This panel engages contemporary historical fictions from across the MENA region in an effort to develop our understanding of the genre in the Arabic tradition. The papers will discuss the literary, historical, and aesthetic implications of the novelists' engagements with the past. Lukacs argued that the appearance of historical novels expressed both the popular awareness of history and a growing national sentiment. Equally, we find this distinction in the Arabic tradition, notably in the pioneering work of Jurji Zaydan and Salim al-Bustani. Contemporary historical fictions, by contrast, may suggest other kinds of readings: alternative versions of history, which may focus on those who have been relegated to insignificance by official histories; metafiction and other forms of self-reflexiveness to question the narrative construction of the past; intertextual dialogue with texts outside the novel genre, viz. al-Ghitani's al-Zayni Barakat.
The first paper will discuss two Jordanian novels published in the 1990s that explore notions of identity. One attempts to reclaim a lost or unknown one, i.e. Circassian, and the other exploits the literary heritage in an attempt to restore a personality/person on the verge of fragmentation. The second paper charts a shift in narrative discourse from the fictive to the apocryphal through an analysis of the earliest historical novels published in Morocco in the 1950's to contemporary texts of authors like Bensalem Himmich. These more recent historical novels have disrupted a polarity characteristic of the novel in its imported forms, making it an ideal vehicle for bridging the gap between literary tradition and modernity. The third paper will treat two post-civil war Lebanese novels, one each by Rabi' Jabir and Iman Humaydan Yunus, that deal with the silk industry. Exploring the disparate ways these contemporaneous novels portray this historical setting - depicted by nationalist historians as foundational to the emergence of a Mount Lebanon/Beirut based political and cultural entity - this paper examines the ideological uses/abuses of historical narration. Finally the fourth paper examines Bensalem Himmich's novel Majnun al-Hukm to investigate the relationship between intertextuality, authority, and violence in the text, treating, as well, the novel's relationship to the genre of prison literature.
If we consider that contemporary historical fictions not only represent the past itself, but also the search for the past, these papers offer a fresh perspective on a number of aesthetic, historical and historiographical concerns that circulated among Arab novelists.
-
Dr. Gretchen A. Head
This paper will address the role of the historical novel in Moroccan literary culture from the 1950‘s to the current day. The Arabic literary canon is, in a sense, founded on the evocation of the past. The classical qasidah turns back to the abandoned campsite, the reconstruction of memory embedded in the poem’s structure. The weight of the past, then, is already felt in all its intensity in the pre-Islamic tradition. Subsequently, as a genre with an eye always turned toward the past, the historical novel holds the potential to establish significant links to the tradition. The genre first appears in Morocco in 1950. One of the earliest novels published in Arabic in Morocco, Abd al-Hadi Bu Talib’s Wazir ghirnatah (1950), while historical fiction, differs little from social realism, the mimetically faithful image of the epoch less important than the idiosyncrasies of atmosphere it provides. An example of the growing “sameness” of the world literary system, it has an imported plot similar to European models coupled with an indigenous style. The following decades, however, have witnessed significant development in the genre. More recent publications like Bensalem Himmich’s Majnun al-hukm (1989) and Hadha al-andalusi (2009) exhibit a different engagement with the past and the premodern literary tradition. By drawing on the classical relationship between authorship and genre, Himmich’s narratives are not quite simply fiction; rather, he writes in a discourse that leans toward the apocryphal. Abdelfattah Kilito has noted that the type of narrative fiction in which the author loses his voice in the speech of imaginary characters was highly limited in classical Arabic literature. The attribution of speech, however, not to imaginary characters but to real persons of unquestioned historical existence creates an apocryphal discourse characteristically different than fiction, a type of discourse rooted in the classical tradition. Akin to forgery, it is a type of pastiche so convincingly executed as to be essentially indistinguishable from the original. By utilizing this narrative mode, Himmich disrupts the polarity generally considered characteristic of the novel in its imported forms, with a plot from the core (i.e. Europe) and a style from the periphery, turning the historical novel into an ideal vehicle for bridging the gap between literary tradition and modernity. The questions addressed here are how and why the genre has steadily evolved from Bu Talib’s writing to Himmich’s recent novels.
-
Ms. R. Shareah Taleghani
Bensalem Himmich’s 1990 landmark novel Majun al-Hukm (in English translation: The Theocrat) is both a work of historical fiction and a text that has contributed to shaping the genre of contemporary Arabic prison literature. The novel depicts the chaotic rule of al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah, the 10th century Fatimid caliph, whose descent into mental illness is marked not only by his ecstatic visions but also by arbitrary and autocratic decrees imposed on the Egyptian population by often times violent and oppressive means. In portraying to his readers the story of al-Hakim, Himmich deploys a fragmented collage of textual references that include a vast number of direct quotations from medieval Arab historians such as Ibn Iyas, Ibn al-Athir and al-Maqrizi. In addition, the author interweaves the various texts of the ruler’s decrees, Quranic verses, sermons, letters, and descriptive narrative that at times, imitates the style of various genres of classical Arabic prose re-cited in the text.
This paper will examine the prominent role of intertextuality and its relationship to the intertwined themes of authority, violence, authoritarianism and resistance in Majnun al-Hukm. Himmich’s historical novel, which has been referenced in studies of Arabic prison literature, could easily be read in an allegorical fashion as a critique of much more contemporary political oppression and authoritarianism--the “years of lead” in Morocco or the repressive political practices of the Egyptian regime. However, the focus of this investigation will be on the ways in which the text’s structure calls into question the nature of narrative authority and authoritarianism itself. In doing so, the novel can be seen as a quintessentially metafictional work, and as such, a narrative that resists asserting a clear boundary between reality and fiction.
-
Dr. Alexa S. Firat
This paper will discuss two Jordanian historical novels published in the 1990s. Each engages issues of identity and identifications from personal, social, cultural, and national perspectives. As contemporary historical fictions, they capture in their vicissitudes the complexity of experiences within Jordanian society, engaging with histories and historical texts that suggest a polyphonic collective memory embedded with the oral and textual lore and ethnic identifications of a multifarious society. In this way they appear to work against a nationalist discourse, but instead, suggest an uneasy articulation of “being Jordanian.”
The two novels are distinct from each other: Al-Karuj min Sawsar?qah by Zahra ‘Umar (1993) articulates a Circassian cultural voice. It is the first novel to engage with this subject, and exploits myth, folktale and origin stories. As ‘Umar claims in her introduction, this novel is a way of reclaiming Circassian history for both herself and the diaspora, whom, she asserts, have become illiterate in both their language and cultural histories. As much as this novel is a work of reclamation, it is also a novel that interposes a Circassian cultural voice into the Jordanian, and by extension, Arabic literary field. As well, we read this voice not as an artifact, but rather, as an essential component of an active discourse. In the novel al-?amr?w? (1992) by Rama??n al-Raw?shidah, it is narratives, such as A 1001 Nights and Kalila wa Dimna, and Sufi thought, as opposed to historical events or people, in which the novelist searches for a way to mend the psychological fissure the main character finds himself in. Transversing time and texts in a kind of back and forth that conveys madness or “the non-reality of our reality,” the characters of this novel assert their respective continuities in relation to history, but also to the struggles and threats that are faced throughout the ages, i.e hunger, oppression, poverty.
By exploring the narrative strategies and (hi)stories these two novels evoke, this paper aspires to disclose and analyze those inspirations of the past that inform the present.
