Post-Arab Spring Narratives: A Minor Literature in the Making 3031279034, 9783031279034

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LITERATURES AND CULTURES OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD

Post-Arab Spring Narratives A Minor Literature in the Making

Abida Younas

Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World Series Editor

Hamid Dabashi Columbia University New York, NY, USA

The LITERATURES AND CULTURES OF THE ISLAMIC WORLD series will put forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.

Abida Younas

Post-Arab Spring Narratives A Minor Literature in the Making

Abida Younas University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

ISSN 2945-705X     ISSN 2945-7068 (electronic) Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World ISBN 978-3-031-27903-4    ISBN 978-3-031-27904-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit line : John Van Decker / Alamy Stock Photo. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

All praise is for Almighty—Lord of all worlds

I am indebted to numerous people for their support during the writing of this book. I am deeply indebted to Professor Willy Maley for his continued guidance, intellectual feedback, and constant encouragement. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Sophie Vlacos and Dr. Helen Stoddart for their insightful feedback. I owe particular thanks to Palgrave editors, Marika Lysandrou, and Molly Beck, and Raghupathy Kalynaraman, for their patient guidance. I am particularly grateful to my husband, Adnan, who supplied me with endless cups of coffee, and Haroon, my son, whose sweet smile was enough to release my stress. I thank Dr. Saiyma Aslam, Dr. Amal Sayyid, Dr. Djouher, Dr. Kawthar, and Zahida for their prayers. I would like to extend my gratitude to my siblings, Muneeb, Naveed, Zahida, Haseeb, Tayyeb, Alveena, and Husna for their love and support in every possible way throughout this journey. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my parents, the two most treasured people in my life, who define me and without whose continued support this work would not have been possible. A part of Chap. 3 was published as “Magical Realism and Metafiction: Narratives of Discontent or Celebration” in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2018). A short version of a section in Chap. 2 was published as “Configuring the Present for the Future: Personal Narratives of the Arab Spring” in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2022). I am grateful to Routledge for permissions to reproduce the copyright material. v

Abstract

Post-Arab Spring Narratives: A Minor Literature in the Making is a study of contemporary Anglo-Arab writing, read through the critical-theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of minor literature. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory of minor literature from an analysis of western writings. Applying the same theory uncritically in the context of Anglo-Arab literature would be limiting and restrictive, I believe. In my book, I use the concept of minor literature and reformulate it to explore the writings of Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, Karim Alrawi, Youssef Rakha, Yasmine El Rashidi, Omar Robert Hamilton, Saleem Haddad, and Nada Awar Jarrar. With their shared emphases on the Arab world, upon the lives of its ordinary and minority peoples, and the respective revolutions of its nations, the works of these authors can all be seen to manifest some of the political and collective facets of minor literature envisaged by Deleuze and Guattari. My book contends that they all exhibit a mode of linguistic experimentation, one that is uniquely contemporary to the field of Anglo-Arab writing. The selected novelists repudiate the use of metamorphosis which is conventionally required for the successful deterritorialization of the major language. Rather, as I argue, their writings enact the minor practice of linguistic deterritorialization, through their metaphors, through their adoption of modernist and postmodernist strategies, and through their incorporation of

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contemporaneous modes of protest, including popular slogans, tweets, and chants—customarily not associated with minor literature. In so doing, the authors selected in this book contribute to a renewal of the stylistic conventions of minor literature. They adopt this mode of deterritorialization I claim, in order to foreground the experiences of officially silenced voices. I propose “a revised conception” of minor literature by specifically drawing attention to the stylistic choices made by selected authors. While it is too early to discern definitively the characteristics of Post-Arab Spring literature, this book is a contribution to developing a critical-theoretical framework suited to its analysis. Keywords Minor literature; Deterritorialization; Arab Spring; Anglo-Arab writers; Minority

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Writing  the Present to Commemorate: Personal Narratives of the Arab Revolution in Ahdaf Soueif’s Memoirs of a City Transformed and Hisham Matar’s The Return 25 3 Magical  Realism in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Metafiction in Youssef Rakha’s The Crocodiles: Rethinking Minor Literature 61 4 Post-Arab  Spring Cairo in Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicles of a Last Summer and Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins: Urban Narratives as Minor Literature 93 5 The  Humanitarian Narrative of the Arab Spring in Saleem Haddad’s Guapa and Nada Awar Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven: Further Toward Minor Literature127 6 Post-partum165 Bibliography171 Index183 ix

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Creation takes place in choked passages … Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric. —Deleuze, 133

In the above quote, Deleuze talks about writing in cramped spaces, which enables writers to produce a new statement, a new object and a new language. Such writings go beyond drawing on various disciplines but move toward disciplinary deterritorialization—a term use for a spatial manifestation of changes under way in the relationship between social life and its territory. This term has been adopted in humanities and social sciences disciplines such as literature, language, geography, and others. Writing in cramped spaces is not drawing from multiple disciplines, but about exploring what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “the edge of the field or woods … at the borderline of the village, or between villages” in a way that deterritorializes the cramped spaces of various disciplines by discovering a new language: a minor language and drawing the connections between literatures (246). Writers in Middle Eastern countries work in cramped mental spaces due to censorship. This may be one of the reasons that these writers flout disciplinary conventions in their writings. Deleuze and Guattari (1975) used the term minor literature to refer to such

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_1

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writings that eradicate disciplinary conventions because of an experience of being confined, constrained, and controlled. This monograph, in its focus on the representation of the Post-Arab Spring Arab world, specifically addresses the striking ways in which Post-­ Arab Spring literature describes the aftermath of Arabs’ spectacular twenty-­ first-­century revolt. I particularly focus on the minoritarian strategies used by contemporary Anglo-Arab authors in their writings to deterritorialize the major tongue, English, to present a collective enterprise. Through a minor usage of language (by which I mean the experimentation with language), I claim that contemporary Anglo-Arab authors do not only highlight the socio-political context of their countries but also foreground silenced voices. In this context, my aim throughout this book is to not only highlight the mode of deterritorialization that these writers adopt to represent marginalized voices but also propose “a revised conception” of minor literature by specifically drawing attention to the stylistic choices made by selected authors. My purpose in this monograph is to offer a critical evaluation of the so-called Arab Spring and to deconstruct the revolutionary rhetoric that heralds a new era for the Arab world by producing a counter-narrative. This book lies at the intersection of critical theory, literary studies, politics, arts, sociology, and the history of Arab lands and its peoples, and seeks to establish, through these multiple perspectives, a revised version of minor literature, outside of its limited western context in order to apply this to a literature produced by postcolonial nations.

Post-Arab Spring Literature At the end of 2010 and at the beginning of 2011, the world witnessed massive protests across the Middle East, referred to as the Arab Spring. By toppling the longstanding regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, the Arab uprisings seemed to initiate a democratic journey. However, the results were rather disappointing because the outcome of Arab insurgencies proved to be chaos, fragmentation, breakdown, and recurrent authoritarianism. The strong determination of people to overthrow the regime turned into ill-­ starred reality when the military hijacked the revolution in different parts of the Arab world and crushed it ferociously. Since then, an endless battle has raged between totalitarian regimes and their civilians, which has produced uncertainty throughout the Arab world, especially in Egypt, Syria, and Libya. This worsening situation of the Arab Spring has served as a trope for socio-political activism in the work of Arab writers. The

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unprecedented vigor and velocity of the Arab Spring has become an empowering political aesthetic. In this way, a new generation of Arab writers has transformed the nature of Anglo-Arab fiction. From the traditional notion of what Geoffrey Nash calls the “Anglo-Arab encounter,” a myriad of themes and issues emerge (11). Tracing the domestic perspectives of the Arab Spring, Anglo-Arab novels go beyond the demography of gender, age, and space. Post-Arab Spring literature, published after the momentous events of the Arab Spring, reflects the aftermath of recent events; whether it is chaos, disintegration and mass repression, the transition of government, or war. The purpose of my work here is not to trace the Post-Arab Spring changes as such. Rather, I am particularly interested in the ways the emerging Post-Arab Spring literature intervenes into the politico-cultural sphere of the Arab insurgencies and transforms Arab Spring narratives. Although the events of the Arab Spring and its literature take place within the political and the aesthetic spheres, the two are deeply interrelated. Jacques Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible is useful to emphasize the aesthetic side of the Arab Spring. According to Rancière, politics not only is the exercise of governmental power, but as such is the distribution of what is sayable, visible, and thinkable: an order that thereby determines which people are recognized as political subjects and those, conversely, who should be silenced (The Politics of Aesthetics 12). I believe that the Arab revolution disturbs this sensible order and brings to light the silenced subjects. Post-Arab Spring literature partakes in the distribution of the sensible by creating the space where the unseen and silenced subjects, for example refugees, activists, prisoners, writers, and members of the LGBTQ+ community can speak for themselves and can protest against an authoritarian regime. This potentiality of literature, I argue, is political and not just because the author and literary text itself is explicitly involved in politics. Post-Arab Spring literature finds those who have no voices, no names and who remain inaudible and invisible and thereby challenges the prior aesthetic division between the sayable and the unsayable, the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible. In this context, I argue that this literature is always in a continuous struggle against the ideological veils of the state. In fact, it first resists the existing order and then seeks to establish a new order. This is the move from critique to creativity. Post-­ Arab Spring literature works in the same manner, progressing from an instance of critique to one of creativity. The first can be categorized as parasitical as it depends entirely on the existing body of literature whereas

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the latter is germinal (the birth of the new). Post-Arab Spring literature operates to upset the already constituted movements, criticizes them and then goes on to produce new kinds of thoughts and new modes of subjectivity. Dissent is thus a crucial element and there is an affirmation of a new community in this literature, “a bastard community of the sick and the frail, a hybrid and mutant collectivity always in progress, always open to any and every one” who fail to “to ‘live up’ to the models offered (in fact forced upon them) by the major” (O’Sullivan 8). Having said this, I do not mean to negate the history of pre-revolution counter-hegemonic aesthetics. Different generations of Arab writers across the Arab world have offered public intellectual opposition to the repressive structures of successive authoritarian regimes through their writings, which have acted as a catalyst for change. They expose political and social injustices that impact different spaces of their countries and thus power “the popular imagination with visionary images of its revolutionary potential” (Sakr 6). This potential of literature works as a fuel to drive people to the street as El Hamamsy and Soliman note (3). For example, many Arab writers like Nizar Qabbani, Kamel Al-Riahi, Khaled Khalifa, and Alaa Al-Aswany already foretold the revolution in their writings. They dared to offer transformed political geographies. In this regard, looking back from the present moment of the Arab revolution reveals anti-authoritarian and postcolonial struggles in which Arab authors, for almost a century, have shaped and influenced the imagination that brought change. Therefore, when focusing on the Arab uprisings as a watershed moment in the history of the Arab world, much of the cultural imaginary on which the recent revolt is formed emerges from the previous few decades of literary production. Art has always been the handmaiden to the revolution because it is impossible to prompt large masses of people without conveying the messages efficiently. Art, particularly literature, is the “weapon of the future” in the struggle against repressive regimes (LeVine 1277). Literature proves vital when civil society has little or no space for protest to challenge oppressive regimes. There is a natural confrontation between critical literature and an authoritarian regime since both compete in creating fictions. The difference between the fictions of authoritarian regimes and the fictions of dissenting authors, however, is that novelists tend to create their own alternative realities to those presented by dictatorships and thereby present direct challenges to political orthodoxy. Authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, produce single-minded fictions that do not accept any

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alternative views. Consequently, many writers are censored, banned, and harassed in their own states especially in Libya and Syria.1 However, the Arab revolutions democratize the “republic of letters by admitting previously unacknowledged, or little known voices of the various revolts” (Sakr 12). Not only do Anglo-Arab writers have taken on board creative narratives about the Arab Spring, but also a boost has been seen in the production of Arabic literary narratives by writers in the Arab world. Thousands of authors, including immigrants as well as home authors, have attempted to explain, depict, decry the movements and predict the future in the form of poetry, novels, memoirs, short stories, and so on. Despite the severe political repression, Arab writers respond to the rise and fall of the Arab revolution in different narrative forms. They present bitter criticism, denounce the dictatorial structure, and critically engage with the failed revolution experiences in their writings written in standard Arabic. For instance, Mohammad Rabie’s (Egyptian writer) Otared represents the failed revolution in dystopian narratives. Dima Wannous (a Syrian author) opts for psychological realism in her novel Al-Kha’ifoon (The Frightened Ones), whereas, Samar Yazbek records the Syrian revolution in the form of dairy entitled Taqatu’Niran: Min Yaumiat al-intifada as-Suriya (A Woman in the Crossfire: Dairies of the Syrian Revolution). Another interesting detail is that new publishing houses are established that seek fresh work to challenge the state narratives and headlines. Hoopoe publishing house is one such example in which fiction writers can reimagine histories without the fear of being banned. In the same way, some publishing houses such as Dar al-Adab, Dar al-Saqi, and many others have provided a publication haven for those writers who were previously banned and censored by their own states. Not surprisingly, a number of old texts are republished and translated into English. For example, Khaled Khalifa’ In Praise of Hatred, originally published in 2006, is translated into English in 2012 and Manal Alsarraj’s As the River Must, originally published in Arabic in 2002, is also republished in 2013. It is worth mentioning here that both these texts were originally censored and banned by the Syrian regime. The Arab Spring “provides an element of opportunism to publishing industries as many texts are republished as the novel of 1  For example, in Libya, Muammar Al-Qaddafi set up literary festivals and invited all young writers around the country to attend. He then arrested them and threw them in a prison where a whole generation of intellectuals spent a decade (“Hisham Matar on the Power of Libyan fiction” npr.org, Apr, 2011).

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the Arab Spring or the novel that predicted the Arab Spring,” Khalid Khamissi’s Taxi (2007), for example (Younas 2). The literary magazine Banipal recently published several volumes of Syrian, Libyan, and Tunisian literature. Considering this scenario, I argue that the Arab Spring empowers and restores existing cultural forms. Novelists play an important role in subverting authoritarian regimes because literature has the capacity to express what is forbidden in unique ways. In her study of Bedouin communities, Lila Abu-Lughod describes how Bedouin women use poetry to express themselves in a conservative society (which otherwise would not allow them to speak openly) by experimenting with form (42). This is precisely the type of liberating fictional space which Anglo-Arab novelists inhabit. Despite the limitations that have been imposed on Arab literary writings, a strong contiguity is found between the politics of the Arab world and Arab fiction. Arab writers, in Caroline Rooney’s term, can be defined as being in the “vanguard of democracy” in their mission to articulate and empower political activism because they have called for the deconstruction of their society politically and socially before the revolution (369). They do not write directly about brutal realities, but work in the realm of symbols, allegory, and metaphor. Not only do they experiment with a range of genres to inscribe uncertainty within their narratives, but they also upset the boundaries between literary genres and sociological essays in their writings. On the one hand, they refer to the wider framework of critical social realism and on the other they portray social reality using peculiar modernist and postmodernist literary aesthetics. My main concern here is not to interrogate the portrayed social reality surrounding the Arab Spring events. I instead examine the literary strategies that are used to narrate the intense and enigmatic reality of the Arab revolution. Although my chapters are led by thematic concerns, they inform each other to support the overarching argument of my book: that emerging Post-Arab Spring literature embodies the theory of minor literature thematically while also redefining the stylistic aspects of minor literature in order to represent marginalized voices justly. I do not confine my analysis to events surrounding the Arab Spring; rather, I follow the trajectory of peaceful demonstration to the point where it becomes a humanitarian crisis. Therefore, while contextualizing the events of the Arab uprisings, I also consider the pre-Arab Spring scenario, the military intervention in different parts of the Arab world, and the refugee crisis. While it is too early to discern definitively the characteristics of Post-Arab Spring

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literature, my book is a contribution to developing a framework in which to do so. With this context in mind, I limit myself to the work of those writers who have a close affiliation with their home countries during and after the Arab Spring. In so doing, I argue that emerging Post-Arab Spring literature conspicuously reveals that the Arab Spring becomes a means for political intervention in the homeland for immigrant Arabs. Prior to the Arab Spring, Anglo-Arab immigrant authors had developed a connection with home through the lively imagination of the homeland. However, at the outset of the Arab Spring, many writers went back to their countries to participate in the revolution and to present an eyewitness account of the revolution in their narratives. What connects these writers is their experimentation with the form of the novel—often viewed in a western context as a platform for examining individual consciousness—to present collective utterances. This book explores an exciting range of powerful novels and memoirs from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya that, in the last decade especially, unraveled the changing political geographies and the popular discontent in their respective national contexts. Methodologically, it emphasizes the interdisciplinary interaction among literature, cultural and urban geographies, and human right discourse. In the following pages, I set out the discussion of the minoritarian strategies used by these authors.

Minoritarian Strategies in Post-Arab Spring Literature Since the Arab revolution is an evolving phenomenon, many writers “admit their difficulty of writing about such dramatic changes, and culturally emotively intense events” (Buontempo 38). These authors find it difficult to transcribe the evolving revolution because of its changing dynamics. For instance, Soueif and Matar choose to record the revolution in memoirs rather than turning it into fictions because the hegemony of realism is increased in memoirs. Both writers summon their storytelling talents to trace the trajectory of their nations’ ongoing transformation in their narratives. Soueif and Matar deterritorialize the major language and push it to the limit to articulate disrupted present, non-hegemonic relations of space and time and envision the future of the revolution in their personal narratives. Their attempts at witnessing and writing at the same

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time make their narratives flexible and open to revision. Some writers adopt creative approaches to realism and reality such as magical realism and metafiction. For instance, in his metafictional novel, The Crocodiles, Rakha continuously reflects on the language of his narrative to show that reality is constructed. Conversely, Alrawi uses magical realism to capture the contested reality of the Arab world in his magical realist novel, Book of Sand. Both writers forge a new language to express grim realities; a language that does not seek a divorce from lived experiences but to capture its struggles through magical realism and metafiction. Internet technology also has a significant impact on Arab writers since it played an important role during the revolution. Many Arab writers use blogs for self-expression and literary experimentation. Therefore, a new generation of writers who have emerged from the world of blogging use internet technologies as a fictional device in their writings. For instance, a peculiar kind of personal blog, in which an individual focuses on his/her personal life, leads to the emergence of a new genre in Arabic literature called the autofictional novel, a novel which deals with the author’s self-­ exploration. Autofictive writing practice “becomes a way of asserting one’s voice and existing in society” (Pepe 11). For example, being concerned with human rights and humanitarian representations, Jarrar and Haddad push language further and place themselves in the position of those who are absent from the world’s larger narratives, for example, refugees, exiles, and LGBTQ+ people in their autofiction. Recently, it has been noticed that people from other fields also contribute to the literary world; therefore, fictional genres have proliferated in parts and amalgamated with other genres. For instance, many Arab journalists have gone on to become successful novelists in recent times. These journalists-cum-novelists use their journalistic techniques in writing fictions. For example, El Rashidi blends fact and fiction to narrate real events by using storytelling techniques in The Chronicles of the Last Summer. A filmmaker and media activist, Hamilton narrates the revolution cinematically in The City Always Wins. El Rashidi and Hamilton bore holes in language to disclose the silenced subjects and push it to its limit to say the unsayable. These strategies and techniques aim to reveal a reality filled with horror, instability, destruction, and hyper-violence. The significance of Post-Arab Spring literature lies in its use of formal experimentation to diagnose diabolical power in the Arab world. Previously, Arabic literature was considered “the highest form of literary writings, the closest possible to the ideals of literary aesthetics” (Allen 14).

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However, against the background of the rise of nationalism, the conflict between Islam and westernization and with the spread of secular education, the traditional notion of literature as a display of “verbal skill” is replaced by the view that “literature should reflect and indeed change social reality” (Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature 15).2 Therefore, unlike previous authors, contemporary Anglo-Arab immigrant authors believe that aesthetics in writing should not be considered “as the cultivation of a taste for the beautiful,” but rather should invoke the writer as a “producer of form, and as a producer, in particular, of the form of himself through an aesthetic labor” that transcends existing narrative modes and strategies (Lloyd 6). For this reason, these writers emulate, but do not simply reproduce, the qualities of Arab canonical writings in accessible language. Consequently, their writings are excluded from the canon of Arab literature for not committing to naïve realism, which confers on the status of minor literature.3 In Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, David Lloyd is of the view that the primary feature of minor literature “is its exclusion from the canon” on the “grounds of purely aesthetic judgment” (Lloyd 20). Minor literature does not necessarily refer to literature produced by racial or ethnic minorities, but literature that is written with the aim of dismantling pre-­ existent epistemological and ontological categories. The emerging Post-­ Arab Spring literature might be understood as a parallel form of cultural production within the dominant culture. It does not occur separately from major literature; on the contrary, I argue that it operates within the major mode using the same elements in a different manner to “oppose, subvert, or negate the power of hegemonic culture” (Mohamed 298). In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams advances the same argument that literature establishes the changing meanings of the vocabulary that arises in culture with the passage of time. He claims that in every society there is a dominant group which comes to represent the norm of society as a whole (Williams 121). In contrast to the dominant group, a residual group exists sometimes alongside the dominant to reinforce it, and sometimes acts as an oppositional or alternative to oppose the dominant group. Cultural 2  For details about nationalism, see the “Introduction” to Badawi’s Modern Arabic Literature. 3  By naïve realism, I mean that Anglo-Arab authors do not take mimesis, as an imitation of life, in literature in the naïve sense. Instead, their writings are innovative and experimental.

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emergence breaks the pre-determined limitation to move forward and produce something real by incorporating new practices, new meanings and new values. Thus, the residual includes those experiences, meanings, and values that cannot be verified as dominant but live (as it contains past elements); and emergent includes new meanings, values, and practices. Post-Arab Spring literature contains both the residual and the emergent because it consists of marginalized experiences that the dominant group fails to acknowledge. Such minor writing is, in fact, a movement within the major, as it calls for collective enunciation. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of minor literature, I argue that Post-Arab Spring literature, as minor literature, is both political and subversive as it calls for another possible community—a democratic society of justice in which minority groups like prisoners, activists, writers, protestors, refugees, LGBTQ+ people are valorized and eventually cannot be a part of world literature that has “limited itself to studying the literatures of a very few major literatures” (“Major/Minor in World Literature” 29).4 A “minor no longer designates specific literature” but what Deleuze and Guattari call a “revolutionary literature” within the “heart of what is called great or established literature” (Kafka 18). Therefore, I argue that Post-Arab Spring novels as minor literature are writings of delegitimation: Anglo-­ Arab writers “reject not only the western imperium but also the nationalist project of the postcolonial national bourgeoisie” (Appiah 353). And, so it seems to me, that the basis of delegitimation is grounded in an appeal to an ethical universal value which is an appeal to simple respect for human suffering.

Minor Literature Literature produced by immigrant authors is often known as minor literature. The expression “minor literature” is used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe Franz Kafka’s writing in the German language as an example of the Jewish literature of Prague. Following the same line, I assert that Post-­ Arab Spring literature in the English language, as immigrant literature, falls primarily into the category of minor literature. Minor literature does 4  World literature seems to consist of only a few European and western literatures. This practice has recently been challenged from the perspective of other non-European or non-­ western major literature; however, the question of the minor literature or minor authors is still far from settled.

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not come from a minor language; rather, it is the literature produced by the minority in the major tongue, as is the case with English writings produced by Arab immigrant authors. Literature produced by Arab immigrant writers remains marginal in both Arabic and western societies. In Arabic societies, the writings of Arab immigrants are not accepted by the various autocratic regimes because they sit uneasily with the ostensible ideology of Arab Nationalism: an ideology which celebrates and promotes the glory of Arab civilization and the unity of Arab people. But in the West, these same authors are marginalized as Arabs. The predicament for Franco-Arabic writers of the Maghreb is similarly marginal. Like Anglo-Arab authors, Maghribi writers also seek to deterritorialize the colonizers’ language. In Experimental Nations, or, the Invention of the Maghreb, Reda Bensmaia examines the works of Maghribi writers which have been reduced to “ethnographic evidence” (7). These writers, he argues, occupy a place in the “transnational spaces”; therefore, their writings should not be viewed in a narrow definition of writers’ affiliation which is based on geographical borders (125). Like Anglo-Arab writers, Maghribi writers also experiment with the major language, French, and create a French of their own suited to their experiences. In this study, my focus is on Anglo-Arab writing, and the way in which such authors reinvigorate the major language, English, to fit their experiences, consciously bending and breaking conventions and linguistic codes, cross-­ fertilizing English and Arabic traditions and appropriating those traditions to deconstruct the English language in its majoritarian usage. Joseph Massad notes that Anglo-Arab novels are both English and Arabic novels that transform “English into Arabic and Arabic into English in revolutionary ways” (75). The use of the major language (English language in the context of my research), as Deleuze and Guattari proposed, raised many issues. It is argued that the use of the English language—a language having a colonial attitude and replete with European values—may stereotype Arab cultural norms and Arab political memory. However, the emerging Post-Arab Spring literature used English “as a tool of resistance to colonial and neo-­ colonial codes” (Nash 24). Anglo-Arab writers are seen as aware of the outlandish possibilities of the English language, as they fuse recondite dictionary lexis with standard Arabic vernaculars. Just as Kafka “takes [his Prague German] farther, to a greater degree of intensity, but in the direction of a new sobriety, a new and unexpected modification, a pitiless rectification, a straightening of the head” (Kafka: Towards Minor Literature

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25–26), so contemporary Anglo-Arab writers Arabize English by “investing it with extravagant metonymic equivalences that deliver it into a deterritorialized realm far beyond the bloodied terrain out of which it grew” (Nash 28–29). For example, Soueif uses the Arabic word shabab, the literal translation of which is “the youth” in Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. The word shabab refers to rebellious young men and they are usually idealistic. The English word “youth” does not work in the context of the revolution. This is perhaps the reason that Soueif uses the Arabic word shabab because the connotations in Arabic are of esprit de corps, or camaraderie which is much more than the simple word “the youth.” Further, Anglo-Arab authors’ choice of the English language “has contributed to their position as public intellectuals with a wide readership and influence on the revolutionary republic of letters inside and outside of the Arab world” (Sakr 12). Moreover, the selected authors spin out a different reading of the hyphen in this book. Unlike previous Anglo-Arab literature for which the hyphen designates cross-cultural mediation, my study of Post-Arab Spring literature provides a different reading of the hyphen that links “Anglo” to “Arab.” In the case of Post-Arab Spring literature, the hyphen functions less as a linkage between the Arab and the West and more as an affiliation of these writers with their home countries. Far from being deterritorialized, it is clear that Post-Arab Spring writing is rooted in its place of origin whereas hybrid Anglo-Arab writers interface with the upheavals of Middle Eastern history as well as with the deterritorialized realities of life in the western metropolises. Post-Arab Spring minor literature is practical by nature and demonstrates that the “writer is a man of action” who “participat[es] in the construction of the nation within which he will be comprehended” rather than being a corpus responding to the demand of exoticism, for knowledge of the Muslim and a response or writing back to the West (Lloyd 72). Further, post in Post-Arab Spring Literature, like the post in postcolonial, is heterogeneous and multifaceted. Like postcolonial, the term Post-Arab Spring is often reducible to after the Arab Spring. Instead, it is a whole new creation, one that is informed with new cultural thought—as evident in the subsequent chapters. Post-Arab Spring is not only concerned with the pre-Arab Spring era, but moving beyond it. It is consciously taking routes in different locales and histories. Not only do Anglo-Arab authors address political and cultural concerns of life in a

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decolonized nation (after the colonization), but they also refer to a complex grounding or in other words, the political and cultural context in which the book is set. According to Deleuze and Guattari, minor literature has three main characteristics, which are shared by Post-Arab Spring minor literature: first, “the deterritorialization of language”; second, “connection of individual to political immediacy” and third, “the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Kafka 19). The first and foremost characteristic of minor literature is “that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 16). In the context of minor literature, deterritorialization represents the various ways through which minor writers subvert a major language by using that language for granting validity and agency to the marginalized communities that he or she represents. I argue that the major tongue, or in other words the global language of English, in the hands of contemporary Arab immigrant writers, has been deterritorialized and transformed to meet the cultural specificity of Arab people; to help find their “own point of underdevelopment, [their] own patois, [their] own third world, [their] own desert” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 18). For this reason, they appropriate the English language by using more localized lexicons, glossing, and also disregarding syntactic rules. Knowing that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 99), Anglo-Arab writers still struggle to dismantle the English Language anyway “to rebuild an alternative with a different set of tools” as evident in the subsequent chapters (Katz 487). Reflecting on the uncertain future of the Arab world requires a language that could best describe the prevailing chaos and disintegration in the Arab world; “a deterritorialized language” which celebrates obscurity and insignificant characters that rebel against the totalitarian regime. In his writings, Kafka deliberately kills all metaphors, symbols and signification to mark “the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 16). In the same way, I believe contemporary Arab writers adopt different strategies to foster an appreciation for marginalized experience and also make it possible to speak of injustices and social taboos. This deterritorialization of the English language also calls into question the orientalists’ assumptions. These writers “accept the kind of representational burden implied in Deleuze and Guattari’s second and third features of minor literature” by

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rejecting the orientalist’s dichotomy altogether (Hassan 6).5 In so doing, Anglo-Arab authors escape the capitalist logic that Graham Huggan calls as strategic marginalization; instead, their literature can be reclaimed as body of work that opens up a space of a becoming-minor for English. In the brief essay, “Literature and Life,” Deleuze describes the function of literature in terms of stuttering, becoming, fabulation, and visions/ auditions (225). To achieve these functions, Deleuze claims that language (medium of literature) must escape the dominant linguistic system. In line with this view, contemporary Anglo-Arab writers experiment with language and “activate lines of continuous variation immanent within language” (Bogue 108). In so doing, these writers fashion their speech within a dominant language by engaging a mode of creative deformation that various minorities utilize. This kind of linguistic experimentation is directly political because it makes possible the inclusion of marginal literature within the category of minor literature and thus calls for the collective enunciation of a minor people who find their expression only through writing. Given this context, contemporary Anglo-Arab writers displace the literary convention of the global language, English, by making it stutter. Stuttering in the language does not mean “some form of the impediment of speech or pronunciation”; rather, it refers to “a way of speaking and writing in the language that is always emergent, hesitant, and taking new forms” (Gale 304). They stutter the English language by incorporating a range of vocabulary. For example, mathematical formulas in Book of Sands, and words borrowed from science (such as energy, motion, and evolution) in The Crocodiles. In some cases, these writers mix the languages of Arab and English to show that the English language is not adequate to express the identity and cultural heritage of Arabs; therefore, Anglo-Arab authors indigenize the English language to convey their Arabic experiences. For instance, in the selected texts, the male protestors are shown as wearing kaffiyeh—a square-shaped scarf worn by Arab men fastened by a band around the crown of the head. This is significant because Anglo-Arab novelists domesticate the English language in order to fit with the Arabic 5  The writings of Anglo-Arab authors are normally refracted through the prism of Orientalism. According to Wail S. Hassan, contemporary Anglo-Arab texts resist orientalist discourse by enacting cultural translation. These writers accept represent the burden of being a representative of their own people by deliberately deterritorializing English. This can take the form of the infusion of the English language with Arabic or linguistic and stylistic deterritorialization in favor of experimentation with the English language.

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culture in this context. In the same way, the word Habibi is used in almost all the selected texts. Habibi is an Arabic word that means my love, my dear or beloved and Arab writers use this word in different contexts. For instance, Haddad uses this word for his beloved Taymoor in Guapa, and Tariq in Book of Sands uses it for his daughter Neda in Book of Sands. It is worth mentioning here that the word Habibi is the most prevalent Arabic word with many uses as evident in the selected texts. They also use sensory language to convey an impression of the familiar environment of the Arab world. Moreover, they also incorporate Arabic myths (the myth of Ghoul, for example) and the direct translation of Arabic proverbs in their writings. Throughout my study, I discuss how these writers take a major tongue away from the dominant system, fashion the same language in their own tongue and thus minoritize a major language. I believe that these writers’ attempts at linguistic deterritorialization entail the reorientation and transformation of the major tongue and the creation of a new tongue in the same language; one which they use to portray their Arabness—people who live in Arab countries and share cultural characteristics, notably Arabic language and traditions—their society and their culture. Through linguistic stuttering, I suggest that these writers induce a becoming-other of language which is central to the function of literature. A becoming is always an in-between or as Deleuze and Guattari define it “a passage between things” (“Literature and Life” 225). To become is not to attain a form of identification but to find the zone of undifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished as a singular entity. Unlike major literature that views the author as a superior individual with a unique identity, minor literature embraces the anonymity of an author who places him/herself in the position of others to make them audible and thus acts as a collective enterprise. And when a minor writer enters into a process of becoming, I contend he/she invents those people who are missing, thereby enacting or realizing a fabulative function of literature. A minor writer must therefore invent a people that is lacking, or create a subject who could decode a binary power relation. I argue that minor writers must invent a subject of the collective, which decodes or unravels its externally enforced identity. For instance, Rasa, an autofictional character, is a voice from the homosexual community in the Arab world who unravels his fake identity and celebrates his gay identity at the end of the novel, Guapa (discussed in detail in Chap. 5). Deleuze claims that as a seer and a hearer, the minor writer pushes the language to its limit to seek to describe the ineffable. Accordingly, Anglo-Arab writers puncture language to reveal

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silences. They embellish their writings with color and sonorities to paint and sing the silenced reality. For instance, the style of Post-Arab Spring literature is characterized by pictures, painting, and graffiti to render visible invisible forces, music to render sonorous nonsonorous sounds, and cinema not only to render visible the invisible but also to disclose a speech that was once unspeakable. According to Deleuze, there are certain “veritable ideas which writers could see and hear in the interstices of language” (Essays Critical and Clinical 16). They are sounds, colors, and sights proper to language but at the same time, they render the language silent. My reading of Post-Arab Spring literature informs me that contemporary Arab writers attempt to make palpable the invisible, the unsayable, the insensible, the inaudible (people whose demands and needs are ignored) through various devices—the use of sensory language, metaphors, symbols, imagery, and through strategies of narrative-camera technique or cinematic narratives,6 magical realism, metafiction, journalistic technique and so on—primarily through evocative and incantatory chants (e.g., slogans used by protestors).7 At times this rhythm becomes muscular and rough, while at other times it becomes very quiet and self-effacing as evident in my analysis.8 Certainly, I believe that Anglo-Arab authors deterritorialize the major western traditions, that is to say, modernist and postmodern practices, for new forms of representation and new signifying regimes. They dismantle not only their autocratic regimes but also their western-backed policy by standing against them practically and figuratively in their writings and by using traditions of western art (e.g., magical realism and metafiction). Richard Jacquemond stresses the continuity of western art traditions in Arabic literature. However, at an analytical level, I argue that the narratives of the Arab uprisings unsettle generic boundaries while seeking rupture and continuity both with the narrative strategies and modes characterized by contemporary and earlier generations of writers as illustrated in the proceeding chapters. These narratives refer to the wider framework of what is called “new humanism” and “critical realism” and to the peculiar ways in which modernist and postmodernist 6  Using different film techniques in narrative to tell the story. For example, attention is paid to light, sound and music, and so on. 7  It is through this capacity of their writings that these authors gamble on the performative potential of creative fiction. 8  The examples throughout in this book are not simply instances of experimentation with form. I also illustrate how the inculcation of slogans, the mixing of Arabic and English and glossing create the environment of the Arab revolution.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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literary traditions develop in Arabic literature. I argue that these narratives express the present time’s uncertainty without proposing a radical departure from many of the earlier strategies that have been adopted in Arab literature. Building upon interrogatives, on rupture and continuity, my research suggests that Post-Arab Spring narratives hack the frame of reference in which they are written using different strategies and at different levels by recurring techniques and tactics such as reversion of languages and literary modes and their replication. Minor literature is not political in the sense that it does not necessarily involve the politics of what Deleuze and Guattari term molar organization (molar refers to organized, single, punctual organization). Rather, it connects different aspects of life, be they individual or social (indeed non-­ human, like the city), for the production of molecular revolution. The molecular is incessant, vital, and unruly; molecular movements constitute the potential to transverse and undermine the molar organization. Unlike major literature where “the social milieu serv[es] as a minor environment or a background,” in minor literature, the individual concern is connected with the larger juridical, commercial, bureaucratic, and economic social milieu (Deleuze and Guattari Kafka 17). For example, minor practices are mostly self-organizing. Coming into the streets against their government, sitting in Tahrir Square, chanting and singing a song against corrupt autocracy, graffiti, and lectures at Tahrir Square, these are all minor practices that ultimately lead to a molecular revolution. This is the essential feature of Post-Arab Spring literature; that it carves out a space that is not yet distinctly disciplined. Given this context, literature produced by Anglo-Arab authors can be understood as writing in-between disciplinary spaces in a way that considers the intersection between environment, social movements, politics, and the arts. It is neither singular nor a separate discipline; hence, borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, I refer to it as a series of plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari define a plateau as “a multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome,” suggesting that Post-Arab Spring literature establishes connections between different organizations and arts and literature (A Thousand Plateaus 2). Like the diverse society of the Arab world, the political horizon is also rhizomatic (a concept that accommodates connectivity and multiplicity). The rhizome assumes “diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 7). Horizontal practices such as

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graffiti, lectures, and singing, common during the Arab Spring, produce rhizomatic issues that cannot be categorized into a single unifying form; rather, they “proliferates along different lines of growth” (Sarnou 68). Therefore, their works resemble what Deleuze and Guattari describe in the context of Kafka’s work as crabgrass: a “bewildering multiplicity of stems and roots which can cross at any point to form a variety of possible connections” (Kafka 14). For instance, one of the common features of the selected works is that all actions are to be read as potentially politically engaged.9 Therefore, the characters and their actions are entangled in a network, an endless pattern in which “everything is linked to everything else” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 27). Minor literature involves collaboration, networks of collectives rather than individual talent or position, and thus calls for “an active solidarity in spite of scepticism” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). In such literature “what each author says individually already constitutes a common action” because he/she speaks on behalf of a whole ignored community (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). The marginal or excluded position of a writer allows him “to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). In this sense, minor literature invents a new mode of existence and creates a concept for “a new earth, a new people” by resisting the present (O’Sullivan 5). It does not talk about new people and a new earth in the literal sense but people who are already present and who decide to change their lived reality by challenging the hierarchical structure of their lands and the totalitarian regime that maintains such inequalities. This concept of minor literature interacts with the specific ethos of Post-Arab Spring narratives. Not only does it deterritorialize the global language by making it stutter, but it also dismantles the hegemonic structure of its own society. Rather than existing on the margins of their society, Anglo-Arab authors voice the perceptions of minor subjects and thus foreground collective utterances, grievances, and plights of minorities in their narratives, eventually adding diversity in themes, narratives, and styles to their writings. However, I think this definition of minor literature is too narrow to be applicable to other works produced by minor writers. Deleuze and Guattari claim that Kafka’s style of writing, or rather his process of writing, is specific to what they describe as a particular writing 9

 The example of such system is given in Chaps. 3 and 4 (pg.76).

