So much Difference among Iraqi ‘Sixties’ Generation? The Iraqi ‘Sixties’ have many things in common not only with the rest of the Arab world, but also with some in the ‘West.’ But, upon looking into the historical sketches and assessments written by some of its members, one is struck by the divergence, not in perspective but primarily in historical detail. In this intervention, I would like to focus on the reasons behind this, in relation to a bifurcated national political record and a hybrid legacy at the threshold of significant cultural and ideological currents. The cold war, internal politics, the 1967 debacle, and the engagement with literatures in translation, brought that generation face to face with itself, driving it often to internalize challenge in writings that rarely give vent to jubilation or joy. Mostly working in dailies and little magazines, its proponents confuse their little roles with grand projects and presumptions. On the other hand, its members often pass through an ‘anxiety of influence’ that drives some to fight back the ghosts of their forebears, an attitude that initiates further discord but proves quite invigorating at times.

The work of the Egyptian novelists Khairy Shalaby and Ibrahim Aslan each explore the poetics of marginality through their use of humor and a deep sensitivity to the Egyptian vernacular. While other writers of the Sixties Generation experimented with formal innovation in their narrative styles—be it the use of realist or hyper-realist styles (Sonallah Ibrahim), historical realist (Gamal al-Ghitani), magical realist (Edwar al-Kharrat) or non-linear narration (Radwa Ashour), the fictions of Shalaby and Aslan (along with others such as Yahya Taher Abdullah) stand out for their commitment to incorporating the Egyptian dialect as a central vehicle for expressing the rich oral culture of the underclasses. This paper will explore this attentiveness to the colloquial as a type of literary language and as the language of a populist discourse that, in many ways, might be said to foreshadow the explosion of works in the nineties and millennial years written in the Egyptian colloquial. One might argue that in light of this proliferation of new fiction, the debate over the use of colloquial as a literary language largely seems to have become obsolete. As more young writers capitalize on using alternative venues for circulating their work and political ideas (i.e., independent presses, screenwriting, blogs and forms of signage), we have, as many other scholars have noted, increasingly witnessed an overall democratization of language within the Egyptian literary field. Revisiting the way in which the oral is represented textually through the artful contributions of Khairy Shalaby and Ibrahim Aslan will help contextualize the variation in Egyptian writing today where the fluid movement between cultural and linguistic registers is the new norm.

Egypt’s capital has long captured the literary imagination of its writers. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century novelists and short story writers drew on the urban setting of Cairo in the development of these two relatively new literary genres, both part of a growing realist tradition. Cairo was the backdrop against which writers depicted the nation’s struggle against British colonialism, the possibilities of national independence, and the people’s confrontation with a rapidly changing world; in these works the city’s alleys and streets, its architecture and edifices, were as important as its inhabitants. This paper explores the representation of the city of Cairo in the work of the ‘Sixties Generation’ in Egypt, as a means to examine the socio-economic, political, and aesthetic changes of the post-colonial period. By proposing a reading of these works that concentrates on spatial representations, I emphasize an approach that attends to both literary innovation and thematic preoccupation. Through a reading of two novels by writers of this generation —Sonallah Ibrahim’s Tilka-l-ra?i?a (The Smell of It, 1966) and Gamal al-Ghitani’s Waqa?i? ?arat al-Za?farani (The Zafarani Files, 1976)— I argue that there is a move away from the realist depictions of the popular quarters of the city as the site of national struggle or of the alley as the cross-section of Cairene society. What we see instead is the reimagining of the urban landscape as a prison and the alley as a fantastical space. In this presentation I will demonstrate how each of these novels presents a different metonymic approach to the mapping of urban space revealing that the relationship between the individual and the state is one dominated by techniques of surveillance and repression. Within this context of state repression and surveillance, these novels launch virulent critiques against the regime of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, exposing the failure of the post-colonial state in Egypt in the years following the 1952 Revolution.

This paper examines the various ways in which Lebanese writers and poets fashioned an aesthetic response to decades of war in the region by drawing on the classical Arabic literary tradition of “stopping by the ruins”, namely "w?q?f ‘ala al-atl?l". Known as the “Poets of the South” or shu‘ar?’ al-jan?b, this relatively new school of Lebanese poets is credited with giving voice to an underrepresented part of the nation. In an attempt to find a language of memory distinct from dominant recollective modes of urban writers, this new school of poetry proposed alternative memories stemming from the southern borderland. South Lebanon is a rich place to explore the continuous unfolding of silenced memories as it existed in a state of exception for the larger part of its existence. Although the “Poets of the South” culled their commemorative language from the classical poetic tradition, their poetry, as exemplified by Abbas Beydoun’s “Tyre”, effectively transforms tradition to reflect a contemporary wartime environment. The modern poetic voice thus exploits the custom of “stopping by the ruins” to mourn a war-torn past instead of the idyllic loss of the classical qasida. As the modern literary voice tarries over his ruined abode, his memory is stirred by nightmarish recollections instead of amorous pasts. Elias Khoury’s novel Yalo, for example, posits its eponymous protagonist Yalo as a living ruin of war. Through this living war ruin, Khoury invites us to contemplate Lebanon’s conflicted past by casting a critical eye on the internal ills that produced the Everyman of war. I will show how each of the works I engage adapts the "atlal" motif to engage its contemporary wartime context. I argue that ruins, real and imagined, traditional and modern, create a productive tension that underlies the modern memorial poetics of Lebanon. The overarching connection between these genres is their common use of the classical ruins motif to open different portals onto Lebanon’s pasts.

In its first issue, published in Beirut in November of 1962, Tawf?q ??yigh's literary journal ?iw?r (1962-67) introduced itself to its Arabic readership, announcing a journal "in which literary authors and thinkers from all regions of the Arab world would write, and which would be concerned with the living issues that interest our nation [ummatan? wa-wa?anan?] ... from within [min al-d?khil]." Yet there were doubts circulating even before this first issue was distributed, as writers in the Arabic press wondered at what ??yigh, an established Arab poet who had just returned to Beirut after teaching in London upon completing his studies at Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, was up to publishing ?iw?r from Beirut with the support of an organization with its main offices in Paris. By the eve of the 1967 Arab defeat to Israel, that organization -- the International Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded by the American Central Intelligence Agency in 1950 to foster the Non-Communist Left worldwide through literary and cultural initiatives -- too was in a state of Cold War collapse, a literary scandal that played out on pages of journals and newspapers across not only the Arab world, but the major cities of Europe, Africa, India, China, Japan, and Latin America. This paper will chart the debates in Arabic journals of the 1960s surrounding the publication, funding and ultimate demise of ?iw?r, considering in particular authors whose work appeared in ?iw?r, including Yus?f Idr?s, al-?ayyib ??lih, and Luw?s ?Awa?. An American imperial infiltration of Arabic literature, an anthology of some of the most important authors publishing Arabic prose and poetry from 1962-67, ?iw?r's legacy remains constitutive of the field of Arabic literature into the present.