In his widely-referenced 1984 essay "Reflections on Exile," Edward Said warns us that despite the legion of literary and critical writings on the topic, "exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible." By cautioning against viewing exile as solely "beneficially humanistic", Said seems to suggest that the exiles of wars, revolutions, imprisonment, and other historical events -- the exiles of political power -- are not to be confused with their representations in art. Yet, given such a distinction, how do we interpret the myriad works of contemporary Arabic literature in which we are invited to imagine exile through literary representation? How do authors articulate and reinvent exile in literature? How do their literary vistas comment on and transform our grasp of the relationship between the exile, community, and the politics of modernity and the nation-state? How do Arabic texts on exile both interact with and form a part of their political and social milieus?
This panel gathers together innovative literary-critical analyses that interrogate multiple conceptions and resonances of exile as they unfold in landmark works of Arabic literature. Two papers analyze the relationship between the notion of exile and imprisonment: the first panelist considers imprisonment, mourning and forcible separation in the story of As`ad al-Shidyaq as told by his brother Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's Al-Saq `ala al-Saq (1855) and Butros al-Bustani in Qissat As`ad al-Shidyaq (1860). The second discusses the intertwined relationship between political detention, exile, and metafiction in Syrian author Jamil Hatmal's short stories that were written in the 1980s and early 1990s. A third paper discusses the link between the themes of self-exile and alienation in Haydar Haydar's Walima Li-A'shab al-Bahr (1983) as it relates to the defeat of 1967, and post-1967 discourse. An additional panelist offers a reading of novelist and activist Mus‘ad Abu Fajr’s first novel Tal‘at al-Badan (2007) that questions the possibility of exile within the nation's borders and the notion of community itself. The fifth participant scrutinizes the novella Ma Tabaqqa Lakum, by Ghassan Kanafani (1966), via a reading in which exile is viewed as a formal concern, rather than a detail of authorial biography; the characters are analyzed within an economy of actual vs. potential action at the juncture of gender, exile and community. In each analysis, we evaluate exile in both poetic and political terms with an eye to broadening the concept and the possibilities of its significance in modern and contemporary Arabic literature.
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Mr. Jeffrey Sacks
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's "al-Saq `ala al-saq" (Paris, 1855) commemorates a loss. Yet it is not that this text marks the decisive leaving of a past behind, but that it mournfully reiterates and repeats the sorrow which occasioned the irreparable loss of his brother. The story of As`ad al-Shidyaq is the story of his conversion to Protestantism and of his imprisonment, torture, and death. It is a story which is told in Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's "al-Saq `ala al-saq" and in Butros al-Bustani's "Qissat As`ad al-Shidyaq." It is a story which Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq was compelled to repeat--in his departure from Lebanon, in his citation from al-Bustani's "Qissat As`ad al-Shidyaq," and more. And it is a repetition--and a departure, a conversion of sorts--which occasioned the beginning of a literary career. It is not that literature, may be said to leave the past behind, but that it entails the restating and redisposition of something or someone--an idiom, a lexicon, a person who has died--which is said to belong to the past and to be no longer. And it is not that the present remains prisoner to a past from which it may not escape, but that the story of As`ad al-Shidyaq's imprisonment may be said to work like a parable of the modern in Arabic letters: if the forces of consolidation and violent appropriation which the prison occasions desire to clearly separate the past from the present, the secular from the religious, the pure from the impure, and more, literature may be said to occasion an unsettling force of dis-propriation--a force of disproportion and discombobulation--without which nothing new may be said to take place at all.
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Ms. R. Shareah Taleghani
In his introduction to the posthumously collected short stories of the Syrian journalist Jamil Hatmal, Abdalrahman Munif describes the underlying tone of the author's stories as one of sorrow—a sorrow that also is inherently tied to the author's biography. Born in 1956 in Damascus, Hatmal was briefly imprisoned in 1982 for a period of four months due to his membership in the Syrian Communist Action Party. He was released early for a heart condition that was greatly exacerbated under the conditions of his detention that reportedly included torture. Subsequently, Hatmal began a life of itinerant exile, working as a reporter for major Arabic newspapers. Having undergone several heart operations in Paris, he died in exile in a hospital in Paris in 1994. Nonetheless, in Munif's reading, many of Hatmal's fictional narratives on exile and imprisonment retain what he terms an inevitable "redemption". Accordingly, Hatmal's works show that exile, like the experience of detention, despite or because of its physical and psychological turmoils, can provide a space for transgressive or subversive creative production. Hence, Hatmal's stories, like several works of prison literature of his generation, tend towards formal experimentation and eschew the dominance of social realism that marked an earlier generation of Syrian literature.
