“The time: Beirut; the place: a day in August 1982,” notes the subtitle for Mahmoud Darwish’s 1986 book, Memory for Forgetfulness (????? ???????). What appears at first as a simple stamp of time and place is revealed to be much more, as it purposefully conflates the two axes; the time is Beirut, the place is one day in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli invasion. This statement demonstrates one of the book’s central elements – the destabilizing of space and time – as a direct result of the Nakba of 1948. But if the relation between time and space generates in Bakhtin’s terms a chronotope, in Darwish’s book it is presented in negation, almost an anti-chronotope. The narrator is a Palestinian refugee living in exile in Lebanon, whose life is permeated by violence and precarity. He was expelled from his land, and falls victim to related violence in his new dwelling place, which is impermanent and volatile. The Nakba is often understood in terms of displacement, evident in literature as well, as Salma Khadra Jayyusi notes that exile is a prominent quality of modern Palestinian literature. However, my paper argues that Darwish’s book underscores the related instability of time. In conditions of constant violence, the narrator loses his sense of time, and narrative time becomes fluid and dream-like, making it difficult to trace the events which all take place in one day that also feels like a lifetime. Given this narrative and historical timelessness, Darwish’s narrator conflates what has happened with what may happen, actual events and his musings and imagination. The destabilization of time and place are simultaneously geopolitical and literary, contributing to the sense that the narrator is removed from the world and even from himself. A clear manifestation of this is his fractured relation to his body, as he often imagines his body falling apart, sees himself dying and even visualizes his own funeral. The narrator, and with him the readers, is increasingly unable to distinguish between life and death, as the ongoing conditions of strife he lives in due to the tragedy of the Nakba have altered what being alive means. Through the interlacing of space, time and body as equally precarious, Memory for Forgetfulness demonstrates that the Nakba is not a moment in time but an unfolding and interminable event, and that its effects on the lives of Palestinians are pervasive.

Avant the Avant-Garde: Mikhail Naimy and the Literature of Commitment (al-Iltiz?m) The 1950s witnessed the emergence of a “literature of commitment” in the Arab world, led by writers and critics such as Suhayl Idr?s, ‘Abd al-Ra?m?n al-Sharq?w? and Y?suf Idr?s, who called for and produced realistic fiction that focused on the political, social and moral development of their societies. These writers, inspired by the Sartrean notion of engagement, spurned the notion of art for art’s sake defended by literary figures of the preceding generation, such as ??h? ?usayn and ‘Abb?s Ma?m?d al-‘Aqq?d. The two groups joined in literary debates in the pages of the journal al-?d?b and elsewhere, with the younger, “committed” writers assuming the position of a literary avant-garde. What is seldom acknowledged is that literary commitment was not entirely new to Arab letters in the 1950s. There were writers producing “committed” fiction well before the concept came to dominate Arab literary thought. This paper argues that one of the best examples of a committed Arab writer in the period before commitment became a recognized literary movement was Mikhail Naimy. Though a contemporary of the literary old-guard (Naimy, ??h? ?usayn and al-‘Aqq?d were all born in 1889), Naimy wrote prose, poetry, drama and non-fiction between 1915 and 1930 that any reader of the 1950s or later would recognize as fully committed, both in form and content. Despite the commitment evident in Naimy’s writing, two reasons are suggested for its having gone largely unrecognized. First, Naimy’s committed works of the early 20th century were simply too far ahead of their time to be understood as “committed,” an idea that had yet to become established—or even named—in the Arab world. Second, by the time literary commitment had come to dominate Arab writing, Naimy had moved on intellectually and begun to devote almost all of his writing to spiritual, otherworldly concerns. Thus, not only was Naimy’s early commitment neglected but also, in the 1950s, his spiritual ideas were so at odds with prevailing standards of “commitment” that he seemed, in Salma Jayyusi’s words, “a strange voice coming from another world.” (Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, vol. 1, p. 117 [Brill, 1977])