1 INTRODUCTION 

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machine. Consequently, I would argue that Kafka’s writing cannot be exemplary of minor literature in general. They derive their axiom of interpretation that “only expression gives us the method” after the detailed analysis of Kafka’s literary machine: for example, they define its component parts and its connections and describe the whole process of how it is assembled, which make it so specific and rigid that it is not applicable to other writings (16). Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari work within the western context and propose their theory of minor literature with reference to western writings, namely Kafka and Beckett. Using the same theory in the context of Anglo-Arab literature without some pruning and grafting would be to limit and potentially distort its significance which is in itself vastly diverse and complex. A productive tension emerges when the concept of minor literature is read alongside Post-Arab Spring literature. This literature calls for a new framework that enables the exploration of the particular events of the Arab Spring as well as the different strategies and techniques to transcribe those events and experiences. Attempting to address this lacuna, my book revisits Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature and reformulates it according to the emerging literature. Keeping in view Kafka’s mode of expression, Deleuze and Guattari argue that a minor writer must assert him/herself through the use of metamorphosis and must reject conventional metaphor for the successful deterritorialization of the major language. Metaphor and metamorphosis function as opposites because metaphor signifies the form, subject to the readers’ individual interpretation, whereas metamorphosis is characterized by structural experimentation, and thus direct the readers while reading. Deleuze and Guattari prefer metamorphosis because in this case, a reader does not need to interpret; rather, he/she discovers the meaning as the text leads him/her. Without ever approaching metamorphosis, Post-Arab Spring literature is characterized by the use of metaphor, as well as modernist and postmodernist literary strategies, as set out in the chapters that follow. I argue that the use of metaphorical form and other modernist and postmodern strategies (e.g., magical realism and metafiction) does not necessarily compromise the deterritorialization of a major language. Rather, in the case of Post-Arab Spring literature, metamorphosis exempts itself as a prerequisite for the successful articulation of minor literature so that readers can participate in making connections and meanings while they read. Considering the experimentation with form and language in the selected novels, I demonstrate that Anglo-Arab immigrant writers drift

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away from Deleuze and Guattari’s original notion of minor literature and thus expand and redefine it.

Post-Arab Spring Narratives as Minor Literature While the foregoing provides significant details about minor literature, I am particularly interested in the ways in which contemporary Arab writers deterritorialize the major tongue, English. I thus draw attention to the stylistic choices made by contemporary authors and show how this contributes effectively to my study because it helps to review and reconsider the stylistic aspect of the theory of minor literature. My readings confirm Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that with revolutionary literature “expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sproutings,” as throughout my study, I assert that the Arab Spring engenders diverse narratives: personal narratives, postmodern narratives, urban narratives and humanitarian narratives, among others (28). After an analysis of Post-Arab Spring narratives with reference to the concept of minor literature, I conclude that these narratives are more of a process rather than a finished product. Therefore, I believe that it is more accurate to call it minor writing rather than minor literature, although Deleuze and Guattari use both terms interchangeably. Post-Arab Spring literature as an example of minor writing pushes up against the edges of representation and forces it to the limits for a new form of representation. In the light of these paradigms, I discuss the idea that Post-Arab Spring narratives have a propensity toward being minoritarian. Deleuze and Guattari argue that “what in great literature goes down below—here takes place in the full light of day, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). Therefore, streets, jungles, libraries, bookshops, universities, journalism, informal sectors, museums, schools, and all the governmental institutions and their mechanisms which are typically rendered are brought to the light as the “central telos” of the narrative. The individual tales are tied to the territory of the whole nation with which they are affiliated. Since the revolutionary experience holds transformative potential for absolute deterritorialization, Post-Arab Spring narratives point toward linguistic deterritorialization by default. With this context in mind, I demonstrate that the global language, English, is taken “farther in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety—arriv[ing] at a perfect and unformed expression, a materially intense expression” (Deleuze and

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Guattari, Kafka 19). I argue that Post-Arab Spring narratives are comprised of a revolutionary language which is a collection of slogans, chants, tweets, and speech acts—directives, declaratives, commissives, and assertives. In a nutshell, it is simple and plain language which minimizes the figurative sense in order to maximize the survival of the collective. Yet this language is political because it strives for freedom, justice, and rights as Jan Mohamed argues that minor literature is positively charged “with the role and function of collective, even revolutionary utterances” (296). Unlike canonical Arab writings, which follow a “vector that goes from content to expression,” I claim that Post-Arab Spring literature begins by expressing itself. My objectives have been to highlight ways in which Anglo-Arab authors carve a “new space within cramped conditions” for those who are invisible (Piotrowski 83). My reading of Post-Arab Spring literature suggests that these writings, in both aim and process, are anti-­ essentialist and emerge as counter-narratives that serve to undermine the revolutionary rhetoric elsewhere proclaimed by new rulers. In The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi suggests that the Arab Spring “marks the end of postcolonial ideological formations” which is characterized by its oppressive nature and its subjugation (17). On the contrary, the Arab uprisings demonstrate the persistence of authoritarianism, re-autocratization in some regions like Egypt and the resilience of monarchy in Morocco, Jordan, and the Gulf states. The emerging Post-­ Arab Spring literature presents this critique of old and new orthodoxies. Though my main focus is on fictional rather than journalistic representations of the Arab revolution, I occasionally refer to the depiction of different aspects of the Arab uprisings in mainstream journalistic reportage in order to contextualize my debate on the different aspects of the Arab uprisings.

Chapter Overview Chapter 2 focuses on the memoirs of Hisham Matar and Ahdaf Soueif, in which they narrate revolution from the ground up by using a cinematic narrative technique. Soueif and Matar draw links between writing and revolution while exploring how the act of witnessing/writing can produce narrative memory. The first half of the chapter highlights the Egyptian revolution in Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed (2014). In her memoir, Soueif writes that it was “impossible to sit in a corner and write about the revolution” (1); therefore, she flew to Cairo “to revolute and write at the

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same time” (2). Written in the form of a diary, she provides snapshots of the revolution by inserting dates and times in her memoir. In the second half of Chap. 2, I discuss the Libyan revolution with special reference to The Return: Father, Sons and the Land in Between (2016). Hisham Matar went back to Libya when the revolution broke out there. The Return (2016) is an account of his journey and presents a detailed eyewitness account of events. It is noteworthy that all three of Matar’s novels are inspired by his personal life. His other two novels—In the Country of Men and Anatomy of a Disappearance—are written before the Arab uprisings and are based on his own idea of Libya and his childhood memories of the country. In those two novels, he has fictionalized the account of his absent father whereas in his third book he presents his illuminating journey to Libya, both psychological and physical, in search of his father, and presents the on-the-ground scenario of the unfolding revolution. While focusing on the stylistic aspects of both memoirs, this chapter centers on the discussion of how each author, as a minor writer configures the immediate historical, social, and political dimension of the revolution. What is particularly distinctive about these memoirs is the way Soueif and Matar use diverse strategies to historicize the present and to ensure the representation of the marginalized people. In Chap. 3, I explore the writings of Karim Alrawi and Youssef Rakha. Like Soueif and Matar, Alrawi and Rakha also participate in the revolution and represent the Arab Spring and the Post-Arab Spring scenario of the Arab world in their novels. They inform the world about the doomed 2011 revolution by using postmodern strategies of magical realism and metafiction. Many writers around the world have long used magical realism to criticize totalitarian regimes, and given the inherent unreliability of language to portray reality a metafictional strategy is used to portray the uncertain scenario. Using magical realism in Book of Sands, Alrawi foregrounds the corruption, recurrent authoritarianism and despotism in the Arab world whereas in The Crocodiles Rakha employs a metafictional strategy to exhibit precarious scenarios of the Arab world. In so doing, I argue that they capture the contested reality of the Arab world. I posit that their narratives are postmodern narratives because the stories in both novels refuse to be narrated chronologically, but rather play out in a postmodern self-reflexive manner on several different levels of narration, place, and time. The above writers present the Arab revolution, the mass upheaval against the totalitarian regime and the uncertainty in the Post-Arab Spring

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Arab world using different literary strategies. However, the Arab Spring does not end with the mass outbreak and the toppling of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Rather, it worsens in many parts of the Arab world with the passage of time. The Arab Spring becomes an urban phenomenon when Arab security forces, whose job is to secure and protect their own people, in different parts of the Arab world turn the home front into a battleground, converting all major cities of the Arab world into military targets. Chapter 4 charts this transition of the Arab revolution from peaceful demonstration to urbicide. This chapter deals with the urban narratives produced by Yasmine El Rashidi and Omar Robert Hamilton. El Rashidi and Hamilton discuss the changing dynamics of the urban landscape in the wake of the Arab Spring and counter the state’s narrative of military protection for the revolution and revolutionaries. Like other writers, El Rashidi and Hamilton also went back to their countries and sat in Tahrir Square to protest against the autocratic regime with others. Being journalists themselves, they blend fact and fiction in their novels and produce creative non-fiction. They explore the transformation of the Cairo landscape through neoliberal policies and the security forces’ violence, posing the question of how Cairo subsequently emerges as a revolutionary space of dissent. Their decision to write urban narratives helps them to reveal the silenced voices of those who are living unknown lives in the streets of Cairo, such as street hawkers. Owing to its immediacy and “close connection with the street” I consider this literature as distinct from previous cultural production (13). Bearing in mind this historical context, my aim is to highlight that the Arab Spring was not just a social movement held in the city; rather, the city is the main site of the Arab revolution. I suggest that as minor writers, they represent the unrepresentable spaces to highlight those people that are spatially off-limits. The first part of the chapter focuses on El Rashidi’s portrayal of pre-Arab Spring Cairo in which she reveals those urban practices which have made revolution inevitable. She represents the city’s progression in detail to reveal its political history. The second half of the chapter concentrates on those spatial practices that revolutionaries adopt to assert their right to the city. The chapter ends with the discussion of how El Rashidi and Hamilton’s writings create minor space for all those who participate in the revolution in their writings. Chapter 5 considers the fabulative function of minor literature. I argue that writers like Saleem Haddad and Nada Awar Jarrar embrace the discourse of human rights and work as humanists as well as novelists. With

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the help of minor literature, these novelists invent those people who are missing from the world’s larger narratives. For example, in the Arab world, migrants, and refugees, as well as gay and lesbian people, have been widely discriminated against. These groups are subjected to severe persecution based on their political beliefs and sexual orientation. The latter constitute a group particularly vulnerable to human rights abuse in Arab counties. However, after the Arab Spring, these marginalized groups are now incorporated in the mainstream group of “the people,” all cognizant of and demanding their rights. Like other subjugated groups of the world, LGBTQ+ communities and refugees also find sanctuary in literature in which they explore their identities, grieve their losses and celebrate their joys. This chapter focuses on the ways in which Post-Arab Spring fiction speaks of migrant, refugee experiences and sexual identities with special reference to Haddad’s Guapa and Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven. I suggest that these writers assert their voice and carve a space for Arab refugees, exiles, and gay people through autofictions. The novels studied in this monograph differ significantly from one another in style, subject matter, and setting. However, all of these texts are dominated by the theme of political struggle, which eventually gives courage to people to find their voices. The early Post-Arab Spring literature is emotionally charged and euphoric in tone, and is followed by disillusionment. However, the distinction between the first period of optimism and subsequent disenchantment is not clear considering that the Arab revolution involves vastly different systems of governance. Perhaps, literature produced immediately after the Arab Spring adheres to the euphoric account of Tahrir; however, with the passage of time, literary optimism has disappeared; my book is organized accordingly around the timeline of the Arab Spring. Starting from initial eyewitness narratives in the first chapter, the selected novelists transcribe every stage of the cultural and political: from excitement to disillusionment, optimism to despair, and hope to trauma.

CHAPTER 2

Writing the Present to Commemorate: Personal Narratives of the Arab Revolution in Ahdaf Soueif’s Memoirs of a City Transformed and Hisham Matar’s The Return In Literary Autobiography and Arab National Struggles, Tahia Abdel Nasser argues about the historical significance of autobiographical writing: “Arab writers chronicled life and experience within vast networks of cultural-­ historical relations; they explicitly or obliquely revisited the national landscape that shaped them” (3). Nasser’s view that life writing provides insight into the place, time, and culture in which it is produced becomes the starting point for this chapter. Herein, I consider the impact of the Arab revolution on Arab life writing since 2011. In doing so, I argue that the socio-political reality of the Arab revolution influences writers’ creative decisions. Unlike previous life writings, the Arab spring memoirs “replicate a revolution in the making, so that it does not simply record—but form parts of the events” (Nasser 131). Indeed, Soueif writes, “the revolution is not an event but a process, a process we’re all going through, and this book is going through it with us, fitting itself to the altered forms of the revolution” (xiv–xv). Conscious of the historicity of the moment, Anglo-Arab minor writers are endeavoring to produce narrative memory. This chapter focuses on the narrative configuration of revolution, primarily in Ahdaf Soueif’s Memoir of a City Transformed (2014) and Hisham Matar’s The Return (2016), which I call as the personal narratives and journalistic memoirs of the Arab Spring. I argue that these writers combine their observation with eyewitness testimony in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_2

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which they perform an act of memory-making by storying the present for the future. I avoid a reductive approach that would view each text as an autobiography which is highly impressionistic. However, the claim that they combine memoirs with testimony and create a future history is supported by the writings of both writers to whom I devote the most attention, Ahdaf Soueif (an Egyptian novelist and a political and cultural commentator) and Hisham Matar (British-Libyan author). The use of journalistic reportage, interviews, human right reports, and the excerpts from their emails and blogs supports my argument of journalistic memoirs. Rather than representing only the on-ground scenario of the Arab revolution, it is striking to note that these writers “establish a peculiar relationship” with “the past and (perhaps also) with the future” to diagnose and unveil the oppressive regimes of the Arab world and thus offer prospective as well as retrospective narratives (Agamben, What is an Apparatus? 49–50). Given this context, both writers exemplify what Giorgio Agamben calls “contemporaries” who “firmly hold [their] gaze on [their] own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness” (What is an Apparatus? 44). The contemporary is a person who can perceive the obscurity and who could write about that obscurity. Like contemporaries, these writers perceive the darkness of their epoch and seek to articulate and preserve it in their narratives. Perceiving the darkness means that the contemporaries do not merely represent the given state of affairs. Since the Arab revolution is an evolving phenomenon, writers face difficulties in articulating disrupted present, incoherent, non-hegemonic relations of space and time, and envisioning the future of the revolution. The unpredictability of what revolution could bring is clearly reflected in diverse forms of the narratives of revolution. The two memoirs, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed (2014) by Ahdaf Soueif and The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016) by Hisham Matar, that I discuss here represent an on-ground scenario of the Arab revolution. Both writers participate in the revolution and their narratives offer a unique perspective on the Arab revolution and what it means to be caught up in a moment of change. Their attempt at witnessing and writing simultaneously make their narratives flexible, provisional, and open to revision. Owing to the evolving nature of revolution, the process of recording it is necessarily open-ended. In this regard, an inconclusive technique can capture the revolutionary spirit of such narratives. This is of great significance because the narrative of the revolution is closely related to the revolution itself. It largely focuses on registering the revolutionary scene accurately

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and to reflect the social tensions during the revolution. Therefore, the narrative of the revolution comprises divergent narrative techniques that are necessarily not related to one another. The participants (protestors) of the revolution belong to different strata; something which necessitate different levels of discourse. This has resulted in “heterogamous narrative discourse” which clearly illustrates the differences among those who support the revolution and those who oppose it. For example, the protestors’ adherence to peaceful demonstration is rendered through signposts, dialogue, slogans, tweets, and posters throughout the narratives. This also represents these narratives as counter narrative discourses to the governmental discourse of the revolution. The focus of this chapter is to examine the narrative discourse of the revolution. I prefer to use the term discourse because it comprises both the mode of narration and the style of technique. Discourse here represents diverse narrative techniques employed by the selected authors that I discuss in the first part of the chapter with reference to Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed and The Return. Moreover, I call it discourse because both writers fuse social, historical, political, and poetical narratives, which stand as more than just mere texts but discourses. In her narrative, Soueif incorporates radio and TV scripts, her written emails and many newspaper articles, revolutionary songs and anthems and maps of Cairo. For instance, she incorporates full poems which revolutionaries sang during the protest. Similarly, Matar combines his past research about his father’s absence, many of his written articles and reports about the human rights violations in the different newspapers, his father’s written scripts and poems, prisoners’ testimonies together in the form of a memoir. For instance, he incorporates long excerpts from his father’s prose fiction when one of his uncles presented to him.

Arab Spring Memoirs: Keeping the Discourse of the Revolution Alive in Minor Literature As I have stated earlier, my aim in this book is not to foreground the portrayed reality surrounding the Arab Spring events. My aim instead is to examine the narrative strategies used in both memoirs and the way it contributes in revising the concept of minor literature. My focus here is to highlight the various narrative techniques employed by both authors in their memoirs. Interestingly enough, many writers have spoken about the

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difficulty of writing fiction during uprisings and the need to participate actively in the revolution. Ahdaf Soueif addresses this issue in a piece of the Guardian magazine in August, 2012 saying that artists must perform “the responsibility of citizenship” at the time of crisis and as a citizen, her duty is “to be present, there, on the ground, marching, supporting, talking, instigating, and articulating” (Soueif “In Times of Crisis”). She believes that as an artist her gift “is narrative”; she does not want to escape but rather “to be part of the great narrative of the world” and thus constructs the present for a future generation (Soueif “In Times of Crisis, Fiction Has to Take a Back Seat” theguardian.com, Sept. 2018). Likewise, in his talk at the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias, Matar says that in the wake of the Arab Spring in Libya, he “wants to be close to the earth and wants to understand the complexity of the present” (“Podcast: Hisham Matar Speaks About His Memoir, ‘The Return: Father, Sons and the Land in Between’ at Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias 2017,” britishcouncil. org, Sept. 2018). Therefore, he returns to Libya and starts recording his experience in his memoir, The Return: Father, Sons and the Land in Between. Given this context, it is noteworthy that both writers start their memoirs with the outbreak of the revolution, the moment they decide to go back to their country. For example, when the revolution broke out in Egypt, Soueif was “in India” to attend “the Jaipur Literary Festival” (Soueif 5). When she heard the news of revolution in Egypt, she decided to go back to her country, noting that “what transfixed me so completely was that the picture on the [TV] screen was from Tahrir” (Soueif 7); therefore, next day she “caught a plane that put [her] in Cairo on the evening of Thursday the twenty seventh” (Soueif 10). Likewise, when “Tripoli fell, and revolutionaries took control of Abu-Salim” Matar decided that he “wanted to be there” (Matar 11). This illustrates that for both writers, revolution becomes a mean of re-establishing and strengthening their connection with their countries. It also indicates political awareness of both writers, as they are alert to the problems that their societies have been experiencing and at the same time play their roles at the time of crisis, in their capacity either as writers or as political or literary activists. For instance, when the revolution erupts, Soueif is seen to be involved in the protest while writing about the revolution as she proclaims that we (Soueif along with so many other Cairenes) are “taking part in the events that are shaping our lives and our children’s future as I write” (Soueif 6). During all this time, she writes inside stories of Tahrir square

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for different national and international press media on the one hand and provides “blankets, bottles of water, medical supplies” and “mobile charge cards for the people in the sit-in” on the other hand (120). During the initial days of the revolution in Libya, Matar was not present on the revolutionary ground yet he lent his hand indirectly to revolution even before the rising began. He belongs to a human rights group of activists and writers “who have their own histories of being victims and who write seeking to redeem themselves from their losses, pains, and grieves to attain approximate catharsis for their sufferings” (Mirdha 24). In this way, they situate “themselves as world citizens in an international civic sphere” (Mirdha 24).1 This evidence shows that in the wake of the Arab revolution, both writers honor their responsibility as citizens to their countries and fulfill their duty as writers by preserving the present for the future in the form of their memoirs. Soueif’s Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed presents an illustration of Cairo during the Egyptian revolution in 2011. The title clearly illustrates that it is a portrait of a city, Cairo, with its resonant history. The word memoir in the title shows that this book merges the past and the present of Cairo. Soueif tells us a story of a conversation that happens in the streets of Cairo. She creates a poetic personification of her city in which Cairo emerges as a dynamic and evolutionary entity. History in her memoir is twofold: personal and political. In fact, her personal is political because the personal events of her life, her relatives, and her home, even the hospital in which she is born, are all intricately tied to the politics of her country. The events that precede January 25 and February 11, 2011, and those that succeed make Soueif particularly conscious of the fact that history does not only record the past in books but is also a living reality of everyday life. Violence and massacre, the loss of fellow humans and the constant insecurity of existence are features of this everyday life. Soueif attempts to historicize the haunting and oppressive reality with which Egyptians grapple and wrestle every day. In so doing, she conceptualizes the history of her city Cairo and reconstructs it in meaningful categories. She captures the initial euphoria of Tahrir square protestors and their struggles to end 1  The process of storytelling is generally marked as the beginning of a healing process for the victims. In this regard, Matar also inscribes the grief of his “absent-present” father through his writings. It has been noticed that he is motivated to map the disruptive effect of stunting life choices in a repressive regime through writing. Thus, his texts are personalized as a statement of injustice and to address the denial of human rights to himself and his father as well as to the Libyan population.

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three decades of Hosni Mubarak’s US-backed police state. She informs the world about the strong determination of Egyptians who form a human chain around their country’s assets (museums and antique souvenirs, for example) to protect those assets which have been sold out by the Egyptian government. She also tells how this moment of national unity is snuffed out by the military. Since she is trying to capture unfolding political events, the structure of her book is confusing. She starts with revolution then pauses in the middle and goes back to reveal all those causes that make the Egyptian uprisings inevitable. She herself acknowledges that to keep pace with writing the revolution is impossible. She tries, however, to do so and even publishes an updated version of her memoir with an addition of 100 more pages to show the aftermath of the revolution in 2014. In her updated version, she also introduces a forward momentum to show what happened after the revolution. The Return is a story about a writer investigating his father, Jaballa Matar’s fate at the hand of the brutal autocratic regime and a son’s effort to come to terms with the death of his father. The sense of living with an “absent-present” burdens him to the extent that he decides to return to Libya with the hope of releasing the uncertainties that constrain his life (Matar 39). All his life, he feels trapped inside “a room, barely high enough for a man to stand and certainly not wide enough for him to lie down” (Matar 15). He says that “no matter how hard [he] tr[ies], [he] could not find a trapdoor, a pipe, anything leading out” (Matar 15). Therefore, he decides to return to Libya to face the ugly truth of his “father’s unknown death and silence” (Matar 34–35). The story of the pursuit of his father turns out to be a tale of a disturbing depiction of the brutal regime, absolute power, and people on the cusp of change. He goes back to Libya when “justice, democracy and the rule of law [a]re within reach” during the 2011 revolution (Matar 140). Even before the revolution, he spends his entire life as an activist, and he opposes the Qaddafi regime through his writings and through continuous struggle against the regime from outside Libya. Unlike Soueif, Matar never takes part in protest physically but remains an observer of the protest. He writes The Return with emotional detail and gives us an authentic account of place and time. It would be an injustice to call this memoir a family saga; it is also a portrait of Libya. Matar links the personal story of his father’s abduction with the political history of his homeland and reveals the brutality of Qaddafi’s regime. Through the inclusion of his grandfather’s story, he gives an account of colonial

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Libya—a time when the country is exploited emotionally and economically by Italy. The story is not told chronologically; instead, the narrative jumps from present to past and vice versa. One reason may be that the past of Libya is intermingled with the present as part of the country’s current uncertain scenario: the cycle of fears and hope is writ in the country’s past. Faced with the anarchy of his fragmented country, Matar’s memoir introduces the scenario of the Arab Spring in Libya, when “the entire country was poised on a knife-edge” (140). It reports that Matar has “never been anywhere where hope and apprehension are at such a pitch (Matar 50). He writes that “anything seems possible and nearly every individual met speak of his optimism and foreboding in the same breath” (Matar 50). He also shows how the military seizes control of the different parts of Libya and the civil war destroys the hope of the Arab uprisings. It is important to consider that both writers end their texts at an arbitrary point. Neither text has a clear sense of closure because the revolution in their countries is on-going which keeps on affecting writers’ stylistic decisions throughout their narratives to produce complete/incomplete texts. These decisions involve the choice of tense, the use of pronouns, the shift between public and private self. Using little or no fabrication, both texts deal with the actual events of the Arab uprisings. They merge the past with the present and the personal with politics. While observing demonstrations unfolding and people’s aspirations for the uprisings, both writers choose to record these grand historical events in memoirs rather than turning them into fiction for which they would need more time. Soueif argues that writing fiction at the moment of revolution is not possible as “the immediate truth is too glaring to allow a more subtle truth to take the form” (Soueif, “In Times of Crisis”). She acknowledges that she may turn to fiction later using stories of revolution for writing a novel. Similarly, in an interview given to Fiction Writers Review, Matar admits that he will probably write a novel one day on the subject of the Libyan revolution but not at the time of revolution because fiction “responds slowly” (“The Trouble with Talking: An Interview with Hisham Matar,” fictionwritersreview.com, Sept. 2018). For the reasons outlined above, I argue that both writers distance themselves from writing fiction and produce personal narratives, a representative of a zeitgeist at this particular juncture. It is argued that a memoir is “an attempt at setting the record straight, of telling the facts” (Nesher 259). In this respect, these writers attempt to record the real events of the Arab uprisings by casting themselves as the witness and narrator of their

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narratives to produce journalist memoirs. It is worth noting that in their narratives, they appear as journalists and as well as the main characters, reporting about the Arab revolution rather than contemplating their personal lives. Their narratives are a reflection of real events seen through the eyes of real-world people; therefore, these writers choose to write memoirs as the hegemony of realism is increased in memoirs (Elaskary and El-Gabry 3). They reconstruct the historical situation by rewriting and correcting past events. Hindsight enables readers to see the emerging narratives as bearing witness to the grand historical moment all too often “denied and disfigured” in the words of Egyptian writer, Radwa Ashour (88). Moreover, the writers’ attempts at writing memoirs can also be seen as an effort to provide a healing catharsis to the victims of revolution and thus make audible the inaudible like protestors and activists. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith claim that memoirs and personal narratives are a powerful literary genre for the highlighting of human rights violations for helping to gain “both local and international audiences” (13) for the “voices of dissent” (15). In these works, “the pressure of memories of traumatic past and the hopes for an enabling future are held in balance” (Schaffer and Smith 8). In line with the same thought, Whitlock argues that memoirs can “make powerful interventions in debates about social justice, sovereignty, and human rights” because it foregrounds those people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard (Whitlock 3). These personal narratives can be positioned as minor literature on the basis of the three interconnected characteristics of that form.2 I argue that as a retrospective exploration of the Arab Spring, these personal narratives, as in minor literature, do not only intertwine the individual concern with the broader social milieu, but also highlight broader interconnected socio-­ political issues, such as the history of violence, corruption, and even pre-­ colonial time. The writings of both writers demonstrate that in their countries “the family triangle connects to other triangles—commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical—that determine its value” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). People in the Arab countries are entangled in the wrecked system and they are complicit in the general state of corruption and bribery and so on. In so doing, these writers force “each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern in minor literature, thus, becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because the whole story is vibrating within it” (Deleuze and 2

 As described in the Introduction, page number 21.

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Guattari, Kafka 17). Considering the stylistic aspect of both memoirs, I also demonstrate that both writers use different strategies to historicize the present and to ensure the representation of the marginalized people such as protestors, activists, writers, prisoners, and so on, which eventually expand the concept of minor literature. To begin with an elaboration of the first attribute of minor literature, as listed in the introduction, that serves as the foundation for what follows, minor literature is constructed by a minority “in a major language” within a major system (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 16). Despite their minor status, Anglo-Arab authors choose to articulate their social reality as well as the reality of marginalized communities that they represent through a major tongue, as exemplified by Franz Kafka who does not write in his native language Czech but rather in German. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “since the language is arid,” a minor writer “make[s] it vibrate with a new intensity” (Kafka 19). Therefore, Arab immigrant writers purposefully use the English language as a medium for discourse and communication to integrate their Arabness within the socio-political sphere of English language and culture. They extend the language to its very limit to discover, as Paul Ricoeur states, a “new resonance within itself” (3).3 Using peculiar strategies to portray the fractured and cryptic realities of their countries, the selected authors push the language “farther in the direction of deterritorialization, to the point of sobriety”—in short to utilize the word in an unexpected intensities—and articulate a political critique—the second defining feature of minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 19). Minor literature is a property of people who make and consume it. This literature is not burdened with greatness; rather, it is political in immediate sense. By linking their personal stories with the politics of their countries, both writers substantiate Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (Kafka 17). The social milieu in their narratives is no doubt “a mere environment or a background” as in the case of major literature, but “every piece of personal property, display of idiosyncrasy, and various territorialities” they discuss in their narratives is utilized as public property. 3  Recognizing the fundamental power of language in constructing the world, the works of these writers demonstrate that there is not just political and epistemological imagination, but also, a linguistic imagination that generates and regenerates meaning through the power of metaphoricity.

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Every individual tale and act are tied to the politics of their countries as evident in both memoirs. While the context and content are important aspects of their work, my focus is on their experimentation with the form to “concentrate on the need of the whole minority” (“What is Minor Literature” 2) and this defines the third aspect of minor literature—“the execution of collective utterances” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). The final characteristic of minor literature works to tie all three characteristics together. Deleuze and Guattari argue that in minor literature “there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation” (Kafka 17). To speak on behalf of the whole community, both authors themselves become the narrator—the voice of the common people—of their narratives. They use various documents like journalistic reports, images of martyrs, human rights reports and testimonies of prisoners to incorporate divergent experiences and collective utterances. In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson talks about a new type of subjectivity in which individuality is completed by collectivity. He claims that collectivity neither means that individual lost his/her distinctive individuality nor means that he is lost in a communal individuality but all of us are “indeed a single experiencing individual, yet at the same time, we [are] in a very important and delightful manner distinct from one another” (Jameson 8). A pioneer of cultural memory, Jan Assman, also speaks of collective memory, that writing “social groups constitute a cultural memory, from which they derive their collective identity” (qtd. in Erll 29). Given this context, Soueif and Matar both write in relation to the alterity to the official narratives of the totalitarian regime. In comparison to all those decisions, identities, and meanings that make a reservoir of the authoritarian regime, in the writings of Soueif and Matar, a new political subjectivity emerges that holds the potential to reflect the social group’s life world and its own self-image. They are in the words of Bromley “proleptic and prefigurative: scripting a socially shared, and shareable, future through mnemonic potential and iconic augmentation” (223). They incorporate many voices in their narratives of revolution—characteristics that make it a potential work of minor literature. The Arab revolution does not have any prominent figure or head who can lead a group of people; in fact, a group of people together march and anticipate that they would be successful. This is illustrated in their narratives where collective heroism replaces the individual leadership. All the protestors equally

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participate and play a significant role in shaping the course of the revolution and both writers engage all of these voices when transcribing it. This polyphony of voices makes the narrative more plausible and representative of the revolution as they incorporate the collective utterances of all those who participate in the revolution. Soueif and Matar consciously use the major language to create “alternative subjectivities, spatialities and temporalities” in their writings (Katz 490). To achieve this goal, both writers use diverse literary strategies, for example, the use of metaphor, proverbial expressions, foreshadowing, visual memories, imagery, sensory language, and so on. which alter the existing understanding of minor literature and extend it. In doing so, they deconstruct the available range of meanings not only to create future history but also to build a new reflexive analysis of the revolution. Perspective, language, tense, and tone: all these factors together contribute to what Bromley terms “we-narrative” for “collective refiguration” (224).

The Reconfiguration of the Revolution Soueif and Matar attributed new meanings to the events through writing memoirs. They made their writing bespeak about the events of the Arab Spring. Their narratives present the first-hand experience of the people who believe in taking the “country’s affairs in hand” and renouncing the centuries old authoritarian regime (Badiou 109). Thus, these stories become an emblem of a unique narrative structure that combine time with iconic and mnemonic properties as these narratives become preserver of Arab history. By recording these narratives in aesthetic form, Soueif’s and Matar’s narratives speak about both collective and individual memory. According to Ernst Van Alphen, memory and experience are “shaped and structured according to the parameters of available discourses” (96).4 The most challenging task for the writer is to take into consideration today’s needs and to produce a new form of text that is mentioned as “prosthetic” texts by Alison Landsberg, which “emphasize the bodily experiential, sensuous and affective” dimension of testimonial writing (qtd. in Erll 133). By doing so, a writer would be able to acclaim his 4  This implies that those who have lived through extreme experiences sometimes cannot represent anything more to themselves than having lived through events. Hence, it was difficult for both writers to represent the events. Van Alphen calls this phenomenon the failed experience which needs discursive construction.

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­ resence in texts, and simultaneously it will make his/her texts receptive p to the readers. A writer is a means through which the link between event and recording could be maintained as he/she “sutures himself or herself into a larger history” (Erll 133). Due to the unavailability of historical accounts, both writers seem to rely on their experiences and imaginations in shaping their narratives. By recording the present and encoding the future, these texts emerge as a first-hand account of place, time, and experience of revolution, which questions the relationship that exists between the text and the sociocultural surroundings in which it is produced. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur claims that “time becomes human time” when it is organized in a “narrative” pattern and narrative becomes significant when “it portrays the features of temporal experience” (qtd. in Erll152). Human time is defined as the tension between the “horizon of expectations and the space of experiences” human beings foresee the future while keeping in view the present circumstance (Grethlein 316).5 They are either disappointed or fulfilled by new experiences, “which in turn not only forms the background for new expectations but also retroactively transforms the memory of previous expectations and experiences” (Grethlein 316). This definition of human time is crucial in exploring the temporal configuration of narrative as the tension between experience and expectation is established in the narratives as well. This tension is evident at the level of action in the texts of the Arab uprising as in both memoirs, it can be noticed that the expectations of the people regarding revolution are either fulfilled or the people face disappointment in the end. In the narratives of revolution, the revolutionary perception is embedded in a field of what Edmund Husserl terms “re- and pro-tensions, in which previous perceptions continue to resonate and coming perceptions are anticipated” (qtd. in Grethlein 315). The pro-­ tension is plausibly unknown and thus it can either be presaged or remains open to revisiting. For instance, Soueif foresees the future of revolution as “No More Torture!” “We have entered the new phase” (Soueif 150), “We’ll get married/We’ll have kids—Lift your head up high, you’re Egyp-­ tian” (Soueif 152). Her utopian expectation about the future depends on the successful toppling of the Egyptian regime which she rebuts in the later version of her memoir. 5  This tension between expectation and experience provides the ground on which we can explore the narrative configuration of time.

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Ricoeur notes that literary world-making is governed by the interaction among the “prefiguration” of any text, a reference to the existing extra-­ textual world; the “textual configuration,” the narrative operation which creates literature; and the “refiguration” which refers to the reader interpretation. Keeping in view this approach, literature “appears as an active and constructive process in which cultural system of meaning, narrative operations, and reception participate equally, and in which reality is not merely reflected, but in fact, poetically refigured and iconically augmented” (Erll 152). Ricoeur’s speculation regarding the literary text as tied to the external literary world proposes that narrative construction is grounded in the external world of action, its structures, its resources, and its temporal character. Therefore, extra-textual reality and the narrative enter into a mutual relationship of change and influence, which means that the threefold Mimesis6 of Ricoeur brings together the textual world, the real world, and the reader. Whitlock presents a similar idea about the memoir that it “refers to the lived experience” by professing “subjective truths” (8). According to her contention, memoir engages readers to the extent that readers become part of the portrayed world (Whitlock 8). In line with this idea, Soueif and Matar transform “fabula” into “sjuzhet” in a way, which reviews the past of their countries on the one hand and also shapes our (readers’) expectation on the other hand—the third mimesis of Ricoeur’s model.7 According to Ricoeur, the reception of narrative is also an experience like real life: “our consciousness is filled with re- and pro-tensions” (326). With respect to this, both writers recount the experiences of protestors and make their texts perceptible to the readers by using diverse devices like signposts, images, sensory language, metaphors, proverbs, and so on. The narrative structure holds future promises as we see that throughout the narratives, Soueif prioritizes her readers over the character by informing her readers about her helplessness and her decision why she chooses a certain style for her books. In her revised version, Soueif keeps the ending open by acknowledging that she has “no idea what will be happening in Egypt as you read it” but at the same time she anticipates that by the time “when you read these words, many months from now, maybe we’ll be  Mimesis 1 (Prefiguration), Mimesis 2 (Configuration), and Mimesis 3 (Refiguration).  In classical narratology, Russian Formalists give the distinction between fabula and sjuzhet. Fabula refers to the chronological sequence of events and sjuzhet is the representation of those events. 6 7

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farther down the road towards [the revolution] great, human aims” (Soueif 226). Such excerpts influence the way we (readers) process the information and also shape our expectations regarding the revolution. Ricoeur’s tripartite model provides a space where narratives and time co-exist. By doing so, both writers preserve the continuity of the unfinished revolution. By weaving the present moments in narratives, they create a historical time that floats between the present and the past. Soueif and Matar’s narratives, therefore, create a site for memory-making along with witnessing the moment of change. Instead of creating fictional characters, they refer to real people and real places in the real world in their narratives. The presence of a writer is also a contributing factor that “guarantees the validity of that event” because they represent their lives as representative of collective identity (Vallete 46–47). The provision of the actual dates, facts, and figures further confirms that the narratives of Matar and Soueif are linked with the external world and the real event yet at the same time, it is also distinct from it as a literary representation. Being a reflection as well as construction of temporality, narrative thus links with the temporal character of human experience that is illustrated here with special reference to the narratives of revolution. Ricoeur’s approach offers a way of gripping human temporality where the configuration of time can be explored through the formal examination of narratives. For example, Soueif’s narrative gives more space to the revolutionary events, whereas Matar’s memoir pays attention to the Pre-Arab Spring in Libya, relating his personal history and his attachment to his country. In both memoirs, some events are explanatory while many events are passed over in silence or in summary. The events that happened on January 25, 2011 (Egypt) and February 17, 2011 (Libya) achieved significance in this regard as on these days the autocratic regime was shaken and people won against pro-Mubarak and pro-Qaddafi supporters and thugs. Therefore, these incidents are recorded in narratives and become memory-­ figures as Soueif describes January 25th and the day Mubarak steps down to a greater extent. These days are of great historical significance in the history of Egypt because on this day Egyptians finally overcome their fear and revolted against the dictatorial regime that had been in power for more than three decades. In order to recount these experiences, Soueif uses the simple present tense which suggests that she wants these triumphant moments to last forever. Similarly, Matar’s memoir gives a full description of the events like the flag-raising in eastern Libya by Izzo and Marwan and includes detailed

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commentary of both friends. Izzo and Marwan risk their lives to go “up to the roof to take down the dictator’s flag” (98). The removal of the dictator’s flag and the raising of the freedom fighter’s flag symbolically signify that Libya belongs to its people. Besides this, there are many other significant incidents, which he intends to ignore. One example of this is the incident of the Abu-Salim massacre to which he refers throughout the book but he only describes it in detail at the end of the book. Although the massacre is important in Libyan history, Matar finds it too painful to describe, and thus, he chooses not to visit Abu-Salim prison even after the revolution. Both writers are consciously aware of the historical significance of the events and they choose to incorporate the temporal dimension of everyday life during the Arab Spring and the Post-Arab Spring while integrating plurivocality and focalize information. These texts are no doubt the reflection of the temporal dimension of the Arab uprisings in which both writers celebrate the history of their countries. Further, these memoirs are based on recalling the present situation or the events of the past; the timespan between it and the reader’s present is short. Some of the mentioned events are not witnessed by the author but they are mentioned because they might be experienced by readers. The noting of these incidents suggests memoirs are capable of filling the gap in our memory from the point of view of the author. By making their texts the site for past and present incidents, these authors continuously employ the flashback technique to show that the present circumstances of the country are the aftermath of past scenarios. Through the deployment of flashbacks, they revisit the past to expose the triggering points which become a cause of revolution. These memoirs do not follow the linear sequence of the plot which creates a temporal imbalance in their narratives. It further shows that the present moment and the current attitudes of people is an appropriate response to the course of the events. It is worth mentioning that Soueif and Matar preserve the memory of the Arab revolution and re-establishes it through new forms of narrativization in which they not only record their living memory but also recount the detailed past incidents of their countries. By taking both past and present into consideration, they show that time in past and present co-exist as put by Astrid Erll, the capacity of memory construction takes “into account the insights that every memory is related to the present situation” which shows that the present scenarios are the outcome of the past circumstances (20). Dealing with the diachronic dimension of the

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revolution, both texts re-present and re-stage grand historical movements in the narratives. As Soueif gets distracted from the revolution for a short period of time while narrating the revolutionary activities in Tahrir square, a place for which she “prefers the Arabic word midan” and which she calls the “Holy Grail” (Soueif 7). Instead of using Tahrir square, Soueif’s usage of the Arabic word midan is significant because “it does not tie [us] down to a shape” but it has historical significance (Soueif 10). She skillfully traces the history of Tahrir Square from pre-colonial Cairo to revolutionary Cairo, offers Tahrir as a “home to the civic spirit of Egypt” (Soueif 8), and thus shows that “it is not just a square or a circle” (Soueif 10). Likewise, Matar revisits the past to bridge the link between the present devastating scenario of Libya and its causes in the past. He mentions the day he reaches Libya unexpectedly “mark[s] the twenty-second anniversary of [his] father’s first week in captivity” at Abu-Salim (Matar 41). Instead of progressing the story, Matar here pauses and reveals the cruel history of Abu-Salim prison. These instances of retrospective narratives although create ambiguity in the text, they also help writers to disclose true historical accounts, as Soueif attempts to reveal the history of Tahrir Square and Matar reveals the history of Abu-Salim prison. Considering this, I argue that both texts work as empirical texts that seek the accuracy of historical representation, and consequently, do not conform to chronological order. In the next two sections, I discuss how both texts re-present the revolution and become a medium of memory considering that Soueif was a direct observer of the revolution and Matar joined the revolutionary ground rather late.

