This paper engages with literary representations of material and human dispossession following the post-2003 Iraqi refugee crisis, focusing specifically on the 2007 book La Shay La A?ad (Nothing and Nobody). Written by poet and art critic F?r?q Y?suf, an Iraqi refugee who has been living in Sweden since the beginning of the war, La Shay La A?ad won the Ibn Batt?ta Prize for modern travel writing under the category “diary” in 2006. The “chronicling” that takes place in La Shay La A?ad blurs the lines between poetry and narrative, fiction and autobiography, and deals intensively with some of the psychological aspects of traumatic survival and the precarious nature of asylum in Europe. The narrator, who deems cities and states as sites of expulsion, not hospitality, searches for a sense of complete refuge in the natural spaces that he encounters in his new locale. Indeed, he creates a fantasy around the idea of an original state, various manifestations of which are conjured up through re-readings of Genesis, Hayy Ibn Yaqz?n, Robinson Crusoe, and the local Scandinavian literature. Such a search for an original state in which one is safe from expulsion relates to the trauma of a refugee who has already been expelled at least once. The reference to Genesis, for example, is read with the knowledge that this story of an original state always does end in expulsion. The search for an original, it seems, reflects an anxiety about that very state, suggesting strongly the increasingly precarious state of asylum in “Fortress Europe.” The systematic deportation of asylum seekers in Sweden and elsewhere, including the more recent pressure for “voluntary returns” stands in stark contrast to the forest (forest vs. fortress?) that is imagined in La Shay La A?ad, which does not exile or expel those who take refuge in it. La Shay La A?ad reads as an attempt to confront the kind of alienation that transnational migration can engender. In the wake of survival, the place of refuge carries within it the threat and possibility of a second expulsion.

The traditional genre of the elegiac poem or marthiyya reemerged in the 19th century with the reorganization of social and political structures around the values of the Arab Renaissance or nah?a. In their elegies, poets such as A?mad Shawq? (1868-1932) and ??fi? Ibr?h?m (1872-1932) mourned the death of fellow poets and intellectuals who, through their passing, bequeathed to their fellow citizens ideals of a unifying Arab nation. Poetic mourning in this context served to honor the passing poet or writer and exalt the modern nation as a both a political and cultural project mediated through literature. These elegies inscribed the dead poets and intellectuals as the fallen heroes of the modern nation. However, the historical events of the mid twentieth century and the Arab defeats in the face of Israel starting 1948 more specifically, inverted the positive relation between the mourned intellectual and the rising nation. The loss of Palestine marks the beginning of Arab intellectuals’ disenchantment with the social and cultural ideals of the nah?a and ushers a new literary reconfiguration of the poetics of mourning. This change paves the way for the development of a new elegiac genre that melancholically ties the death of the poet to that of the nation. In this paper I examine three elegies composed by Ma?m?d Darw?sh, Sam?? al-Q?sem, and Muhammad al-Magh?t. Through a psychoanalytic reading of the structure of loss in the poems, I argue that melancholia, defined by Freud as identification with and an internalization of the lost object, emerges as a dominant affect in this poetic genre. I examine the ways in which Arab intellectuals mourned in these elegies are identified through metaphors of dispossession that condemns them to a permanent exile and deprives them of a resting ground in the nation’s soil. I argue that while the Nahda marthiyya presented the death of the poet as a moment of transcendence and national salvation, in the three elegies I examine the death of the poet brings about the death of the nation as such. In my reading of the contemporary marthiyya, I explain how the contemporary Arab intellectual’s disenchantment and loss of ideals imbue and shape his melancholic subjectivity.

With political regimes intent on controlling publication and the flow of information in parts of the Arab world, dissent and opposition are systematically expelled from traditional media outlets and the public domain. The loss of national space for independent voices has encouraged the proliferation of a liminal text called the “rumor” (ishaa’a), which struggles to fit into media and genres, whether they be new or conventional. In Egypt, the rumor surrounding the death or illness of President Hosni Mubarak is such a text that blends and adapts many literary genres, constantly intersecting with political power. Beginning with its more recent manifestations in the Arabic-language press, the rumor regarding Mubarak’s health and death can be traced across several generic boundaries: the national newspapers (al-dust?r, al-bad?l, al-ahr?m), the Egyptian blogosphere, and the novel Maqtal al-rajul al-kab?r (The Murder of the Big Man) (1999) by Ibrahim ‘?sa. In this paper, I will investigate the rumor not only as an expression of the writer’s departure from conventional genres, but also as a tool of resistance endowed with a particular “performative power” as theorized by J.L. Austin and others. Specifically, I will argue that the rumor draws its force and inspiration from such genres as radH (vernacular cursing), hij?’ (the classical invective), and waswasat ibl?s (the whispering of the devil) in order to contest the oral authority of the Egyptian state. An investigation of the word itself (ishaa’a, “rumor”) in the medieval Arabic lexicon Lisan al-Arab can provide additional conceptual clarification. Further parallels and theoretical support will be drawn from Neubauer’s celebrated study of the rumor in the “western” literary tradition (The Rumour: A Cultural History, 1999). By examining the connection between textuality and power in Egypt, this paper will expand the scope of investigation undertaken by cultural and media studies into the Arab Blogosphere.

In his introduction to Trevor Le Gassic’s 1997 translation of ‘Awdat al-Ta’ir ila-l-Bahr (Days of Dust) by Palestinian novelist Halim Barakat, Edward Said stresses the inextricability of the link that binds the development of the Arabic novel as a literary form to the monumental Arab losses of 1948 and 1967. These calamitous defeats, Said argues, put in question the very notion of an Arab present, which became conjectural after the naksa (1967) especially, suspended between a past of disaster and a future of uncertainty. In an attempt to affirm the ephemeral now, novelists joined the heroic effort by Arab writers of all genres to creatively reconstitute the present scene-by-scene and thus simultaneously implicated the trajectory of the Arabic novel in a dialectical relationship with the crisis of a fleeting post-naksa reality. Building on Said’s argument, I focus on Halim Barakat’s ‘Awdat al-Ta’ir ila-l-Bahr and Elias Khoury’s Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun) in order to examine the literary craft by which each author constructs the genesis of the Arab present. Through my comparative analysis of figurative language, imagery and allusion, I argue that both Barakat and Khoury’s modes of originating their respective contemporaneities indicate the specific historical dilemmas that faced each author. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the naksa and therefore forced to create from nothing, Barakat devises his textual universe through a method of parodic reflection. By ironically alluding to canonical Western texts as inversions of his post-1967 surroundings, Barakat conjures the Arab present as a cohesive amalgam of recurring counter-images. In contrast, Khoury’s creative approach derives from his temporal location at the death of the last native-born Palestinian generation, whose heroic history his novel seeks to preserve. Through his narrative technique of fusion, Khoury dissolves the boundaries between past and present, thereby engendering a reality that unites the legacy of the dying with the unstable identity of the living. Although the modalities of each novelist’s endeavor differ, I show how both Barakat and Khoury similarly fashion their particular genesis scenes in ways that alert the reader to her status as the creation’s ultimate witness and, by implication, as the agent of its fulfillment. Such cooperative engagement of the reader by both authors suggests that the development of the Arabic novel as a textual medium of the post-naksa endeavor to reconstruct the Arab present formed the act of reading novels (not just writing them) into an activist enterprise.