In narrating socio-political changes in Egypt between 1919 and 1957 Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy (1956-57) chronicles the effects of these developments on the life of the Abd al-Jawad family over three generations. Whether it is the notorious family patriarch, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, and his son, Fahmy, in Palace Walk; or his youngest son, Kamal, in Palace of Desire; or his grandsons in Sugar Street, the focus is male characters’ coming of age in an Egypt struggling under British occupation. This paper traces a female journey on the margins of the last volume, Sugar Street (1957). I argue that through erasures in the narrative, readers can piece together a female subtext, which the novel neither centers nor overtly acknowledges, but one that tells of the intellectual and political formation of a modern educated Egyptian working-class woman in 1930s and 1940s Egypt. On the seams of this male-authored, male-centric text, is the story of female growth and development – a female Bildungsroman, of journalist Sawsan Hammad. As an editor of a journal, Sawsan evaluates pieces that amateur journalists such as Ahmad, the grandson of Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, send for publication. She believes in a world where all efforts are mobilized towards curing the nation’s ills; a world where art is functional, and the artist involved. Although it is Ahmad who emerges as a representative of the post-1919 Revolution national intellectual at the conclusion of Sugar Street, his education is unthinkable without Sawsan, who is instrumental in his training and eventual maturation as an independent thinker. Ahmad’s apprenticeship mirrors that of Sawsan who guides him through the process using a dialectical method supplemented by philosophical readings. A counterpoint to the women in his family, she represents the new generation of actively engaged women who demand a place in political life, and for whom domesticity is not the ultimate goal. In a reversal of the traditional female story, it is Ahmad who is rewarded with marriage to Sawsan once he becomes her intellectual equal. After marriage, Sawsan remains her husband’s tutor as, for example, when she heads to work the day following their marriage, or as she continues to fight for workers’ rights, unperturbed by his imprisonment.

Palestinian poet, writer, and academic, Husayn al-Barghouthi’s poetic autobiographies, “Al-daw’ al-‘azraq” (2003) and "Sa-akounu bayna al-lawz,” (2004) are written by a self positioned at the limit, the edge of experience; the former is recounted from a space of madness, marginality, and estrangement as a graduate student in the US, and the other recounts his experience at life’s edge in occupied Palestine, while battling cancer and facing death. Both of these autobiographies emerge from a space of intensification of life and death, and elaborate on an experience of exile and coloniality through “endless creation”: al-Barghouthi partakes in the tradition of Sufi mystics’ writing of the nafs, narrating the self through the voice of the other, wherein a ritual of transformation, metamorphoses, and renewal, and of a life transcending its carceral, bestial form is undertaken. For al-Barghouthi making an account of oneself involves questioning limits: between the human and divine, self and other, self and world, human and animal, colonizer and colonized, and myth and history. The creation inherent in his writing has much to do with those limits that mark finalities and boundaries, for he takes on a creative, inventive process that gives rise to a self that cedes control and wherein multiplicity of forms can find home. The space of writing becomes a bridge, wherein exile, madness, and death, demand a fluidity of form so as to cross thresholds, letting dreams, visions, poetry, and philosophies, undo and transform one’s relation to life and death. In this paper, I will be working through how the self is articulated as soul by drawing on the writings of Ibn Arabi and Al-Ghazzali, examining how the imagistic property of his poetic prose lends itself to a writing of the “I” as bearing a potentiality to metamorphose. Further, I will seek to elaborate on the tension between the particular and the universal, for the individual and the historical coincide while maintaining their own rhythms. The autobiographical writing of the self is not just a work of the imaginary, but of history too; for al-Barghouthi, the writing of the self becomes a historical site where the impossible and transcendental manifest themselves in concrete form. This paper will address how the limit comes to unfold the self, demanding a leap and suspension of the “I", so as to make a larger argument regarding al-Barghouthi’s exilic, metamorphic self-writing and its implication for anti-colonial aesthetics and politics.