Transcribing the Egyptian Revolution in Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed Soueif had always wanted to write a book about her city, Cairo—but these attempts had always ended up reading “like an elegy” (Soueif xiii). However, when the revolution broke out, she decided to write “the story of her revolution” (Soueif xiii). The result was a self-reflexive and telegrammatic narrative of revolution which is a eulogy for her city, a story of her revolution, and an attempt, in Bromley’s words, “to give memory a future” (7). Unlike other contemporary memoirs, Soueif’s memoir reads like an activist diary. The narrator, activist, protestor, TV and radio commentator,

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organizer, international figure, and of course a writer narrates the history of Cairo and the revolution in her memoirs. Her narrative is shaped by the consciousness of space and time as it is embedded in the temporal process of the 18 days of the revolution. The events/incidents take place in her narrative chronologically on a specific day and she records every event with the date and time, but her narrative is disrupted temporally because of her use of flashback. The forward momentum in her narrative is interrupted by a long section called “An Interruption” which is critical, reflective, less euphoric, less optimistic and which serves to remind the reader that this is not in fact a real diary but rather an edited and revised document. The updated version published in 2014 is written after the occurrence of the real events regardless of the fact that she depends on her first version and documents she records while participating in the revolution. In her effort to historicize the revolution, Soueif struggles with the form and structure of her memoir to incorporate divergent experiences which eventually contribute in redefining the notion of minor literature as well. The stylistic choices of Soueif clearly illustrate that she is aware of her deterritorialized position and she is forcing it to express something different. Her minor utilization of language brings her city out of its temporal stasis into dynamism. In the updated version of the book, Soueif traces the changing nature of revolution through a series of events marked by the extreme violence of the Egyptian government and the military. The public transformation of the revolution is interlinked with her family stories. She often quotes from her own newspaper articles and from her own blog to dramatize the urgency of the situation—most notably on the birth of her great nephew, his father is in prison, which prompts her sister to go on a hunger strike until her son is released. Likewise, on Eid “every prisoner is allowed an extra visit” but when she, along with ten family members, goes to prison, officials do not grant them entry.8 In this way, the public and private are interchangeable as Soueif chronicles the determination and the declared aim of revolution: “bread, freedom and justice” (Soueif 13). Through a map of stories derived from her personal life and public records, Soueif narrates a story of the revolution that is both publicly Egyptian and intimately hers. Soueif chooses to punctuate her narratives with dates and historical markers. Therefore, time is a crucial part of the updated version of the 8

 Eid is a religious festival which Muslims all over the world celebrate.

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book as Soueif particularly marks some days pronounced by the revolution as “after 100 days of Morsi presidency” and “the Friday of accounting” (Soueif 212). For instance, one particular event is the Maspero massacre (October 9, 2011) in which 28 people were killed and 212 injured. Soueif considers this event as the turning point in the Egyptian revolution because it categorically demonstrates “the tactical marriage of police and army” (Soueif 60). This day achieves an immediate symbolic resonance for Soueif and becomes a memory-figure in Soueif’s memoir because the Maspero massacre is one of the iconic and defining moments of the counter-­ revolution. Soueif claims “Maspero is the consolidation of SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Forces) and the Dakhleyya (Ministry of interior) working together against the revolution” and this indicates the failure of the revolution (161). The military, which was meant to be the people’s guardian and who were meant to “guarantee peace and safety” in the initial days of the revolution, turned their weapons on the people (Soueif 150). For example, the Midan (Tahrir Square) where people were gathered against their government was “razed to the ground” by the military (Soueif 89). Revolution does not change anything for Egyptians and they are still ruled by the corrupt regime as Soueif confesses, “the revolution comes to clean the land of Egypt. But we still have a corrupt regime” (Soueif 91). It is clear from Soueif’s text that her writing entails considerable condensation of the events she witnessed and remembered. In the second edition of her book, Soueif is far less euphoric but she still ends section II with a positive note, suggesting that although the military tries to crush the revolutionaries, the revolutionaries “so far have beaten it back” (Soueif 96). People believe that “election could be a way of getting rid of the military” (Soueif 178), and on Election Day, Soueif votes for the least worst available option (Morsi). Yet she ends this section with an upbeat note by referring to four positive instances of resistance in her country and shows the continuing public protest not only in Egypt on a daily basis but also in Spain, Greece, and Palestine. By referring to uprisings in different parts of the world, Soueif, as a minor writer, wants to consolidate the protestors of the world in her memoir. Although the revised edition of the book charts a reversal of the revolution, Soueif still holds onto the hope that it will eventually achieve its desired aims. This may be one of the reasons that she acknowledges the creativity of the first 18 days of the revolution—graffiti, art, poetry, and songs. Despite the recurring violence from the state and the military, the

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continuing presence of the first 18 days of creativity throughout the narratives testifies to her hope. Soueif’s role in the revolution ends with the parliamentary elections when she leaves the revolutionary field. Being in the revolutionary field helped her to develop a potential archive of the Arab revolution and also to articulate the possibility of a hopeful future. She scripts and imprints publicly available signs, scenes, and symbols to keep the discourse of the revolution alive. The final chapter “Revolution III: Postscript, 31 July 2013” is an addition written after Soueif left the site of struggle. In this section, she describes the litany of human rights violations during the Morsi period which once again brings people out to the streets against their newly elected president. This section is more reflective than previous sections and Soueif does not comment on her position anywhere throughout the section although she makes it clear that they “are in danger of the old regime slipping on yet another mask, slipping into power” (Soueif 225). She speculates: “Revolution III is in grave danger of being co-opted by the enemies of Revolution I”; therefore, she says: “Revolution III is not against Morsi and the MB as such, but against the continuation of the policies that marked the Mubarak era” (Soueif 225). She tries to conclude her book with a note of optimism: There is a core, a resolute core, that does not lose sight of the aims of the revolution—bread, freedom, social justice—and what these bring of human dignity; that knows that what the people will finally demand is the administration that will put them on the road to achieving these aims. And that the people—even if they digress onto a side street—will return to insist on their original path and their essential aims. (226)

She finishes her account of all three revolutions with a positive note, suggesting that even after so many losses she is hopeful about the future of Egypt. Such an open ending of the book reveals the determination of Egyptians who are ready to risk their lives against the old corrupted system. Along with her use of flashbacks, Soueif employs foreshadowing. Foreshadowing in the narration means anticipating future events with some sort of certainty rather than suspense. In the narratives of revolution, foreshadowing is closely related to the author’s prediction, which is shaped by past events as well as the present situation. Consequently, this narrative technique not only is concerned with the author’s point of view but also

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consolidates the present, past, and future by witnessing the past that produces the present and heralds the future. For example, Soueif’s mother keeps repeating: “I’m worried about el-belad; the country, Egypt” before dying (Soueif 104). Upon seeing the failing condition of her country, she anticipates the revolution in terms of “a massive storm rolling towards” el-belad (Soueif 104). Foreshadowing, as represented in this example, is an anticipation of the event of paramount importance. It is more than an imaginative prophecy; instead, it is a yearning for an extraordinary dream, which may materialize during the course of narratives. The usage of the word el-belad is noteworthy. The word el-belad is used in Arabic for city, village and, in some instances, country depending upon the context. Using the word el-belad, Soueif particularly wants to leave the option open for all its readers. Moreover, the word el-belad is closer to the heart of Arabic people and it contains a layer of meanings instead of a simple word, a city as Soueif says in one of her interviews that if you are Cairene, Cairo is the place of your own history. When writing the books related to Cairo, she claims that she wanted to combine the movement, the emotions associated with her city, and its historical significance; hence, she uses Arabic word instead of the simple word city or country (Speaking to Sharifa Alamri “Ahdaf Soueif,” dure-­dundee.org.uk, June 2012) Soueif keeps the narrative of revolution alive by binding together the history and archives, space and time, her public and private self in a processual text. Her book contains pauses and interruptions and holds the conversations about the 18 days of the revolution. She claims that Revolution I in her updated version opens the possibility of a dialogue in Egypt after a long period of silence and repression. She neither creates a populist text nor constructs herself as a heroic figure. Rather, in her process of writing, she is striving with form and structure to produce historicity of the moment as she herself says that “I am part of the surge of happy humanity flowing across the bridge” and this demonstrates that she considers herself as a part of the large demonstrations (Soueif 151). She soon shifts from the personal singular pronoun to plural pronoun when she becomes a part of the protest: “I stumble, and a hand under my elbow steadies me” to “the way ahead of us is invisible behind the smoke” (17)— followed by the plural personal pronoun: “we stand.—We sing the national anthem (Soueif 18). Here Soueif constructs a new language, a grammar of solidarity to incorporate collective utterances. A narrator in the narratives of the revolution appears to be part of a large demonstration, which is in line with the stream of revolution and conscious of the story he/she

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narrates as a part of the collective consciousness of the people, hence the use of the pronoun “we” for the collective voice. This suggests Soueif’s effort to push the language to incorporate collective utterances. In the narrative of revolution, the narrator serves as a linkage between the author and the outside world he/she presents. The peculiarity of Soueif’s memoir lies in the fact that “narrator and the intradiegetic narrator are the same” as Michael Butor notes (64). The narrator is not an echo of the author; rather, the author herself plays the role of narrator and appears as a public character. From the above example, the sense of mass theater emerges from the Tahrir Square and a section concludes with the enunciative sentence like “we stand our ground and sing and chant and place our lives, with all trust and confidence, in each other’s hand” (Soueif 18). This paragraph is then followed by a very small paragraph of exactly four words stating, “some of us die” which can be characterized as her effort to acknowledge even those who die for the great cause (Soueif 18). Her use of personal plural pronoun indicates that she owns her city, her people and considers herself as a part of them. The above attributes of Soueif’s writing makes her an ideal example of a minor writer. The textual evidences illustrate that she deterritorializes the English language not only to incorporate divergent experiences but also to show that the personal is political in her country. Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed is a factual document and all the recorded events in it are based on facts. Soueif uses direct language and avoids any tinge of imagination. She uses cinematic narratives to give the real sense of the revolution as she claims in her interview that she wanted to present the same “emotional charge” to her readers who were not in Cairo during the revolution (Speaking to Sharifa Alamri “Ahdaf Soueif,” dure-­dundee.org.uk, June 2012). She incorporates the colors and sounds of Tahrir Square to recreate the revolution scene in her narratives. Therefore, readers could hear the chanting and shouting of protestors while reading many scenes. Soueif also adds textures to her written script by infusing it with sensual details of the surrounding area and weather just as movies showcase a setting in detail. She relies on the evocation of the senses and the use of sensory language in order to convey the gravity and unthinkable scenario of revolution. She draws upon the excessive references to the sensory experiences of smell represented in flames, burning, and tear gas. Thanks to her cinematic narrative coupled with the sensory language, one could literally feel oneself on the revolutionary ground while reading her memoir. For example, the book starts with the

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“coughing and choking” of Soueif and other protestors due to heavy “tear gas” (Soueif 3). Throughout the narrative, there are scenes of burning cars, smells of burning tires, and vinegar that is used against the protection from tear gas, smoke, gas, and surgical masks. In so doing, Soueif helps readers to understand readily the scenario of protest. Along with sensory language, images are utilized to a great extent in the narrative of revolution to provoke the people and to defend the revolutionary actions. For example, by displaying the picture of Abu Muhab’s son (a martyr to the cause), the activists try to incite people to revolution; as Abu Muhab says of his son “he dies for the revolution, and I will live for the revolution” (Soueif 75). Likewise, Mina Danial, a human rights advocate who insists “on the struggle for everybody’s right,” is killed by the military (Soueif 160). Activists and protestors prepare Mina’s banner with words “We are all Mina Danial” (Soueif 160). By considering Mina as a symbol of freedom, dignity, and social justice, activists use her banner to prompt people for the great cause: Throughout the year, Mina’s banner appeared at the darkest points of our confrontations with the military, at the protest outside parliament, at the heart of the strikes. It spoke of courage and gallantry that could never be defeated. It lifted our spirits and put courage in our hearts, because where we saw it rise, we knew that around it, under it, there were kindred spirits and a space that was human and humane and inclusive and clever and free. And Mina’s banner appeared in Cairo and Luxor, in Alexandria and Aswan; everywhere where people were expressing an idea of freedom and dignity, social justice and inclusiveness, the red banner with Mina’s stencilled face under the Egyptian flag was there. (Soueif 160)

Soueif’s narrative is also marked with signposts to counter the state’s discourse with the aim of reaching out to an even larger and greater audience. We are told of how “Egyptian state TV is lying so shamefully” (Soueif 109), and of how Soueif’s son, Omar Robert Hamilton, along with his two friends “have established Tahrir Cinema” and “every night they show footage, clips” to counter the state’s discourse (Soueif 79). In order to recreate the memory of Tahrir Square in the present and to invite readers to be a part of the revolution, Soueif deterritorializes the major language and incorporates such textual features like signposts, images, and sensory experiences. By articulating all available signs and symbols supplemented by the subjective category, Soueif produces narrative memory of

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the revolution for the future generation. Her experiments with form and structure to incorporate the collective voices and to create factual pictures contribute to a revised and renewed style in minor literature. Unlike Soueif, Matar was unable to write at the time when the revolution broke out in 2011 because of the enormity of events, nevertheless, this gave him enough time to reflect upon the situation. First, as a distanced human rights activist and later as an eyewitness and observer of the Arab uprisings, he records his experiences through different strategies to contribute to minor literature which I address in the next section.

Chronicling the Libyan Uprisings in The Return Libyan history is full of massacres and Matar tries to record some of these in his memoir The Return: Father, Sons and the Land in Between. The title captures Matar’s journey to Libya in search of the truth behind his father’s abduction. Although the sub-title, “Father, Sons and the Land in Between,” shows it as a family saga, it is, in fact, chronicling a siege and provides insights into the political upheaval in Libya. Matar provides the details of the complex political events that lead to the Libyan revolution. The story of the nation’s past and present is set against the family to show state interference at the domestic level and to reveal that everything, even personal lives, is political in the Arab countries. The violent intrusion of the state into the home belies Libyans’ illusion that their homeland belongs to them. For instance, enduring his “father’s unknown death and silence,” Matar feels humiliated and ashamed for having been denied the dignified burial of his father (Matar 34). He laments, “I envy the finality of funerals. I covet the certainty. How it must be to wrap one’s hand around the bones, to choose how to place them, to be able to pat the patch of earth and sing a prayer” (Matar 35). This example clearly illustrates that the state itself is involved in depriving subjects of the process of grieving and mourning for the missing family members. The state has failed in its duty to shelter its subjects from trauma “caused to them by undermining their world of secure filial relationships” (Mirdha 6). His father’s absence overshadows his whole life that he attempts to show in this memoir. Matar’s memoir is a portrait of loss and pain and he avoids celebratory and twisted plots in his narratives. He skillfully conveys human emotions using quiet sentences and metaphorical language. For example, the ill-­ fitting suit in which he travels to Libya conveys his discomfort. The talk

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about the presence of Jaballa Matar always ends with “I am sorry,” and the elderly prisoner who lost his sight and memory is found with the picture of Jaballa Matar shows the mysterious absence and unknown death of Matar’s father. Such evidences about Jaballa Matar usher an illusionary hope in Hisham Matar that fall back into the abyss as soon as Hisham Matar starts believing it. As a minor writer, not only does Matar counter the regime’s narrative with his emergent narrative of the uprising, but he also incorporates the inaudible collective voices in his narratives. To present the silenced and ignored reality of Libyan revolution, he puts together a range of interviews, documents, photos, archives, and the testimonies of protestors and prisoners with the personal testimony as an oppositional narrative in the form of his memoir. Like Soueif, he is also storying the present, recalling the past, and encoding the future. For instance, in February 2011 when the revolution first erupted in Libya, Matar indirectly lent his hand to the revolution and started “efforts to supply international journalists with information about what was happening in Libya” (Matar 93). His “flat in London had become a makeshift newsroom” until he could not join the revolution directly where he made “fifty calls a day” to different protestors to know about revolution and asked, “questions about when and how and what, the exact time, the number of those involved, the casualties, how many dead” (Matar 93). He wanted “to document the 17 February revolution at the political, economic, social, cultural and judicial levels” along with other journalists who had always been “censored, imprisoned and sometimes killed” under Qaddafi’s regime (Matar 113). In addition to monitoring the evolving present, these journalists are also “publishing accounts and personal testimonies of life under the dictatorship” (Matar 113). It represents Matar’s preoccupation with his country and his fellow countrymen even though he lives far away. It also highlights that Matar pushes deterritorialization to the point where nothing remains but the intensity of situations and events. In so doing, he reveals the dreadful scenario of the revolution in Libya. In comparison to Soueif, Matar seems to be more indulged in his country. After moving to London, Soueif knows that Cairo is “being constantly downgraded” (Soueif 32). While staying in London, she claimed that “both cities changed, but I liked—on the whole—the changes that happened to London: the view from Waterloo Bridge, more exciting every year, the blossoming street markets, the angel alighting once more on the dome of our local theatre. In Cairo, every time I went home, home got a

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bit more bitty on me” (Soueif 32–33), yet she never tried to do anything for her country. Therefore, upon her return to the revolution, she found her city “degraded and bruised and robbed and exploited and mocked and slapped” and she was “ashamed of [her]self for not saving her” (Soueif 36). On the other hand, Matar stays away from his family and his homeland, yet he remains involved directly or indirectly in the welfare of his family and in his country politics, which is reflected in the novel the way he risks his life by raising his voice at different international forums against Qaddafi’s regime. For instance, after writing an article related to human rights violations in Libya for The Times magazine, he is told that he “causes an earthquake” in “the Libyan Embassy of London” (Matar 186). Although he was settled abroad, he was under regular surveillance and “carried a knife in [his] pocket every time [he] stepped out of the flat” (Matar 187). He even ran a “public campaign for the release of [his] father and relatives” in which he became successful as “on the 3rd of February of that year, and after twenty-one years of imprisonment, all except [his] father were set free” (Matar 45). In the novel, it is shown that he acts very cautiously by keeping in mind his whole family, not only his own wife, brother, and mother but an extended family of his father too. Like his father, Matar remains a strong opponent of Qaddafi’s regime, criticizes it at every international platform and decides not to “negotiate with criminals” (Matar 5). He says “every time [he] give[s] an interview criticizing the dictatorship, [he] walk[s] around for days feeling the weight of the regime on [his] back” (Matar 174). These examples show his loyalty and his concern for his fellow citizens. Although he enjoys a dignified life abroad, his humanitarian conscience makes him refuse to stand by and watch the brutality of the dictatorship and thus, he stands for his own people and as a minor writer, he becomes their voice on an international platform. As a minor writer, Matar seems to utilize different literary devices, for example, metaphor, proverbial expression, and the scripting of photos and videos to articulate collectivity. In so doing, Matar ultimately alters the existing understanding of minor literature and reformulate it in a new way. For instance, unable to witness the time when revolution breaks out, he uses the technique of visual memories, including videos and photos, to reflect on the early days of the revolution. Matar’s attempt can be read as an effort to foreground the silenced reality. Those photos and videos are captured and made by his nephew Izzo and his friend Marwan, who took part in the revolution. Through photography, Matar reveals the whole

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story of the initial days of revolution in which the country youth is shown as “tired” and carrying heavy “machine-gun” (Matar 90) to fight as an “armed rebellion against the dictatorship” (Matar 86). In some pictures, youth is also shown as “carrying a Kalashnikov, an RPG” and their “chest crossed with bullet belts” (Matar 86). A series of pictures shows the wounded bodies of youth as “a face freckled by shrapnel, white cotton in the ears, pupils as red as plums” (Matar 86–87). These photos and videos are evident of the silent reality of Libya where the youth has been robbed of their future by involving them in war. Matar has also transcribed his telephonic conversation with rebels during the revolution who provide him with accurate details of what is happening in Libya. For instance, in one conversation, he is informed that the regime “dug up the graves and burnt the bodies” of rebels (Matar 95). He also articulates a video film made by Izzo and Marwan who go up to the roof of the media building to take down “the rags of the tyrant” and raise the flag of Libya (Matar 98). After raising the Libyan flag, they record a message in the video that “the freedom fighters of eastern Libya fly the first liberation flag in the town of Zliten” (Matar 99). Matar’s attempt at articulating the video scripts, telephone calls and visual imagery in his narratives not only reveals the missing account of the revolution—those days when Matar was not the direct observer of the revolution, but also instances of visual memories and scripts help readers to make sense of the Libyan revolution. Upon returning, Matar also witnesses images of martyrs in different court squares: “images of these recently deceased young fighters [a]re everywhere” (Matar 242). By imprinting all these available symbols and scenes in the form of memoirs, Matar is trying to present the disrupted present and envisioning a hopeful future as well as anticipating that “like pictures of saints, the images of these young men had replaced those of the dictators” which is “a new development” on the way to a free Libya (Matar 242). This example indicates Matar’s hope of a democratic Libya. Events in Matar’s memoir are narrated in a sequential fashion in which one narrated event signals another upcoming event. He does not use the foreshadowing technique to anticipate the future; instead, he uses metaphorical expressions to show the anticipated events. In his memoir, he claimed he was born at a time when his father was working as a diplomat in the USA: “dressed in a suit and tie, far away from home, collecting the pieces of a dead man. He was thirty-one years old. I was born” (Matar 33). The metaphorical expression “collecting the piece of a dead man” clearly illustrates the fate of Hisham Matar as he spends his entire life

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searching for his dead father, Jaballa Matar. For this purpose, he even talks to Qaddafi’s son, Seif el-Islam: “I was a desperate man, willing to talk to the devil in order to find out if my father was alive or dead” (Matar 199). Likewise, upon returning to Libya, he finds his father’s short stories. Although, Jaballa Matar wrote these stories when he was 19, he already foresaw his own fate and that of his son. For example, in a story “In the Stillness of the Night: A Libyan Tale,” Jaballa Matar writes, “I will not let disgrace stain my forehead” (Matar 135), words that are echoed in his “first letter from prison, when he writes “my forehead does not know how to bow” (Matar 136). The last sentence of his another story “A Struggle with Fate” says that, “I decided to work and survive” catches Matar’s attention. He said throughout his life he “did odd jobs in a small market town in Bedfordshire” to survive and now “finding it in the shape of the closing sentence of one of only two short stories my father ever published, was oddly consoling and disquieting” (Matar 142–143). This evidence from the text shows that Jaballa Matar already anticipates the future of young Libyan men and suggests that their fate is inseparable from their country’s history of resistance. Having trained as an architectural designer, Matar describes building in a compelling way, including his grandfather’s home and Abu-Salim prison. He has never been to prison and chose not to visit it, yet he describes it meticulously. His description of his grandfather’s home can be read as a microcosm version of Libya; it is described as “austere, unpredictable, plain, unfinished, yet inhabited” (Matar 148). Like his grandfather’s home, Matar sees Libya as an “unfinished state” because of the “deliberate negligence and carelessness” of government (Matar 148). In his view, buildings should be built with “a sense of necessity, intent or desire” so that it can be useful for its inhabitant (Matar 148). Since Libya has never been built for Libyans, so the very structure of Libya, in other words, its architecture is “an affront,” “offensive and indeed oppressive” (Matar 148). The metaphor of “unfinished homes” which is used throughout the text shows the unfinished structures of home physically and also represents the vacantness and hollowness of home/country because every family’s “father, a husband, or a son in Abu-Salim” (Matar 248). Matar’s text is also littered with many proverbial expressions. These proverbs have metaphorical values which help the reader to understand the cultural context of the story. Proverbs are extensively used in narratives of revolution because they help to verbalize the real world the way metaphor is regarded as symbolic of something else. For example, Matar’s

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saying that “each one was parent and child. To make up for the missing pillars, the once balanced structure of four columns was now in perpetual strain” skillfully conveys the sorrow and grief of Matar’s family because of the absence of father figure (Matar70). The absence of Matar’s father leaves a huge impact on his family on the one hand; it empowers the regime’s endocolonial practices on the other hand. According to Pramod K. Nayar, “endo-colonialism is a process of emplacement where individuals are put into categories that are perceived as threats to the nation” (25).9 Jaballa Matar’s disappearance can be read from this perspective, as his identity of a “successful businessman” is a threat to Qaddafi’s regime; therefore, regime declares him “a dangerous enemy” to the nation and kills him leaving no trace of the disappeared. Unlike Soueif, who describes revolutionary activities throughout, Matar gives equal space to events in the Pre-Arab Spring period as well as the revolution: from colonial Libya till the revolution. In comparison to Soueif whose focus is on the near past, Matar articulates the distant past and post-revolutionary uncertainty of Libya in his narrative too. In so doing, he foregrounds those people who struggle for the independence of Libya and thus, incorporates collective utterances. He skillfully links past events with the uncertain present to demonstrate that the past of his country is inextricably linked with the current situation. Bringing colonial discourse of Libya, Matar reveals that practices of dehumanization and tortures continue in postcolonial Libya too. The text details the story of violent colonial repression and Libyan’s history of resistance against Italian colonization in which Matar’s grandfather was a strong opponent, fighter, and witness. Instances of torture, illness, starvation, depopulation, and genocide become common scenes of that period. For example, Matar tells us that the “policy was depopulation” and “destruction and slaughter took on a massive scale” during the time of Italian colonialism (Matar 153). Matar highlights the fact that before the independence of Libya, a member of the Libyan resistance was carried to Italy either “to be tortured for information and then killed” (Matar 161) or for “execution and the bodies of the deceased are never returned to the families” (Matar 160). The same policy is continued after independence and during Qaddafi’s reign “opponents of the regime were hanged in public squares and sport arenas” (Matar 4). Many “dissidents who fled the country were 9  Endocolonial practices call for the destruction of the subject as a legitimate process conducted by the state to protect itself from its potential enemies within.

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pursued—some were kidnapped or assassinated” (Matar 4). Qaddafi’s regime even kidnapped the “exiled critics” and sent them to Abu-Salim prison (Matar 6). Jaballa Matar’s smuggled letters reveal that Qaddafi’s dissidents were kidnapped, handcuffed, blindfolded, and imprisoned “in a place that was absolutely dark” (Matar 54) where they could “never see the light” (Matar 82) and “at times a whole year passed by without seeing the sun or being let out of this cell” (Matar 10). Matar divulges injustices and the atrocities of the regime by sharing first-hand witnessing of stories provided by family members and other prisoners who spend decades in “the mouth of hell” (Matar 238). For example, an Israeli manufactured and designed handcuff: “a thin plastic wire that drew tighter with the slightest resistance” is used and one feels “the pain not so much around the wrists but inside the head” (Matar 267). Loudspeakers are purposely fixed inside each cell on which “speeches of Qaddafi, propaganda songs and slogans expanding the virtues of the regime” are played every day “from 6 a.m. to midnight” at full volume “so loud” that the prisoners can feel their “muscle vibrate” (Matar 256). On numerous occasions prisoners are physically and verbally beaten and tortured, deprived of the medical care, sleep and being “fed and watered” (Matar 266) and “a bucket full of cockroaches” is spilled over their chests (Matar 260). These torture practices enable the regime to construct “Foucauldian heterotopias” to justify the incarceration and “target the citizens of the nation as enemies within its borders” (Nayar 23). With these horrible tactics, prisoners “become as thin as a ghost” (Matar 264). Instead of protecting its people and ensuring equal rights to everyone, the Libyan regime itself is involved in the “ghostification and anonymization of people” (Nayar 118), worsening their condition and rendering them powerless to the extent that they “don’t even have animal rights” (Matar 266). By transcribing the first-hand accounts of prisoners in his narratives, he attempts to highlight the voices of prisoners who have never been given voices—a feature of minor literature. These examples suggest that in a country like Libya—ravaged by despotism—if anyone dares to oppose the regime is liable to beating, torture, and detention by state security. In his memoir, Matar detects an echo of old power, which was frequently exercised through cultural means, including the oppression of free speech under Italian rule and in postcolonial Libya as well. Matar makes reference to this oppression on page 155, in the context of book banning and the arresting of authors. The same policy is later adopted by the Qaddafi’s regime and assassinates all men of letters as Matar says that the

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regime “repeatedly assault on bookshop—confiscating their stocks and closing some of them down” and thus “perfecting the dark art of devaluing books” (Matar 116). The country’s social and political “dogmas thwart every possible artistic instinct” (Matar 116). To occupy the geopolitical cultural spaces, Qaddafi’s regime deliberately compromises the freedom of the judiciary and press, charges people “with treason” (Matar 83), often attempts “violent crackdown on journalists and human right activists” (Matar 110) and makes it impossible for the dissident’s family “to gain employment or receive a scholarship” (Matar 77). He even closes libraries and incarcerates the large group of authors by setting up a trap: he “invite[s] young literary talent to take part in a book festival, and then arrest them” and send them to prisons (Matar 117). Not only these, people [w]itnessed the militarization of schools … seen the banning of books, music and films [Matar’s own novels were banned in Libya] … the closure of theatre and cinemas, the outlawing of football, and all the other countless ways in which the Libyan dictatorship … infiltrated every aspect of public and private life. (Matar 109)

Foucault’s notion of biopower helps to explain this social reality created by Qaddafi’s regime and invoked in The Return. According to Foucault, biopower controls every aspect of human life through state apparatuses, which reproduce and re-enact the power of the state (np). Examples are schools, universities, prisons, and so on which are established for the purpose of controlling behavior through the coercive method. If anyone dares to raise their voice against such an oppressive environment, the authorities can go to any length to subjugate, detain, and repress the oppositional voices. Matar cites countless examples to show that those who oppose Qaddafi’s regime have always faced the horror of the regime. Many young men in Libya are assassinated and abducted by the regime. For example, Maher Bushrayda, Matar’s cousin, “was arrested and spent the years from 1977 to 1986 in prison” because of “criticizing the dictatorship” (Matar 126). Likewise, students of Benghazi University “were hanged in the gardens of the Cathedral” because they “demanded to protect the academy from growing political interference” (Matar 121). By combining these episodes of pre- and postcolonial Libya, Matar produces a narrative memory of his country, Libya. These episodes communicate that the regime is involved in destroying intellectuals and the future of its own people. By recalling these past atrocities in the present account, Matar

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shows that these conditions in Libya make the country ripe for revolution. Therefore, upon seeing a revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, people in Libya also gather courage and decide to take the street against the ruthless totalitarian regime: Tunisian had altered the political landscape, as well as the landscape of the imagination—Cairo’s Tahrir Square was filled with demonstrators. Libya’s two neighbours had risen. Something irreversible had begun. (Matar 232)

Like their Tunisian and Egyptian fellows, a million Libyans took the streets and called for the downfall of the regime. The regime used the vast apparatus of repression to crush the revolutionaries. Qaddafi and his son, Seif el-Islam along with their allies committed every possible crime in order to stop the revolution. The regime considered Libya as its “family private property”; therefore, when the revolution broke out, they started a savage campaign of “crush[ing] the dissents” (Matar 235). Not only did they kill the revolutionaries, but they demolished whole cities to stop the revolution. For example, when the revolution first erupted in Benghazi, its courthouse square was festooned with revolutionary banners and flags where revolutionaries sang revolution song and soon it became a pulverized wilderness. In contrast to Soueif’s memoir where some days become memory-­ figures, some sites or places achieve symbolic resonance in Matar’s memoir. Matar roams around different cities of Libya and gives an eyewitness account of the uprising in the different parts of Libya unlike Soueif who only gives the details of revolution in Cairo. For example, the revolution was “quickly and ruthlessly quashed” in Benghazi, Libya’s second big city (Matar 121). Matar claims that Benghazi “had always been unenthusiastic about Qaddafi regime, and it paid the price” (Matar 119); therefore, “Qaddafi meant to punish the city, make an example of it, and put an end to the revolt” (Matar 49). The whole city was desolate, there were some “trucks and tanks packed with green flags and placards that read: BENGHAZI USED TO BE HERE” (Matar 49). The despotic regime targets Benghazi to destroy the city and erase its rebellious identity to stop the Arab revolution. The regime does not even hesitate to exercise the necropower—the force that subjugates life to exterminate its dissents (Mbembe 39). Instead, the regime warns Libyans that if the revolution is not stopped, “a nightmare would follow: civil war, destruction and mass emigration” (Matar 234). Seif el-Islam even tries to terrorize people by

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saying that “you will be crying over hundreds of thousands of deaths. There will be rivers of blood” (Matar 235). He considers revolution as the product of a conspiracy of international Libyans abroad and “blames the uprisings on Libyans abroad” (Matar 234). However, revolutionaries, on the other hand, believe that “people and not the dictatorship are the true custodians of Libya” (Matar 90) and that “this country belongs to” them (Matar 235). Therefore, they continue their “March until the country is cleansed of the rats,” which shows the strong determination of Libyans who do not retreat and continue fighting for freedom regardless of the difficulties and sacrifices (Matar 90). Like Soueif, Matar too unheroically continues “wandering through the streets” (Matar 119) of different cities like Benghazi, Tripoli and Ajdabiya and “passed by tanks and military trucks” to document the revolution (Matar 48). It is worth noting that unlike Tunisia, the revolution in Libya does not achieve its high ideals, instead, the situation becomes worsened as the death toll rises, “universities and schools” are shut down, hospitals are “only partially operative” (Matar 141). The situation becomes so grim “that the unimaginable would happen” and Matar “could sense the possibility of horror” (Matar 141). Yet people are determined to carry on the protest because they believe that “revolutions have their momentum, and once you join the current it is very difficult to escape the rapids. Revolutions are not solid gates through which nations pass but a force comparable to a storm that sweeps all before it” (Matar 112). This hope makes Libyans more determined than ever to continue. Given this context, it can be argued that Arab people finally come out of their passivity and emerge out with new subjectivities10 to withstand the authorities. To describe his own and other Libyan fellows’ revolutionary spirit, Matar refers to Ivan Turgenev’s protagonist who “is young and trapped between two powerful impulses: a romantic sensibility that makes him ill-suited for absolute certainty, and a revolutionary heart that craves that certainty” (Matar 112). He is of the view that he and his Libyan fellows are “falling into a similar predicament” (Matar 112). This is probably one of the reasons that revolution is continued in the Arab world even after so many years. Although the outcome of revolution throughout the MENA region is not positive, many resistance groups are still active and people are still protesting against the dictatorial regime. For example, one 10  This is also one of the features of minor literature as minor art must involve the creation of new subjectivities (O Sullivan 7).

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of Matar’s cousins has “joined the resistance” in Syria and when he is asked to come back to Libya, he replies, “we have to defeat these dictators” (Matar 103). It is noteworthy that throughout his narrative, Matar mostly uses the past tense, which suggests his hope that the period of darkness and atrocities is over. However, when it comes to the description of revolutionary fervor, he uses the present tense, which indicates that even after so many years Libyans are still determined that their resistance will win and that they would achieve their revolutionary ideals. In comparison to Soueif, Matar is more self-conscious and introspective. In his narrative, he explores his internal psyche, which suggests that he wants to move beyond the anatomy of his disappeared father to accept the loss. He is never self-pitying but provides a mediating account of grief and loss. For example, due to Qaddafi’s regime, his family leaves the country in 1979 and going back (during the uprisings) “after all these years” become a traumatic event for “the chasm that divided the man—boy” (Matar 2) which leaves him wretched and distressed: “Rage, like a poisoned river, had been running through my life since we left Libya. It made itself into my anatomy, into details. Greif as a virus” (Matar 119). Reflecting on his own scenario, he alludes to “Dmitri Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak and Naguib Mahfouz” who are of the view that “never leave the homeland,” because if you leave “your connections to the source will be severed. You will be like a dead trunk, hard and hollow” (Matar 2). Therefore, he decides to go back to his country to re-establish his link with his culture. Matar also alludes to Homer and quotes Telemachus in search of his wandering father: “I wish at least I had some happy men/ as a father, growing old in his own house/ but unknown death and silence are the fate of him” (Matar 273). Throughout the course of the text, he refers to many renowned writers to describe his own circumstances. By situating himself in these literary and mythological histories, he indicates many others who suffer from such circumstances. Secondly, these references contribute to the book’s wider argument about finding comfort and solace in art and literature in the time of tragedy. Hisham Matar’s father also finds consolation in the creation and recitation of poetry in prison. For Jaballa Matar, literature is “strength at the weakest hour” (Matar 180), poetry for him serves as “comfort and companion” (Matar 30). He claims, “knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest” (Matar 30). Thus, the chain of literary allusion helps Hisham Matar to survive.