In addition to ambiguously describing the spaces of both exile and imprisonment in such a way that they appear to be one and the same, many of Jamil Hatmal's stories consciously interrogate the critical dilemmas and productive potentialities of writing. In this paper, I offer an investigation of the thematic triad-- prison-exile-writing-that consistently emerges throughout Hatmal's short stories. First, through the lens of Abdalrahman Munif's introduction to Hatmal's collected works as well as the critical literature on exile, I will trace the critical links between prison literature and literatures of and on exile more broadly with special attention to the notion of exilic redemption-as-resistance. Second, I will examine how Hatmal metafictionally scripts both exile and imprisonment as inherently intertwined with and through the problematic process and act of writing. In doing so, I will show that the metafictional aspects of Hatmal's stories provides us with a cautionary tale. The act of inscription cannot merely be a path of redemption or a means of resistance; rather, writing, in and of itself, can come into question as another space of exile or detention.
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Ms. Yasmine Ramadan
Can one be an exile within the nation? What is one when one is not a national? How does the position of such individuals call into question such categories as the national, the regional or the international? This paper seeks to examine these questions through a reading of novelist and activist Mus‘ad Abu Fajr’s first novel Tal‘at al-badan (2007). Focusing on the Bedouin communities of Sinai, Egypt the author examines the position of these groups within the national and regional context. The novel, whose actions span the twentieth century, both problematizes the image of the Bedouins of Sinai as it has been articulated by the official, Egyptian (and to a degree Western) discourse and draws attention to their ongoing marginalization and persecution. Through the telling of stories Fajr’s characters construct an alternative narrative for their people, alerting the reader to the ways in which time and time the Sinai Bedouins have been exiled from their lands. This project of narration is itself conscious: the reader is privy to the narrator’s process of selection and deletion, telling and re-telling. By tracing the effects of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, Fajr also traces the ongoing displacement of the Bedouins-a group that has not historically been represented as the ‘victims’ of these conflicts. Beginning in 1948 al-Fajr presents the Egyptian and Israeli struggle for land, a struggle that included Bedouin land. It is the construction of the national which concerns this paper: what happens to those who are left outside of this construction? What is the political and geographical fate of these ‘outsiders’ and how does there existence call into question the very category of Egyptian or Arab?
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Dr. Nader K. Uthman
Exile continues to occupy a significant space in modern Arabic letters; references to exile, migration and displacement abound. While a wealth of criticism, anthologies and conferences have grown up around the themes of exile and displacement, the bulk of these studies focus on lived exilic experience, or the biographical details of the author. That is to say that exilic writing is usually understood to be the fiction created by authors who are themselves exiles. In contrast, this paper examines the modernist novella “Ma Tabaqqa Lakum” (“What Is Left to You,”1966) by Ghassan Kanafani, for the ways in which it inscribes exile as a poetic act. Rather than anchoring Kanafani’s artistic production in the facts of his biography, this analysis considers how the inscription of exile as a formal aspect of the novel allows for previously-neglected possibilities of representing gender and nation.
“Ma Tabaqqa Lakum” makes extensive use of flashback and stream-of-consciousness in its narration, constantly calling into question the uneasy marriage of form and content. Within this modernist treatment of narrative, Kanafani creates a literary space in which aspects of gender and nation are interrogated and recast. In Kanafani’s novella, exile is represented with the goal of interrogating the “proper” and “honorable” roles of men and women, especially as they experience dislocation and the dissolution of their nuclear and extended families. While characters move within and outside the Palestinian nation – a concept already problematic from the outset – Kanafani creates an economy of action and inaction so that characters experience difficult choices against the backdrop of a shifting sense of community and their roles as men and women in society. By shifting our critical perspective to how exilic poetics function within the literary work – rather than how exile informs authors’ own experiences – I aim to open up avenues of insight and reflection into how the staging of exile informs our understanding of gender roles, concepts of nation, belonging and dislocation from one’s community.
