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Voices of the Lost
'Barakat isn't writing about 'the immigrant'. She's writing about the human.' Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind Shortlisted for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Translation * Longlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award, 2022 Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a devastating story of displacement, war, and the unlikely glimmer of hope in the dark In an unnamed country torn apart by war, six strangers are compelled to share their darkest secrets. Taking pen to paper, each attempts to put in writing what they can’t bring themselves to say to the person they love – mother, father, brother, lost love. Their words form a chain of dark confessions, none of wh...
the tiller of waters
This spellbinding novel narrates the many-layered recollections of a hallucinating man in devastated Beirut. The desolate, almost surreal, urban landscape is enriched by the unfolding of the family sagas of Niqula Mitri and his beloved Shamsa, the Kurdish maid. Mitri reminisces about his Egyptian mother and his father who came back to settle in Beirut after a long stay in Egypt. Both Mitri and his father are textile merchants and see the world through the code of cloth, from the intimacy of linen, velvet, and silk to the most impersonal of synthetics. Shamsa in turn relates her story, the myriad adventures of her parents and grandparents who moved from Iraqi Kurdistan to Beirut. Haunting scenes of pastoral Kurds are juxtaposed against the sedentary decadence of metropolitan residents. Barakat weaves into her sophisticated narrative shreds of scientific discourse about herbal plants and textile crafts, customs and manners of Arabs, Armenians, and Kurds, mythological figures from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, and Arabia, the theosophy of the African Dogons and the medieval Byzantines, and historical accounts of the Crusades in the Holy Land and the silk route to China.
The Stone of Laughter
A novel of the civil war in Lebanon whose protagonist is a homosexual trying to remain neutral. But as he discovers, neutrality in a civil war is not possible. He becomes involved like everyone else and is the better man for the experience gained. The novel won an award in Lebanon.
Disciples Of Passion
Disciples of Passion chronicles the civil war in Lebanon through the troubled and sometimes quasi-hallucinatory mind of a young man who has experienced kidnapping, hostage exchange, and hospital internment. As he recalls his village childhood and recounts his relationship with a woman of a different faith , his fragmented narrative probes the uncertainties of political testimonial and ascriptions of responsibility in wartime. Marilyn Booth's fluid translation brings to an English audience one of the Arabic language's finest contemporary novelists. Widely celebrated in France, where she currently lives in exile (from Lebanon), Hoda Barakat writes from personal experience: her novels focus on the civil war in Lebanon and how it shaped the lives of people marginalized by the conflict. Compelling scenarios of war and its aftermath of suffering and destruction are integrated into subtle psychological portraitswith protagonists often propelled into unexpected action.
Hoda Barakat's Sayyidi Wa Habibi
Hoda Barakat's 2004 Arabic novel tells the story of Wadie, a young man who leaves school and becomes corrupted by crime, and his wife, Samia, who flees with him to Cyprus to escape from gang leaders and militiamen he has riled during his criminal career. Set against the backdrop of the Lebanese civil war, the story is narrated by Wadie until he suddenly disappears from Cyprus; Samia then takes over the narration. Discrepancies between their stories raise questions about what exactly has happened, and Wadie's disappearance is never explained. Laila Familiar abridged the text with the author's approval so that it can be read by students with low-advanced proficiency in the Arabic language. Familiar provides introductory materials, a short biography of the author, a personal dictionary, and exercises that develop linguistic and cultural competency. Audio files of Barakat reading five passages from the work will be posted for free access on the GUP web site; these, along with a recorded interview, will help students improve listening skills. The book is meant to be used as a supplementary text and can be covered in ten class sessions.
The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel
After the Lebanese Civil War, many Lebanese novelists committed themselves to building a "memory for the future." What resulted was a vital contribution to the legacy of contemporary Arabic literature. Through interviews, literary analysis, and the lens of trauma studies, Lang sheds light on what it means to remember through post-war literature.
Celestial Bodies
Celestial Bodies is the International Booker-winning and internationally bestselling novel from Jokha Alharthi. Set in the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries Abdallah after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These three women and their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slave-owning society slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured and taut, Celestial Bodies is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s ...
Leaves Of Narcissus
This novel of home and homelessness, of exile both physical and psychological, centers on Kimi, a fragile heroine suffering from a rift in her persona, unable to distinguish between her own pain and the pain of others. For Kimi it is not a simple case of to be or not to be, but rather of how to be in disjointed and contrary times. Leaves of Narcissus, like earlier Arabic novels about East-West encounters by male writers such as Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Hussein, and Tayeb Salih, is about a young Arab student going west in search of education. Here, though, the protagonist is a young woman and her destination is Ireland, a part of the West and at the same time a victim of the ravages of colonialism adding ambiguity to the customary representations of the East-West dichotomy. In this captivating novel, Somaya Ramadan displays a rare virtuosity in evoking and interlacing literary motifs from the popular to the learned, from the folk to the mythic, from the Egyptian to the Irish and poses questions rather than answers, questions that hold a mirror to our selves.
Anxiety of Erasure
Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women’s repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force. In this book, Al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw’udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change. She asks what it means to develop a national, gendered consciousness from diasporic locals while staying committed to the homeland. Al-Samman presents close readings of the fiction of six prominent authors whose works span over h...
Arabic Literature
A highly readable collection that maintains that Arabic literature reflects the Western postmodern condition without denying its own traditions.