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Given that Matar’s narratives reflect his own internal psyche; his narrative represents the development of his personality from introvert to extrovert. Unlike Soueif, who decides to go back to Cairo as soon as the revolution breaks out, Matar is hesitant in going back to Libya. Although he acknowledges that part of him has “stopped developing the moment [he] left Libya” and by never returning to Libya, he will remain incomplete and unfulfilled, nevertheless, he resisted the idea of going back to Libya initially (Matar 14). However, with the passage of time, he is “done with resistance” and decides to go back to his country: “I was traveling home in the ill-fitting suit” (Matar 26). The metaphor of the ill-fitting suit states his inner condition that he is not comfortable while going back to his home. In his initial days, he feels “uneasy” in Libya and does not want to be a part of any kind of activism (Matar 45). In the novel, when his cousin wants to arrange an activity where he could meet with other literary people and journalists, he rejects the idea telling him that “I am here to see my family. I don’t want to give interviews” (Matar 114). However, after seeing people’s significant enthusiasm for the revolution, he claims that he has “never been anywhere so burdened with memories yet also charged with possibilities for the future, positive and negative, and each just as potent as probable as the other” (Matar 140). He thus joins the civil resistance movement (Matar 140). He feels relieved after joining the civil resistance and starts calling Libya “home—a place from which the entire world is suddenly possible” (Matar 126) and even talks to his wife “about living here part of the year” (Matar 125). Before returning to Libya, it was even harder for him to imagine Abu-Salim Prison “which was known as ‘The Last Stop’ the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget” (Matar 10). The jail for him is a dark, menacing and terrifying place and it is painful for him to imagine what his father endured there as he writes, “when I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me” (Matar 47). Upon returning, he domesticates his fear and anxiety by meeting with ex-prisoners, listening to their stories. Although he decides not to visit Abu-Salim, he encounters his fear and his emotions which are born of loss and longing by asking all details about life in prison from the survived prisoners. Throughout the text, he gives countless references to the massacre that happened in Abu-Salim prison on June 29, 1996. Matar believes that his father, Jaballa Matar dies on that day when 1270 prisoners are gunned down together. This may be the reason that he does not describe this

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incident in detail until the last pages of his memoir, when he finally musters up his courage, asks his uncle and other relatives about the massacre, and narrates it comprehensively. The witnesses tell him that “they heard a loud explosion, then dense and unceasing gunfire—all sorts of weapons: pistols, machine guns—and the sound of men screaming” (Matar 269). The dead bodies are then left there for four days until the smell causes the witnesses to vomit. It shows the extreme dehumanization of Qaddafi’s regime. By bringing stories from the witnesses into the present time, Matar reveals a history of trauma in which Libyans find themselves in the past even at the present time and thus, produce a testimonial narrative. Being a writer himself, he sees the writer as a part of the civil resistance movement which includes literature and art “as part of the national effort to drive up literacy and education” (Matar 133). Therefore, he becomes a part of the event where, he along with many other Libyans, discuss “the challenges the country was facing after the revolution, the place of literature and ideas in Libya, the role of education and civil society, human rights and the importance of addressing the past atrocities” (Matar 136). In both positions (novelist self and an activist self), although meek in the beginning, he commits to political opposition. Given this context, both these fiction writers dare to step out of their fictitious world into the real world, fight for freedom and try to articulate the moment of change with the help of narratives and thus contribute to minor literature in a distinctive way. In so doing, not only do they historicize the present memory but they also help their readers to make sense of the violent and chaotic unfolding events in the Arab world. By transcribing the revolution in narratives, they produce the legacy writing in which they construct a present to commemorate. Both memoirs recall the discourse of the 2011 uprisings and its aftermath in complex narrative dimensions to accommodate the voices of the weak and disempowered such as protestors, prisoners, and activists. Instead of distancing themselves from the moment of change, both writers prefer to be a part of the change, participate in it actively, witness it by reconfiguring the story of their revolution in narratives and thus situate their resistance against the despotic regime passively through their writings. Both writers choose to articulate the reality of the revolutionary days and their own people through major language, English. The analysis of both memoirs reveals a subtle form of experimentation with language as well as with the narrative form. In their narratives, they construct the

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revolutionary moment, record the present for the future and bring the collective utterances to fabricate we-memory. By experimenting with the form of memoirs, they incorporate the voices of all those people who remain inaudible like prisoners, writers, students, and protestors. Their use of metaphor and other literary strategies such as the use of proverbs and cinematic narrative effects do not diminish their efforts in writing minor literature; instead, they redefine and expand the original notion of it. The analysis reveals that the elimination of metaphor and articulation of metamorphosis is not requisite of minor literature. The chapters that follow examine in more detail the ways in which contemporary Anglo-Arab authors capture the recent developments in the Arab world in their peculiar way, and thus expand and redefine the concept of minor literature.

CHAPTER 3

Magical Realism in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Metafiction in Youssef Rakha’s The Crocodiles: Rethinking Minor Literature

In “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth argues that literature must seek a new means of expression since it has exhausted its earlier possibilities (66). After analyzing writings of Beckett and Borges, he claims that by utilizing different strategies such as dreams, stories within stories, metatextualism, and the exploration of metaphysical states, Borges and Beckett extend and complicate the nature of the novel (67). In line with them, contemporary Middle Eastern writers who are grappling with disappointment and the chaotic aftermath of the Arab Spring use particular strategies to portray the fractured and cryptic realities of the Arab world. Instead of mimetic, “the ideal types provided in traditional mediaeval literature, presented in the most elaborate language,” contemporary Anglo-Arab writers are more concerned to portray “concrete observable reality” using diverse literary strategies (Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature 16). I argue that contemporary Anglo-Arab writers embrace a wide variety of approaches and style to reimagine history and to counter the state’s narratives. Karim Alrawi and Youssef Rakha, writers that I discuss in this chapter, utilize modernist and postmodernist strategies to capture uncertainty and chaos, and in so doing extend the horizon of the novel. I argue that it is “the realities of power and authority” that inform and influence the work of both of these writers (Said 5). Consequently, these writers establish their resistance to the autocratic regime in postmodern narratives, employing diverse literary strategies to portray the present times’ uncertainty and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_3

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harsh reality of the Arab world. Keeping in view theoretical postmodernism’s emphasis on epistemic relativism and social equality, it is no wonder that postmodern devices should now be used to incorporate previously ignored and excluded voices that are so important to minor literature. Unlike typical postmodern texts which focus more on portraying the postmodern condition, postmodern fictions of contemporary Arab writers seek to legitimize minority voices. For instance, both Alrawi and Rakha forge a new language to express grim realities; a language that does not seek a divorce from lived experiences but to capture its struggles through magical realism and metafiction. Given this context, I suggest that in the context of the 2011 uprisings, both Alrawi and Rakha, being immigrant writers, seek to unsettle generic boundaries while seeking “rupture and continuity with the narrative modes and strategies” of earlier and contemporary generation Arab writers (Buontempo 38). These writers produce counter-narratives that undermine the revolutionary rhetoric that has been acclaimed by new rulers. Both writers belong to the new breed of Egyptian leftist intelligentsia and participated in the civil disobedience of 2011 against Mubarak’s dictatorship. In Book of Sands: A Novel of the Arab Uprising, Alrawi employs magical realism “to express [his] view[s] of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement” (Cooper 17). Alrawi is a leading Arab writer living in Canada. He is a cosmopolitan writer equally at home in Egypt as he is in other western metropolitan areas, such as London, Canada, and America. While remaining an Arab at heart, he is deeply committed to liberation from the despotic regime and his writings are banned by state censorship. He was arrested and detained by Egyptian state security for his writings yet he continued to write against the Mubarak dictatorship. Like Alrawi himself, the strategy of magical realism is also linked to nomadic thought because as a written discourse, magical realism is unbound by a traditional system of writings and verbal expression, and “crosses frontiers of thinking and expression freely” (Erickson 249). Book of Sands opens in the unnamed capital of an unnamed country. Alrawi keeps the setting of the novel unknown. He purposefully situates the action in a geographically deterritorialized place because it allows him to present the worsening situation of all countries involved in the Arab uprisings. He expands the traditional realist narrative style of Arab novels by blending realist elements with magic. In this way he is free to interrogate the absurd cultural practices of the Arab world. His choice to privilege marginalized sections of society is consistent with the conventions of

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magical realism conceived as a postcolonial discourse. The attempt to foreground marginalized perspectives is one of the features postcolonialism and magical realism have in common. As a subset of postmodernism, magical realism also depends on narrative characteristics such as metatextuality, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity which I illustrate shortly. Similarly, Rakha, an award-winning essayist, poet, and novelist of Arab origin, writes against the despotic regime. His novel The Crocodiles presents a metafictional account of Egyptian society during and after the Arab spring. With the increasing social instability of the Arab world, the question of how to represent reality is integral to recent Arab art, as it seeks “to fulfill the need for security from being deceived by fictions” (Grunder 63). In response to this, Rakha chooses metafictional technique to “expose the very process of writing procedures and techniques” (Grunder 63). Through persistent self-reflection on his own process of writings, Rakha formally exhibits the precarious scenario of the Arab world. By continuously reflecting its own process of construction, Rakha reveals that the representation of reality is reliant on the web of semiotic systems. The language of his narratives is “distinctly relevant to the constructed reality in which it reflexively locates itself as an act of writing” (Herman et.al 301). In this way, he conveys the contemporary situation of the Arab world through formal experimentation. Using magical realism and metafiction, Alrawi and Rakha deterritorialize the language and take it away consciously from the trap of familiarity in a way Deleuze and Guattari discuss in the notion of minor literature. The three attributes of minor literature are discernible in various degrees with different combinations in the works under consideration. Rakha’s and Alrawi’s novels are examples of minority writings that have originally been intended for a wide readership and thus have been written in the language of the majority; they write highly political fiction that revolves around the issue of the Arab Spring; both books offer a detailed analysis of Arab countries, people, and their politics via the articulation of complex collective utterances. However, considering the experiments with form and language in the novels, both writers drift away from Deleuze and Guattari’s original notion of minor literature in which immigrant writers are supposed to assert themselves through metamorphosis. Without ever approaching metamorphosis, Rakha’s and Alrawi’s works are characterized by their use of metaphor, symbolism, magical realism and metafiction. For example, Alrawi uses symbols throughout the course of the novel. Readers encounter high walls throughout the narrative which

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symbolize the close and narrow-minded fortress of the Arab autocratic regime where education is of no use; where there is no freedom of expression and the masses are supposed to keep their voices lower as “who knows who could be listening” (Alrawi 11). Similarly, the protagonist Tarek, a mathematician, prefers to explain the mysteries of life “by using symbols” of mathematics rather than arguing as “arguing is not a good start to the day with a long journey” (Alrawi 97). Rakha meanwhile, uses the metaphor of “moon” for the female protagonist Qamar throughout the novel for two reasons: one is her beauty because Qamar means moon. Secondly, Rakha is of the view that like the moon, which only remains bright for a few days, Qamar goes “up in smoke” and “no one hear[s] [any]thing more about moon or know[s] what ha[s] become of her” (Para.15).1 Given this context, Alrawi and Rakha accentuate deterritorialization of the English language by embellishing it with Arab symbolism and metaphorical expressions.2 Both texts expand the definition of minor literature by challenging some of its aspects and use metaphorical form along with the postmodernist techniques of magical realism and metafiction. Their use of modernist and postmodernist devices does not diminish their effort to create a new minor literature; rather, it enhances their effort to deterritorialize English language. For example, they write about their own culture and the revolution and they write about the marginalized section of their society like protestors who have not been given their equal rights in English. In so doing, they deterritorialize the English language as both writers use English—Global and Eurocentric language—to represent Arab people. This instance of deterritorialization could be best described as geographic-linguistic deterritorialization because they do not use Arabic, their national language, but a global language. Secondly, their attempt of experimentation with the form of the novel which is often associated with the Latin American writers and western writers also deterritorializes the English language; thereby presenting an act of literary-cultural deterritorialization. This method of deterritorialization subverts the traditional use of those forms (magical realism and metafiction) and shows that minor literature can overlap with modernist and postmodernist literary trends.

1  This novel is written in numbered paragraphs rather than numbered pages. I use the word “para” throughout my chapter during in-text citation to show paragraph number. 2  In other words, they indigenize the English language.

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With an aim to capture the grim reality of the Arab world and its revolution, Alrawi and Rakha attempt to create hybrid texts by blurring the boundary between fact and fiction to the extent that the “reader is never quite sure where factual material ends and artistic license begins” (Galloway 326). The reality that a writer aims to portray in his or her fiction depends upon the level of “verisimilitude—making things seem real” because “all fiction makes things up, the difference is how and to what purpose” (Erickson 251). In this regard, as Stephen Slemon notes, magical realism is seen to analyze a real social condition and work as a “speaking mirror” (21) because it reflects the society with all its positive and negative attributes. Magical realism implicitly conveys the tyrannical practices of the past that require revisioning and involves “the dispossessed, the silenced, and the marginalized” of mainstream society (Slemon 21). Similarly, given the inherent unreliability of language to portray reality, metafictional texts stress narrative strategies to the extent that it takes its own self as its subject matter and thus, in its highly self-referential form, they are able to deliver reality. Alrawi’s use of magical realism and Rakha’s deployment of metafiction serve to question the status of reality and to articulate the excluded people forgotten by the traditional histories by “emphasis[ing] discontinuity in the progress of the historical narratives” as discussed in the following pages (Currie 12).

The Real and the Magic in Alrawi’s Book of Sands Magical realism, a term coined by German critic Franz Roh in 1925, combines magical and fantastic elements with reality. “Propinquity” is the fundamental organizing principle in the magical realist text in which “contradiction[s] stand face to face, oxymoron march in locked step – and politics collide with fantasy” (Zamora and Faris 1). Magical realism is a unique and complex literary genre of the last century. While it is commonly associated with Latin American writers, writers from all over the world have made contributions to this genre. Magical realism becomes “a language par excellence” for postcolonial writers in particular to its prioritizing of “non-western cultural systems by privileging mystery over empiricism, empathy over technology and tradition over innovation” (Zamora and Faris 3). By mixing two apparently irreconcilable worlds, magical realist texts microscopically reflect the political tension in the colonized and the postcolonial world. In the words of Ouyang, it is inherently “politically concerned not only with the continuous influence of empire in the

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postcolonial world” but also foregrounds and challenge the authoritarianism, corruption, and despotism of the postcolonial states (153). Not only does the trope of magical realism satirize the prevalent anarchy and corruption, but it also genuinely expresses postcolonial countries consciousness in which the new generation struggles against the old regime. Therefore, most of the magical realist texts are written in response to totalitarian regimes. For example, Toni Morrison (North American writer) writes her magical realist novel Beloved in response to American slavery and she criticizes the North American hegemony in her region. Salman Rushdie presents a critique on Gandhi’s autocratic regime in Midnight’s Children. Considering this, I argue that Anglo-Arab writers utilize magical realism in their writings to critique the despotic regime of the Arab world. I also want to stress here that the magic in the contemporary Anglo-Arab writings encodes an old tyrannical regime whereas the realism represents appallingly struggle of the new generations. The inherent antinomy between the magic and the real that exists in magical realist texts is helpful in expressing unpopular scenarios in socio-­ political contexts. By its very nature, it allows minority voices to be heard in representational contexts—a characteristic that makes it a potential strategy for minor literature. For instance, Alrawi uses magical realism to reveal the despotic regime of the Arab world as the neocolonial practice that perpetuates bribery, corruption, patriarchy, and persistent authoritarianism. He depicts corrupt bureaucracies that are alienated from the social realities of the ordinary people. The corrupt bureaucrats bribe their own people because “bribery is simply the cost of getting anything done” in the Arab world (Alrawi 3). Therefore, people, even though if they do not want to partake in corruption, “feel complicit in the general state of corruption” (Alrawi 3). Magical realism captures the “uncanny and [the] marvellous fantastic” (Todorov 20). According to Todorov, the uncanny refers to something extraordinary and strange that can illicit response from readers—often fear, whereas with the marvelous fantastic, the extraordinary events are “accepted as part of the narrative and elicit no hesitation on the part of the reader” (Todorov 20). Although to Todorov, the uncanny and the marvelous fantastic stand at opposite poles of the literary canon, magical realism merges these two subgenres. The mere occurrence of enigmatic incidents does not make text anti-realist, but rather, the encounter between the magic and the real leads to the creation of a third space which is neither magical nor real. It is a trans-empirical reality: a reality that is

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affirmative, intensive, extensive, and inclusive. The real world of this novel is filled with so many magical happenings, yet it does not distort reality or create a fantasy world, so much as intensify the categories of reality. For example, Book of Sands offers an interplay of the real and the magical which throws light on the harsh reality of the despotic regime in the Arab world where “babies decide not to be born” (Alrawi 1). By creating such an extreme state, not only does Alrawi capture the contested reality of the Arab world, but he also helps to foreground its silenced reality. Magical realist texts confront reality “to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts” (Leal 121). Magical happenings in the novel are presented as something very real, in such a way as to prevent the readers from considering them as something fantastic or magical. The novel is about the Arab Spring and the Post-Arab Spring usual days of the Arab world. Using his artistic abilities, Alrawi transforms the everyday harsh reality of the Arab world into magical elements. For example, the Arab revolution is introduced via the description of the flocks of birds that “rise and settle, flutter between buildings, perch on balconies and windowsills” in a very natural way (Alrawi 13). Nothing is shown as marvelous or remarkable that the Arab government “seals the square” (Alrawi 13) to stop people’s protesting but Alrawi’s “feathered emissaries” start protesting against them (Alrawi 19). In the novel, people are not surprised by this incredible event; instead, their reaction toward the hovering of birds is similar to the inhabitants of Macondo in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude where many yellow butterflies arrive in town. People do not marvel at the sight, they are irritated and annoyed because the “swarms of birds” cause a delay in their daily business (Alrawi 20). The distinctiveness of Alrawi’s protest resides in the fact that he shows nature as a protesting agent. In so doing, he reflects the deep-seated aversion of Arab people to authoritarianism. As the novel progresses, it seems that all its elements are combined together in such a way as to signal foreboding and impending drama. Yet no one reads these magical happenings as extraordinary events which thus show that anything can happen in the Arab world. Wendy B. Faris outlines five attributes of the magical realist text. First, the magical realist text “contains an irreducible element of magic, something that cannot be explained through universal laws” (Faris 167). By reversing naturalistic logic and adding an element of magic, the reality is either portrayed as amazing or ridiculed, in other words; the reality is either reflected as wonderful or ironical. In this regard, the purpose of magical realism is to present a satire and political commentary on the real

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world. The second major attribute of the magical realist text has to do with its detailed description of the phenomenal world and its “idiosyncratic recreation of historical events, […] [is] grounded firmly in historical realities—often alternate versions of officially sanctioned accounts” (Faris 169–170). This suggests that a real world is thoroughly delineated but that some of its familiar objects are rendered magical in order to present alternative perspective on reality. The third feature of magical realist texts involves readers who may hesitate between two opposing events: an event that happens as per universal laws and the existence of a marvelous event that may require suspension of the logical universal law. Similarly, the fourth trait of magical realism textualizes readers3 as they start experiencing “the closeness or near-merging of two realms, two worlds” (Faris 172). This happens when unusual magical acts occur on a daily basis in the real world, as when Rushdie states that “impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun” (Rushdie 302). Lastly, magical realist fiction questions preconceived notions related to space, time, and identity. In Book of Sands, Alrawi records the popular uprisings of the Arab world which shook both the Arab despotic regimes that were their targets and the wider world. He presents Arab world where the sense of time is distorted because of the citywide disruption caused by the “swarms of birds that swirl above [people] like tufts of cumulus” (20) and “walls constructed overnight by the military” (2). In Alrawi’s world, “the obstetrician estimate[s] the date” (3) of delivery but pregnancies are unnaturally “protracted” (30). Although these incidents are incredibly odd and challenge universal laws, they do not read like aberrations to the natural order of things. For example, he blends two realms where “whispering trees” guide humanity (Alrawi 27). An example such as this reveals that in the Arab world, nature helps the people against the cruel dictator who disrespects his own people and does not provide them better facilities; consequently, people have a hard living in their own country. It also shows that in a magical realist text shocking events take place as a part of normal day to day routine, and that magical realist authors give no explanation as to the occurrence of such mysterious happenings. The shunning of rational explanations is a major aspect of magical realist texts. Characters “do not dare ask about the reasons of astonishment” or “about the supernatural aspect of their situations, but choose rather to 3

 By textualizing readers, I mean when readers become textually self-aware.

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accept the extraordinary happenings in their life as something very normal. In so doing, a magical realist writers provide “access a fresh perspective on reality” to his/her readers (Suyoufie 189). For instance, in the very beginning of the novel, Alrawi denounces the ruthless despotic regime by blurring the boundary between magic and real saying that “mother ceases to give birth” here (1). Likewise, the novel opens on a normal working day and one encounters a traffic rush on the road, and “flights of starlings sweep over minarets and cathedral cupolas” (Alrawi 1). The arrival of a flock of starlings is depicted in the novel in a naturalistic way and is considered as a normal phenomenon not something marvelous. By suspending the rational explanation, Alrawi seems to celebrate the magical event and as a minor writer, he writes a story from the perspective of the common man. He uses the form of magical realism to reveal the brutal reality of the Arab Spring and the Post-Arab Spring’s grievous politics—something related to minor literature. In addition to politics, he covers a broad range of Arab issues, including religious beliefs, identity politics, and superstitions, which collectively contribute to his new vision for the magical realist genre. The remarkable point of Book of Sand is that though it blurs the line between magic and real, it does not lose its political credibility. Alrawi’s artistry lies in his abilities to utilize the theme of magic at various levels. In the first form, it has been noticed that magical elements are emanating from the belief system in which a person firmly believes in unseen mysterious forces of nature like ghosts, jinn, and so on. For example, in the Arab world it is believed that before marriage a girl should “spen[d] her days standing over burning censers calling on the jinn lords to make her fertile” (Alrawi 209). Similarly, a man is given a magical “potion of yohimbe” to “strengthen his seeds and [to] ensure he produce[s] a boy” (Alrawi 214). In the Arab world, people link natural forces with the presence of spirits and name them accordingly. For example, they believe that winds are “caused by mischievous sand demons” such as “afrit and jinn” who fight one another “with scimitars that flash lightning” (Alrawi 203). In the second form of magic however, Alrawi goes against natural forces. For instances, the normal pregnancy period is protracted. By opposing natural forces, Alrawi employs a very powerful kind of magic which is at once ironic as well as symbolic. For example, the way “the multitude of flocks” causes “chaos” in the real world is quite satirical in a sense that police arrest the students who come out for the protest (41). The police “slap them” and then” knock [them] sideways” (Alrawi

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34) and even stub a cigarette “into the soft underside of [their] arm[s]” (Alrawi 34). However, they could not control birds that are seen to stand in solidarity with the people, in “a community like those of humans” (Alrawi 20). By disrupting reality with moments of magic—birds show solidarity to humans, for example—Alrawi complicates social and political inequalities. Not only does he highlight the political inequalities, but he also disregards grammatical and syntactic rules. For instance, throughout the narratives, episodes of violence are conveyed through the use of incomplete phrases that stand as independent sentences. This conscious breach of grammar and syntax constitutes a performance of stammering and stuttering of language which shows that language fails to capture the brutality and violence of the despotic regime. The protestors are tortured but are not allowed to speak; “he ground his teeth so as not to make a sound” (Alrawi 34). This muteness, the lack of voice is a hint of oppression and dispossession of language. As a minor writer, Alrawi compensates for this lack of voice and speaks an unspeakable reality. In this situation of utter helplessness, when governments build walls to shut down every opportunity for the people, the flock of birds comes out to help them and play the role of emissary. This is reminiscent of the way birds were sent with “burning stones on Abraha the Abyssinian with his mighty elephant” (Alrawi 47).4 In such a state of dejection and destitution, it is seen that in the novel people no more trust their fellow beings, instead they call the spirits of the dead considering that dead ones “have special powers from being in heaven, to make things right” on earth which are no more in control of them (Alrawi 53). These examples show that Alrawi presents a world where spirits of dead people influence attitudes of real people and where the living feel connected to the dead. Thus though the insertion of magical elements in the real world, not only does Alrawi reveal the animosity of the Arab people and show his fidelity with the oppressed masses of the Arab world against the tyrannical regime, but he also captures the unspeakable and gives voice to a silenced reality. Such 4  This refers to the historical true story of the governor of Abyssinia, Abraha Al-Ashram, who tried to attack Ka’ba (The Holy place of worship for Muslims). Abraha gathered his army and elephants and marched toward Makkah. However, on his way to Makkah, the elephants kneeled down and refused to march forward. Abraha tried everything to make them stand again but they did not move. Abraha though was still willing to go in the direction of Makkah. Meanwhile, Allah (SWT) sent birds that resembled a hawk having a stone in their beak, legs, and feathers. These birds then dropped these stones on the Abyssinians and destroyed the whole army.

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magical intrusions can be taken as a language of minor expression because it helps to reveal this silenced reality. It is worth noting here that Alrawi’s usage of magical elements at two levels has a twofold purpose. In this way, not only does it help him to expose the atrocities of the Arab government but it also helps to unveil the superstitious belief of the Arab world too. It also indicates that Alrawi utilizes two kinds of magic, what Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria distinguishes as ontological magic and epistemological magic. According to Echevarria, the magic in magical realistic narratives can be distinguished into these two types, with ontological magic stemming from “native beliefs” (Pabalate 6) or from “the cultural context in which the text is set” (Bowers 86) and epistemological magic originating from unusual sources which are “not common to the narrative setting” and is based on the writer’s intention (Pabalate 7). For this reason, Jeanne Delbaere calls epistemological magic as “scholarly magical realism” (qtd. in Bowers 87) and a writer uses it “to produce a particular narrative effect” (Bowers 87). Magical realist writers often pick one of these magical effects. For example, by incorporating the magic of Shiva (one of the Hindu gods), Salman Rushdie utilizes ontological magic in his novel Midnight’s Children. Tahar Ben Jelloun by contrast uses epistemological magic in his novel The Sand Child, “in which the protagonist keeps on changing its gender to dismantle the universal logic of gender” (Younas 6). However, Alrawi seems to utilize both these magical effects in his novel. By employing both types of magic, Alrawi, perhaps, wants to show events from both a believer’s view point and a rational point of view. He uses epistemological magic to expose the reality of the Arab world and uses ontological magic to criticize the troubling aspects of Arab culture. For example, the frequent appearance of spirits and other mythical creatures, for example, ghoul and the lord of afrit, in the novel reflects some of the superstitious beliefs in Arab culture. Magical realism also requires an individual’s bond with tradition and with the faith of the community. From this perspective, “the elements employed in magical realism are not completely fantastical and unearthly” instead sometimes many intertextual references are used to refer to another culture or faith (Abdurrahmani 117). Given this context, Alrawi uses intertextual references to revisit the cultural and historical traditions of Arab culture. For instance, throughout the narrative Omar, a self-proclaimed believer and Maulana, quotes repeatedly from the Quranic verses. He does so in different contexts in order to legitimize his irrational acts. People like him only pick the bits and pieces

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of religion to show themselves highly religious while often indulging in immoral activity. For example, to keep an upper hand over his wife, he even misinterprets God’s word. He quotes from Quranic scripture that “men are a degree above women” and he interprets the word above as “above means more. More means better” (Alrawi 108) which gives a man the upper hand “to beat his wife in public” even though “she [is] pregnant with his child” (Alrawi 228). Instead of a true interpretation of Quranic verse that held men responsible for every kind of financial support of women, People like Omar use religious scripture for their own purposes. This manifests the troubled religious lives of Arab people and their selective religious practices. In this example, a familiar scene is presented without dealing with the supernatural. However, by referring particularly to Muslim Maulana, Alrawi foregrounds one of the important aspects of the Islamic religion.5 These examples illustrate that Alrawi’s utilization of ontological magic does not only reveal the irrational belief systems of the Arab world, but also shows the stereotypical and false notions attached to the religion of Islam due to the misinterpretation of the Quran. Similarly, with the help of epistemological magic like “the alley thick with birds” (Alrawi 69) along with the crowd of protestors, Alrawi perhaps wants to create a state of narrative urgency against the despotic regime of the Arab world, where everyone and everything, even the walls erected by the government, is “calling for the fall of tyrants” (69). These examples reveal that by inculcating the extraordinary, Alrawi manages to critique the social practices and political scenarios faced by Arab individuals. Alrawi materializes both kinds of magic at two levels in the narrative as well. Gérard Genette, a French literary critic, analyzes different narrations and proposes a model of narrative levels consisting three levels of narrative. The outermost level which is primarily concerned with the narration itself is called extradiegetic. He claims that at this level, the narrator narrates a story without any personal involvement in the story. For example, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there is a frame narrator at extradiegetic level besides Marlow’s voice who has no personal involvement in the story. 5  In this example, Alrawi, as a minor writer, highlights an important aspect of the contemporary world. Maulana, Maulvi, or Ulema is a name given to the Muslim religious scholar. They are generally considered highly rich in the knowledge regarding Islam and are responsible to interpret the religious teachings of Islam in the right way. Unfortunately, some Maulanas (as the example is given in the text) use the text of Holy Quran for their personal interest and manipulate people. In the above examples, Alrawi shows the subjective interpretation of religious script.

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By contrast to the conventionally omniscient extradiegetic narrator, there is a second level of narration which Genette identifies with intradiegetic narrative. In this case, the narrator is herself involved with the events narrated, as is the case with Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Finally, metadiegetic refers to secondary narrator (fictional character) within the story. Alrawi employs epistemological magic at the very beginning of the novel at the extradiegetic level of narration, as when the narrator describes the unusual arrival of flocks. Ontological magic by contrast appears at the metadiegetic level of Alrawi’s narrative, for example, when the protagonist, Tarek, narrates a fairytale to his daughter. Alrawi later blurs the boundary between both narratives and it becomes difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. Instead, the magical elements of both levels assist each other. For example, the novel opens with a real Arab world description where pregnancies are protracted and its atmosphere is clouded with “the chittering swarm” of birds (Alrawi 1). Presented in a naturalized manner, the extradiegetic narration works to normalize the magical events it portrays and these fantastic elements do not seem to dominate the real world. Rather, in an otherwise conventional and ordinary real world, babies refuse to be born and the city is swarmed by birds. Alrawi then inculcates magical events at the metadiegetic level of narration by recounting stories within a story, as when protagonist, Tarek, recounts the apparent fairy tale story of the wishing rose to his daughter, Neda. Later in the narrative, this story comes to serve as a supporting sub-plot for the main plot in the novel itself, with many of the story’s magical incidents serving to reveal the mystery of the main plot and complete its actions. In so doing, Alrawi links the magical world with the real world, as the extra- and intradiegetic narratives fuse and readers ultimately become conscious of magical depth in the real world. At this juncture, Alrawi as a magical realist writer achieves “the veritable aim of the magical realist: [to] capture the magic that palpitates in things” (Sperl 241). By creating a story within a story, Alrawi, as a minor writer, attempts to bring creativity in an affirmative way in the literary practice dominated by western and Latin American writers. In doing so, he substantiates Deleuze and Guattari’s viewpoint that a minor writer utilizes the available immediate material of expression in a new way to produce revolutionary a spirit. Given this context, I maintain that Book of Sands presents an amalgamation of realist and the magical elements. It talks about ruthless Arab World regime on the one hand and at the same time, it outlines a fairy tale where

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a magical “wishing rose” (Alrawi 27) of the fairy world is needed “to break the spell on babies” in the real world (Alrawi 185). This suggests that magical realism does not abandon the real world but it is “always foreign to the real while being part of the real” and the text which emerges “from such combination is at once disturbing and fantastic; familiar and extraordinary” (Suyoufie 188). Alrawi mythologizes his real story by using the myth of the ghoul. The ghoul is considered an evil spirit in Arabic mythology that consumes human flesh. Unlike the magical elements at the extradiegetic level of narration, the story of the ghoul exists at the metadiegetic level of narration narrated by Tarek to his daughter, Neda. Alrawi artistically links the myth of the ghoul with real characters. Alrawi’s novel does not set in the realm of the realism, nor could it be counted as the fantastic world of magic. As in the very beginning of the text, it is noticed that seemingly Terek, a protagonist in the novel, is narrating a story of the three sisters to his daughter, Neda, in front of whom “mother-ghoul” appears and says to them that she “could gobble [them] all from [their] toes to [their] curls” (Alrawi 26). To save themselves from mother-ghoul, all three sisters “ran as fast as their legs could carry them” (Alrawi 26) and then parted on a journey “searching [for] the wishing rose” to break every evil spell (Alrawi 27). As the story progresses, it is disclosed that three sisters, in fact are not the part of the fairy tale but they belong to the real world, as Neda is the daughter of one of those sisters in the story. It is interesting to note that these two realms in the novel never claim superiority over one another. Instead, Alrawi deconstructs the binary between magic and the real by placing the world of rationality alongside the magical world. By utilizing the trope of magical realism, Alrawi shows that the magical world is an extension of the real world. For example, in the novel, he provides the details of superstitious cultural practices such as “the tomb of seven angels in the real world where people go to tie ribbons and threads for their “wishes to come true” (Alrawi 139). In so doing, he demonstrates the co-existence of magic and reality in everyday Arab life. It also suggests that people fail to acknowledge the existence of magical elements in the real world; rather, the magic permeates in the very lives of Arab people. It is noteworthy that Alrawi achieves such exceptional hybridity with the help of defamiliarization. Scott Simpkins notes that magical realist authors defamiliarize familiar objects in order to “prevent an overwhelming sense of disbelief” (150). In so doing, such writers foreground those elements of reality which are present in the real world but remains invisible due to the hegemonic social forces. There is always unspeakable reality which falls outside of the reach

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and limit of language, where even writings become mute. Magical realist writers compensate for this muteness. They manipulate the language and use a minor form of expression (i.e., insertion of magical elements) to reveal the atrocities of the real world and make it alarming as well. Unlike fairy tale or utopian fiction, magical realist narratives are drawn from realistic grounds “to create an alternative world that corrects often the skewed representation of historical events and reality created by the center” (Pabalate 17). The existence of the real world in the magical realist text “requires the reader to look towards reality and not away from it in order to reassess historic and future events from an alternative perspective” (Pabalate 26). Following the same logic, Alrawi tells us a beautiful love story amidst the upheaval and atrocities of Arab uprisings. He uses a range of magical and fantastical happenings throughout his narratives which disrupts the narrative logic and creates “contradictory understanding of events and unsettling doubts” (Pabalate 53). In so doing, Alrawi prompts us to question traditions and the received norms and also doubt the validity of the representation itself. This suggests that magical realist texts resist a monologic politics and culture and monolithic interpretation. Book of Sands exemplifies the contradiction and doubt in an artistic way. For example, the protraction of the normal nine-month process of pregnancy is used by Alrawi to expose the gravity of oppression in the Arab world as described: She gasps, catches her breath, pants through the slow wave of pain, exhales in short puffs, anticipates the next pulse, leans back into the cushions of the chair, pants, closes her eyes, keeps puffing. No, she does not feel ready—no, not yet—feels a pulse gather as a coil tightens, wants to disconnect from the rhythm strengthening to child birth, wishes it like a sound to fall silent. She pants, waits for the spasm, the wave of pain, pants again, opens her eyes, checks her watch. She closes her eyes, puffs and pants for another minute, opens one eye while keeping the other closed, peeks a look at her watch. Still nothing. She puffs for a while longer and then stops, opens both eyes. She calls to Tarek. It’s stopped. (Alrawi 31)

This description of the prolonged pregnancy is symbolic of the protracted suffering of the Arab world under repressive regimes; the unceasing cramps indicate the presence of the brutal regime even after the Arab Spring while the undelivered baby manifests the common masses’ resistance to it. This intermingling of magic and real can also be interpret in terms of the conjunction of distinct narrative traditions. Magical realist writers keep the local narrative in line with the western European realist traditions of the novel. Therefore, it can be argued that the paternity of the magical

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realist text is drawn from the western tradition of realism but the maternity of the magical realist text is heterogeneous and varies from locale to locale and born from the distinctiveness of the native region. By blending these two distinctive traditions, magical realists’ authors disintegrate the line between the local native and the western narrative traditions. By merging the boundary between local and western narrative traditions, magical realist writers set out the mythical and fantastical elements in the real world in order to manifest the reality of world with all its strength and weaknesses. The real world is full of the diverse mores and credence together with the scientific laws. Throughout the history and even today’s world is full of the illogical dogmas that have negatively impacted the lives of the common people. Given this context, magical realist texts question realism “with its heavy-handed narrative irony” and “force the reader to stop and re-­ examine their ideas and assumption about the real” (Pabalate 10). Female genital mutilation (FGM) in some parts of the Arab world is one such example of a brutal cultural practice that adversely affects female sexual lives. Alrawi refers to female circumcision in Book of Sands and reveals that Arab people believe that “by [her] very being, woman is seductress” so it is necessary to have her circumcised as this cut is believed to help “remove the thorn of desire from” her (Alrawi 109). He shows that irrespective of the fact that it is painful, women are forced into circumcisions which can sometimes even take their lives. Alrawi explores this practice through the figure of Fadia, whom he describes “as stiff as a chrysalis” after “the cut [was] made.” Her body is later shown “wrapped in a white sheet and taken for burial” (Alrawi 133). Alrawi’s use of the word chrysalis has its own significance. In “Magical Realism in Libya,” Miriam Cooke refers to animal-human metamorphoses and juxtapositions as examples of Arab magical realism. She argues that the cruel and uncompromising environment of the Arab world “compels human to establish and maintain the subtlest of balances between themselves and the animal species” (9). For instance, a chrysalis generally refers to insect pupa which later on turns to either butterfly or moth. This suggests that in the Arab world young females, who are not even aware of their own sexuality, are tortured to death in the name of their irrational belief systems. The use of the chrysalis (nonhuman category) implies that language fails to capture this absent reality of the Arab world. Therefore, Alrawi here pushes the major language to the point of its demise to reveal the suffering and the torment of young girls who are subjected to a torturous ritual.

