The 11/7/2009 issue of the fine London-based newspaper The Guardian included reviews of two books that were translated from Arabic to English. The first one is Yalo, written by Elias Khoury, Chief Editor of the cultural appendix of Al-Nahar, and the second is The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story, written by the prominent novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh. After I had ordered the two books, I travelled to Jeddah on business, and then went back to London to find the books waiting for me. I took them with me to the south of France in a briefcase that held a few dozen books. Naturally, I started reading the political books first, because of the necessities dictated by my profession. In fact, what I liked in James Lasdun's review of Khoury's novel is that he read his other novel, Gate of the Sun, which is about a comatose Palestinian fighter narrating the different phases of his self-larceny. Also, what caught my attention in the review of the new novel is the unfolding of the Syriac Yalo's story about the civil war, which was being told, and then retold. As everybody was getting closer to the truth or farther away from it in a different angle, we read the confession obtained under torture, the police report, and other accounts of the same events. I knew the Lebanese Syriacs closely, most of whom by the way come from Iraq originally. However, this familiarity was severed after I left Lebanon in 1975. In our neighbourhood, there were many Syriacs who did simple jobs, and their names were Teda, Bassio, Ammu and Barsham, as well as Abu Ibrahim whose eldest son fought with the French Foreign Legion and then disappeared. He was assumed dead up until the end of the fifties when suddenly there was a great ruckus among the Syriacs: Ibrahim had suddenly returned from among the dead. In any case, they [the Syriacs] did not have any role in the civil war, by the first year of which I had left Lebanon. Meanwhile, the Guardian's Joan Bakewell wrote a review on Hanan Al-Shaykh's novel. Although the latter's title in Arabic seems different from the one in English, they carry the same nuance in which the mother tells her daughter: “my story is a prolonged explanation: Had it not been for the locust, the bird wouldn't have got trapped”. If I had to choose one word to describe the literary style of Hanan Al-Shaykh, it would be courage for addressing everything that is taboo, controversial or even scandalous. In this context, the English novelist and critic who is reviewing Hanan's book mentions how the mother in the book confesses to her sins and mistakes. Following her forced marriage, she enters into a forbidden love affair with another man, and then she leaves her family in the end to be with him. Between this and that, she is constantly suffering, and even engages in stealing, before ending up being the family's absolute matriarch. After I read about these novels, I contacted my colleague Abdo Wazen in Beirut. We exchanged some information while he responded to my questions, as he is a professional when it comes to novels and literature and I'm just an amateur. He then sent me two reviews of the novels, one by Raja Nehmeh on Yalo, and the other by Yusra Moukaddem about My Story is a Prolonged Explanation. I found in Raja's description about the Syriac rituals information that I did not know of before. In the book, for instance, Yalo goes with his mother Gabi and his grandfather on the night of Epiphany to the sea, where the mother stands between her father's arms, removing her hair pins and the latter spraying sea water on her loose hair and then begins to comb it in what looks like baptism. Meanwhile, there was some “boldness” shown in Yusra Moukaddem's review where she says: “We don't deny that there was courage shown in narrating a full biography where there are many instances of breaking free from the usual and imposed norms of an oppressive society, and of misdemeanours leading to death, madness, suicide and adultery ... However, these acts of breaking free remained shallow and superficial, and bypassed any serious state of actual struggle. Instead, the book disguised itself in a cloak of audacity to cover up its predisposition to being revoltingly scandalous – which we are not here to morally judge in any case – while it is quite usual for oppressed heroines to take refuge in delinquency, rebellion, and disregard of customs in protest of their situation.” The fact of the matter is that Hanan Al-Shaykh's latest novel, and her previous novel, A Flower's Story, reminded me of something I've always known about Arab literature: The literature of “confession”, as in Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint published in 1969, moved away from confessing personal mistakes, even those that are embarrassing and scandalous like the ones narrated by Alexander Portnoy to his psychiatrist, into family scandals after the release of Mommie Dearest in 1978. In this book, Christina Crawford documents the journey of her personal torment with her adoptive mother actress Joan Crawford. She accused the latter of neglecting and mistreating her, and of being alcoholic who took many lovers and often acted hysterically. Back then, those who knew Joan Crawford were split between those who refused to believe Christina's accusations and those who supported her. Most importantly, however, autobiographies have since then branched into another type of literature where the biographies of the father or the mother or even the parents together are told, with everyone competing to highlight the scandals and problems, to the extent of talking about sexual abuse. In fact, I started gathering information about this type of novels/biographies, but in the end I decided to content myself with reading reviews for these books instead of reading them themselves, since I need to read political books before anything else. I believe that Hanan Al-Shaykh's novel is the first of its kind in Arabic in what relates to the scandalous nature of talking about her parents, and perhaps it will affect Arab literature in the same manner that Mommie Dearest affected English literature. In the meantime, I think that the novel Yalo will succeed as much as The Gate of the Sun did, or even more. I continue tomorrow.
