[caption id="attachment_55227975" align="aligncenter" width="620" caption="Emerging Arab Voices edited by Peter Clarke"]
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Emerging Arab Voices offers highly original writing that is often bold and uncompromising with resonant narrative voices that assert themselves powerfully. Drawing the reader inwards and commanding undivided attention, this anthology is of an extremely high quality and deserves a wide readership.
Published as a bilingual Arabic-English text, Emerging Arab Voices emerged from an intensive 10 day workshop held on the island of Sir Bani Yas in the United Arab Emirates in November 2009. The judges of the first two cycles of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction were invited choose from over 120 critically acclaimed writers submitted for consideration, and selected a small group from Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates to participate.
Although only 119 pages long, this eight piece anthology is richly rewarding and unafraid in the subjects it takes on whether of love and lust, dysfunctional families, dictatorship and corruption, violence, and writing and art.
Many of the stories have a mysterious quality to them grounded in many cases by an exquisitely crafted palpable sense of place - one of their most salient features- the full comprehension of which may elude the reader, precisely because at the heart of every physical landscape there are signifiers with potentially plural meanings. The emotions, perceptions, and memories they generate are intimated without being explicitly stated.
The prose tends towards a restrained lyricism. Though some of the authors make heavy use of similes, all convey matters of both physical reality – light, landscape, the contours of a human face and body – and matters of the spirit without neglecting one or the other and with a keen sense of control. While the writing is often poetic it is also minimalistic, enabling it to achieve a self-sufficiency that beckons the reader without prostrating itself before them. The enchantment of the reader is consequently, subtle, natural, and complete.
The tone of these stories is generally melancholic but not despairing – there is a sense of loss, longing, and loneliness which permeates the anthology but it is never felt as a deadening weight which closes conversation. On the contrary, the characters invite the reader’s fascination and interest. Some of the stories have elements of what appears to be a distinctly Arab form of magical realism and perhaps a new Arab literary genre. It is near impossible as a reader to separate the sometimes surreal and dream like nature of some of the stories, their styles and subplots from the Arab places, images, and cultures in which they are embedded and by which they are enabled. At times it as though landscape and culture are conjuring story rather than story evoking landscape and culture.
A few of the stories are reminiscent of the psychologically insightful, rigorous, and self-contained worlds that Paul Bowles created in his tales situated in desert landscapes and other eco-systems of the Arab world. Reading them over and over one feels enchanted and immersed in a world that is simultaneously real and unreal, merging several planes of existence, physical and spiritual, and various dimensions of time, space, emotion, and perception in ways that from a practical perspective are impossible but within their context are not only plausible but take on a naturalness and believability that lend them power.
Many seem able to situate themselves in the modern world and the ancient world simultaneously – it is perhaps the transcendence of time and its strictures and structures that are the most dominant feature of this uniquely Arab ‘magical realism.’
Some of these stories – particularly the Tunisian allegory entitled The Gorilla, by Kamel Riahi – require several readings to fully appreciate the writing.
Other particularly rewarding chapters include The Beaver by Mohammad Hassan Alwan. Set in Saudi Arabia, it is acutely sensitive to difficult family dynamics, relations between brothers and sisters, mother’s and children, husbands and wives. “Because we do not speak, we are forced to fake talk. This is one of our random attempts to understand and communicate with one another, in accordance with the suppositions we make about each other rather than what we really are.”
Mohammed Salah-Al-Azab’s contribution, entitled Temporary Death is a chapter within a novel and is one of the most daring and original selections in which the landscape of the possible and impossible, real and imagined, become entirely enmeshed.
Other selections may be difficult for readers unfamiliar with the culture and history of a particular place – such as the story entitled The Ghosts of Fransawi by Mansour El-Sowaim, which is a chapter from a novel, set in Sudan. Despite the difficulty and the innate limitations of reading only one chapter within a larger novel – it is still a rewarding read even if elliptical and at times somewhat opaque.
The last two selections are especially strong. My Own Sana’a by Nadia Alkokabany, beautifully renders the city and offers tantalizing glimpses of love and attraction, by turns furtive and confident in which lovers and city are both separated and united. The Stone of Desire by Nasser al-Dhaheri, fuses descriptions of tactile and sensuous objects: stone and sculpture, gardens and food, with meticulous evocation of their interplay with human beings in a way that is mysterious and elusive. It creates one of the most memorable landscapes, physical and emotional, in the collection and powerful evocations of the conjunctions and disjunctions of bodily desires and emotional and creative needs.
This is writing that is intimate and bold, linking the individual and the social thoughtfully and carefully, but that is never didactic or predictable. Each author’s voice is idiosyncratic and mature; one of the anthologies greatest pleasures is how it combines what are substantially different voices and styles which – despite their differences – yield a coherent and compelling whole.