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In line with this, Alrawi also highlights that in the Arab world, the sole purpose of a woman’s body is considered as the carrier of life. Therefore, even an educated man, “a gynecologist,” wants “to manage women’s bodies so that they may procreate future generations” because this is his “profession[al] obligat[ion] to society at large” (Alrawi 115). Women are even tortured in bed on their wedding night and later, the bloodied sheet is “hung on a line in the courtyard” to prove that “she ha[s] bled on the marriage altar” (Alrawi 215). These examples demonstrate the inhuman and disrespectful attitude of males toward their wives. Alrawi also highlights the practice of polygyny in the Arab world. In the Arab world, a son is given special treatment because he is supposed to “extend [his] father’s shadow, give life to his name” and if there is no son, “the ancestors require that [he] take[s] another wife”; therefore, polygamy becomes a common practice (Alrawi 205). By foregrounding these cultural practices, as a minor writer, Alrawi, perhaps, wants to draw attention to such events that are often taken for granted and thus invites them to re-examine and reassess their beliefs and traditions critically. The same strategy can be helpful in re-assessing the stated official historical events. For example, Rushdie gives an entirely different perspective—different from an official historical account of India’s independence through the use of magical incidents in his novel Midnight’s Children. Likewise, through the use of magical realism, Alrawi provides us a different version of the despotic regimes of the Arab world. Through introducing element of magic in the narrative, Alrawi aims to liberate the voices of the voiceless community, such as villagers, prisoners, and travelers. In the novel, Terek witnesses the congregation where people are gathered “to watch the bodies brought up from the excavation” (Alrawi 91). He was informed by one of his villager fellows that these people are targeted by “the army, state security, foreign contractors” (Alrawi 91). By quoting this incident, author is actually criticizing the security officers of the Arab World, whose job is to secure the nation, but they are involved in assassinating their own people instead of protecting them. Not only are the politics of the Arab world placed under close critical scrutiny, but Alrawi also questions many traditional notions of Arab society. The presence of the desert marks a significant contribution to the Book of Sands. Like Ben Okri’s Nigerian forest in The Famished Road and the presence of the Sahara in Ibrahim Al-Koni’s New Waw, Sahara Oasis, the desert setting in Book of Sands foregrounds the life of prisoners, travelers, and nomads. By using travelers and nomads in his settings, Alrawi

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“strategically moves [the] spatial shifting from site to site” to give the detailed account of a war-torn country and also witnesses the atrocities of the autocratic regime in the Arab world, from voices usually kept silent (Erickson 254). The above evidence reveals that as a minor writer, Alrawi’s narrative is anti-authoritarian and subversive, which challenges both social and political forms of authority as it allows the unprivileged other—prisoners, nomads, travelers, or simply the unfamiliar—to the center of his narrative. Given this context, I consider magical realism is a literary trope that depicts reality with all its strengths and frailties. However, there are some other aspects of magical realism that questions the nature of realism. In this regard, metafiction generally plays a role in encountering the problem of the accurate representation by “provid[ing] commentaries on themselves, often complete with occasional mises-en-abyme—those miniature emblematic textual self-portraits” (Faris 175). Metafiction can be regarded as one of the important elements in the magical realist literature as it works to invoke “the magical power of fiction itself” (Faris 175). While reading metafictional narrative, readers experience the closeness of words with the real world and thus they feel “verbal magic” (Faris 176), as manifested in Rakha’s The Crocodiles, discussed in the next section.

Metafiction in The Crocodiles Metafictional texts keep the reader conscious about the fictional status of the text either by incorporating a story within a story or by referring to the process by which they are made. The term metafiction is first used by William Gass in 1970 and described it as “fiction with self-conscious, self-­ awareness, self-knowledge, ironic self-distance” (Currie 1). Indeed, metafictional novels are such texts which contain a propensity within themselves to address the difficulty of fabricating fiction. Patricia Waugh claims that a metafictional novel transcribes the real world’s instabilities and the language of the metafictional novel clearly reflects the fact that “novels are constructed through continuous assimilation of everyday historical forms of communication” (Waugh 5). In Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Waugh defines metafiction as fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of

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construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (2)

By continuously inviting the reader’s attention toward the constructed nature of text, metafictional writers prompt them to ask questions about the reality. For this reason, metafictional novelists look for such narrative styles that can show the constructed nature of reality—framing, for example—which I illustrate shortly. Rakha conveys the subject matter of the novel—the ill-fated revolution and the subsequent disintegration in the Arab world—by experimenting with form. Metafictional writers believe that the power structures of today’s world are invisible and everyday language, as Patricia Waugh remarks, “endorses and sustains such power structures through a continuous process of naturalization whereby forms of oppression are constructed in apparently innocent representations” (11). Considering language as an independent and self-contained system that generates its own meaning, the notion that language reflects an objective world is no longer a tenable argument. Instead, the relationship of language with the phenomenal world is “highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention” (Waugh 3). Therefore, the term “meta” is required “to explore the relationship between this arbitrarily linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers” (Waugh 3). In fiction, writers are required to examine the “relationship between the world of the fiction and the world outside the fiction” (Waugh 3). By living within the parameters of fictional form and to represent social reality honestly, metafictional writers thus turn “inwards to their own medium of expression” (Waugh 11). For example, Rakha explores the constructed nature of reality in The Crocodiles by continuously reflecting on the language of his narratives. The storyline of The Crocodiles mediates between fantasy and plausibility. While reflecting on his own process of writing, not only does Rakha locate his narratives within a “matrix of historical circumstances, authorial intentions, and linguistic specificities” to expose the constructed nature of reality, but his reflection on the process of his writing also disrupts the narrative logic of the story (Herman et.al 301). In this way, they oppose and resist social conventions and norms through the form of the novel itself. Not only do they write against social conventions but they also situate their resistance to social norms through the form of the novel. The sense of disillusionment and discontentment of the Arab

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world is portrayed by Rakha in his narratives through its form. Like his characters, who are struggling hard to make sense of their chaotic lives in the midst of Arab uprisings, Youssef is struggling with the disintegrated form of the novel. Here, I could briefly state that metafiction is not a novel phenomenon in Anglo-Arab fiction, one can see that Yousef Rakha’s The Crocodiles is influenced by novelists such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Naguib Mahfouz, and Yousef Al-Mohaimeed. The Crocodiles shares many elements of Al-Mohaimeed’s The Clamour of the Dead (2000)—I shall briefly mention some of these shortly—especially drawing the reader into the narrative to participate in the meaning making. This style is previously adopted by modern Arab novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in Screaming in a Long Night. The Crocodiles is an experimental fiction written in the form of a memoir with numbered paragraphs which slip between poem and prose. It breaks all novelistic norms and jumps in time and space, with a section dealing with an event of 1997, for instance, interrupted by the choking gas of Tahrir Square. The novel’s central plot revolves around the foundation of a secret poetry group, critical of the older generation of writers. Throughout the narratives, the narrator, who is the metafictional version of the author, introduces himself that I am Youssef; an “Egyptian writer born in 1975 (or 73 or 76)6. Whatever the precise date, I am born after the October war of 1973 and before the Iranian revolution” (Para.20), is in continuous conversation with other contemporary writers and older writers. In the very beginning of the novel, he proclaims that he is an “Egyptian writer” (Rakha Para.20) who is talking about his group, Crocodiles (Rakha Para.26). This comment here informs readers beforehand that an author is about to start a story about his group. The metafiction at this stage is autoreferential because the narrator, a metafictional version of the author himself, establishes that he is writing a novel which is distinct in nature than the previous work of literature and thus this work can be referred to as an autometafictional novel.7 The Clamour of Dead 6 7

 Youssef Rakha is born in June 1976.  This term is first used by Marc Chénetier to describe similar settings: All of the characters from Barth’s earlier works reappear there in conversation with one another, and for good measure, so does the figure of the Author himself, engaged in a permanent debate with his past creatures. This kind of book would not seem to authorize a disjointed reading of the rest of the oeuvre. In order to describe this work, we would have to coin a term even more barbaric than ‘metafiction’ and speak then of ‘autometafiction’. (Chénetier 73)

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also begins with the narrator asking, and many times himself being asked, why don’t you write a novel? The story begins with a clear statement where a narrator/writer announces that he is about to start a novel. It is clear that The Crocodiles seems to follow the autometafictional style of The Clamour of Dead. Just as the magical realist text combines the magical and the real, here fiction and criticism are associated. According to Waugh, “metafictional novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of fictional illusion and the laying bare of that illusion” (6). In other words, in metafictional novels, the two processes—the creation of fiction and making a statement about that creation—are held in narrative tension in such a way that the distinction between creation and criticism finally implodes, with a logic of simultaneous creation and critique, or deconstruction, ensuing the implicit meaning of the text. In metafictional novels, fiction and criticism assimilates each other and achieves self-consciousness. Criticism works through the “affirmation of literariness in its own language” in order to form critical insight within fiction, whereas for fiction it means to assimilate the “critical perspective within fictional narratives” (Currie 2). This mutual relationship blurs the boundary between fiction and criticism, and therefore, “the roles of writer and critic are often fulfilled by the same person” in the metafictional novel to formulate critical insight within fiction, as The Clamour of the Dead is exactly doing the same (Currie 3). The Clamour of the Dead also provides within itself a commentary on its own status as fiction, and also provides commentary on its own process of reception and production. Following the same logic, Rakha, in The Crocodiles, becomes a “dialectical figure” in his novel because of his persistent reflections upon his own writing and he embodies both “the production and reception of fiction in the role of author and critic” (Currie 3). Throughout his narrative, he is seen as commenting on his writing process and even on his imagination persistently. For example, he imagines Radwa “sitting on the balcony wall’s wooden balustrade” just before her suicide, but in the next line, he is commenting on his imagination saying that “why I imagine the balustrade to be made of wood, I don’t know” (Rakha Para.2). Similarly, while introducing Ashraf—one of the characters in the novel—he says that “this engineer—whose name I remember, or imagine, to be Ashraf” (Rakha Para.50). The word “imagine” in both examples shows that Rakha is highly aware of his writing process and unlike in other metafictional novels, this awareness is quite explicit rather than implicit expertise. Rakha

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creates fiction by making a statement about his creative process. This kind of self-reference and preoccupation with the writing process may be considered as autofiction and hence, typically postmodernist. Christopher Norris argues that postmodern novels “draw attention to their own fictive devices, rather than trying to pass themselves off as chunks of real-life experiences,” as is illustrated above (Norris 157). Having started his career as a blog writer, Rakha’s writing is greatly influenced by internet technologies. Being a journalist, writer, poet, and blogger at the same time, Rakha always experiments by merging poetry, prose, journalistic narratives and the style of blog writings. Likewise, Al-Mohaimeed also starts his writing career as a journalist. Their professional experience of journalism become essential part of their writings and one can see the insertion of facts and figures throughout in their fictional narratives. For example, throughout his narratives, Rakha writes like a reporter, as one who analyzes from direct observation. For instance, he writes: “Millions streamed out of Cairo’s mosques onto the streets after the Friday prayers to rail against the interior ministry. And I felt that God had happened for real. It was January 28, 2011” (Rakha Para.157). By blending fact, like the insertion of dates, with a fictional writing style, Rakha tries to portray the reality of the Arab revolution (Egyptian revolution in the context of the novel). Many Arab writers like Hamilton and El Rashidi also use a journalistic narrative style but Rakha dexterously employs journalism with metafiction which makes it an effective strategy for conveying his intended message about the doomed revolution of 2011. Written in the form of 405 discrete paragraphs, The Crocodiles can be compared with the form and strategies of blog writings. Rakha presents the story in a “jumbled and unstructured way” by writing unrelated discrete paragraphs. Consequently, readers face difficulty in making the sense of a story. The reader may initially feel difficult to follow the story and how the narrative fragments related to one another. This style, however, reinforces his central argument: the doomed revolution. Like Alrawi’s style of narration where the insertion of magic disrupts the narratology, Rakha deteriorates the continuity of the story by writing the scattered paragraphs instead of following linear plot. This creates ambiguity and instead of answering readers’ questions, it pulls the readers in unexpected direction. In so doing, I believe metafictional writers establish a relationship between the reader and the writer, where both the readers and the writers are engaged in a continuous dialogue. Similarly, in Al-Mohaimeed’s The Clamour of the Dead, the narrator/author communicates with his

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characters and characters with each other to expose the secrets behind mystic relationships throughout the novel. Similar to Al-Mohaimeed’s novel, Rakha does not direct his readers while reading, instead as a minor writer, he makes his writing more interactive and requires his readers to be active participants in the interpretation of the text—a characteristic of minor literature8—by discovering the blurred identity of the author/protagonist/main character/narrator. Interestingly, both novelists, Rakha and Al-Mohaimeed, demonstrate that they have no control over their characters and that their characters are leading the narratives and they are only following their dictates. This attribute seems to echo the deconstructionist’s view of “the death of the author.” Apart from The Crocodiles, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal, his first novel, is also an example of such experimentation. In The Crocodiles, Youssef, the narrator, is criticizing the writers of an earlier generation, who “ha[ve] failed to move beyond the seventies generation in any essential regard” and bring no innovation to the literary field (Rakha Para.92). Therefore, he keeps on experimenting with his writing style to create something innovative and new. In an interview with Hilary Plum in 2015, Rakha discusses the inherent conflict between his writings and the older generation as is explored in his novel, The Crocodiles. Unlike many metafictional texts, where narrators are apprehensive about their ability as writers, here Youssef, a narrator and an implied author in The Crocodiles, is confident. In Donald Barthelme’s famous metafictional short story “Florence Green is 81,” the narrator Baskerville is conscious about his writing and fears that his story may sound boring for readers. Similarly, the narrator and the implied author in Al-Mohaimeed’s The Clamour of the Dead seem hesitant to start a novel as he asks himself in the beginning: “are you able to write a novel?” (Al-Mohaimeed 5). From the beginning of the novel, it is noticed that a narrator/writer is seeking maturity in writing that he achieves with difficulty. In his novel, Al-Mohaimeed is seen as struggling to write a novel but always failing to do so. Yet he continues his writing and keeps the readers informed about his writing process and story as he says that “with a black pen I draw over the heads of these characters, their features, history, dreams, hopes, and memories” (Al-Mohaimeed 1). Rakha’s Youssef by contrast feels no such fictional trepidation and difficulty. Instead, he is assured of his ability and calls himself the “great knob” because he is “the most conscious of the creeds of secret poetry” and “the 8

 Please see “Introduction,” pages 19 and 20.

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most capable of following what [i]s happening” (Rakha Para.22). Such intrusions on the part of the implied author show that Youssef is assertive and highly aware of his role as a narrator and as a writer and keeps them inquisitive to make them critical. Having said this, I argue that both writers seem to be more concerned with being a writer than producing literature. Their experimentation with the form of the novel appear to show no distinction between product and process. Thus, I argue that following his predecessor and being a minor writer, Rakha favors expression over the content of the novel because minor literature begins with expressing itself. Rakha also merges reality with fiction by using the techniques of framing. In simple words, a frame can be defined as “construction” (Waugh 28). Metafictional writers believe that “everything is framed, whether in life or in novels”; therefore, they draw attention toward the framing itself and examine it to unveil how the reality, as well as the novel, is constructed (Waugh 28). In comparison to metafictional texts, where “frames are established and often contradict, interact, or intertwine,” there are “a fairly simple set of frames that rarely interact and bleed into one another” in the traditional realist fiction (Grunder 68). Following the same logic, no dichotomy exists between reality and fiction in The Crocodiles. For example, the Egyptian group of poets and artists is central to the novel and it reflects the literary scenario of 1990 in Egypt. However, this main plot constitutes the stories of real people and fantastical tales that blurs the boundary of the real world and the fictional realm. On the other hand, The Clamour of the Dead is a theatrical game of the narration between the narrator/author and his different characters, and together they trick the reader in the whole process of narration. There is a polyphony of voices among the characters, and the narrator/author and all of them are telling their stories. The real and the fictional elements get mixed up during this digressive game of storytelling. The continuous back and forth between the reality and fantasy leaves the reader to wonder where the actual story ends and where the fiction starts. This can be seen in the example of the lion in The Crocodiles and the dead people in The Clamour of the Dead. The dead people appear in The Clamour of the Dead in front of the author/narrator stirring up confusion in the mind of the readers as at times, they start arguing with the author/ narrator, interrupt him, and force him to write although they are dead. Similarly, in The Crocodiles, the readers are well aware that the lion that appears to Nayf is the “supernatural” element present in the story, yet the

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narrator’s saying that he “never for an instant doubted the reality of the lion” creates confusion (Rakha Para.14). Also, while discussing the protest, Rakha continuously creates ambiguity in the mind of readers through shifting from the real world to the world of fantasy. As in the novel, on January 29 the narrator sits “in the entrance of [his] building” and describes “the traces of twenty-four hours of sprinting and stopping and squatting on pavements, of cheating tear gas” (Rakha Para.157) and then suddenly shifts attention toward the lion that appears to Nayf and says that “the lion [is] revolution because the lion [is] God” and he is even grateful for the presence of lion as “your blessings, O Lion!” (Rakha Para.158). Quoting the event of the revolution with date makes it more authentic; however, Rakha’s mentioning of the lion leaves the readers in the state of confusion. The frame of The Crocodiles is often interrupted by the intrusive commentary of the narrator, who breaks the fictional frame to make direct appeals to the reader: “[I]t’s time to let you know is that I met with Maher Abdel Aziz” (Rakha Para.89), the narrator states in the middle of a story about his characters, for instance. At times, he even starts telling a new story to his readers and then stops abruptly by informing them that “this is a tale for later” (Rakha Para.28) or “the time for all that is yet to come” (Rakha Para.47). In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Term, Chris Baldick talks about this kind of self-referential nature of metafictional novels which focus on the relationship between the text and the reader: “the term is normally used for works that involve a significant degree of self-­ consciousness about themselves as fictions, in ways that go beyond occasional apologetic addresses to the reader” (151). Such intrusions on the part of the narrator “expose the ontological distinctness of the real and the fictional world” and destroy the illusion of the fiction’s reality. (Waugh 32). These intrusions might be referred to as metatext which complicate the text further but at the same time, it calls attention to the constructed nature of fiction and reality. These examples also illustrate “the discontinuity between fiction and reality” (Sasa and Nimer 169). Such kind of abrupt shift from fiction to reality while maintaining realism is vital for metafiction as Mark Currie notes: Metafiction explicitly lays bare the convention of realism; it does not ignore or abandon them. Very often realistic conventions supply the control in metafictional texts, the norm of the background against which the conventional strategies can foreground themselves. (53)

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Thus, it is clear that the metafictional strategy fortifies “the relationship between reality and fiction” (Sasa and Nimer 169). Given this context, Currie agrees with Waugh’s idea that a metafictional novel is a response and a contribution to a sense that fiction and reality are naturally associated with each other. To show this association between fiction and reality, Rakha’s text is punctuated with so many authorial intrusions that chaos is created in his narrative. This disorder in the form of the novel exemplifies the perplex situation in the Arab world where people are excited that their protest will overthrow the dictatorial regime. However, the revolution becomes a “post-despair” for all those who participate in the Arab uprising (Rakha Para.231). The utter disappointment at the hands of the military makes people questions about their presence in the protest. As quoted by Yousef: I can’t see that my presence among the hundred, thousand, million unarmed souls exposed to gunfire, run-down, snatched, would either help or hinder. I feel I’ve run quite far enough in previous months and that all that my death might achieve would not outweigh my sister’s grief, though her sadness at my loss might last no longer than a few days. (Rakha Para.231)

This example clearly exemplifies the chaos, disintegration, and fragmentation in the Arab world following the insurgency. One of the other significant strategies of Rakha in his metafictional novel is his deployment of collage in his narratives. A collage is a technique of an art production in which many pieces of different artworks are glued together to become one piece of art. Like a French cut-up literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text, Rakha has adopted a kind of collage method and pasted story after story together in the form of a novel. With the help of this technique, Rakha includes the stories of those people of the Arab world who have never been part of mainstream society. In the course of the entire novel, in every paragraph, Rakha describes a different story. Talking about his closed literary group which aims at the “scrutiny of Poetry” in paragraph 23, all of a sudden in paragraph 24, he tells the story of Moon, “the only poetess” who manages to be a part of their group, and later while thinking about Moon in paragraph 25, he turns to the brutal despotic regime in Egypt where “young men are abducted and tortured” (Rakha Para.25). In a similar way, the narrative contains stories of writers, protestors, female activists, lesbian and gay people, and even members of the marginalized

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Nubian community in Egypt. Nubians are the descendants of ancient African civilization who once ruled Egypt and are currently living in the southern Egypt. They have never been granted their rights and in order to be part of the mainstream society, they have to “abandon every aspect of [their] identity” especially the “profounder things—language [and] culture” (Rakha Para.90). Different governments in Egypt ignore the Nubian’s demand for social, economic, and cultural rights. Thus, with the help of collage, Rakha incorporates the voices of all those people who remain inaudible until now and exemplifies minor literature. All of his stories are interlinked to the extent that it is even hard to identify the main outer story and together these narratives reveal the subject matter of his novel—the discontent that accompanies the Arab insurgencies and the ill-­ fated revolution of 2011 in the Arab world. In dealing with the issue of disillusionment followed by the Arab uprisings, The Crocodiles has its own distinctive narrative strategies which widen the stylistic aspect of minor literature. On a formal level, Rakha’s narrative strategies work to express the uncanny reality of the despotic regime of the Arab world. The Crocodiles narrativizes the difficulty of portraying the reality of Arab insurgences at different levels. At one level, Rakha allegorically presents the Post-Arab spring situation. For example, poets of the Crocodile group figuratively represent the Post-Arab spring scenario, as in the poem entitled “Blood,” a Crocodile poet addresses the government and informs them that their pain is a “joy” which is “greater than [their] anatomy can ever comprehend” (Rakha Para.32). The poetry of the Crocodile group allegorically represents the torture and violence inflicted on the protestors and activists by the Arab government. The symbol of red poppies in their poetry is noteworthy because red poppy is grown in the field of France, where many soldiers were killed while fighting in battle. People today wear red poppies to show their respect and solidarity to those killed in wars. In the history of English literature, it is considered as a symbol of remembrance for all those who take part in wars.9 By using this symbol, a writer may want to suggest that the Arab Spring protestors and revolutionaries would always be remembered because they stand against the tyrannical regime. Perhaps, through the symbol of poppy, Rakha is paying the tribute to those who lost their lives for the great cause.

9  Barrett, Emily. “The Poppy Contextualizing a Seemingly Timeless Symbol in History, Materials and Practice.” Syracuse University Honors Program Capstone Projects (2016): 1–70.

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On another level, the events and facts are narrated in a cyclical fashion in which one narrated fact or event foreshadows the upcoming event or incident. The narrator punctures the narrative throughout by directing attention to the missing piece of the story which has eventually complicated the entire plot of the novel and made it at times unintelligible. For instance, the book opens with a scene of the suicide of Radwa Adel, an “intellectual, writer, great thinker” (Rakha Para.1) which signals to the “breakup of The Crocodiles,” a group of writers and artists (Rakha Para.71). It is easy to draw a parallel between Radwa Adel’s suicide and the experience of the Crocodiles. “Radwa Adel ha[s] died the day the group [is] announced,” and Rakha draws attention to the synchronicity of both events (Rakha Para.10). Secondly, the death of Radwa Adel, a leftist activist, and writer of the 1970s generations, signifies the end of the writing style of seventies generation writers. The Crocodiles “locked[themselves in] a room” in an effort to unveil the socio-political reality of their country (Rakha Para.23) just like Radwa who locked herself in the room and “went out onto the balcony and jumped over the wall” (Rakha Para.1). Their friendly relationship ends too. In the same way, the reference toward the nakedness of the emperor indicates the incident of 2011 revolution when a young blog writer “Alia Al Mehdi publish[es] a nude picture of herself on her blog” as “her contribution to the revolution” (Rakha Para.132). These narrated facts and events constitute a thread that Rakha uses to weave The Crocodiles in which one stated fact signals or refers to another episode and cyclically returns to the determined subjects, thus making the entire plot difficult to comprehend and interpret. Rakha’s use of such narrative strategies is twofold; it captures the disillusionment in the wake of the so-called Arab spring and also it extends the stylistic aspect of minor literature at same time. Metafictional writers set parole (individual utterances) against langue (conventions) of the novel. In so doing, Rakha transforms what is considered as negative “into the basis of a potentially constructive social criticism” (Waugh 11). For example, when Alia Al Mehdi, who publishes her nude picture on the internet, was criticized by the revolutionaries in the novel, Youssef admires her act by considering that this act of Alia has no ideological basis and it is away “from the stomach turning struggle, for a power that would sweep away neither beggary, nor prostitution, nor even the lawlessness of the police” (Rakha Para.133). Further, one of the most offensive subjects, sex is taken very lightly in the novel. Rakha paints a disappointing picture of the rebellious and frustrated youth who are

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indulged in drugs, sex, and poetry. The youth of the country is stuck between the deteriorated system of the country and their incarnate desires. The sense of the disappointment in the lives of the character is aroused partly due to the dissension with the system that do not hold any prospective promises as put by Rakha, the system is “too narrow to hold [them], to hold [their] future” (Rakha Para.146), and partly because of their own erotic desires (Rakha Para.166). Most of Rakha’s character are sexually driven. The more they are indulged in sexual activities, the more they experience dissatisfaction as they face “a more profound and authentic pain” after having sex (Rakha Para.204). This shows that people become insensitive under the repressive regime and “the violence, lies and brutality no longer affect” them as stated by Yousef that “the murder of innocents in the street no longer move him” (Rakha Para.188). Yousef further states, he will “go on supporting the demonstration despite the fact it meant that he’d be murdered” (Rakha Para.188). This dissatisfaction leads Yousef and many young people like him to use sex as a mean to dealing with the oppression, as a form of escape. The disappointment of people followed by the Arab spring stands in contrast to the resilient spirit portrayed by Tahar Ben Jelloun in his novel, This Blinding Absence of Light (2001). Rakha’s novel sharply contrasts Ben Jelloun’s novel where poets and writers are engaged imaginatively in a kind of revolt against the despotic regime before the actual uprisings. In Ben Jelloun’s novel “millions of ordinary people emerge on the streets” for “a revolution of a new kind: spontaneous and improvised” (qtd. in Sakr 3) but here in The Crocodiles, people have “lost the urge to descend to the battlefield of Tahrir Square” and they “feel no guilt” (Rakha Para.26). People in the Rakha’s novel are not at all enthusiastic about the revolution because they have experienced it and witnessed its utter failure. In this way, Rakha knocks down the debate surrounding the Arab Spring and presents counter-narrative that retaliates the claims that Arab uprisings of 2011 mark the end of the “old phase” and a rise of the new one (Dabashi 84). Counter-literature does not celebrate Arab uprising; rather, it addresses the consequences of Arab uprising and claims that the Arab Spring does not yield “liberal or democratic outcomes” (Lynch 18). Given this context, Rakha himself refers to the production of counter-­ literature: “from the start of the nineties something was changing – the same year that saw the first issue of counter-literature released” (Para.71). He emphasizes on the idea of revising the various trends of Arabic literature with the 2011 revolution. He considers the writing of early

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generation as politically irrelevant and utterly crushed because it does not portray the reality of the Arab world honestly (Rakha Para.121). By referring to the previous literary forms, Rakha justifies his strategy of creating a new literary form. For this reason, the writers of the Crocodile group start writing about the revolution in an innovative way. He also criticizes the previous generation writers, who write “for the elites and not the rabble” for the publication of their work and act as if “atop Cairo’s cultural pulpits,” and they prefer to keep their production unknown and unpublished (Rakha Para.118). Along with the detailed depiction of the politics, Rakha, as a minor writer, chooses to articulate the reality of marginalized communities like prisoners, writers, activists, women and frustrated youth, and make them heard through the language of the majority. In contrast to the submissive women of Book of Sands, Rakha highlights the other extreme version of Arab women. He provides the distinctive representation of Egyptian female characters in a male dominated culture. Rakha’s gendered focus probably aims at critiquing gender inequality within patriarchal society and delineates the idea that Egyptian women are brave enough to follow their whims and desires. In the novel, he depicts those women who sell their bodies and are attracted only “to [those] men who could benefit [their] career” (Rakha Para.178). In The Crocodiles, women are seen to indulge in sexual activities with men other than their husbands for their own ends. For example, Nargis, who is married to “a well-off engineer” Ashraf, has an illegal relationship with Paulo, one of the writers of the Crocodiles’ group (Rakha Para.179). She does not go back to Alexandria when her son is taken to the hospital” because she is “getting ready for her exhibition at the Atelier du Caire” (Rakha Para.179). In Rakha’s narrative, readers also meet those brave women who challenge the manliness of Arab men by calling them “a son of a dog’s religion of a coward” (Para.194). For instance, when Nayf, a gay poet, asks Moon, the beautiful married poetess, for marriage, Moon tells him that he is “a coward” and he is “not ready to put [him]self in someone else’s place, even in [his] imagination. [He’s] scared to ask [him]self whether, in [such] circumstances, [he] would marry” (Rakha Para.194). Besides these, the narrative refers to the lesbian woman who “discovers the hidden pleasures of her body with no need for a third party, nor for man”; rather, her girl friend is “following the dictates of a body that ha[s] urged her on since puberty,” and therefore, she chooses “lesbianism for the remainder of her life” (Rakha Para.360).

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In the Arab world, not only are women being oppressed under patriarchy, but also many are being oppressed by the government, including prisoners, whose “bodies [are] marked with scars, purple tumescent welts and black bruises” because of the “acid burns” (Alrawi 144). This textual reference illustrates the inhuman treatment of prisoners at the hands of the autocratic regime in the Arab world. Likewise, writers and poets are being tortured as well as censored. Rakha reveals that writing is “an impossible dream” in Egypt, and thus writers and poets write secretly (Para.7). These examples clearly demonstrate that as a minor writer, Rakha takes into account the divergent experiences of all those marginalized individuals who are repressed either because of the strong patriarchal tradition of the Arab world or because of the despotic regime, and thus produce counter-­ literature that deals with “street rabble” (Rakha Para.118). Book of Sands and The Crocodiles recall the discourse of the 2011 Arab uprisings and their aftermath in different narrative dimensions to accommodate the weak and disempowered in their writings. Even in their fragmented, playful versions and self-reflexive style, both authors bring the collective utterances to the forefront. Unlike realism where only “individuals and personalities” are highlighted, magical realism and metafiction, both “strengthen the communities [and] societies” as in the case of minor literature (Zamora and Faris 10). By undermining the fixity of borders, the deconstructive impetus of magical realism and metafiction makes it a revolutionary expression for privileging the marginalized and underrepresented which confer the status of minor literature to both novels. While describing the personal and intimate experiences of Arab people, these writers convey collective utterances of travelers, writers, female activists, or frustrated youth and ultimately address larger issues of the Arab society. Not only do they foreground the politics of the Arab world but also the social ills of Arab society. Moreover, the narrative patterns of both texts involve “intratextual communication between the characters and narrators, and extratextual communication between the author and the reader” (Sasa and Nimar 173). Using magical realism, Alrawi illustrates the intratextual communication between the varied characters from all strata of life and by utilizing metafiction, Rakha refers to the extratextual communication between the reader and the author. Building upon the disillusioned reality of the Arab world, I suggest both novels try to capture the cryptic reality through different strategies and at different levels. Both novelists entail a significant relationship with the highly unstable reality of the Arab world in the postmodern narratives

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and show that reality is elusive and uncanny which is hard to analyze and even harder to transcribe it. The technique of magical realism in Book of Sands represents the Arab insurgency and its subsequent repercussion by complicating the realist mode of the novel. The fantastical and magical events are projected in the very real situation of the Arab world with an indefinite time setting in the narratives. Similarly, in The Crocodiles, Rakha discloses the uncertain situation of the Arab world by disturbing genre and form. By mixing fiction, reality, and criticism, the novel at once gives us the subjective and objective accounts of the Arab uprisings from the marginal perspective of the novel’s protagonists. These authors rethink the paradigm of the conventional narratives of Arab fiction by experimenting with its form. In short, with the help of metafiction and magical realism, both writers convey a better understanding of the contemporary situation of the Arab world and show that reality is interdependent with a web of semiotic systems. What was once projected as simple narratives had now developed as a complex portrait of individual stories having their own peculiar characteristics. A linear trajectory from dictatorship to democracy, the Arab Spring evolved as the dreadful winter and trauma for the Arab countries and Arab individuals. Anglo-Arab authors try to capture this complexity, uncertainty, and indefiniteness of the Arab world through metatexts via experimentation with language and form which will be further illustrated in the next two chapters. The experimental nature of their writings also shows that in order to contribute to minor literature, writers are not required to adopt a particular style and to reject certain others. Rakha and Alrawi use symbolism, metaphors and experiment with the form of the novel to convey the devastating reality, complexities, and uncertainties followed by the Arab insurgencies in the Arab world. Having said this, I argue that both writers negate the idea of Deleuze and Guattari that minor literature repudiates the use of metaphor and prefers metamorphosis in order to deterritorialize the major tongue and to validate the representation of the silenced marginal community.

CHAPTER 4

Post-Arab Spring Cairo in Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicles of a Last Summer and Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins: Urban Narratives as Minor Literature The Arab Spring was more than just a social movement in the city. Rather, the city was simultaneously the main site of the event, one of the reasons behind the Arab revolution, and a lab for political praxis. The socio-spatial inequalities and injustices felt by the residents led them to develop the spatial practices and thus they brought urban revolution. The city cannot be divorced from one’s life. It is the human’s right to make and remake the city “after his heart’s desire,” which David Harvey calls the right to the city (3). It is one of the most fundamental, yet the most neglected human rights in the Arab world which eventually led to the dissatisfaction among its dwellers.1 Approaching the Arab Spring through the urban lens shows how the event changes the socio-spatial structures of the city as well as the continuities of daily life. The changing dynamics of the urban landscape in the wake of the Arab Spring thus give rise to urban narratives that foreground the silenced voices of those people who refuse to accept the constraints placed upon their lives and liberties by their government. Seeing the city in a crumbling state and as a revolutionary space, Yasmine El Rashidi (Egyptian author) and Omar Robert Hamilton (the son of an Egyptian novelist, Ahdaf 1  In the Arab world generally, and Cairo particularly, the process of urbanization was strictly under the control of the autocracy, which shaped its cities as a surplus value (profit). See the details under the section “History of Cairo,” page number 172.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_4

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Soueif) attempt to articulate this phenomenon in their writings. In doing so, they move the discussion of the Arab insurgences away from human experience to the devastation of the landscape or environment in which they are living and which give existence to the Arab insurgencies themselves like buildings and streets—in other words, the city itself. In this chapter, I examine, with special reference to Cairo, how neoliberal policies and the narrative of violence transform different aspects of the landscape— something El Rashidi discusses in detail in Chronicles of a Last Summer (2016). Drawing on Coward, Travis, Lefebvre, Serag, and Smith’s notion of urbicide and the public right to the city, I specifically highlight Cairo’s response to the Arab uprisings through diverse expressions of dissent with special reference to Hamilton’s The City Always Wins (2017). This chapter also seeks how the Arab Spring turns Cairo into a revolutionary public space of dissent. Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins is a kinetic, docudrama-­ style retelling of the Arab revolution, laced with newspaper quotes and real Tweets. He re-creates the revolutionary moments of Cairo in cinematic form. The novel revolves around a group of young activists and protestors who promote their revolutionary cause through a multi-media informatics operation called “chaos,” identified by the narrator (Khalil) as the “cerebral cortex at the center of the information war” (20). Hamilton skillfully conveys the emotional atmosphere of the revolution by using long run-on sentences in which the protagonists struggle through crowds, escape the brutality of police or battle unconsciousness after being wounded or injured. However, no such verité aspiration is found in Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer. It is a quiet novel about the revolution. She avoids the smoke and chaos of the Square. Instead, she suffuses the present with the past to convey that every activity in her city, whether a walk through Cairo or even the purchasing of vegetables, has historical and political significance. El Rashidi portrays the city and its inhabitants in detail, accurately illustrating the vibrant color of the city and skillfully representing the city’s progression over the decades to mirror the political history. The remarkable aspect of both novels is a discussion of the economic underpinnings of the uprisings. El Rashidi and Hamilton focus on the ways Egyptians challenge autocracy and the neoliberal social order. As a political ideology, neoliberalism foregrounds individual freedom and the right to private property (Thorsen and Lie 12). Neoliberal reforms have

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paved the way for the global free market through political and economic policies that produce new subjects while dismantling those institutions, practices, and norms that are anti-market. After its independence, Egypt underwent a series of structural adjustments, including privatization of state-owned businesses. In this era of structural adjustment, the Egyptian government sold all the Egyptian assets to the private sector. The state facilitated marketization and privatization in the arenas of social life. From this perspective, the urban regions and cities were the main site where this regular process of creative destruction occurred. In the name of modernization, such reforms entailed much destruction not only to social welfare but also to the Egyptian land and civilization. The foundations for the Arab revolution were laid during the neoliberal restructuring of Middle Eastern and North African regions. Achieving a socially sustainable community in neoliberal cities remains a challenge for many governments across the world. A place is said to be socially sustainable if it has a harmonious living environment with little ideological biases, no division or social inequality. Unfortunately, the current power structure, at the global level in general and the MENA in particular, is “organized around the expansion of capital, an intrinsically unsustainable endeavor” (Mahadevia 44).2 This situation intensified the political situation in the MENA region which led to the Arab Spring. On January 25, 2011, Egyptian citizens poured onto the streets and occupied all the squares of their cities to challenge autocracy and the neoliberal policies of the Egyptian government. It was a collective attempt, primarily by young protestors to remake their city, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, and in order to attain greater economic and social justice. The emerging Post-Arab Spring literature of this region captures all these urban changes by developing a distinctive geography that maps out the contours and coordinates of the struggle. The theme of the city recurs in classical and modern Arabic literature. However, at the outset of the Arab uprisings, the inherent meaning of the Arab city as an epitome of Islamic history and civilization undergoes change. Contemporary Anglo-Arab writers see the transformation of the city into a necropolis. These authors approach the city from different  To achieve sustainable development, environmental considerations cannot be taken as an afterthought for profit economy. Unfortunately, the power structure at the MENA region ignores the reality and perpetuates the unequal power structures. 2

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perspectives and highlight it as a space controlled by military establishments and dominated by “political corruption, human rights violations, economic exploitation, decadence, moral bankruptcy” (Gohar 1). For example, Egypt had been under emergency law for a long time and this law “suspended civil liberties and led to widespread unjustified detentions” (Smith 5). Instead of targeting culprits or terrorists, Egyptian police used this law to target civilians such as writers, activists, intellectuals, and the poor. Therefore, state violence was a routine component of daily life in Egypt. El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer and Hamilton’s The City Always Wins represent this perspective of Cairo and show that violence is inseparable from the city space. The two novelists are diametrically opposed in their approach to the same city. Together, they show that the city has the potential of generating wealth and poverty, enthusiasm and contempt, tolerance and intolerance, and democracy and oligarchy. Given this context, I believe that the city in Post-Arab Spring literature emerges as writing in its own form, or as “a form of literature in which the streets are the lines of a book which can never be complete,” and urban narrative can thus be seen as a means of understanding the past and the present of the city (Ackroyd 4). Unlike previous Anglo-Arab literature in which the city has functioned either as a setting or as a backdrop for its protagonists, the city in Post-Arab Spring literature becomes more autonomous. El Rashidi and Hamilton’s expressions of urbanism are not merely a metaphor but substantive narratives in their own right. The city in their narratives is not just a backdrop rather, the whole city with its material existence (its buildings, walls, and its squares) stand with its crowd to claim its rights as I illustrate in the second half of my chapter. The techniques they use to depict Cairo suggest congruence between urban and narrative forms and a significant role for the urban narrative within minor literature of the Arab Spring. In this way, Rashidi and Hamilton attempt to highlight the needs of people who (for reasons of oppressive brutal regime) were once spatially off-limits. In their depiction of Cairo, both writers imagine and represent the unpresentable spaces, language and life of the city, and translate them into narratives to make them liveable (Alexander 158). This process of foregrounding the silenced people in their writings validates Deleuze’s claim that writing is a mode of vision and audition. According to Deleuze, writing is inseparable from seeing and hearing (16). He claims that writers like Kafka and Beckett bore holes in language in order to disclose silenced

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subjects.3 In line with them, Anglo-Arab writers similarly use language to reveal silence and make it audible. They attempt to paint and sing through words, in accordance with Deleuze’s claims that “there is a painting and a music proper to writing” and that it is “across words, between words, that one sees and one hears” (Deleuze 9). Accordingly, Hamilton expresses the emotional atmosphere of the revolution by using sensory language in which readers also choke while reading an intense scenario of Tahrir Square. El Rashidi takes her readers on a long walk around Cairo to reveal the daily experiences of urban life, using colors and sounds in her narrative to familiarize her readers. One hears the car honking and the voices of street vendors while reading this narrative. In so doing, both writers deterritorialize the English language and create a new language within that language (English), proceeding through colors and sounds. This new tongue communicates with its proper outside. At this juncture, colors and sounds make vision and audition that form the outside of the language. Therefore, paintings and music are inseparable from a linguistic limit of pure intensities toward which they tend to give the strong sense of their Arab environment and their revolution. In this way, these writers give life to those who are living an unknown life on the streets of Cairo, to those who are everywhere yet invisible and thus liberate life, where it’s imprisoned, through writings (Deleuze 15). Writing during the bleak climate of the Post-Arab Spring years, both writers style themselves as custodians of a neglected and forgotten history while presenting the Post-Arab Spring Cairo as a place of chaos and fragmentation. It is worth noting that literary journalistic techniques and forms are located in Arab writings prior to the revolution. Not only are the literary journalistic techniques found in Anglo-Arab literature but also in Arabic literature such as Yousif Ma’ati’s Ana La Aktub wa Lakenny Ata’mal “I Do Not Write, I Spectate” (2007), Han’eesh Keda’s W Nmoot Keda “We Will Live Unchanged and Die Unchanged” (2009), and Gihan El-Gharabawi’s Akl ‘Eesh “Eating Bread” (2010). Arabs have been producing journalism with literary flare since the nineteenth century. Arab writers write about the reality of their countries by focusing on ordinary details, distorting, magnifying, and connecting them to the bigger issues. Mahmoud Adham

3  It is an inexhaustible drive to drill holes in the language or pierce the surface in a way that the void appears itself.

