Emerging Arab Voices: Nadwa I: A bilingual reader

I have become an enthusiastic follower of the race for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which basically amounts to reading everything M. Lynx Qualey puts on her blog. They announced the short list last week which I was able to live tweet, and for a brief moment in time it almost felt like I was part of an academic community. Which is the feeling I have longed for forever. I mean, I wanted it in College, but American was a wasteland, and the few rebellious critical theory junkies I riffed with sometimes were just a flirtatious substitute. 

And being in New York has been the worst. I’ve snuck into lectures at Columbia, loitered around the Arabic section at the New York Public Library, I’ve even stooped so low that I solicited friendship on the gradcafe forum to anyone willing in the tri-state area. So I try to keep myself busy. From my nebulous interest in all things Arabic, grammar, history, religion, language ideology, I have for the time being been able to focus my vagabond academic interests on contemporary Arabic fiction. It’s been great. There are not only lots of resources (blogs, Banipal, prizes, newspapers), but a community of people who are interested in the same things.
  On my end it is hard getting caught up to speed with all the fucking books. Reading in Arabic is really really slow going. Reading كتاب الطغرى this year almost killed me. I usually succumb to the temptation to just read the book in translation. For the classics like city of salt, Zayni Barakat, Choukri, al-Tayeb Saleh, you can easily find the translations. But if you want to be really hip, with things from the last 3 or 4 years, you have to read in Arabic. Which is cool. Reading something at a level of obscurity that you could automatically trump any millenial on the L-train. Ohhhhhh the victorious feeling of smugness when I get looks on the train. But again, it’s super slow going. How the hell am I supposed to read مولانا by Ibrahim Issa before the winner of IPAF is announced, much less before the novel is irrelevent. For كتاب الطغرى, knowing that Paul Starkey’s English translation is coming out this year helped light the fire under my butt (I don’t think I will be ever able to read tutanamayanlar until it finally gets commissioned).
Not to mention I am still learning Arabic. Sure I can read something by Sonallah Ibrahim or, apparently, Rabi’ Jaber, but I can’t even get through two pages of شطح المدينة by Ghitani. So having Emerging Arab voices as a kind of Arabic fiction reader has been super helpful. It’s a niche, but I wold recommend the book to anyone at my reading level in Arabic to help them from spending hours thumbing through their Hans Wehr. It is interesting to see how those two main types of writing in Arabic, clear hemingway-esque MSA, and infuriating what-the-fuck-is-this-string-of-6-words-I-don’t-know oh and all the dialogue is in Ammiya, what these two things look like when written in English. You wouldn’t really be able to predict it by just looking at the English text.
There are three really good stories in this volume: The beaver, deja Vu, and the Gorilla. The Gorilla was fantastical while still being an interesting historical record. It talks about impotence and political oppression and racism in an allegorical way without ever losing sight of the narrative or the historical immediacy of the story. I will be sure to look more into Kamel Riahi.
There are two really bad stories: Ghosts of Faransawi and the stone of desire. They are both packed with useless word-stuffed rambling, and barely make any sense. Ghost of Faransawi was so confusing that for 2/3 of it I thought the story was taking place in South Texas, where I’m originally from. I thought it was something post-apocalyptic involving kalishnakovs and goat herders. It took some realy google sleuthing to figure out there is a town in the south of the Sudan nicknamed Texas.
There are two stories that feed into the worst Arab’s-psychoanalytic-fear-of-the-insatiable-female-desire stereotypes: temporary death and stone of desire. I couldn’t believe my eyes. One even employs magical realism just to show the violent apocalyptic jouissance of the untamed woman. Oh, and did I mention that these women are pedophiles too? Fucking weird that they were accepted by an organization who has as its chairman for the main prize somebody who wanted to ban “for bread alone” from being taught in school for being unredeemabley amoral.
  And as to the translations, it was awesome to see how much of a difference it makes. And it also shows how much of a difference having a native English speaker as translator makes. I am basing this off of the names of the Translators, but basically the ones with stuffy British names just made the better translations. The Gorilla was just as awkwardly verbose as the stories I didn’t like, but was rendered beautifully. The Arab translator of stone of desire, on the other hand, at one point translated something as “imitated the impetuousness of stone”, yuck. There are other examples I will look up later. Just like the kind of SAT-words that an 11th grader would stick into a story.This is, of course, great news for an aspiring corn-fed Arabic translator like me.