Is death always an end? How does one ending bring about a new beginning? From where do memories originate and from what? How do we recover those that have been lost? And in what ways do memories constitute history? The novel, Qasr al-Matar (1993), by the Syrian author Mamduh Azam, is an attempt to narrate the process of returning to a lost memory. The novel describes the transmigration of a soul between bodies and experiences. Incorporating local story telling techniques and popular belief systems from the Druze community of Syria, the narrative constructs an external historical discourse, i.e. a space for writing history. This history is a collection of lost memories, carried across time by a soul, leaving the physical elements (the bodies) of history behind. This soul, carrying both meaning and memory, is a site of recuperation from the tyranny of existence, and from the tyranny of erasure. Leaving the body/bodies behind in biological time, the soul – the memories – transgresses to historical time, and in this way becomes integral to its narration. On the surface, the novel is about the Syrian struggle against French rule in the first half of the 20th century, and as such, can be considered an historical novel. But as one uncovers the intertextual reference points in the novel, other historical levels reveal themselves; that of the social “collective” and further, the mask of despotic rule that swallows history and the people born in it. In this paper, I will consider how intertextuality, in this case with Plato’s Republic, Druze mystical (and secretive) tenets, and local storytelling techniques, converge and create a narrative that constitutes an ending, an ending in the sense of returning to a beginning, to the process of creation, and in the case of this narrative, to a history that transcends its time.

In "The Moroccan Novel Written in Arabic," Abd al-Rah?m al-Sall?m observes: In its beginnings (1942-1965), the Moroccan novel was, strictly speaking, connected to autobiography ("al-Z?wiyah," "F? Tuf?la," "Innah? al-Hay?," "Sab‘at Abw?b")....The development of prose in Morocco had specific features that uncover the distinct levels of cross-pollination to be found in the creation of the novel and that of autobiography in Moroccan prose narrative. (105 translated from Arabic) The significance here is that, in contrast to the development of the novel in the Arab East, the earliest examples of modern narrative in Morocco are autobiographies. Al-Sall?m’s point of departure is al-Tuh?m? al-Wazz?n?’s "al-Z?wiyah: kayfa ahbabtu al-tasawwuf," a Sufi autobiography written in 1942, but, as is elucidated in "Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition," autobiographical writing has been existent in Arabic since the ninth century. The idea that there is a clear and definitive rupture between the premodern and modern autobiographical traditions, specifically in regard to Moroccan prose narrative, will be contested here. To that end, al-Wazz?n?’s "al-Z?wiyah" will be analyzed in terms of its similarity to the texts of earlier Moroccan authors, all of whom have penned their life stories using analogous figurative tropes and structures. The links between "al-Z?wiyah," unfailingly cited as Morocco’s first modern “novel” (despite the generic difference between novel and autobiography), and texts like Zarr?q’s fifteenth century "al-Kunn?sh f? ‘ilm ‘?sh," al-Y?s?’s seventeenth century "al-Fahrasa," and Ibn ‘Aj?ba’s nineteenth century "Fahrasa" can be seen in a number of fundamental areas within the texts. Of primary importance is the idea of a governing model, proposed by Karl J. Weintraub in “Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,” in which it is shown that early autobiographers patterned their lives on a number of different ideal figures, functionally similar to archetypes. The conception of the model would help supply a plot and shape to the narrated life. One of the rhetorical continuities we find between "al-Z?wiyah" and its predecessors is that they share the same governing model taken from a specifically Moroccan branch of Sufi thought. This and other rhetorical continuities within the texts’ structures will be explored with the aim of contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the historical development of modern Moroccan prose written in Arabic, pointing to its indigenous roots rather than viewing it as a strictly imported phenomenon.

Na’il al-Tukhi's 2006: The Story of the Great War (2009) intervenes in a long tradition of writing about revolutions and underground political organizations in the Arab world by parodying it. While seemingly maintaining the somber tone of these accounts and following their narrative conventions, 2006 tells the story of a revolution that starts as a desire to establish "the Republic of Literature" through purifying fiction of any influence by other genres. The "revolution," however, is betrayed and turns into one that valorizes poetry above any other means of literary expression. Thus, al-Tukhi’s novel places itself within an intertextual web of various textual and visual works, including films (e.g. Rud Qalbi, 1957), novels (e.g. Naguib Mahfouz’s 1977 al-Harafish) and memories (for example, the large corpus of narratives of the Palestinian resistance). In spite of formally following the conventional solemnness that characterizes accounts of revolutions, 2006 represents not an account of a revolution, but the image of such an account. For it reduces these account to their bare minimum, providing the reader with an X-ray of their structure. Thus, 2006 focuses on the following key points: the initial inception of the idea and subsequent secret agitation, the rise and fall of the revolutionary ideals, and the cult of personality that forms around the figure of the poet whose death inspired the revolution as well his widow who became the revolution’s iconic image. In this paper I look at the nature of al-Tukhi’s intervention in discourses about revolutions. I also explore the extent to which al-Tukhi's parody disturbs revered narratives of political action and the role of intellectuals in them. Some of the questions I pose are: What textual strategies does 2006 employ in its conversation with canonical texts about revolutions and political organizing? How does it respond to and alter our readings of these texts? What effect does its comic nature have on the serious tradition it inserts itself into? Finally, This paper also examines the novel's reception, analyzing how and through which strategies of reading certain reviews of 2006 emphasized the novel’s comic nature at the expense of its radical subversion of elite politics, thus turning it from a critical parody of revolutions and political organizing into a critique of specific failed movements.

This paper will consider the idea of landscape by way of the work of two Iraqi poets Badr Shakir as-Sayyab and Saadi Youssef. I will argue that as-Sayyab’s most famous poem “Inshudat al-Matar” (Song of the Rain, 1960) has become the emblematic text through which several Arab poets (e.g., Darwish, Youssef and Antoon) have meditated on contemporary Iraq. In particular, I will examine the way in which Youssef’s poem, “Amreeka Amreeka” (1995) draws on the alternating dystopic imagery of as-Sayyab’s poem (landscapes of drought, famine, date palms and ruinous floods) alongside images of wartime aggression and devastation (neutron bombs, Tomahawk missiles, television cameras, and American soldiers). In Youssef’s work the iconic imagery of Americana (jazz, jeans, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman) brought into relief against the chaotic warscape of Iraq during the American invasion in 1991 is eclipsed in the last few stanzas by a nostalgic recuperation of the country as a lost idyll of date palms, mulberry trees, and pomegranate blossoms, “butchered, pummeled, and drowned” in the aftermath of war. To this end, both poems are constructed as lyrical lamentations for a vanished idyllic space. Yet where as-Sayyab’s poem implicitly references the failure of an Arab leadership to speak to Iraq’s suffering, Youssef explicitly addresses an American reader. Ultimately Youssef takes as-Sayyab’s anguished anthem for Iraq and weaves within it the imagery of an American patriotic anthem (particularly drawing on Irving Berlin). The result is a politically charged and highly visceral joining of two lyric traditions.