Egyptian writer Mohamed al-Makhzangi’s “Lahazat gharaq jazirat al-hut” (1997, “Memories of a Meltdown: An Egyptian between Moscow and Chernobyl,” 2006) brings together two autobiographical works that record the author’s impressions of the Soviet Union during the late 1980s and 1990. The first, “The Four Seasons of Chernobyl,” reflects on the psychological and ecological impact of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on the city of Kiev, located 85 kilometers from the nuclear power plant. The beauty of Kiev and the surrounding countryside is juxtaposed with descriptions of the effects of the accident at the nuclear reactor on the human and natural environment. Although the landscape maintains its splendor, it is poisoned, and this poison reaches as far as Egypt when contaminated baby formula is discovered in the author’s home country, pointing to the failure of national borders to contain major crises. The second text, “Moscow Queues,” captures al-Makhzangi’s musings during a 1990 visit to the titular city, utilizing his encounters with anti-Jewish sentiment, both in Moscow and within himself, to explore the contemporary crisis of Palestine. This paper expamines al-Makhzangi’s record of the border crossings he engages in as an Egyptian student studying in the Soviet Union. For al-Makhzangi, these movements are both physical and psychological, as the discrete sites of Palestine and the Soviet Union are collapsed into each other in his mind and writing. This paper argues that al-Makhzangi’s encounters with the geography and people of a place that for him is a space of transit facilitate a linkage between Chernobyl and Palestine, creating a transnational sense of horror at both disasters. The switch from a third person narrator in “The Four Seasons of Chernobyl” to a second person narrator in “Moscow Queues” implicates the reader, further expanding the text’s reach. By linking the environmental crisis of Chernobyl to the political calamity of Palestine, ecological responsibility is connected to social justice, and both are expanded beyond the national borders within which they occurred, demanding recognition.

Iraqi short fiction writer Hassan Blasim’s "The Iraqi Christ" (Coma Press, 2013) provides a horrifying portrayal of the Iran-Iraq War, Desert Storm, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as depicting the deep impact of these conflicts on the Iraqi people. The fourteen short stories in the collection demonstrate how the wars that have plagued Iraqi society have the capacity to bring out the most gruesome and ferocious tendencies in its people. One of the recurring themes in the stories is border crossing. Illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees escape their past traumatic experiences of violence and attempt to find happiness and success in new cultural landscapes, even as they show a deep awareness that their futures may be full of nothing but devastation and, ultimately, death. This paper gives a general overview of the ways in which acts of border crossing, across national boundaries, geographical landscapes, and mental spaces, are portrayed in the collection. Crossing physical borders is a dangerous undertaking that often ends in disaster. However, some characters succeed in reaching their destinations, proving that borders can be transient, fluid, and penetrable. Others dwell indefinitely at borders, where they attempt to negotiate their subjectivities in these “in-between spaces.” On the surface, Blasim’s characters seem to be able to survive their past tragedies and adapt to new social and cultural contexts. However, this paper argues that even for those who succeed in finding asylum, mental borders created by the past remain impenetrable. Traumatic memories play a central role in impeding characters’ attempts to live peacefully in the moment or to envision a nonviolent future. Their failure to liberate themselves from the burden of past violence ultimately leads to either madness or death. To capture his characters’ fears, anxieties, and obsessions, Blasim shifts between realist, hyperrealist, surrealist, and Kafkaesque styles. This paper sheds light on how the characters’ border crossings within Blasim’s stories is reflected in the author’s movement across hyperrealist, surrealist, and Kafkaesque modes of expression.

Yousef al-Mohaimeed’s 2003 novel Fikhaakh al-Raa’iha (Wolves of the Crescent Moon) opens with the question “where to?” This opening line can be understood as a prosaic inquiry by the novel’s protagonist, Turad, who is situated in a Riyadh bus terminal contemplating his next step. Yet, he goes nowhere, as the primary temporal frame of the novel is circumscribed by the protagonist’s very stationary evening in the terminal. Despite this stasis, the kinetic implication of this opening question is fulfilled as the novel bursts into a flurry of stories and memories that involve migrations, border crossings, and the traumas associated with both the protagonist’s movements, as well as the geographic and physical transitions of other integral characters in the novel. This paper will focus on the significance of these movements and transitions in Fikhaakh al-Raa’iha and how this novel contributes and deepens our understanding of the Rihla, both as a literary genre, and a variegated theme within modern Arabic literature. This novel thrives on the contradictions of characters’ movements in negotiating their identities: Turad, the Bedouin protagonist frustrated by his sedentary existence in Riyadh, removed from the open desert: Amm Tawfiq, the Sudanese character enslaved after being illicitly transported to Saudi Arabia via Hajj routes, forcibly distanced from his native land; and Nasir, an orphan whose narrative arc originates at a point of severe familial dislocation. Where the Rihla genre, in its various manifestations over the centuries, has frequently incorporated a progressive development of characters akin to a Bildungsroman, al-Mohaimeed’s novel employs motifs of travel, migration, and dislocation among a group of marginalized characters to contest such a progressive vision.

This study examines an 8/9th century CE mufakhara (debate or boasting-match) composed by the renowned adib (belles-lettrist), al-Jahiz, and looks particularly at the text’s complex reception in the 20th century. The mufakhara recounts a fictitious and sexually explicit debate between a proponent of the relative sexual merits of slave girls and boys. First, this paper briefly contextualizes the Jahizian mufakhara in the social and intellectual climate of Iraq’s urban centers of the time, and it sheds light on how the author playfully manipulates authoritative discourses to produce meaning in the text. Next, and most significantly, this paper traces the text’s politically fraught reception in the 20th century, emphasizing how and why western scholars reached wildly different and telling conclusions about the social environment of the time and the author himself. In 1957 the French scholar and Jahiz-specialist Charles Pellat edited the first Arabic edition of the mufakhara with an apologetic introduction, claiming that the text was not appropriate enough to accompany al-Jahiz’s other essays. In subsequent years, the mufakhara entered into the larger Jahizian canon, and drew attention from scholars such as Pellat, Van Gelder, Rosenthal, Hutchins, and AbuKhalil. The reception and publication history of the mufakhara betrays not only the simultaneous impulses towards censorship and eroticization (selections made their English-language debut in Playboy Magazine), but also the tendency to impose culturally specific categories and conceptions of sexuality on a text of a different time, place, and cultural milieu. A close reading of the reception and interpretation of this one mufakhara brings into relief the broader challenges, slippages, and anxieties that characterize textual crossings, here from 8th century urban Iraq to 20th century academic institutions and publishing houses. By juxtaposing a close reading of the text itself with its politicized reception centuries later, this paper offers a mixed methodology that combines philological rigor, discourse analysis, and contributions from gender and sexuality studies.