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is considered the pioneer of literary journalism in the Arab world.4 His novel Abu Naddara (The Man with Spectacles) is the first Arabic novel that shows a detachment from formal Arabic and utilizes satire as well as other literary techniques associated with fiction. Arabic literary journalism is shaped by two main factors. First, the continuation of censorship makes it essential for the voices to be masked, and secondly the desire of Arab fiction writers to contribute to political discourse. For example, one of the oldest established newspapers Al-Ahram (1876) received a three-day suspension in 1952 for its involvement in politics. Since then, Arab journalists dressed up facts to the point of composing scenes, characters, and plots to avoid trouble. Having said this, I argue that literary journalism is developed as a necessity in the Arab world. Douglas opines that oppression and tyranny in the Arab world have fueled the production of literary journalism. Having been denied the freedom to express the truth, many journalists start experimenting with literary strategies and techniques to voice the truth in subversive ways. Arab censored journalists often use humor to mask criticism because it is difficult to condemn a humorist. Previously Arab writers use exaggeration, satire, humor, and juxtaposition in creative nonfiction. However, contemporary Arab writers incorporate reportage and personal reflection and analysis in their fictional stories. For example, a Syrian novelist and journalist Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay tells us the story of horror taking place in Syria. The book weaves journalistic reporting with poetic musing on an appalling reality. This is perhaps the reason that as much as it is a work of fiction, it also feels like a commentary on the brutality of war. As journalists and authors, El Rashidi and Hamilton can be seen to blend fact and fiction, and narrate real events using storytelling techniques. They integrate creative writing techniques with narrative journalistic reportage and produce creative nonfiction. Rather than embedding themselves into the story, both writers communicate their credibility by appealing to the reality of the events they depict. They use literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives in their novels. Therefore, their work is akin to journalism which can also be termed as literary journalism: “literary for using arts of style in writing and ‘journalism’ for using what is actually happening around” them (Kaur 55). It is 4  Mahmoud Adham, a journalist, is also the author of Adab Al Jahith Min Zaweya Sahfiya (Literature of Al Jahith, a Journalistic Perspective).

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worth mentioning here that journalists do not simply pass on information, instead, they do field-work and interact with people to collect bits of information. Their aim is to present information with accuracy, clarity, truth, and fairness, and El Rashidi and Hamilton employ similar techniques in their novels. They share many of these traits of journalists. Like El Rashidi and Hamilton, Samar Yazbek also went back to Syria to record 100 days of Syria’s uprising against the regime. In her book, A Woman in the Crossfire, Yazbek documents the beginning months of the Syrian uprisings with facts and well-researched information. When the revolution broke out, both Rashidi and Hamilton flew back to their countries to witness the event. They participated in the uprisings and met with people to collect information. In her short story, “Cairo, City in Waiting (Egypt),” El Rashidi claimed that she gathered information for her novel by spending “days and evenings on the streets, demonstrating, lingering, speaking to people about their problems and stories and struggles” (Rashidi 58). Similarly, Hamilton also participated in the Egyptian uprisings and presented an inside story of the Arab revolution. Instead of creating a fact-filled document, both writers interacted with people and recreated the real stories of real people in their narrative. Since the facts were continuously evolving and could not yield to story easily during the revolution, building a fictional narrative blended with reportage was a challenging task for both writers. They use social realism in their narratives, develop scene-by-scene construction, quote real facts and figures in their novels and thus develop narratives which have color, life, and immediacy. They educate, inform, and entertain readers through texts with creativity and forms of truth. They arrange facts in such a way so that readers can make sense and see patterns in the chaotic life of Egypt. Following the same logic, Syrian writers also use facts in writing novels. For instance, in Planet of Clay, a young protagonist, Rima, provides commentary on the brutality of war throughout the novel. Yazbek blends facts and fiction in her book in which Rima acts as a reporter and provides us with an eyewitness account of the Syrian war. Therefore, I argue that in their writings, Anglo-Arab authors represent accurate facts and well-­ researched information by blurring the line between fictional fact and factual fiction, thus, their narratives can be referred to as creative nonfiction and journalistic fiction. I select Cairo as the case study in my book because of all the Middle Eastern states, Egypt is an exception as its city space demonstrates an efficacious use of civilian-based power during the uprisings. Cairo at once

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succeeds in toppling the autocratic regime that has ruled for almost thirty years yet the city is not free. From one oppressive government, it came under the control of the extremist government of the Muslim Brotherhood, then the military regime that rules over it now. Cairo is significant for Egypt because socially, politically, and economically Egypt is directly influenced by what happens in Cairo. Cairo, one of the largest metropolitan cities in the MENA region, is home to 22.8 million people (Arwa Gaballa “Egypt’s Capital Set to Grow by Half a Million in 2017” reuters.com April, 2018). The landscape of this city is constantly shifting due to the complex nature of Egyptian politics. There was a plan to reshape Cairo by building highways, skyscrapers, and bridges by 2050. However, this plan only led to the growth of informal sectors, street vending, squatting, and a visible division between the rich and the poor in Cairo which is illustrated in Chronicles of Last Summer. Hosni Mubarak’s regime remained blind to the disintegration of urban life. In the name of modernization, the government deprived half of the city of its essential urbanity, which eventually led to the degeneration of the built environment.5 According to Coward, destruction of cities historically happened due to either the development or modernization that deprived the city of its traditional structure, or war that devastated the infrastructure. Cairo witnessed both kinds of destruction. Part of Cairo was destroyed due to the government’s neoliberal reforms before the Arab Spring and the rest was destroyed by military activity and military technological regimes after the Arab uprisings. Even after eight years of the Arab Spring, Egypt still manifests political instability and unrest that is often expressed in the form of protests. This state of unrest continues to shape the city space. For example, in 2014, two security headquarters of the Delta city were targeted by terrorist organizations, which led the government to install a concrete blast shield around security headquarters and other important governmental buildings. Similarly, many governmental buildings surrounded Tahrir Square; therefore, the Egyptian government erected a wall around it with a three meters tall iron gate at one side of the square. Such changes have contributed toward the transformation in the city’s appearance. Three decades of neoliberalism accompanied by emergency law have had an adverse effect on Egyptian citizens. This law suspended civil 5  Urbanity here refers to materiality and the substance of the city which means a sum of social interaction and ways of being which enable people to live together without any conflicts.

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liberties and led to unjustified detentions. Consequently, many people were taken to prison and literary activities were banned. The gap between rich and poor deepened during Mubarak’s emergency law when even the buildings and streets of Cairo were designated as government property, and protection was only given to those people who worked in close alliance with the government. In this process of neoliberal urban restructuring, access to the country’s resources was only given to selected groups of people who had close alliance with the political leaders. Consequently, economic polarization became prominent which led to a sense of alienation among the poor. Although Sadat’s and Mubarak’s policies made Cairo the center of foreign investment, they ignored the largest proportion of the middle class, and lower middle class who turned revolutionaries and took to the streets against an autocratic regime. In so doing, these protestors turned neoliberal Egypt into a revolutionary place which is demonstrated in The City Always Wins. For instance, all the squares of Cairo were festooned with flags and revolutionary banners and the walls were chalked with people’s demands which suggest that along with people, the city also stood up for its rights. This transformation of Cairo in the Arab region dismantles the stereotypes associated with postcolonial cities as “pathological space(s) in need of salvation at the hands of western experts” (Kanna 360). The autocratic regime that has ruled the Arab people for decades is overthrown and this changes the lives of its people: to echo Henri Lefebvre, their lives are changed by “changing their spaces.” Thus, the Arab Spring is not only a political and economic revolution for the Arab region but also a specifically urban revolution because the revolutionaries make strategic use of urban spaces to carry out their revolution. As urban literature, El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer and Hamilton’s The City Always Wins foreground the politics of the urban space and how it leads to the urban revolution. Mapping Cairo’s progression over three decades to portray the political history of Egypt, El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer is a bildungsroman novel that tracks the growth of an unnamed narrator from childhood innocence to adulthood. Yet her chronological journey is not equally progressive for her city, Cairo. We glimpse the shifting political landscape of Cairo through her eyes. She is a keen observer who is often puzzled with what she sees in Cairo. Chronicle of a Last Summer opens in summer 1984 when the narrator is a child and her life is surrounded by gaps and absences of “things that are there for a very long time and then disappear” (Rashidi 22). She

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notices all the absences but she is not allowed to ask questions; therefore, she writes “a story called The Disappearing People” (Rashidi 23). She is even discouraged by her teacher who says to her that she “shouldn’t be writing such things at this age” (Rashidi 23–24). Throughout the novel, she seems determined to find the answers to all these forbidden questions. By observing Cairo through her room window, she finds her city as “a place of disappearing people” during her childhood, and later, as a filmmaker with her “eyes darting, searching” for all unanswered questions, she finds it “a place of repression” (Rashidi 94). Then in the aftermath of Mubarak’s regime, she is seen as a writer exploring the silences of Cairo and sees her city as a “revolutionary place.” Here, I would like to mention that silence is the repeatedly used motif in Arab novels that represent the limit to language. Silence expresses the violence that words cannot express. This is perhaps the reason that we find the motif of silence frequently used in such novels. For example, Yazbek’s Planet of Clay gives us a haunting and unflinching look at the Syrian war through the eyes of a young, quiet, and silent girl, Rima, who is physically tied up to keep her from constantly moving. In one of her interviews, Yazbek claims that her protagonist is silent because “there are no words that can express violence in Syria” (Author Interviews “Planet of Clay describes the brutal toll of the Syrian Civil War on a young girl” npr.org October.2021). Similarly, The City Always Wins chronicles the aftermath of the Arab uprisings; while it is a novel, the narrative reads like the writings of an activist reporting on the revolution, and countering the state’s narrative through the use of social media. Chronicle of a Last Summer covers three summers of the narrator’s life and represents the political landscape of Cairo and Egypt in general. The City Always Wins is divided into three parts, entitled “Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday.” Like El Rashidi, Hamilton shows that a chronological journey is not a progression in the case of Cairo. The so-called elected Muslim Brotherhood ignores the revolutionary demands of the populace with a new constitution that “doesn’t protect any minorities,” “subjugates women,” “allows for torture,” “invites privatization,” and the army too kills the protestors and seizes control over the land (Hamilton 121). To emphasize the reversals of the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood, although the narrator has a forward momentum, the headings suggest a non-chronological structure. It suggests that even the temporal structure of both texts also convey the decline of the Arab revolution.

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The City Always Wins opens in Cairo’s hospital, which is “compressed with bodies and rage and grief” (Hamilton 5). Cairo is portrayed as a place where civilians are “running from the army” and “everywhere are the cries of a new loss” (Hamilton 5). Cairo was once a place from where “the whole history of the world [could] be seen” (Hamilton 10). However, now it is a place where justice is an “insulting word” (Hamilton 10). Cairo was once a city of “Jazz that promise[s] freedom from the bad old times” (Hamilton 10) and now becomes an “ecology of suffering” (Hamilton 264). Even birds have migrated so that now “only helicopters and the lingering chemtrails of fighter jets” fly everywhere. With the revolution, Cairo becomes a place of “dying animals,” “cracked windows in crumbling buildings” and a “sulfuric city of the dead” (Hamilton 265). Considering the distinctive architecture, physical and human as highlighted by Rashidi and Hamilton, these novels can be termed as what Marilyn Booth calls, the house novel. Booth claims that the house novel “consists of intermingling, interlocking stories of people coming and going—stories that character tells each other to justify their existence, to mask their shadowy work, and to gain more space” (378). In this regard, both novels offer vignettes of survival, desperation, frustration, and love. Both novelists foreground the economically margin and physically peripheral sites of Cairo and illustrate entangled tales of colliding lives who try to confront the power of authoritarian regimes in their newly found urban space. The other defining feature of both novels is that they are written to oppose the state’s narratives. Egyptian media and schools have always been under the control of the state and serve as an instrument to shape public opinion, which will be outlined shortly. The ministry of information controls the content of media and the ministry of education decides what to teach and what not to teach. Both novelists counter the state’s narratives skillfully. To maintain a balance between truth and their opinion, they use metatextual excerpts throughout texts. For example, in Chronicles of Last Summer, the narrator’s cousin and uncle tell her about “the facts” of Egyptian history. They tell her those facts about Egyptian history that she was never taught: “they didn’t teach us these things in school. Only uncle and Dido told me” (Rashidi 58). Whereas in The City Always Wins, activists use social media to oppose the state’s media narratives. The narrative of The City Always Wins is punctured with many tweets and Facebook statuses of activists and protestors which counter the state’s media on the one hand and draw the attention of readers toward reality at

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the same time. For example, during the massacre of Port Said stadium, the news only reports the death “of three people at Ahly match in Port Said” whereas one of the activists’ tweets that “dozens of ultras are dead in the stadium!!! It’s a massacre” (111). In this way, the revolutionaries undermine the state through social media and disrupt state narrative through metatextual excerptions. Along with the technique of metatext, both writers use various metaphors to capture the disintegrated condition of Cairo and its failed revolution. In Chronicles of a Last Summer, the narrator’s home is a microcosm of macro Cairo. In the beginning, her home was full of people, people the narrator knew and people that she “didn’t know” (Rashidi 13). It looked “like a castle” and its architecture was plain and unique but modern (Rashidi 12–13). The “garden was filled with trees” of “mangoes, figs, tangerines, sweet lemons” (Rashidi 12). The River Nile was visible “from the upstairs balcony” (Rashidi 12). However, over the course of time, the beauty of Cairo crumbles, people leave out of fear and their houses lie abandoned. The narrator’s home is also decayed and emptied (Hamilton 181). The narrator “had lost almost everyone, family first, then the large and carried staff” (Rashidi 72), eventually, her “house was like an echo chamber” (Rashidi 72), and “most rooms kept permanently closed” (Rashidi 73). This gradual disintegration of the narrator’s home mirrors the decayed state of Cairo. In The City Always Wins, the love between Mariam and Khalil is employed as a metaphor for the revolution. The two meets during the protest in January 2011 and develop feelings for each other instantly. The couple run media outlets to disseminate information about the revolution from which the narrative interlaces excerpts, along with Facebook posts, tweets, and news headlines. Throughout the course of the novel, they strive to maintain their relationship as they struggle to keep the 2011 revolution alive; however, eventually, with the falling revolution, their romance ends as well. Insofar as generalizations can be made, the above-given textual evidence suggest that the use of metaphor, metatextual excerptions and literary journalism expand the depth, range, and force of the major tongue to evoke a form of emotional and political truth for their readers. Both writers use the major language, English, in the interest of minoritized social groups (working class, students, the poor, protestors and activists) and speak on behalf of the neglected collectively. Both novels thus stage a contest between the dissident (people who are not given their due rights) and the dominant force of government over the uses of the city. The narratives

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of both novels offer a remapping of Cairo according to an individual’s affect and desire and resemble minor literature, which aims to reclaim urban space for all those people who have never been granted equal rights by bureaucracy and the politics of their country. Given this context, I argue that El Rashidi’s novel mainly reveals the issues, causes, and urban spatial practices prevailing in the pre-Arab Spring Cairo, which appear to have made revolution inevitable. Hamilton’s narrative by contrast focuses on those spatial practices that revolutionaries adopt during the revolution in order to make themselves heard. The unsustainable development, poor governance and rampant corruption eventually drive people to the streets and exploit the same repressive urban environment to make their voices heard. Both writers turn Cairo into a vivid character that rises up to claim its rights. The emerging urban literature from Egypt map and remap Cairo by showing “cars, signs, shops, pieces of garbage, donkeys, billboards, food carts, posters stuck to lampposts, villas” as manifested in El Rashidi’s Chronicle of Last Summer (Rashidi 21).

Neoliberal Cairo in Chronicles of a Last Summer El Rashidi’s urban narratives have a propensity to be minoritarian. Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature, I posit that in El Rashidi’s narratives, the city takes the central stage and everything in it, ranging from institutions like schools, different buildings, museums, prison cells, universities, to the streets and its dwellers that are typically rendered like street hawkers and beggars is foregrounded. Deleuze and Guattari argue: What in great literature goes down below, constituting a not indispensable cellar of the infrastructure, here takes place in the full day of light, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone no less than as a matter of life and death. (17)

As I will demonstrate in the following pages, El Rashidi’s urban narratives fit nicely with this definition. In her novel, the social milieu of the city is presented as a mere background and every command and action in it “has a bearing on the entire collectivity unto the point of life and death” as in the case of minor literature (Deleuze and Guattari 17).

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Deleuze and Guattari argue that minor literature is intimately involved with the life of the people. In line with this thought, El Rashidi also examines the peculiar condition of people living in Cairo. She highlights those Cairenes who cannot assert their rights over their city. A close reading of the Chronicle of a Last Summer reveals that Cairo is divided into two halves. On the one hand, there is the upper elite class who attends the “English School” and is shielded in gated communities (Rashidi 24). These individuals share the urban space of Cairo with those who cannot afford to study in private international Schools. Unlike the elite class, who get fresh fruits and vegetables “from the embassy,” the poor cannot afford food from the supermarket and buy instead from “the pavement” (Rashidi 16). The growing gap between the rich and the poor is evident from the way houses are built by the river Nile. On the one hand, “big house[s]” (Rashidi 52) are built for affluent people at the side of the river, whereas, the poor live in places like “a shed on the roof of a building with a single lightbulb and no running water” (Rashidi 106). These examples confirm that the Egyptian government does not allocate enough space to the poor for living. The lack of adequate space has compelled many people to seek alternative spaces for living as anglers and their families live “on boats as small as [the rich people’s] bathtub” (Rashidi 61). Furthermore, the ordinary citizens “have only provisional connections to sewage and electrical infrastructure” (Smith 6). The Chronicles of a Last Summer illustrates that power cuts occur routinely in Cairo. El Rashidi writes that sometimes “the cuts last one hour, sometimes two. Some days, in the winter, they skip a day” (9). We “all have power cuts” except some people who “never have power cuts” because “their fathers are important” and work for the government. This example suggests the government’s refusal to provide equal services to all the country’s citizens (Rashidi 9). Although the country’s resources are for everyone, the Egyptian government only provides for those who work in close alliance with them. As in the novel, Uncle Sadat’s house never has power cuts because he works for the government. As a result of this kind of favoritism, only a small section of the Egyptian society, who are in close connection with the government, profits from the country’s resources, whereas a large section of poor Egyptians is alienated from the government and the rich. By providing this ordinary detail of everyday life in Cairo, El Rashidi, as a minor writer, presents the antithesis between the government and common people. She highlights, in the words of Kafka, “the dissatisfied element” of her city. In this way, she makes visible those people who are living an unknown life in their city.

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Given the above scenario, it can be said that the political connection is seen everywhere in Cairo. In every era, every government has brought its own favorite class to prominence, which has ousted the previously privileged class of the previous government. For example, when Nasser took over the presidency, many people who were working in close coalition with the previous monarchy had to leave the country during Nasser’s regime. This act of nepotism divided the city’s landscape further and eventually led to discrimination against the poor. For example, to ensure protection to the governing bodies, streets, and roads around government property are often shut down and blocked by the military despite the fact that such road closure disrupted the city’s proper functioning. Additionally, leisure space, which is supposed to be open to all civilians so that they could access it easily, is also segregated. The half of “the horseracing track” and “the golf course” is reserved for the government authorities whereas “the other half [is] for other kinds of [common] people” and they even “have to pay” to go inside those places (Rashidi 49). By foregrounding the culture of nepotism, El Rashidi develops an intimate link between her work and politics—something which is related to minor literature as well. In her urban narratives, El Rashidi produces a literary history of her city. In a plain language, she gives the detailed account of the pre-Arab Spring Cairo to show that the revolution was an outcome of the bad governance policies. Like minor literature, her writing digests the existing material thoroughly and she states everything related to the city openly. In her novel, she shows that the initiation of the neoliberal market has transformed the whole typology of public spaces in Cairo. Serag argues that Cairo acts as a “bellwether” for Egypt and is primarily “defined by its organization of spaces, its skyline and silhouette, its patterns and architectural styles of its buildings, as well as the forms of transportation and traffic flow lines within the city” (4). These elements of Cairo are affected entirely during neoliberal reforms and “the sound of the city has shifted” (Rashidi 123). Following Sadat’s neoliberal policy, Cairo’s city spaces have been restructured badly by Mubarak and “the city’s little green space is now fenced off” and “the grass is dead anyway” (Rashidi 75). Three decades of neoliberalism during Mubarak and Sadat’s regimes have transformed the city’s open spaces. The open spaces of Cairo turned into “rows and rows of redbrick and concrete buildings, unfinished, not connected in any way to the infrastructure of the built city” (Rashidi 125). In so doing, the traditional city in which “open space was the city’s marker” and “there had been little except villas” (Rashidi 82) was

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transformed into the modernized city. In the name of urban renaissance, the government thus erects shopping malls, amusement parks, golf courses, luxury apartments and private universities and schools in the city’s open spaces. This radical reformulation of Cairo’s landscape divides the city into two halves as mentioned previously. The city slums and informal houses characterize one half whereas the second half comprises of luxurious gated communities accompanied by a theme park and many other types of development which uphold utopian imagery and thus provide symbolic and economic value to that place. This new development initiates privatization, commodification, and social segregation. Initially people “thought Mubarak might be different but already he proved that he was just an old Scrooge” (Rashidi 33). Like the former presidents’ projects, he also introduced a “new valley project,” Toshkha, which was “intended to turn thousands of acres of desert into agricultural land” (Rashidi 132). However, people knew that like Nasser’s project of the “Aswan high dam” and “Sadat’s the Suez Canal,” this project would also come out as “the greatest failed promise of any president” (Rashidi 132). Such neoliberal reforms led to the destruction of national infrastructures “in favor of supranational corporations, particularly financial capital,” because to expand their neoliberal market the government was involved in the development of the private sector while neglecting the public sector (Laurell 246). El Rashidi writes that the Egyptian museum, which epitomizes Egyptian history and civilization, is in a devastated condition because of the negligence of the government. The museum is found in a state of disorder. The walkway around the museum has already been demolished, and its fountain and lawn are covered in rubble (Rashidi 77). The government is liable to pay special attention to the maintenance and preservation of museums and monuments because they are generally viewed as a national asset that contributes to the country’s memory and draws attention toward its past. However, in the case of Egypt, the state assets consign public resources into the hands of the elite, which eventually increases the role of the business class in the state’s policymaking and they use the state as an active promoter of business interest instead of keeping state enterprises. The Egyptian government itself is involved in the demolition of such buildings and “allows for the construction of modern residential towers that would benefit its land owners” (Serag 9). El Rashidi says, “a national monument” which is considered as an outstanding example of the Egyptian architecture has been destroyed. She considers the destruction of monuments as “erasing the identity of a city”

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(Rashidi 77). She says that by destroying museum “everything we ever knew will be gone. Anything with [a] trace of past histories” (Rashidi 77) because the Egyptian museum holds the record of all “the last dynasties, the fake Rosetta, Thutmosis III6, Thutmosis IV7, Amenophis II8, Hatshepsut9” and also preserves sacred objects like “granite coffins, black cats, Ibis, the relief with part of Nefertiti, her head turned sideways, Kohl holders [and] carvings” (Rashidi 78). She also refers to the massacre in the temple of “on the eastern bank of Luxor” (Rashidi 108). According to the New York Times, the Islamic militants attacked this old temple and during this attack 58 foreign tourists, including “Swiss, Germans and Japanese,” were shot dead (Douglas Jehl “70 Die in Attack at Egypt Temple” nytimes. com, May, 2018). In her narrative, she argues that the demolition of old heritage buildings and monuments is less motivated by tactical reasons; rather, it can be characterized as deliberate and premediated destruction of the city, its iconic architecture and its identity. It is a way to destroy the historical record of Egypt and its great civilization. These examples illustrate that El Rashidi does not only record the history but also supports and defends the national pride in her novel because minor literature is “less a concern of literary history than of the people, and thus, if not purely, it is at least reliably preserved” (Bogue 93). As described earlier, Egypt has been under emergency law for thirty years and this law has been widely used against civilians. During this period, everyday mobility in Cairo has been “surveilled, regulated and policed” to keep the masses oppressed (Smith 16). Hosni Mubarak, the longest-serving leader in Egypt, transformed the state security task of protecting and serving the people and the nation, and “put the people in the service of the police” (Brownlee 3). Mubarak, although he never tortured or beat anyone personally, controlled citizens through various security services like police and the military who were the primary facilitators of repression. For instance, the Egyptian police take civilians from the streets to the prison and keep them in a “small room behind bars like a cage” (Rashidi 23). In prison cells, the police officers do “terrible things to people. More terrible than we could imagine” (Rashidi 48). For this reason, if people in Cairo are asked “what they would like to see improved in their  He was the sixth pharaoh of the Egyptian Dynasty.  He was the eighth Pharaoh of the Egyptian dynasty. 8  Seventh Pharaoh of the Egyptian Dynasty. 9  Fifth and the second female Pharaoh of the Egyptian Dynasty. 6 7

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city,” “they get scared” and “walk away” (Rashidi 88). They prefer to stay silent and say nothing against the government. They do not want to get themselves in trouble even though “they are angry, seem disheartened, all have frustration, grievances” (Rashidi 87–88). Some of them even say that “they couldn’t speak about the city. They couldn’t speak about the country” (Rashidi 88). As a writer of minor literature, El Rashidi compensates for their silence and expresses the plight of her own people by providing a detailed account of their city. The politics of Egypt has contaminated every field especially those fields “which find itself positively charged with the role and the function of collective” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). For instance, universities and media can create the collective national consciousness and can provoke the masses to active solidarity. Unfortunately, Egyptian media and schools were deeply affiliated with the state’s authorities and worked as ideological state apparatuses in constructing heroic narratives about Mubarak, his family, and other governing legislatures. By using media and schools, the Egyptian government restricted the means of information in order to keep the masses unaware of injustices and inequality. These ideological state apparatuses were used to repress the masses that eventually made them a “bewildered herd” (Chomsky 10). For instance, schools in Egypt do not provide critical education about Egyptian history and civilization. Egypt was once a British colony; therefore, children are only taught about the independence of Great Britain rather than the independence of Egypt (Rashidi 26). Along with schools, media also played a significant role in spreading the voice of the Egyptian government. It only reported the government’s perspectives and ensured the smooth running of the government’s policies. After coming to power, Mubarak and his allies controlled media content and kept unfavorable content from being published. During Mubarak’s era, “journalists and editors were liable to prosecution under emergency law if they violated certain taboos, such as direct criticism of the president and his family” (Mark Peterson “Egypt’s Media Ecology in a Time of Revolution” arabmediasociety.com, May, 2018). The media works by dictating policies that tell people “what is good and what is not” (Rashidi 65) to protect the autocratic regime from what Walter Lippmann calls “the trampling and roar of a bewildered herd” (qtd. in Chomsky 10). The print media had also been used to advertise the president’s achievements, as “there was never anything in the paper anymore except the bridges the president was building, the new cities, schools, libraries, hospitals, he paid

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for” (Rashidi 75–76). The newspapers were “funded in part from state coffers” and thus published only the state’s content (Peterson “Egypt’s Media Ecology in a Time of Revolution” arabmediasociety.com, May. 2018). For example, students of the American University of Cairo try to protest against the government’s interference in academia and the government considers that protest as “part of a larger movement of disobedience” (Rashidi 93). Using print media as their ideological state apparatus, Egyptian daily newspaper the Al-Ahram publishes a piece against those young people, accuses them and regards them as anarchists. The governing legislatures even complaint to shut down the American University of Cairo because the university encourages disobedience and provokes people against the government. Knowing that in Egypt, school and media act as a tool of political repression and only help to disseminate Mubarak’s ideology, El Rashidi perhaps calls for communal action through her novel. By foregrounding every aspect of her city, I posit that like a minor literature, her novel is charged with revolutionary enunciation. El Rashidi goes even deeper to provide the collective utterances which are missing everywhere else in this milieu because as a minor writer, she believes that “literature is the affair of the people” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). In her narratives, she highlights “the innumerable crowd of her people” and the way their lives get affected by politics (Deleuze and Guattari 18). For example, in her novel, it is noticed that the Egyptian police never get hesitant to take away the means of sustenance from their own people and even to kidnap the innocent people. The police would come sometimes and take away things: “they took the cart of the peanut seller on our street. They took the kiosk by the school that sold chocolates and Cleopatra cigarettes […] They took the man who worked for Uncle Mohsen. They also took the boy who cleaned cars at the garage next door” (Rashidi 22). Instead of providing jobs and sustenance, the Egyptian government deprived its citizens of every means of sustenance. The urban landscape of Cairo also kept on shifting accordingly to avoid the oppression of the police. People acquired alternative ways to earn money. El Rashidi writes, after school, children used to go to the kiosk to buy different kinds of stuff until the police took it away. Therefore, now they go to the shop which isn’t really a shop but a hole in a wall with a wooden counter and shelves. Only one person fits in it and when it is closed it looks like a garage (Rashidi 29). In another example, a police officer takes away a poor woman who is selling vegetables on the pavement (Rashidi 38). Although she keeps screaming, the policeman pushes her into the truck and throws her

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two baskets onto the truck (Rashidi 38). All of the above cases reveal that common civilians, people other than those who are affiliated with the government, struggle to survive in Egypt and have to work hard to earn their daily sustenance, yet they are not given “a chance to an honest living” because “the system is wrecked” (Rashidi 38). This wrecked system of Egypt is responsible for such urban practices as corruption, black marketing, and bribery. Urban practices are “resisted, appropriated and transformed” according to “the conditions of government” (Baptista 64). For example, the rapid increase of wheat prices in the international market encourages bakeries in Egypt to sell some of the state flour on the black market for generating huge profits. Owing to the weak governance, the production of Egypt’s own subsidized goods and foods was drying up which led to the shortage of food items and goods. This shortage of state-­ subsidized food items and goods encouraged many people to sell their items on high prices in the black market. In the novel, the narrator informs us that in Cairo people are quantified and are given a code by the supermarket which decides how much people are allowed of each thing (Rashidi 56). Therefore, those who are allowed to buy more are “taking their allowance and selling it to other people who want more. They sell it for much more than what they buy it for” (Rashidi 57). In all cases, it is clear that the corrupt system of the Egyptian government provokes people into dishonest practices; therefore, “there is a black market for everything now” and “the catastrophe is the government employees are doing it too” (Rashidi 57). The above examples resonate with the idea of minor literature that “its cramped spaces force each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (Deleuze and Guattari 17) because it is clear that in Egypt, individual tales are tied to the territory of the city. There is no single subject in the above evidence, rather, “there are only collective arrangements of utterances” (“What is Minor Literature” 18). El Rashidi remarkably arranges these collective utterances “as diabolic powers to come or revolutionary forces to be constructed” (“What is Minor Literature” 18). In order to attain this revolutionary force, El Rashidi intensifies the deterritorialization by inserting factual information in writing fiction. Her journalistic reports hold the novel together, retrieving feelings, thoughts, voices, and protests that have been buried in Cairo’s fast moving politics. This may be the reason that we see increased activism at the end of the novel. The narrator and her mother are seen to be involved with a community association. They are seen to walk “around the city, taking pictures

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of things that need to change” (Rashidi 174). They then upload the pictures on the social media and invite people to bring the change. In contrast to the above narrative of Cairo, there is another narrative that describes the city as full of potential, a place where ordinary people become political actors, challenge urban planning and eventually overthrow the governmental regime. In Hamilton’s urban narrative, the city is central to people’s resistance. People make use of the city, its walls, its public spaces and its squares in order to make themselves heard. In short, it is the story about the struggle between “the autocratic regime” and “the city” in which the city always wins. As a minor writer, Hamilton pushes the major tongue and enriches and inflates it with social media posts, graffiti, images, and so on. He uses tweets throughout the narratives to present an alternative history of the revolutionary struggle in The City Always Wins.

Revolutionary Cairo in The City Always Wins The deteriorating political, economic, and educational systems of Egypt had already led to frustration among many lower and middle-class Egyptians. Mubarak’s police state and its coercive apparatus “routinely beat and detained people” (El-Ghobashy 2). A number of key events such as the killing of activists galvanized the masses against police predation. A lethal attack on Christian Egyptians proved to be the final straw. In the week before the Arab uprisings, police “bulldozed a church to the ground overnight” (Rashidi 121). To condemn this act, many Copts10 came out and started “protesting, crying, wailing around the rubble” (Rashidi 121). Along with Copts, many “young men, kufiyyahs wrapped around their mouths and noses, dust clouding their knees down, arms hurled backwards, or forward, rocks flying through the air” stood with them in solidarity (Rashidi 121). Large demonstrations against police brutality and the Mubarak regime made people take to the street. Meanwhile, as the novel advances, it reveals the perpetrators. Consequently, people unite, “raise a flag, occupy the street, talk about love, peace” and the revolution starts (Rashidi 125). People do not believe their government anymore, they arise for their rights by reclaiming the public space, calling for “freedom, social justice and the right to a dignified life” (El-Husseiny and Kesseiba 796).

 A native Egyptian and a member of Coptic Church.

10

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Public spaces are urban spaces, which are modified and adjusted by a group of people based on their needs and desires. It is extremely important for governing legislatures to understand the social construct of any space before implementing any reforms for social sustainability. In the case of Cairo, the government’s implementation of neoliberal reforms from above without considering its citizens’ rights led to social unsustainability. Cairo witnessed an unprecedented transformation. It witnessed confrontations between police forces and protestors, the militarization and policing of urban space. The neoliberal restructuring of Cairo ultimately provoked the masses to unite and demand political change. Consequently, while governing bodies reasserted their interests, Cairo people—the working class, students, middle-class citizens, and peasants—all occupied the popular al-Tahrir Square, exploiting and mapping this urban space (as I will illustrate shortly) to contest the autocratic regime. During this massive demonstration: Egypt’s streets had become parliaments, negotiating tables, and battlegrounds rolled into one. To compel unresponsive officials to enact or revoke specific policies, citizens blockaded major roads with tree branches and burning tires; organized sit-ins in factory plants or outside ministry buildings; and blocked the motorcades of governors and ministers. (Ghobashy 1)

Such praxis during the Arab uprisings was inextricably connected to the urban landscape, places of great structural instability, where revolutionary energies were concentrated (Kanna 366). The urban space is concentrated with revolutionary energies which “dialectically emerge in the condition of structural instability” (Kanna 366). After years of battling with the worst scenario of their city, the Egyptians finally take to the street and collectively seek to claim their rights over their city. This is significant because Hamilton remarkably portrays the exercise of collective power which makes his work an ideal example of minor literature. He weaves the absent voices in the fabric of his narrative through graffiti, art, murals, images, scribbles, and so on, and thus makes his novel “a collective machine of expression that can sweep contents along with it” (“What is Minor Literature” 18).

