and police crackdowns in Tunis and an equally claustrophobic inside space (a literal brothel). The text’s heterotopic spaces - the brothel, a cemetery, a shantytown, and echoes of saints’ shrines past and present - are sites that simultaneously represent, invert, and contest the real localities of contemporary Tunis. Tunisia’s police state before the political transformations of 2010 is depicted through the dual tropes of claustrophobia and agoraphobia; though the line of demarcation between outside and inside remains intact, both spaces bear the marks of prison and the text’s significance lies in the subtle forms of dissent embedded in its inscribed spatial relations. This presentation will include diagrams of the internal spatial dynamics of the texts crucial to the analysis.
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Anna Cruz
This paper will focus on the poetry of Ibn Zaydun, an eleventh century Andalusian poet and native Cordoban, and the use of the imagination and memory as a means to commemorate public spaces and how the introduction of nostalgia transforms these public spaces into intimate locales punctuated with personal experiences. The role of memory in this poem is significant as D. F. Ruggles writes, “memory is often more powerful than reality because it engages the imagination: ruins remind us of what was, allowing the mind’s recollection to reconstruct the place as it might have been and as it ought to have been.” The poem is a memory palace for Cordoba and representative of a culture that is forever lost but whose legacy will forever remain in tact. Ibn Zaydun’s personal reflections of his life in Cordoba and Madinat al-Zahraʾ is what Svetlana Boym would classify as reflective nostalgia, which concerns itself with an individual and cultural memory that clings to slivers of details in an attempt to situate and temporalize space.
With the fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in 1031, Ibn Zaydun experienced the disintegration of his homeland from afar, composing his muwashshah while imprisoned in Seville. Throughout the text, he compares Cordoba’s urban space, with its lush gardens and ornate palaces and estates, to a paradise on Earth. The city, as a result, is textually reconstructed with exacting detail through his memories and nostalgia. The terrain and layout of the Caliphate are highly specific as he makes reference to numerous places, gardens, and landmarks for in many instances, these were also the locations of his trysts with the princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi. As a result of this simultaneous mapping and memorialization of Cordoba and the palace Madinat al-Zahra’ within this text, Ibn Zaydun creates a physical and literary monument to a Paradise Lost. Using archaeological, historical, and literary sources documenting eleventh-century al-Andalus, I intend to create and present a series of maps and diagrams based on Ibn Zaydun’s memories that will analyze and situate the locations of geographical markers, man-made structures, and spaces within Cordoba, effectively recreating the city from its ruins.
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Dr. Aria Fani
In the mid 1960s, the introduction of land reform caused the collapse of feudalism in Iran; it later led to the exodus of workers from rural to urban areas. This period marks the emergence of a new literary trend, adabiyat-i rusta’i, a body of literature primarily concerned with rural Iran. Hasan Abedini, the author of A Century of Fiction Writing in Iran, writes, “Tehran could no longer represent the country; therefore novelists began to pay closer attention to other regions outside the capital.” Set in Zaminej, a fictitious village, Ja-yi khali-i Suluch [Missing Soluch], a novel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi (b.1940), exemplifies this literary shift. It closely portrays the period’s transformative events of social and political import. The novel takes us into the life Mergan and her three children as they have been forced to cope with the sudden disappearance of Soluch, the family’s breadwinner. Through mapping absence in the novel, I wish to trace the implications of land reform on the cultural, social and political life of Zaminej. Mapping the text makes visible the destructive impact of Soluch’s absence--physical, emotional and economical--on his family’s rapidly-changing relationship with land, power and people. Through diagrams that elucidate the changes in novel's key relationships, we can most clearly see how Missing Soluch captures the catastrophic aspect of rapid modernization, poorly planned and hastily implemented by the central power, that leaves the countryside with growing class disparity and the migration of its workforce.
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Linda Istanbulli
From King Farouk to General Sisi, Egypt’s authoritarian regimes have all invoked the Egyptian narrative of a unified, strong, stable nation. Idris Ali, in his novel Beneath the Poverty Line, rewrites that narrative; dead is the sacrosanct monologue of a leader at the center of the nation, and born is the colloquial, polyphonic dialogue of a transnational, pluralistic and fragmented people.
Ali establishes Egyptian history within the spatial and temporal movements of his protagonist. But Ali’s history is a radical reconstruction of the events, locations and shared experiences that are the pillars of Egypt’s sanctioned, manufactured national narrative. For example, on one apparently aimless walk around downtown Cairo, Ali renames the League of Arab States as “The League of Savage Tribes;” Tahrir Square becomes Intifada Square, and Egypt’s Bread Riots are the “the revolt of the poor.”
Ali is self-consciously and prophetically rewriting Egypt’s national story. Ali predicts that a fierce revolution will come to bring Mubarak down, “devouring in its path all living and dead things. It won’t stop until a new a new tank rider comes along. And he’ll bring you back to the beginning again.” Six years after Ali published these words, Egypt did indeed have a revolution that brought Mubarak down and devoured living and dead things in its path. And a new tank rider named General Sisi has come, apparently bringing Egypt back to the beginning again, just as Ali predicted.
We will draw the movements and historical constructions of Ali’s protagonist on actual maps of Egypt and Cairo, based on the re-imagined geography and cartography suggested in the novel. Further, we will visually map the protagonist’s downfall, positing that the spatial, temporal, historic and personal journeys all run a parallel course, ending in both a failed suicide attempt and a failed nation-state, wherein each entity is ‘reborn’ into the same place and the same condition that they started in. For the nation, this is the reinstatement of a new strongman following a revolution that brought down the previous tyrant. For the protagonist, despite attempts to soar above, he finds himself back at his departure point, on the Qasr al-Nil bridge, beneath the poverty line, hearing a woman’s voice ask, “what’s your story, I wonder?” The two journeys are one and the same story. It is Egypt’s new national narrative, unsanctioned and most unsacrosanct.