Arab Spring and the Right to the City According to Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city is

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both a cry and a demand. The cry is a response to the existential pain of a withering crisis of everyday life in the city. The demand is really a command to look at that crisis clearly in the eye and to create an alternative urban life that is less alienated. (10)

The right to the city is to reinvent the city according to the desire of its inhabitants. It is included as a part of human rights legislation because it also ensures equal rights to its citizens within a city space. As Abaza argues, it is a way of “enhancing democratic empowering through occupying space” (5). This confirms David Harvey’s sayings that “the idea of the right to the city does not arise primarily out of various intellectual fascinations and fads” instead, it “rises from the streets, out from the neighborhoods, as a cry for help and sustenance by oppressed peoples in desperate times” (Harvey xiii). Under harsh neoliberal policies, the Arab citizens’ attempt to occupy a space and their participation in the urban protest can be read as a challenge for the right to the city. When applied to the Cairene context, the citizens not only constructed the site of resistance, but also used a range of forms and performances, leading to the creation of a novel kind of visual culture from the public spaces of Cairo. Protestors claimed different walls across the city, especially the wall of downtown and Tahrir Square with graffiti, scribbles, and murals. Urban praxis during the Arab insurgences played a diagnostic role. The idea of the diagnostic is borrowed from Lila Abu Laghod, who claims that resistance is a “diagnostic power,” insofar as resistance brings to light power relations and their applications (41). Similarly, urban praxis during the course of the Arab Spring played a role in the diagnoses that helped foment Egypt’s attempts at socio-­ political change. Examples of the diagnostic practices can be gleaned in The City Always Wins. The distinctive feature of this novel is the revolutionary impulse which makes it minor literature. Hamilton gives voice to those people who are protesting against all forms of exploitation by using the city space. These common people, or in other words minor characters, partake of minor-ness through their unflagging attempts to claim their rights to the city. They neither want to overthrow the major nor do they aspire to attain a major position, rather, they continue to claim their rights through spatial practices. For example, the dissemination of fake news and propaganda has long been the modus operandi of Egypt’s rulers; therefore, to state their demands and motives, people occupy all the squares of Cairo, most

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notably al-Tahrir Square, which hosts many demonstrations and manifestations that affected its spatial settings. To make themselves heard, activists in Cairo acquire novel spatial tactics ranging from cyber-activism to diverse innovations used for mobilizing the common masses in Egypt. This is evident in the way these activists turned the lifeless billboard into a meaningful category with people’s slogans. In The City Always Wins, many activists created their own magazine, website, and podcast called Chaos to counter the state’s narrative: Website and podcast up and running already, a print monthly in the works.— hello, dearly liberated from the streets of our revolution, today we’ve got the news from the front lines, tunes from the underground, and every political beat you need to get through your week. (Hamilton 20)

In doing so, these activists establish resistant networks to withstand the state’s narratives by showing the actual reality to people. Such podcasts no doubt allow them greater freedom to speak up for their cause. Contrary to the state’s media, the Chaos is a transnational podcast “carry[ing] news and tactics and triumphs from Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Palestine” (Hamilton 20). Its transmission is open to the whole world; therefore, “a thousand new followers flock to the Chaos Twitter feed everyday” (Hamilton 20). Having said this, these activists invented new real public spaces, which merged with the virtual world of networking. By installing the elements of the internet in the real world, activists empowered the masses. The internet technology no doubt became a central weapon of the weak during the Arab Spring. For example, in The City Always Wins, a police officer refused to release one of the protestors, Abdul-Rahman Ahmed, who had been arrested on the charge of graffiti. Mariam warned the police that “if he was not released in ten minutes the media will be alerted that a young student who was kindly helping the mother of a martyr decorates her house is being illegally detained” (Hamilton 35). Upon hearing this, the police officer released Abdul-Rahman. This example illustrates that during the Arab Spring, social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook became a means of engaging a large number of audiences. The social media outlets did not only help the protestors to strengthen their influence and outreach but the updates regarding revolution were also distributed rapidly through such platforms. Hamilton writes that a plan for marches, which described the itinerary for protest throughout

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Cairo, was distributed in advance via social media: “a hundred people make up the front line at any one time,—behind them, where Mohammad Mahmoud Street flows out into Tahrir, are the spectators, the chanters, the drummers, doctors, quarries, and hawkers” (Hamilton 41). Such planning of protestors helped them in disciplining and organizing during the protest. These new media no doubt functioned “as a digital public square,” encouraging Cairenes to protest in the real public square of Tahrir (chambers 2). During the Arab Spring, when powerless people had powerful technologies in hand, the situation started to change. The social media does not only have impact on the everyday lives and mode of protest but also has impact on literary form. For instance, Hamilton’s narratives sometimes read like an online activism which presents an alternative media while threatening power. Despite the Arab government’s efforts to control the internet, the flow of information from the masses outwitted the state narrative. To maintain their interests, social power and the production of knowledge usually stay in the hands of the governing bodies; however, in the wake of the Arab Spring, I believe that the Arab activists' attempt at blending the virtual and the real world decenters the traditional authority of knowledge and power and challenges the mechanism of established powers like experts and academic pundits: “they can’t keep up with us, an army of Samsungs, Twitters, HTCs, emails, Facebook events—an army of infinite mobility—impossible to outmaneuver” (Hamilton 20). This suggests that social media platforms give confidence to protestors that Egyptian security services can no longer monitor or control them. Since the toppling of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egypt had been ruled by three different governing bodies, SCAF (Supreme Council of Armed Forces who temporarily assumed power), the Muslim Brotherhood backed by the SCAF, and currently, the Army General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. During this period, the diverse urban praxis played a pivotal role in challenging different governing bodies and their policies as illustrated below. Although the success of the revolution is controversial, urban practices have shifted the significance of public spaces. The revolutionaries transformed public square into a revolutionary space where a range of artistic and social activities and public performances took place to combat the state narrative regarding revolution. For instance, in the novel, a march to the state television and radio building, Maspero is significant because Maspero is an Egyptian state television building, one of the most active mouthpieces of the Egyptian government which always broadcasts a manipulated version

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of the situation. For this reason, protestors always want to take over Maspero; however, they could never reach that building because it is always protected by the military. Moreover, through street graffiti, lectures at public spaces, social media, video sharing and the display of martyrs’ pictures in the public spaces, not only their voices go worldwide but they also encourage people to protest against the repressive regime. In the highly censored society of Egypt, it is not surprising to see that Egyptian intellectuals, writers, and artists decide to come out, exploit the public spaces and become agents of change in the society. The work of Egyptian intellectuals and writers is engaged with the Egyptian politics. Not only do they present critiques on the ruling regime, but also create a space in their writings where independent political thought could brew. Therefore, there was strict censorship under the autocratic regime in Egypt to control the opposition movements and intellectuals. Egyptian artists and writers were already seeking an outlet to voice their revolutionary ideas. Public space provided them with “artistic freedom and as a site where the relationship between artistic works, audiences, and the government can develop in a visible and direct manner” (Smith 112). El Rashidi says that during the Arab Spring many artists and writers, after decades of censorship, come out to Tahrir Square and use their work as “a tool for change” (Rashidi 137). Instead of relying on the government’s channel of publication, Egyptian writers and intellectuals deliver lectures and give talks related to their work in public spaces. For instance, in The City Always Wins, the activists are seen to arrange and organize talks of different writers in Tahrir Square which make people more aware of their history and their government policies. Like writers who delivered lectures in the public spaces, artists made use of the city wall by employing street graffiti. In the wake of the Arab Spring, street graffiti emerged as a self-perpetuating movement, developed as a tool for protesters to convey their motivations and thus can be considered as a paradigmatic example of minor literature. Graffiti is one of the most practiced arts during the Arab Spring because the public could easily access different public spaces and thus claim different walls with their murals. I believe that graffiti as a practice is part visual art and part urban play. As a form of visual art, it can be considered as minor art because it highlights social change and becomes an expression of community desire. It is urban because it is performed in the urban environment to reveal the unknown historical facts. Therefore, many Egyptian artists like “Susan Hefuna and Hassan Khan as the Dawn News reported, used the city as a site for their

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work, both before and in response to the uprisings” (Graffiti: Street Art and the Arab Spring” Dawn.com, May, 2012). Along with graffiti, activists and protestors use urban space in many other ways to demonstrate the truth (Hamilton 103). For example, during the Arab uprisings, “every night street screenings are happening, young men and women across the country, gathering equipment, rallying their friends, and taking over the squares and alleyways of their cities to illuminate the old walls with the new truth” (Hamilton 103). Almost every square of Cairo is painted and decorates with martyrs’ pictures and with the remarks and jokes against the autocratic regime: “THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES, DOWN WITH MILITARY RULE” (Hamilton 23). Different walls are sprayed with people’s words: “IF YOU DON’T LET US DREAM, WE WON’T LET YOU SLEEP” (Hamilton 152). The above textual examples illustrate that the scrawls, pictorial art and letterings are the visible legacy of the revolution. By stating their motives publicly in the form of street graffiti, I believe that art enters into the public space rather than being limited to art institutions. By taking art into streets and squares, artists blur the boundary between art and life. In public spaces, the artwork is more engaged with social concerns, yet it also becomes more polysemic when it enters into the public space because of the diverse audiences to whom it speaks. According to Jacques Rancière, art can play an active role in changing power relations as it can prompt viewers into action. Rancière uses the notion of the “distribution of the sensible” to relate art with politics without reducing one to the other. The frequently used expression “distribution of the sensible” in Rancière’s work refers to “the system of self-evident facts of some perception” or in other words to the horizon of what is audible, visible, thinkable, and sayable (12). This notion is used by Rancière to emphasize the political side of art. For Rancière, art is political because it has the ability to disturb the sensible order. Working in the same line, the work of El Rashidi and Hamilton also disturbs the sensible order and thus resembles minor literature. With the disturbance of the sensible order, what was once thought impossible and unthinkable becomes realized and enters into the realm of possibility. For instance, Amnesty International regards Egypt as “an open-air prison for critics” due to its strict censorship policy where security forces have been ruthless in “clamping down on any remaining political, social or even cultural independent spaces” (“Egypt: Unprecedented Crackdown on freedom of expression under El-Sisi turns Egypt into Open-air Prison” amnesty.org, Sept, 2018). Yet, every wall and

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street of Egypt is adorned with pictorially complex murals against dictatorship. Artists protest by drawing the brutal action of autocracy and people’s revolutionary slogans and demands. During the Arab uprisings, art becomes more political because it brings the voices of the dispossessed into the limelight. All of the above practices on the part of protestors and activists connect art to the wider social milieu and thus can be considered as minor art practices which connect different aesthetic regimes together “to bring art back down to life” (O’Sullivan 14). Secondly, these minor practices are self-organized activities and are not led by molar organizations; therefore, they can be categorized as minor art practices. A minor art must involve the production of collectivities which means to incorporate even those people who no longer exist or who are missing, as described earlier, it makes “people” a subject of study. In this regard, displaying the pictures of martyrs in public spaces can also be categorized as minor art practice which does not only witness the absent faces of those revolutionaries who lost their lives for a greater cause, but is also used as a strategy to galvanize the masses. By displaying the photographs of martyrs, activists ensure to keep alive the goal of the 2011 revolution: “hundreds of names of people martyred for the revolution are central to our narrative” (Hamilton 75). In the novel, after the police shoot Ayman (one of the protestors) dead, the activists paint Ayman’s face on one of the walls and they also have an interview with his mother, Umm Ayman, and her words are then broadcasted: Record the blood of the martyr.—our youth were shot and thrown in the garbage. But every one of them in Tahrir is Ayman. And Ayman’s blood will not be lost as long as they are in Tahrir. As long as they hold their ground. I will say Ayman’s blood is lost when they leave. (Hamilton 52)

The image of martyrdom also undergoes a transition during the Arab Spring. Unlike the existing notion of the martyr in which he/she stands as a symbol of sacrifice for the larger community, the Arab Spring martyrs are seen as a symbol of agency and empowerment. Instead of considering the martyrs as victims of state violence, martyrs and their tragic life stories help to fuel the protests because “statements from the martyrs’ families carry a political weight heavier than any other” (Hamilton 35). Given this context, I argue that urban geographies have been transformed entirely with the Arab uprisings as they become politically vital and

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public spaces emerge as “spaces of socio-political contestation, reinvigorating past iteration[s] of protest” (Souza and Lipietz 621). Such tactics and strategies suggest a novel way of claiming the “right to the city” during the Arab revolution. It challenges the dominant discourse about thirdworld metropolises, which is to say that third-world cities are entrapped in the predicament of dictatorship and neoliberalism. The creativity of the Arab revolution had allegedly challenged the deterministic vision of both these paradigms and shook the entire fortress of Arab autocracy. Consequently, the Arab government, or in the context of this chapter, the Egyptian government attempted to combat the uprisings violently. Secondly, by transcribing all the minor practices of the Arab Spring in the form of novel, Hamilton and El Rashidi constitute a literature of collectivity. As an example of minor literature, their works demonstrate that social movements crystallize when people collectively claim urban space, express demands, and organize constituents. In their urban narratives, they illustrate the exercise of collective power by demonstrating how uniquely the urban is conducive of contention. It has been noticed that the minor practices were continued even in post-revolutionary Egypt. For instance, with Mubarak’s fall, the military took over Egypt and made a promise that the nation would soon have an elected president and the army would only protect the country (Hamilton 83). However, in reality, the army failed to conduct the election and remained in power even after one year. Therefore, on the anniversary of the revolution, the streets were again filled with people, all marching to Tahrir Square: “There were more people on the street today than ever before” because even “January 2511 was gone for another year,” and Egypt remained under military control (Hamilton 109). The continued demonstration of Egyptians indicates their willingness to remain on the street until their demands were met. The subsequent government of Morsi proved himself a doppelgänger of Mubarak in his policies, although he promised people to restore peace, to “head a government for all Egyptians” and to build-up trust between citizens and security services (“Egypt’s Mohammed Morsi: A Turbulent Presidency Cut Short” bbc.co.uk, June, 2019). On the first anniversary of Morsi’s presidency, Egypt witnessed, “the largest protest in the history of mankind” calling for the ouster of Morsi.  The day protest erupted throughout Egypt.

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Therefore, the Commander in Chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took over the charge of the country (Hamilton 192). During all this time, the situation appeared to be no different, “the city was at a standstill,” the economy was collapsing and there was a police checkpoint almost everywhere in Cairo (Rashidi 151). The Egyptian army made “protesting illegal” (Hamilton 224) to control mass resistance, yet, in the previous few days (Sept–Oct 2020), scattered protests erupted in Cairo and in other cities, with protestors shouting “leave Sisi.” It highlights the risk that Abdel Fattah el-Sisi could also face broader dissent driven by people’s grievances over economic austerity. In all of these episodes, marches are seen as the significant aspect of protest. It is one of the most popular ways to express demands peacefully and hence can be categorized as minor practice. During March, people from all strata of life come out and gather together for the common purpose. Since the 2011 revolution, Egypt has witnessed an increasing number of voices proclaiming the right to the city. People demand social justice by carrying out the spatial and urban practices inaugurated in the 2011 revolution. Like the revolutionaries constructing public space for themselves, El Rashidi and Hamilton’s attempts at transcribing these minor practices in their novels can be defined as a way of creating minor space for all those people who participated in the revolution like protestors, writers, and activists.

Toward Making Minor Space Andy Merrifield defines “three components of minor space, just as there are three for minor literature, and each relates very pressingly to ‘the body’” (110). In the context of this book, it is the body of those who participate in the revolution. He argues that instead of deterritorialization of language, the body is deterritorialized in the minor space. The deterritorialization of the body involves the body’s relationship to the space and place in which one is residing. The deterritorialized body is a body that does not fit wholly in the model of the dominant or the major and which chooses to stand its ground and fight for its rights. Both texts exhibit protestors, activists, writers, and common people of Egypt deterritorializing themselves, taking to the street and demanding equality, freedom and justice. El Rashidi and Hamilton demonstrate that the deterritorialization of the body in the minor space of Cairo is “an affirmation of residue, of remainders, of the radicality of the irreducible, even if the notion of ‘minor’ here in no way implies the quantitative few,” I am here talking

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about a political, cultural, and social minority who are a quantitative majority, the 99 percent, for example (Merrifield 110). Everything in minor space, like Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature, is political—often out of necessity. The deterritorialized body is a political body in the sense that it challenges the authority and legitimacy of the dominant or the major. Using Hannah Arendt’s notion of “space of appearance,” Judith Butler argues that it is the space of appearance in which people through their bodily actions make their appearance explicit (“Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street” n.p.). The same phenomenon is seen in the streets of Cairo during the revolution. In the novel, when a police officer shoots the protestors, even in their injured state the protestors remain determined, as one of the protestors says after being shot: “your steel lives on in me, poisoning me, seeping chemicals into my bloodstream” (Hamilton 113). Although the Egyptian state uses heavy weapons to subdue the protest, protestors, however, stay unarmed because their only “weapon is mass” (Hamilton 109). This suggests that in order to make themselves explicit/visible, in other words, political, these deterritorialized bodies make themselves vulnerable to danger. As with minor literature, minor space is inherently collective in character. The deterritorialized body in minor space speaks a language of collectivity. It constitutes a common action and a collective enunciation. In both texts, protest becomes a way of life for revolutionaries and they are “happy to spend [their] li[ves] marching and protesting against each shitty government that comes in” (Hamilton 188). Minor space is political and collective because the bodies involved in minor space appear the same to each other—expressing a common understanding, sharing common ground—and through their bodily dimension of action or the expressiveness of the body, they voice collectivity. Given this context, I argue that both texts have all the credentials for creating a minor space for revolutionaries and embody its central characteristics: the deterritorialization of bodies. In both texts, bodies are out of place, they are present places where they shouldn’t be (such as public spaces and squares) and are absent from where they should be (home and workplaces). These bodies are being themselves; they are expressive of the collective—quantitatively the majority—and enunciate a new political discourse that demands “bread, freedom and social justice” (Hamilton 243). The minor spaces created by these authors in their writings “are absolutely creative and affirmative, both artistically and practically, aesthetically and politically” (Merrifield 113).

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The revolution, no doubt, made people “bolder, more resilient” but it brought no positive change for them (Rashidi 171). People still “mutter about the inconvenience and the government’s inability to fix the problem, its incompetence” (Rashidi 168). In the beginning, people were willing to continue their revolution to restore Egypt’s greatness: “Egypt stands tall” and Egypt “shows the world the road forward” (Hamilton 234). However, the poor policies of the Egyptian government and Egyptian owned security forces turn Egypt into “the morgue” (Hamilton 241) and now its “air is filled with the white noise of helicopters, circling over Downtown. Bombs go off every other day” (Hamilton 231). The police gassed people, threw a gas canister into different squares and burned them (Hamilton 241). On the one hand, police were involved in massacring the people that subsequently produced millions of refugees (an issue that is discussed in the next chapter), on the other hand, the Egyptian army bombed different places in Egypt. This type of urban destruction suggests that during the military conflict, the aggressors targeted the urban fabric of the city. Cities in this context are no longer safe havens, rather “extension of the battlefields” (Wright 148). This phenomenon is known as urbicide which refers to the systematic killing of urbanity. Cairo city, which was once known for “its wide and welcoming façade overlooking the shuttered gardens and their mysterious excavations” (10), now becomes “the unending city of sores and scars” (Hamilton 18). Along with neoliberal reforms, the synergy of technological fanaticism, like bombings and helicopters, culminates not only in urbicide but in homicide too. With the installation of technology in war, a space of annihilation is created that surpasses everything, including humans. With the passage of time, the activists start blaming themselves for provoking people and consider themselves “the zombies, the failures, the ones who grow fat on the land and send kids to die—while we drink on their graves” (Hamilton 271). Consequently, the Chaos crew (activists who initiated the website and podcast Chaos) and the protestors shrink: “A million becomes a thousand becomes a hundred becomes one—this is the long end of extraordinary” (Hamilton 271), Cairo takes shape as “the morgue, the house of ungraceful death” (Hamilton 270) and “a glorious start” of revolution meets with “a terrible end” (Hamilton 280). The successive regimes act like a doppelgänger of Mubarak replicating the same government apparatus and the deadlock continues in Post-Arab Spring Cairo. Despite political

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upheaval, the ministry of security services remains untouched. Instead, police and military apparatuses become more strengthened because their budget has increased. Given this context, the selected novels are characteristically urban not merely in their choice of subject matter but also in their use of narrative form. The urban form consists in bringing objects and people from different strata together to create revolutionary movement and highlight the needs and issues of the society and its dwellers which according to David Harvey is an aspect of “urban dimension” (xiii). Henri Lefebvre echoes this idea stating that urban space is a place “of communication and information,” with the urban becoming “what it always was: a place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, the seat of the dissolution of normalities and constraints, the moments of play and of the unpredictable” (Lefebvre 129). El Rashidi and Hamilton’s novels reflect many of these urban features peculiar to Cairo. Both texts are examples of minor writings in a major language because they allow the city’s momentum to constantly settle and unsettle the meanings by using peculiar sounds and colors. Both writers highlight the social, economic, and political issues of Cairo and articulate its pre- and Post-Arab Spring urban changes in a highly energetic and inventive mode. On the one hand, they show that Cairo’s urban space is subjected to spatial transformation because of government maladministration, violence, and bad economic policies. This phenomenon is manifested by multiple actions: adding fences to guarantee security to some people, unequal distribution of resources in different areas, the abolition of monuments and historical buildings, the removal of street vendors and the installation of commercial buildings. On the other hand, they show artists’ attempts to register and reflect the political situation of their country in the form of graffiti on the walls of Cairo city which expresses feelings of joy, sorrow and solidarity while also sending messages to their ruler. I believe that both writers create a minor space for the marginalized in their writings. In their writings, they create a lived space where the minority celebrates their minor-hood and fete their collective joyfulness. Having said this, I believe that the Arab revolution triggers a stimulating debate about urban spaces and Anglo-Arab authors articulate this phenomenon in their writings, inflecting the pool of minor literature with urban narratives. While Deleuze and Guattari assert that metaphor and other literary techniques would detract minor literature from its

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revolutionary agenda, El Rashidi and Hamilton’s urban narratives use metaphor and journalism to give voice to marginalized people. In this way, these emerging urban narratives redefine the notion of minor literature positively by strengthening its political workings. The chapter that follows examines in more detail the way Saleem Haddad’s and Nada Awar Jarrar’s writings extend the notion of minor literature. Haddad and Jarrar articulate the experiences of widely discriminated groups such as migrants, gay people and exiles, and contribute humanitarian narratives in minor literature.

CHAPTER 5

The Humanitarian Narrative of the Arab Spring in Saleem Haddad’s Guapa and Nada Awar Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven: Further Toward Minor Literature I am a beast, a Negro of an inferior race for all eternity. This is the becoming of the writer. —Delevuze, 228

In this quote, Deleuze refers to another sense in which minor literature is political and collective. Besides being a form of stuttering,1 minor writing is a kind of fabulation. The fabulative function of minor writing is to invent missing people. In this sense, a minor writer must create the subject of a collective who can unravel its externally forced identity. Such people do not dominate the world; rather, they are “a minor people, eternally minor, seized in a becoming-revolutionary” (Deleuze 228). Whenever a minor writer enters into this process of becoming-revolutionary, he/she engages with the collective utterances to invent the voice of minor people: Kafka for central Europe, Melville for America—both present literatures as the collective enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who only find their expression in and through the writer. (Deleuze 228)

The closely related second and third characteristics of minor literature stress the inseparability of the political and the personal as well as the 1

 Please see the Introduction (p. 22).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_5

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inevitable collective dimension of any individual effort by a member of a marginalized group; thus, it has proven germane to the discussion of refugees, exiles, and gay and lesbian people. Arab people thought that revolution would fulfill their demands for economic, social, cultural, and political rights, but they found themselves subject to psychological and physical violence. The politics of the Arab world directly affected the Arab inhabitants by politicizing those who were never politicized before. The Governance and Social Development Resource Centre identifies migrants, refugees, and gay and lesbian people as widely discriminated groups that “are particularly vulnerable to human rights abuses for each country” (2). These groups are subjected to persecution based on political beliefs, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender identity. These “eternally minor—bastard people, inferior, dominated, always in becoming, always incomplete” do not accept identity brought upon by the majority (Deleuze 4). With an aim to address the rights of such people, Saleem Haddad and Nada Awar Jarrar speak “in the name of incapacity to speak” (Biti 158). Not only do these writers address human rights struggles, but they also make the most ignored sections of society audible and envision the liberation of refugees and gay people by casting them in their narratives. In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which Post-­ Arab Spring fictions speak of, from and across migrant and refugee experiences and sexual identities, with a special reference to Haddad’s Guapa and Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven. Saleem Haddad and Nada Awar Jarrar, the two writers that I discuss in this chapter, belong to a mixed background (Christianity and Islam). Born in Lebanon to an Australian mother and a Lebanese father, Jarrar is a transglobal subject living in London, Paris, Sydney, Washington DC, and Beirut. Similarly, Haddad, born in Kuwait City to an Iraqi German mother and a Lebanese-Palestinian father, has lived in several countries, including Jordan, Cyprus, Canada, and the United Kingdom. By living in so many places, they believe that they belong nowhere and everywhere. Their fictions deal with the issue of displacement, whether the enforced displacement of refugees or self-displacement and the rights of gay people. Their narratives construct the journey of displaced people whether they are migrants, refugees, or gay people. Exile, displacement, the identity of refugees and sexuality are the recurring issues in their fiction. Given this context, I assert that Post-Arab Spring literature as an example of minor literature foregrounds the ignored experiences of those people who live within political sea-changes and incorporates other modes of belonging

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and being such as belongings of gay people, refugees, and exiles. Taking inspiration from one of the greatest calamities of living memory, Jarrar and Haddad, present the troubled context of the Arab Spring and the Post-­ Arab Spring scenario by carving out a space for the Arab refugees, exiles, and gay Arab people in their autofictions. Autofiction, a term coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 to describe his own literary productions, is initially known as “fiction of strictly real events” (Dix 2). In the 40 years that followed, a number of writers continued to develop and complicate autofictive practices. More recently, this term is used in the sense of “self-exploration and self-experimentation on the part of the author” because many autofiction writings “have been written in the aftermath of some kind of traumatic experience—real or imagined—so that the process of writing in response to trauma can be seen as a means of situating the self in a new context” (Dix 4). Teresa Pepe suggests using an autofictional lens in the study of Egyptian blogs. She argues that “Arab critics rely heavily on western literary debate and have not tried to instigate their own critical debate on Arabic autofiction” (10–11). By contrast, I believe that Arab writers have taken it ahead of its previous status by utilizing it as a literary technique instead of a genre. For example, Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club represents an autofictional account of the author’s life by utilizing autofiction as a literary technique. The autobiographical traces in this work are given not only via biographical details that Ghali and Ram (the protagonist of Beer in the Snooker Club) share but in Ghali’s utilization of first-person narrator, the use of humor that we find in Ram’s witty comments and by playing with nomenclature (Ram is the nickname of Ghali). These three features create the verisimilitude of Ghali’s autobiographical details, and the first-person narration in the novel allows us to read Beer in the Snooker Club as a memoir despite the genre label (a novel) is provided on its cover. This possibility is further enhanced by Ghali’s humor, which is quite visible in Ram’s witty commentary throughout the novel, thus connecting the author with the protagonist and narrator. Radwa Ashour’s Specters is another example of autofictional text in which Ashour gives us an autofictional account of her life. When approaching the text via autofictional lens, it reveals a “mediated space between generic intersections where the author weaves a narrative from threads of her life, intertwined with a fictionalized version of reality that she had witnessed” (Kamal et al. 12). Ashour infuses a layer of referentiality and factuality with imagined settings, environments, and situations that

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encouraged readers to read her work via autofictional lens. Following the same logic, Haddad and Jarrar foreground the struggle for self-definition in the chaotic conditions of Arab society in their autofiction novels. Haddad’s sexual identity and Jarrar’s identity as a refugee make them doubly outsiders in their cultures. Their fictions provide a coherent, retrospective account of their lives and, at the same time, more private issues, such as love or other personal affairs, are more likely to be narrated through fiction. In Arab society where gender roles are rigidly defined, any deviation from perceived sexual norms is not only subversive but also extremely threatening for Arab people. Although Arab countries deny the existence of homosexual acts, the existence of severe laws against homosexuality is a testament that such acts exist in the Arab world. For instance, in his autobiographical novel An Arab Melancholia, Abdellah Taïa tells readers about the dilemma of growing up as a gay in Islamic Morocco and embraces his homosexuality openly for which the local press calls for him to be stoned. Autofictive practice of writing becomes a means of refuge in a society which tends to suppress individual expression: “it becomes a way of asserting one’s voice and existing in society” (Pepe 11). Therefore, despite the social stigma and state-sponsored repression, Haddad finds a creative way to combat homophobia and transphobia through his autofictive novel Guapa (2016). In the same way, the issue of refugees is also a politically pressing issue around the world. Although media coverage overflows with the images of war refugees, the literary voice of the refugee is not much highlighted. The earthquake of revolution and subsequent massive immigration of Arab people to western countries have not only altered the political and geographical landscape but also prompted Arab refugee writers to chronicle their experiences in the form of novels. For example, in his novel The Palm House, Tarek Eltayeb tells the story of people who escape the violence and starvation of their homeland, Sudan, and eventually land in Vienna. It is worth mentioning here that Eltayeb migrates to Vienna at the time of violence in his homeland, Sudan. Nada Awar Jarrar is also an example of refugee writers. As a Lebanese descendant author—displaced several times from her homeland due to civil war—Jarrar explores the issue of refugees, exiles, and identity in her autofictive novel An Unsafe Haven (2016). She deposits her experience as a refugee in the autofictional character, Hannah. Like Ashour’s Specters, Jarrar’s novel is also fusing the generic boundaries, where fiction intersects with memoir. Approaching

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An Unsafe Haven via autofictional lens, I find Jarrar fictionalizes her experience, memory, and identity as a refugee in her novel. It is worth mentioning here that many Arab writers fictionalize their personal memories and experiences in times of cultural displacement. Miral Al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights is one such example in which the fictionalization of memory plays a significant role in grappling with the experience of cultural displacement. Like Jarrar’s novel, Al-Tahawy structures her past (her past in Cairo) in parallel with the fictional narrative, where memory registers experiences in fictional terms. These examples demonstrate that Arab writers utilize autofiction as a literary strategy in negotiating experience, memory, and identity in their writings. Given this context, I argue that by providing autofictional account of their experiences (via imaginative construction of characters), both Haddad and Jarrar express their concern for the suffering of others and arouse feelings of sympathy, compassion, empathy, and pity in readers for sufferers. A major feature of both authors is their preoccupation with the self and the way it evolves and transforms with the passage of time. Their narratives deal with the question of individuality and society, a question that is particularly prominent in today’s time of what Zygmunt Bauman has termed “liquid modernity.”2 Depending on their socio-political and historical circumstances, these authors blur the lines between their own lived experiences and their creation. Their narratives are strictly about the real event, which is to say the Arab Spring, and the fictional element is introduced through the careful fabrication of the way of telling. They put themselves and their own sufferings in their narratives to appeal the wider audiences and as a gay writer, Abdellah Taïa says in one of his interviews that “you have to sacrifice yourself in literature the way you were sacrificed in real life” (Carbajal 500). Therefore, the work they produce is more realist, almost confessional as well as thematically ambitious. In their narratives, they capitalize on their own sufferings and miseries which they think “could serve as a source of inspiration and guidance for others” (Pepe 12). Given this context, I argue that these writers embrace the discourse of human rights and work as humanists as well as novelists. Seeking to represent vulnerable lives across the globe, not only do these writers generate empathy for those people but they also express their solidarity for the helpless population of the world. I suggest they are, in Deleuze and Guattari’s 2  The idea of liquid modernity is proposed by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Liquid Modernity to emphasize the fact of change within society.

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term, philosophers who are representative of “silent and amorphous masses” (qtd. in Biti 281). As public intellectuals, these authors highlight social concerns of the world and appeal to a metropolitan readership through what Restrepo defines “as an aesthetic mediation of suffering” (345). Being concerned with human rights and humanitarian representation, these authors normalize human rights in their narratives by incorporating the rise of humanitarian intervention, hence, contribute humanitarian narratives into minor literature.

Humanitarian Narratives and Minor Literature Human rights have deteriorated significantly in the MENA region since 2011. Governments have used bullets and batons to carry out wide-scale repression, jailed political opponents and cracked down on nongovernmental organizations and journalists. The report prepared by Governance and Social Development Resource Centre states that, in most cases, demonstration is “met by excessive force from security forces resulting in death and injuries” and even non-derogable human rights are “still restricted across the region” (2). In places such as Syria, government has resorted to missiles attacks against their own people. For example, Ardd-Legal reports that the Syrian army’s reaction to the revolutionaries was the “shelling [of] cities like Hama and Homs, epicenters of the uprising, as well as arrest[s] and [the] torturing [of] political opponents and shooting soldiers who refused to fire on civilians” (9). Fear of persecution led millions of people to flee from their home countries and seek refuge in other societies where they may be isolated, impoverished, and different from their original selves. The widespread instability brought by the Arab Spring had uprooted thousands of people from all strata of life from their home countries and had created the largest refugee crisis in the twenty-first century as reported by Amnesty International. A growing number of texts seek to describe the individual experiences of humanitarianism. Anglo-Arab minor writers are now blending their personal stories with the human rights framework. In this respect, these writers invent “people who are missing” from the world’s larger narratives by way of minor literature. I argue Haddad and Jarrar articulate a distinctive gay and refugee identity in the face of the twin threats of sexual identity and assimilation respectively in their novels. As an example of minor literature written in the major language, these writers represent vastly diverse experiences of refugees, exiles, and gay people by centralizing their

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sufferings and traumatic experiences in their narratives. Searching for completely another kind of consciousness from the one established in majority literature, minor literature is the single possible mode of “self-­ identification” for minority people who are “deprived of the acknowledged political modes enjoyed by majority peoples” (Biti 283). For instance, Guapa provides a platform for the expression of that form of identity which is based on non-normative erotic practices. Their narratives operate as an “instrument of redemption of the mutes or those without the right to bear rights” (Biti 283). To bear witness, these writers “place [themselves] in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish [themselves] in a living language as if it were dead” (Agamben 161). In this quotation, Agamben clearly shows the relationship between the suffering mutes and their representatives. Characterized by the feeling of being “a stranger in one’s own language,” minor literature deconstructs the fiction of a unitary national culture by highlighting differences (Deleuze and Guattari 24). Empathy is central in their narratives and different writers use different strategies and techniques to connect the readers with the protagonist. For instance, Haddad structures his novel using bildungsroman, a formative novel focuses on a coming of age protagonist. In the bildungsroman novel Guapa, the protagonist, Rasa, undergoes a process in which he discovers how to be civil and social in society. This process of entering into social spheres is the normal progression of adolescence to adulthood for some people, in reality, a complex process that involves youthful idealism interacting with the real world. This tension in the bildungsroman helps Haddad to reveal a public sphere where non-derogable human rights are abused and violated. At the same time, it also “allows for the production and dissemination of collective common sense,” in other words, these narratives create empathy for excluded people like gay people which is “necessary for the development of more inclusive human rights” (Zabel 39). In the novel, Rasa desperately tries to fall in love with women and in order to conform to societal value, he “furiously demand[s], negotiate[s], and then plead[s]” to God “to make [him] fall in love with women,” but God “fails him and therefore religion becomes a “source of the contradictions” for him (Haddad 156). This example arouses feelings of sympathy for Rasa’s helplessness in readers. According to Jolena Zabel “humanitarian narratives are political, representing global inequalities [and] trauma”; therefore, in such novels, the privileged minority “helps the suffering majority” (28). Unlike other

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selected texts of this monograph, a large number of protestors and activists do not occupy the setting of An Unsafe Haven; instead, a small group of friends in Lebanon come face to face with poor Syrian refugees and help them in every possible way. In a very simple language combined with journalistic reportage, Jarrar tells how people live in a country where nothing is certain when families have to flee from their countries to escape the worst, and refugees are forced to live in perilous uncertainty. Moreover, to give a strong sense of familiarity of place (Beirut and Damascus), Jarrar heavily relies on sensory language: the smell of rain coming, the glittering Mediterranean, and breakfast in a garden. The above examples share all three main features of minor literature: the Arab Spring politicizes the individual lives—in the context of my chapter, refugees, exiles, and gay people—both writers foreground these minor voices in the language of majority. However, it also deviates from minor literature in terms of its strategies and techniques. To centralize the traumatic experiences and to create empathy among readers for such excluded individuals in their narratives, both writers drift away from the stylistic model offered by minor literature. To present the collective utterances of minor people, these writers rely neither on metamorphosis nor on metaphor; instead, in a simple language they deconstruct the notion of a unified national culture, highlight differences and make space for minority perspectives, their identities, and cultural forms. For example, Haddad articulates the queer practices held in Guapa. Guapa is a queer nightclub and a home to all outcasts in a novel in which often radically charged groups like gay and lesbian people can perform their original selves without the feeling of shame: “the atmosphere in Guapa is warm” (232). He also refers to the drag performances of Maj (Rasa’s gay friend) in his narratives: In the basement of Guapa the real fun happens, and where Maj really shines. The moment Maj puts his heels on he becomes someone powerful. He stands in the center of the room, his bright red lipstick glinting under the lights, head tilted slightly upward, and he commands your attention without even trying. He is so good at dressing up you’d never know he was a boy. (232)

It is always important for any minority group to have a mutual physical location where they can combine to socialize and organize a sense of identity together. By creating Guapa in his narratives, Haddad underscores gay

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culture as a “marginalized fraction” of the Arab society (Davidson 141).3 An Unsafe Haven represents refugees and exiles as a part of larger humanity that adds distinctiveness in the world. For example, by showing Maysoun’s and Fatima’s preoccupation with Iraqi and Syrian lifestyles respectively even after they have been displaced long ago from their home countries, Jarrar attempts to highlight “peripheral cultural groupings” of the world which eventually add diversity in the world (Hillis 8). By foregrounding the culture of the excluded people, both writers attempt to represent “a world at the edge of the fringe” (Hillis 8). I would propose to call them microcultures to emphasize its positioning as a marginalized section or as an oppositional to the mainstream society and culture. Given this context, minor literature provides a sense of identity to the excluded group while its diversity encourages respect and tolerance for the excluded or minority. Haddad and Jarrar accommodate the excluded and find a way to respond to the different circumstances that arise from the wake of Arab uprisings. Haddad claims that he always “wanted to write a queer story set in the Arab world,” but many factors prevented him from doing so. However, in the wake of the Arab Spring, he feels that “the country is falling apart and [his] love life is in ruins” too (Haddad 39). Therefore, he wrote Guapa “to figure out all th[os]e questions that were swimming around in [his] head during 2011 and 2012, when the revolutions were in full swing” (Waterman “Saleem Haddad” lambdaliterary. org, Feb. 2017). In an interview to the national press, Jarrar says that “you cannot avoid the refugees and their destitution and despair on the streets of Beirut”; therefore, she takes up this issue in her novel (East “The National Book Club: An Unsafe Haven is a heartful tale of lives damaged by the tremors of War” thenational.ae, Dec. 2016). As an example of minor literature, their fictions are written from the perspective of the minority and are engaged with the affective experience of gay, dispossessed, marginalized, and displaced people. Haddad’s Guapa depicts the life of a young gay man, Rasa, who negotiates homosexuality, authoritarianism, revolution, Islamic extremism, and family and social expectations throughout his journey. Rasa is not open about his sexual orientation in Arab society and he lives his gay identity in his room and washroom where he could utter to himself that he is “gay” 3  Haddad’s narratives provide an arena for the expression of forms of identity based on non-normative erotic practices and thus highlight the marginalized culture exist in Arab society.

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without “feel[ing] any shame” (Haddad 93). In the Arab world, he claims he is “different from everyone else” and is “doomed to be alone” because of his sexuality (Haddad 93). Although he participates in the Arab revolution with the hope of attaining basic human rights, including gay rights, he still lives in obscurity and in fear of the law and society. Therefore, he goes to America considering that America is “a world where [one is] free to do what [one] likes” (Haddad 132). However, he tells us that in America, he experiences an intense level of loneliness and he discovers his “Arabness: new identity foist[s] upon [him]” (Haddad 143). At this juncture, he states that “I was no longer someone with thoughts and dreams and secrets. I was the by-product of an oppressive culture, an ambassador of a people at war with civilization” (Haddad 142). This example illustrates that sexual identity for Arabs is a contested phenomenon both in the homeland and in the diaspora. The condition of exile, whether forced exile or self-exile, does not necessarily lead to the liberation of LGBTQ+. This may be the reason Rasa feels isolated within both societies, which is divided by straight/gay culture and eastern/western values. Although the western claim of liberating gay people is embedded in the human rights discourse, it offers no protection and no right to Arab queers. Jasbir Puar refers to this contradiction as an instance of homonationalism, which empowers certain states to pursue a war against those who repress gay and lesbian people while refusing to provide protection to those who claim refugee status based on sexual orientation (n.p.). Likewise, Jarrar’s An Unsafe Haven depicts the life of displaced individuals, whether they are self-exiles or forced exiles, war-weary refugees “whose lives [a]re prescribed by the customs they ha[ve] brought with them from far-off places” who feel that they are “acquiring a new identity, one that fell somewhere between bland and overspilling, but which nonetheless d[o] not fit in [any] place” (Jarrar 42). Keeping their shattered past and living in an uncertain present, these people have to construct new identities and new realities. They face a lot of challenges in home-making in their new country. The restrictive and non-integrative policies of most countries contribute to the social segregation and their construction as a separate category. Within the liminal space of neither here nor there, they create their public image in accordance with the parameters of the host country but with hues of their homelands. These experiences of “violence, recurring memories, displacement and ubiquitous fear” often resulted in trauma as Ryan J.  Suto notes (Suto “Public Health as Foreign Policy: Trauma in the Arab World” fpif.org,

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Nov. 2017). Taking the example of the Arab world, Suto claims that by the end of the Arab Spring, a large proportion of people had witnessed murder, survived torture, experienced religious and political discrimination or oppression, or had been displaced abused or exposed to traumatic violence (Suto “Public Health as Foreign Policy” fpif.org, Nov. 2017). These traumatic experiences become a part of their self-identity by turning them into either mourners or melancholic subjects because traumatic experiences are, Maria Yassa claims, “undigestable experiences” which “create wounds in the psychic web, thereby destroying the individual’s sense of coherence and continuity” (83). First introduced in Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” melancholia is a pathological tendency that emerges as a failure to mourn—a reaction to the loss of loved objects (242). Freud defines melancholia by juxtaposing it with the notion of mourning. While a mourner is able to surmount the loss of the loved object with the passage of time, a melancholic subject remains unable to complete the process of mourning because of his/her denial of the loss of the loved object. My reading of Post-Arab Spring literature is an attempt to offer a new perspective on melancholia. In the past, in the service of diverse socio-political scenarios, the concept of melancholia has undergone many changes. In the wake of the Arab Spring, the military crushed the hope and spirit of demonstration by committing human rights abuses in public. Protestors faced removal, disgrace, or death in their home countries. In response to such hostile forces, protestors, instead of withdrawing, stand firm to all mistreatments and disappointments. When it comes to their losses, I argue that the melancholia of protestors becomes a “source of inner resourcefulness as well as of political energy” which insists on the persistent viability (Ruti 641). Consequently, their melancholia is neither a private grief nor a paralyzing psychic phenomenon but an embodied collective psychic practice with the political potential to transform private grief into public grief. This concept of melancholia suggests a need for the reconceptualization of refugee and gay identities whose traumatic experiences are linked to the violence of the Arab Spring.

Traumatic Lives of Gay People in Guapa Haddad’s narrative tracks down Rasa’s life as a young gay man, living between cultures and seeking an identity. He narrates the story from the perspective of an immigrant gay man and comes up with a new sort of

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narrative, which presents an overview of the Arab world through the perspective of a man who is both inside and outside. The novel mediates briskly between an unnamed Arab country and America, hovering in on Rasa’s desperate search for a place where he does not have to “present a false image of [himself] to blend into society.” Rasa takes part in the protest (Arab revolution) so that he “would no longer have to wear a mask” (Haddad 82). His personal desire underscores his political dream of the free Arab world where he would have the freedom to live his life. His inability to come to terms with any of the places he occupies turns him into a melancholic subject. The novel is divided into three parts and the narrative goes back and forth to reveal the story of Rasa who traverses cultural, sexual, and gender identities. Melancholia emerges when he comes to terms with his homosexual identity because he repeatedly searches for “who he [is]” (Haddad 94). He also searches “new places to be together” (Haddad 38) with his lover, Taymour, wrestles with societal “Eib”—Arabic word for shame—and finally loses Taymour (Haddad 41). The word Eib is noteworthy because the novel offers us various examples of how Eib works in Arabic culture. Although the English word for Eib is a shame, “Eib is much more than that” Rasa notes (Haddad 41). Rasa feels obligated to attend Taymour’s wedding because “it’s Eib not to go” though this wedding event is excruciating for him (Haddad 244). Likewise, Rasa feels compelled to go into the front seat with the taxi driver on the evening he has his first sexual experience with a man as he recalls it: “it would be Eib to say no, although it also felt Eib to say yes. Struck between two Eibs, I left the books in the back and climbed into the passenger seat” (Haddad 29). This is perhaps the reason that Rasa claims that this word, Eib, “carries an element of conscientiousness, a politeness brought about by a perceived sense of communal obligation” (Haddad 41). In the course of the novel, Eib becomes a generative resource for Rasa’s queer becoming. A striking feature of this novel is the way shame comes up directly and indirectly in the narratives. According to Elspeth Probyn, shame activates what matters the most because it is “an essential part of yourself” (x). Shame has typically been understood as a negative emotion. However, Elspeth Probyn views it as a productive process and considers it as a valuable emotion integral to our humanity. It is a powerful resource in rethinking who we are and who we want to be. Unlike post-stonewall literature, in which gay people are asked to overcome shame, the community of gay people in Anglo-Arab literature is inventing itself through shame. For example, authors of Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories (a collection of Lebanese

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queers) tell how shame offers them a subtle meaning in their lives. They create “their community from the painful site of shame. Their suffering informs who they are and likely who they are becoming as a new community” (Georgis 239). Just like Bareed’s authors, shame appears a significant experience in the life of Rasa. He invents his queer identity by opening himself to shame. Haddad explores the complexities and tensions embedded in Rasa’s homosexual identity and reveal his melancholic state of mind. The development of a gay or lesbian sexual identity is often a complex process because such individuals are raised in communities that are openly hostile to their sexualities. Therefore, homosexual people have a greater risk of melancholy because they have to hide their desire which thereby shapes the formation of their identity. In the case of Rasa, his melancholia emerges even before losing his loved object because the construction of his identity “involves an interaction between the personality dynamics of the individual and the individual’s context” (Erickson 102). In other words, identity formation involves cognitive development and symbolic interaction with society. Throughout the narrative, Rasa struggles with the competing facets of Arab society, its culture and conservative mores due to his gay identity. Rasa’s melancholy and sadness are directly linked with his experience as a gay man because he could not find a place where he could live his true or real self. He is living a lonely life which creates a desire to look for a safer place where he can feel better. Rasa’s melancholy has a relationship with Haddad’s personal life as he says in one of his interviews that, like Rasa, he always feels “an outsider”; therefore, he decides to write his own story. Writing provides him solace and personal space and freedom where his gay identity could breathe. He says: Writing the book was my way of understanding how a lot of these different conflicts played out in my life and how I could reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable aspects of myself. I might have not come to any answers, but I’ve reached a sort of peace. (Langson “Novelist Saleem Haddad on Conflicting Identities, Sexual and Political, in Guapa” edgemedianetwork. com, May 2017)

Habermas’ theory of ego development is salient in this context because it contributes to an understanding of the construction and maintenance of identity because of its identification of “a reciprocal interaction between the individual and societal beliefs and values” (qtd. in Milton and

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MacDonald 93). Habermas’ theory of ego development consists of three stages: the symbiotic and egocentric stage, the sociocentric stage and the universalistic stage, which can serve as the theoretical foundation for homosexual identity formation. In the very first stage, the symbiotic stage—the first year—a child does not have any sense of bodily self and therefore remains unable to differentiate between the self (the physical) and the social environment. In the second half of the first stage, the egocentric stage—the fourth year of life—“the child is able to differentiate between self and environment” and attain “a natural identity or sense of separation from its surroundings” (Milton and MacDonald 94). It is at this stage that the “first conscious and semi-conscious moments [arise] in which an individual comes to perceive of himself potentially as a homosexual” (Milton and MacDonald 94). Several experiences, like genital sex and daydreaming about engaging in sex with the same-sex person, lead to homosexual awareness and identification. They become less interested in the opposite sex and more attracted to the same sex. During this stage, a homosexual child feels separate and different from others and this feeling is manifested in a variety of ways like sexual arousal in the presence of a same-sex person or feeling of alienation. At the sociocentric stage of ego development, “the individual forms a subjective perspective of the world” and an identity, which primarily depends upon “bodily capacity,” becomes performance because social norms affect one’s identity (Milton and MacDonald 94). In the case of homosexuality, sociocentricity emerges when the homosexual individual becomes aware of the societal attitude toward his/her homosexuality. According to Milton and MacDonald, “this heightened awareness provides relief for some individuals; for others, it involves anxiety and confusion” (97). In most cases, the societal rejection leads to guilt, denial, and alienation; consequently, individuals may feel discriminated against and become a victim of identity confusion. To reduce his confusion, an individual obtains information regarding his identity from different sources, either through reading books or through listening to different programs related to homosexuality, and comes up with his own self-definition of homosexuality. After defining himself, an individual then proceeds to the next stage, the universalistic stage that is the last stage of ego development. While realizing the societal norms, an individual, at this stage, attains “the unity, consistency, and continuity that characterize personal identity” (Milton and MacDonald 100). Thus, “the universalistic stage of

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the homosexual identity process is characterized by the acceptance of positive gay identity and commitment to that identity even in the face of its social condemnation” (Milton and MacDonald100). In the case of Rasa, he successfully completes the first two stages of ego development but cannot declare himself openly gay, which makes him a melancholic figure throughout his life. Rasa does not mourn because he does not lose his loved object, Taymour. However, he can neither proclaim his identity openly, nor disclose his sexual orientation due to the prevalent condition of compulsory heterosexuality, and thus remains melancholic. His ego development remains incomplete until the last moment of his life when he declares his gay identity in public openly and says, “a denial is no longer an option” (Haddad 284). In the very early stages of Rasa’s life, he is attracted to the same sex. For example, once during childhood in a taxi, he feels attracted as “the driver’s arms tighten,” and “the large veins running under his skin awoke a sensation inside [him he] had never felt before” (Haddad 34). Therefore, he desires to “connect with him in some way, to be closer to him somehow” (34) to explore “something new and exciting” (Haddad 35). Later, he moves closer to the television screen while watching a sex scene to “glimpse of a bit more of the man” (Haddad 99). He remains confused about his behavior and identity as he says, “with no words and no diagnosis, I could neither understand nor treat my symptoms” (Haddad 92). Yet, he is determined to explore his sexuality and comes across many English and Arabic words that “explore every dimension of what [he] is feeling” but “no one word could encapsulate it all” (Haddad 97). Until finally, he identifies himself with a gay “British pop star George Michael” (Haddad 92) and discovers that he is a “gay” (Haddad 93), though he has to keep it in a “secret cage of [his] mind” for “survival” in the world (Haddad 92). He does not have the courage to reveal his identity, to “juggle his public life” (Haddad 254). This suggests the impossibility to speak of queer Arab experience. As an example of gay minor literature, Guapa focuses on the intensified expressions of everyday life of that gay people use for their self-invention. Rasa is a deeply melancholic character whose homosexual identity is shaped by denial and repression. He knows that in order to survive he has to stop trusting everyone around him and has to keep his homosexual identity confidential which is traumatizing. Jayesh Needham analyzes homosexual identity in the Arab world claiming that in the Arab region, homosexuality takes place in the context of power dynamics and collective denials (290). Despite the claim that homosexuality has been abandoned

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in the Arab world, it continues to exist under the guise of a collective denial in which homosexual acts must be hidden. Since homosexuality is “haram” in Islam; therefore, it is a source of guilt (Haddad 95). The use of the word “haram” is significant here. Instead of stating in simple words that homosexuality is prohibited in Islam, Haddad prefers to use the Arabic word “haram.” The word “haram” has a religious connotation and it is something prohibited by Allah and to make it lawful is an eternal sin. The literal translation of this word—prohibited—does not convey the layer of meanings associated with the Arabic word. This is why Haddad uses the word “haram” because the connotation in Arabic is religious and it is much more than simple prohibition. Therefore, in the course of the novel, it is revealed that people who perform homosexual acts are encouraged to believe that they are “going to spend eternity rotting in hell” (Haddad 93). This sense of shame, guilt, and denial contributes to the structure of melancholia. By highlighting the symptoms of melancholia, Freud argues that the melancholic ceases to be interested in the outside world, is incapable of love, and has a low self-esteem, “to a degree that finds utterance in self-­ reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment” (243). For example, when Rasa has been caught naked in bed with Taymour by his grandmother, the woman who raised him, he feels a sense of “shame” (Haddad 15). Even before he loses Taymour, he is a melancholic figure who “vilifies [him]self and expects to be cast out and punished” (Gay 584). Taymour’s “name brings back all the shame” to him and he even starts thinking of himself as “an animal, dirty and disgusting, madly hunting after his desire with no care for what is right and wrong” (Haddad 17). Rasa regrets his homosexuality to a certain degree, but he does not inhibit his sexual activities and does not lose interest in the outside world. Instead, he starts searching for the new possibilities as he says to Taymour “we will find a way. We’ll find a country where we don’t need visas and we can live our lives away from all this ihbat, all this depression” (Haddad 131). This confirms Ranjhana Khanna’s notion of melancholia. Khanna claims that melancholia “is not simply a crippling attachment to a past.” Instead, “the melancholic’s critical agency” prompts one for a better future condition. Consequently, in the melancholic subject, the “act towards the future” exists because “the hope for a better future persists” (Khanna “Post-Palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance” postcolonial.org, Nov. 2017). Using Khanna’s observation, I argue that in Rasa’s life “hope has been in play for a better future” (Khanna

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“Post-Palliative: Coloniality’s Affective Dissonance” postcolonial.org, Nov. 2017); therefore, he chooses to go to America, a world where he believes one can “be the person [one] meant to be” (Haddad 132). In addition to collective denial, homosexual acts in the Arab world also depend on a set of power dynamics in which “social actors are categorized into roles of power or subordination, clearly defining what is normal or deviant” (Needham 292). To the Arab world, sexual behavior is defined and determined by the assumption of heterosexual male dominance, a tradition of patriarchy in which the powerful (an active penetrator) and powerless (a passive penetrated) are clearly defined. Bruce Dunne claims that the act of penetration in the Arab world takes “place between a dominant, free adult man and subordinate social inferiors—what is at stake [i]s not mutuality between partners but the adult male’s achievement of pleasure through domination” (qtd. in Needham 292). In this regard, this act is less about homosexuality than dominance, and power. For instance, in the novel, Rasa is afraid of the fact that if people knew of his homosexuality, they may call him “Khawal [which] refers to effeminate men,” “a sissy,” “a girlie boy” (Haddad 96), though he confesses many times to himself “in front of the bathroom mirror; Anna Khawal” (Haddad 96) which means “I’m gay” (Haddad 93). It is worth mentioning here that Haddad uses both words “Khawal” and “gay” throughout the novel. He claims that Khawal is an aspect of his identity “a girlie boy” but it “does not encompass everything” (Haddad 103). Whereas the word gay also does not convey the associated meaning attached to this word in Arabic culture. This example indicates the inadequacy of the English language where the word gay does not transmit the cultural notions associated with the Arabic word “Khawal.” Therefore, Haddad prefers using both words throughout the novel. Rasa also utters to himself while looking into the mirror that “is there anything more pitiful than an Arab who attaches emotions to his homosexuality” because in Arab society, a huge stigma is attached to a homosexual person and he/she can be a target of nasty homophobic violent crimes (Haddad 58). Every time he puts his feelings and thoughts into words, he feels good about himself but at the same time, he has to hide his identity from others; therefore, he utters these words “in the lowest of whispers so that [he] could barely hear [him]self” (Haddad 93). Although Rasa does not want to completely denounce his sexuality and is not ready to break his homoerotic relationship with Taymour, he is ashamed of his action after he is seen engaging in a homosexual act. Therefore, he cannot

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face Teta and wants to leave early before she wakes up. On the other hand, he also feels that his action may “tell her that [he is] running away, that [he is] even less of a man” but if he stays his grandmother may “think that [he] ha[s] no shame” (Haddad 26). In this situation of uncertainty, he confides in one of his friends, who suggests a solution to his problem “deny everything, nothing happened” because denial is the only possibility to live his life here (Haddad 58). These examples illustrate that people in the Arab world can maintain their honor by carrying on with same-sex behavior in private and by denying it in public. This notion delineates the idea of clear demarcation between the public and the private sphere of life “whereby the private sphere cannot and should not be violated, but in public people keep up appearances and deny any instances of homosexual behavior” (Needham 292). In his book, Desiring Arab, Joseph Massad claims homosexuality in the Arab culture is considered as something normal and virile if it remains “within the realm of the private and is not advertised publicly” (275). He says that in Arab countries, “the publicness of socio-sexual identities rather than sexual acts themselves” elicits repression (Massad 197). For example, the protagonist of Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley, Krishah, fancies young men. As long as he kept his sexual practices with young men private, no one seemed to care, even when his son was informed of it, he said: he is a man, and nothing shames a man! However, when Krishah becomes open to his sexuality, everyone, including his son, criticizes him not because of the misdeed itself but rather because of his openness to his sexuality. Likewise, in the novel, Rasa says that in public, they “accidentally walk into each other in crowded bars, [their] bodies [may] press together for a brief moment— [but] no one questioned these public moments of intimacy” because, in public, they are “simply best friends” (Haddad 56). However, “in private, [they] laughed about close calls and covered each other in kisses,” he even “stroked his face, his arms, his body. [he] lay on top of him and pushed into him, felt the hairs on [their] chests bristle against each other” (Haddad 56). This suggests that the publicity of such intimate practices is criticized in Arab society, not the practice itself. Rasa, although conflicted regarding his identity, wants to continue with his double existence because as he says, “it’s best to just hide” (Haddad 18). However, Rasa’s balance collapses, not when he is seen by his grandmother because he knows that “Teta will guard this secret far better than Taymour and he” (Haddad 23) but when Taymour becomes what “society wants” him to be (Haddad 103). The final section of the novel, “The wedding” indicates a happy

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ending, but in reality, it shows the downfall of Rasa’s fragile balance when he loses Taymour who is unable to live a double life and gets married to a woman in order to conform to society’s expectations. Abraham and Torok argue that when the loved object no longer exists, reality then demands the retreat and withdrawal of libidinal attachment from the loved object (137). Freud claims that this demand is painful for the mourner to fulfill but the successful mourner substitutes it and forgets the lost loved object. Judith Butler critiques Freud and argues that instead of forgetting the loved object, a mourner must take an “experience of transformation” because “one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever” (Precarious Life 21). This notion hardly seems to be true in Rasa’s case. Despite bitter opposition, he remains unchanged from the moment he discovers that he is gay. Although he does not show any willingness to, in Butler’s terms, transform, he maintains his struggle and progresses toward his future. Rasa keeps the memory of the lost object alive and instead of inhibiting all future course of action, his melancholia is “future-oriented as much as attached to a past that cannot be forgotten or recognized within the logic of knowable memory” (Khanna “Post-Palliative” postcolonial.org, Nov. 2017). Abraham and Torok argue that melancholics also identify with their loved object by fantasizing about incorporating someone or something into their lives as secondary loved object and replace the primary loved object as Freud’s melancholic subject does (131). Thus, after losing his parents (his mother first and then father), Rasa directs his love toward Taymour, who also belongs to a broken family. In the course of the novel, Taymour is also seen as an individual struggling “to fit into society’s mould” (Haddad 221). Unlike Rasa, who is determined to live with his homosexuality even in a hostile society, Taymour plays according to the rule of “one foot in and one foot out” because he wants to live a respectable life and believes in family values as he affirms to Rasa’s father saying “that the most important affiliation for the Arab is his family and community” (Haddad 221). Abraham and Torok’s notion of mourning and melancholia helps to situate this melancholic state of Rasa in relation to the hostile environment: Melancholics cherish the memory as their most precious possession, even though it must be concealed by a crypt built with the bricks of hate and aggression. It should be remarked that as long as the crypt holds, there is no

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melancholia. It erupts when the walls are shaken, often as a result of the loss of some secondary love-object who had buttressed them. Faced with the danger of seeing the crypt crumble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt, showing the concealed object of love in its own guise. (136)

After the loss of his primary love object—his parents—“everything in [his] life is Taymour” (Haddad 217). Due to the external world’s hostility toward their gayness, they “see each other less,” yet Taymour remains Rasa’s “days, nights, [his] only thought and source of pleasure” (Haddad 105). He cherishes the memory of his every visit because “only [his] memories are left” for him to survive (Haddad 106). Although the “fantasy of incorporation” in the form of Taymour thrusts away the memories and unspeakable expression of the primary loved object (his parents), yet the “unspeakable words never cease their subversive action” (Abraham and Torok 132). However, with fantasy construction, Rasa is able to identify with his loved object and can keep it concealed in the crypt “to safeguard his topography” (Abraham and Torok 131). Considering this, I argue that the crypt “functions for the subject as an ego ideal” (Abraham and Torok 131), “bolsters the ego ideal” and covers the subject’s secret and wound by keeping its topography intact (Abraham and Torok 134). In the case of Rasa, the crypt trembles when his “grandmother caught [him] in bed with Taymour” (Haddad 269) but he still manages to stay calm as he says, “I found myself locked in a battle with my feelings” (Haddad 234). “The gaping wound” of losing his parents “open[s] long ago within the ego” of Rasa and is “distinguished by a fantasmic and secret construction in place of the very thing from which, through the loss, the ego was served” (Abraham and Torok 142). Taymour’s presence in his life “perpetuates a clandestine pleasure by transforming [the loss object], after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic secret” (Abraham and Torok 131). Consequently, Rasa’s wound remains “unspeakable, because to state it openly would prove fatal to the entire topography” (Abraham and Torok 142). However, Rasa fails to stay calm when he loses his secondary love object—Taymour—and says, “the part of me that is true and authentic, a part deep within my core, is gone” (Haddad 236). Taymour’s decision of marriage threatens Rasa’s fantasy of incorporation, shakes the wall of his crypt and endangers his entire topography. During the marriage of Taymour and Laila, Hamza, an old class fellow—who first “introduce[s] [Rasa] to the word khawal” (Haddad 255)—criticizes gay people as

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“perverts, using a public cinema as a sexual playground. This spreads disease” (Haddad 269). He even supports the government’s act of “persecute[ing] the gays” (Haddad 270). At this stage, Rasa’s ego—which constitutes his double existence as well as his composed self—begins to quiver and readers hear his melancholic cry, “you’re a regime prick, you’re responsible for all the deaths that have happened. It’s people like you! Immoral bastards” (Haddad 272–273). As the crypt crumples, Rasa’s “ego becomes one with the love object” (Kanwal 4); he realizes that “everything in [his] life is a lie” and he is only living “inside [his] head, and not out here, not a reality” (Haddad 254).4 He also recognizes that he has “spent life hunting for the silver lining in dark gutters, yearning for the unattainable. Mother, Taymour, the revolution” and asks himself the questions “what is this revolution, I am looking for? This revolution exists only in my mind” (Haddad 279). At this stage, Rasa loses his “internal support,” his ego “fuses with the included object”; “consequently, the ego begins the public display of an interminable process of mourning” and his grief does not remain private (Abraham and Torok 136). He tells his grandmother, Teta, that he has “done with shame” and “he has done with [her] rules about what is eib and what isn’t” because he has his “own rules now” (Haddad 291). By opening himself to shame, Rasa discovers his identity and is renewed. This illustrates that shame brings out the deepest wants, desires, and worries when love and recognition are concerned in life. Probyn claims that “shame emerges as a kind of primal reaction to the very possibility of love—either of oneself or of another” (3). It tells us who we are and what we have to become to hold on to love. Further, his “narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia,” in other words, his melancholic longings for his parents and Taymour ultimately move him “into consideration of vulnerability of others” (Butler, Precarious Life 30). For example, in the novel, when Laura, a journalist, calls him for help and tells him that “the opposition has declared an armed rebellion,” he responds coldly and declares “down with the president and the opposition! Down with all of society and their performances. Down with everything! Let everyone kill each other” (Haddad 277). However, it is worth 4  Since he was unable to get love in return; he withdrew his libidinal attachment from the loved object and invested it in the ego.

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mentioning here that Rasa’s traumatic sense of grief does not deprive him of what Iain Chambers calls a “grammar of authenticity” (19) because he has found his “own voice” (Haddad 290).5 Unlike before when he “feel[s] hopeless and do[es]n’t want to say anything” (Haddad 243) regarding revolution and revolutionaries, he now wants to go for protest “against everyone. Against everything” (Haddad 298). I argue that Rasa finally adopts a “stonewall model of advocacy” where he declares his sexual identity openly and shows that his sexual identity—being gay—is part of his being (El Menyawi, n.p.). Instead of engaging in what Hassan El Menyawi calls “activism from the closet,” Haddad attempts to articulate socio-­ political activism in his novel, Guapa. As an example of minor literature, Haddad’s Guapa is a way of signifying for gay people as Deleuze and Guattari claim that minor literature is an “emancipating operation” (Biti 287). By writing a queer story in the midst of the Arab revolution, not only does Haddad bring the issue of LGBTQ+ in the Arab world to a wider audience, but he also makes the voice of Arab LGBTQ+ individuals heard. He underscores the experience of gay life in the Arab world and lends his voice to the revolution by encouraging LGBTQ+ rights. In one of his interviews, he claims that his novel “was prompted largely by the Arab uprisings in 2011, where [he] felt that there was something [he] wanted to explore—a parallel between political revolution and a sexual awakening” (Waterman “Saleem Haddad: On the Arab Spring and Writing about the Queer Arab Experience” lambdaliterary.org, Feb. 2017). Haddad tells the stories of gay people and also builds alliances, and develops national and regional movements by networking across borders for gay people. A similar phenomenon can be discerned in An Unsafe Haven with reference to refugees and exiles because trauma, loss, and mourning are embedded in their life experiences and become a part of their persona too. By foregrounding issues of self-exiled, migrants, and refugees, Jarrar attempts to give expression to those people who are absent in the world’s major narratives. Her novel as an example of minor literature sets out to summon the missing people. In this sense, I believe that like Haddad, Jarrar’s novel also gives expression to the excluded group’s identity (refugees, migrants, and exiles).

5

 Rasa’s traumatic experiences unravel his sense of identity.

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Mourning in the Lives of Refugees in An Unsafe Haven An Unsafe Haven by Jarrar offers insights into the Arab Spring’s devastating effect on individuals living in the various countries involved. The Arab Spring has spawned the world’s largest refugee crisis since World War II. According to the Washington Post, “the number of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Arab world roughly doubled, propelled by the 2011 uprisings and violence in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and the Palestinian territories” (Lichtenheld “The Identity Politics of Displacement in the Middle East,” washingtonpost.com, Dec. 2017). While a certain degree of global attention has focused on the forced migration, the issue of refugee crisis remains largely ignored. According to the Washington Post, population displacement and refugees’ issues is the unique legacy of the Middle Eastern region, but this phenomenon is a relatively understudied area in Arab literature (Lichtenheld “The Identity Politics,” washingtonpost.com, Dec. 2017). Few Arab writers foreground the perspective of undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. For instance, Boualem Sansal, Laila Lalamy, Youssef Fadel, and Tahar Ben Jelloun feature undocumented migrants who themselves burn their citizenship, (figuratively, burn their past) before crossing. Their narratives center on border crossings and the hardships of their journey. In contrast to the previous studies, narratives of Post-Arab Spring literature do not focus on crossings and journeys but on writing borderlands, in other words, space outside of their normative citizenship. The status of those who are forced to flee their homes as refugees is different from other migrants because they do not possess any proof of identity, neither of the original country nor of the new homeland. Their identity documents are lost, forgotten, stolen, or destroyed during their perilous flight from danger. In practice, refugees never own identity documents; consequently, they are the most vulnerable part of society because an absence of identity documents makes their survival difficult. After perilous land or sea journeys, they require basic human assistance such as emergency shelter, health care and legal aid that become a burden on the host country’s economy. They are not given any access to health care, educational benefits, employment, and financial services; even the most basic needs are less likely to be met in the absence of identity document and they are “stopped by the authorities and taken to jail” because of the absence of papers (Jarrar 89).

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Since the start of the conflict and civil war in some part of the entire Arab world, it is nearly impossible for the millions of displaced citizens of the Arab world to replace or to apply for new identity documents; either they are unable to approach government authorities or their applications are denied. As a result, they undergo a complicated process of identity reformulation. Their settlement as refugees in the new cultural, social, economic and political environment is often disruptive to their identity and their sense of belonging in their host country, and consequently, they feel like outsiders. Therefore, over time, refugees become transindividual, that is a citizen of two or more worlds and acquire a new form of identity which celebrates biculturalism. Post-Arab Spring narratives of forced migration imagine the liminal spaces where many asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants inhabit and pass through. An Unsafe Haven, a political novel, maps this perspective of the Arab Spring and addresses the double existence of refugees and other displaced people. Being a refugee herself, Jarrar truly encapsulates the moments of uncertainty, resilience in the face of a trauma and identity conflict in her novel. This perspective of Jarrar’s writing makes her an ideal minor writer because in her novel, she maps migratory geographies and articulates the experiences of dispossessed, marginalized, and displaced people. By exploring the trauma of war, conflict, and displacement, Jarrar highlights how such experiences contribute crucially to the identity of refugees and exiles. War has affected every character in the book by causing tension, either in their relationships or by physically dislocating them. Dislocation can be either forced migration or voluntary migration to seek a better life. However, in the case of refugees, their forced migration makes them “repudiate and repress many attachments of the past” (Volkan 4). The key element that underlies the psychology of refugees is loss. Their migration from one place to another entails the loss of loved ones, home, identity, loss of a familiar system, language, and color. I argue that these losses underpin refugee experiences and explain their ability to mourn which ultimately becomes a part of their identities. Volkan compares refugees with mourners claiming that like mourners, refugees find unforeseen psychological complications because they have lost what is dear to them: “a mourner, in a sense, keeps hitting his/her head against a wall, a wall that never opens up to allow the dead person (or lost thing) to come back” (Austerlitz “Book Review: Vamik Volkan’s Immigrants and Refugees—a look at the Rising Fear of ‘Strangers,’”

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thenational.ae, Nov. 2017). The images of what they leave behind haunt them throughout their life. Mourning is the response of refugees toward their significant loss—the loss of identity or self. From a classical psychoanalytic point of view, Freud argues the mourning process lasts a year or so, although mourners keep the mental images of the lost objects (243). The images of lost objects remain in the psyche of mourners “even when they are tamed, shrunk, repressed, or denied, adult-type mourning, in a sense, does not end until the mourner dies” (Volkan 17). I argue that in the case of refugees, their feeling of guilt over the lost part of the self complicates their mourning process and they do not go through a normal mourning process because these individuals do not totally identify themselves with the lost object. Rather, they keep the representation of the lost object within their self-representation as a foreign object that keeps influencing their self-representation. I suggest that “Swapping one camp for another” in their search for safety and keeping the image of their lost home all the time, they adjust themselves for the purpose of integration in the new environment (Jarrar 74). Refugees in An Unsafe Haven, fly to “neighboring countries—Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan—or make the long and perilous journey further on to Europe” (Jarrar 77). In such a scenario, the past, home, and its customs keep influencing the self-­ representation of refugees. For example, Fatima and her extended family—refugees from Syria to Lebanon—are obsessed with their lost homes. When Fatima’s husband is killed, she decides that she “would not abandon [her] house, that [she] would hold on to it for Wassim no matter what” (Jarrar 73). However, when bombing becomes terrifying, she “gathered a few of [her] things, picked Wassim up and left” (Jarrar 72). After moving to an encampment in Beirut, she remains preoccupied with maintaining their former Syrian lifestyle and uses “the traditional headscarf worn by the inhabitants of the rural region of Syria” (Jarrar 83). This attempt by Fatima could be seen as her effort of integration with the images of what she leaves behind and what she faces in the new environment. This also highlights one of the deep issues of the migrants’ crisis which is the need to respect refugees’ dignity. Through the example of Fatima, Jarrar perhaps wants to emphasize the idea that there is a need to recognize the integrity of refugees’ otherness. By drawing attention to such refugees’ dilemmas, Jarrar invents the “oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations” by way of minor literature (Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka 4). According to Deleuze, the disposition of a writer is to produce reality humanely to engage readers emotionally (Clancy 280).

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Hence, when Deleuze refers to this tendency of a writer, he is referring to the idea that a writer has of him/herself and his/her experience. The images Jarrar projects throughout her novel are ones of intensity (verisimilitude) that cultivate sympathy in readers and thus connect the audience with characters.6 Considering this fact, it can be assumed that refugees’ identities are complex and formed by internal feelings, such as memories of their cultural traditions and beliefs and by external factors, such as resettlement into a new place and the social, economic, and political conditions of the host society. Keeping their cultural traditions intact while adopting new cultural practices for the purpose of integration, I argue that these people acquire portable identities like their “portable cabins” that keep on changing (Jarrar 82). Such individuals “experience biculturalism, resulting in a sense of belonging to neither culture to the exclusion of the other” (Volkan 6). In fact, I would argue that these people belong to both cultures. For example, during the Israeli invasion of Beirut, Hannah’s family flies to Cyprus to “escape the worst of the fighting” (Jarrar 29). During all those years of exile, time stays “as a period of anticipation” for them and they always want to return home regardless of “how long or how damaging the waiting to return might be” (Jarrar 28). Owing to this condition, they remain outsiders in Cyprus and never consider it home. With a hope that they would return soon, they spend “a number of years on Island” with necessary amendments to their identities. However, after 15 years, when the conflict in Lebanon has ended, they return to their country to find that “those who had stayed behind […] harboured resentment against [them]” (Jarrar 29). Even though they are Lebanese and practice their Lebanese identity, they feel like strangers. During their stay in Cyprus, they neither try to assimilate nor to dominate. They stay there while remaining who they are but in today’s age, change is inevitable. Life today is, as Bauman claims, more fragile, temporary, vulnerable, and inclined to constant change (82). This may be the reason that Hannah’s family feels strange upon their arrival in their own home country after a long time. It is worth noting that during exile, they feel incomplete “when away from Lebanon” because “everything about [them] that was most true had Lebanon as its anchor” (Jarrar 53). This suggests that owing to their subaltern status in the adopted land, the stature and identity of refugees 6  It refers to the verisimilitude in the work—that it must be emotionally compelling and near to the real-life representation.

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keep on varying because they are required to shape and re-shape their identity according to the changing circumstances. Rahul K.  Gairola discusses the subaltern identity and defines it as a “reflexive gift” “stuck in a churning network of identities within the ideological constraints of society” (308). He claims that the subaltern’s identity has the “capacity to assume the properties of the gift, it can also assume both the use-value (its intrinsic potential for utility) and the exchange value (its value in a system of equivalence that is arbitrary) of the commodity” (Gairola 308). Hence, identity is inevitably tangled up with the social complex; therefore, refugees like subaltern when to change their locale, they compromise their authentic or true identity and “exchange one facet of identity for another facet of identity” for the purpose of integration into a new environment (Gairola 308). However, this does not mean that these individuals give up their original identity totally. Rather, I would argue that they acquire a new form of identity, one that is [n]either total surrender to the new culture nor the sum of the bicultural endowment. The new identity will be reflected in a remodelled self-­ representation that incorporates selective characteristics into the new culture that have been harmoniously integrated or that prove congruent with the cultural heritage of the past. (Volkan 6)

There is an inextricable relationship between refugees’ subjectivity and their environmental circumstances. Therefore, like the identity of the subaltern, the identity of refugees keeps on oscillating from use value to exchange value and vice versa according to the changing circumstances. For instance, in the case of both refugees, Fatima and Maysoun, even “the place seemed reluctant to accept” them as they were (Jarrar 113). Therefore, “swapping [from] one camp [to] another,” not only their status undergoes change (from privileged position to subalternity) but their personas change, too (74). Although mobility, notes John Urry, improves the socioeconomic condition of individuals, in the case of refugees, their mobility is “like stepping out of one black hole and falling straight into another that is deeper and darker” because their mobility remains unknowable and is “imposed on [them] by events that seem outside [their] control” (Jarrar 77). This involves a number of losses like a loss “of home and of belonging” (Jarrar 78). With these losses in life, the internal world of these refugees becomes a site of struggle between the wish to bring back the lost object or to forget that object. Therefore, unlike the normal

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process of mourning, I argue that their mourning is complicated and does not turn into melancholia; instead, these refugees or mourners invest their psychic energy in establishing a link with the deceased object by identifying with someone and something that is known as a linking object or linking phenomenon and become perennial mourners while not developing melancholia. In Volkan’s view, the linking object serves as a symbolic bridge between the mourner and the deceased lost object. This suggests that through linking objects, a mourner makes an adjustment with the complication in their mourning process. Perennial mourners cannot “bring back to life” or “kill” the lost object, for example, person or thing; therefore, “they recognize their lost ones in someone alive whom they encounter” and remain stuck in their mourning process (Volkan 19). Linking objects help perennial mourners to “control their wish to bring back or kill the lost person, thus avoiding the psychological consequences if any of these two wishes are gratified” (Volkan 21). Intellectually, they acknowledged their loss, while at the same time it keeps them emotionally alive by allowing them to identify with someone or something. In most cases, perennial mourners cannot identify totally. Consequently, they cannot maintain an ego function properly and are prone to suicide. The struggle between wishing to keep the lost object and wishing to eliminate it may lead to suicide. Such extreme cases underline the fact that a mourner makes a stronger attempt to abolish the lost object that is internalized in mourners’ self-­ representation. However, in the case of refugees, the relationship between the mourner and the lost object is ambivalent and the mourner’s reaction is complicated by a variety of feelings and emotions. For instance, in the case of Fatima and Maysoun, both of these mourners identify selectively with someone and replace it with the lost object. Fatima, after becoming displaced from Damascus, identifies totally with Anas because like her, he has also been displaced from Syria due to war and “his own circumstances coincide with hers” (Jarrar 77). Whereas, Maysoun, who has been displaced from Baghdad, identifies with Jalal who is also displaced from the same city due to war. Both of these refugees assimilate with the replaced object because they “could trust” each other. As Fatima says to Anas “the moment you came this evening, I knew I could trust you. The others are kind but they don’t know what it’s like for us” (Jarrar 75). Identification is generally considered a gradual process because the linking object is the “corresponding mental image” that exists in the mind of mourners. Consequently, most perennial mourners do not give clear

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evidence of the linking object in their lives (Volkan 57). However, once identification happens, it replaces the lost object with someone or something and enriches the ego functions so that the victim can even perform those ego functions previously performed by the lost object. For instance, Fatima flees from Damascus with two children (a son and an illegitimate daughter), but later she decides not to keep her daughter as “she’ll just be another burden for [her]—and for Wassim as well, eventually. And once she gets older, what chance will she have without a father to protect her?” (Jarrar 265). Therefore, she tells Anas: “I cannot possibly keep her. Please, you have to take her. You and your wife can take care of her” (Jarrar 76). Similarly, after losing family and home in Baghdad, Maysoun lives alone in Beirut and has no desire to live a better life until the moment Jalal asks, “why do you always feel you should suffer along with others, Maysoun?” (Jarrar 100). It is at this moment that she realizes and imagines her life in Auckland with Jalal. By identifying with a person of the same background, Fatima and Maysoun reveal their true selves to them. Thus, Anas and Jalal prove to be a linking object for Fatima and Maysoun respectively through which they attempt “to recreate and then to resolve the ambivalence that characterized the relationship prior to the person’s death: an attempt to initiate or complete the mourning that never completes itself” (Volkan 57). These examples suggest that identification protects perennial mourners from extreme actions like suicide because they are able to control their wish to bring back the lost into life. This phenomenon of identification with a linking object reconceptualizes the notion of mourning in a way that can be categorized as neither painful nor pathological, but as, Jose Esteban Munoz suggests, a “structure of feeling” integral to refugees’ lives and part of refugees’ communities (74). Such a psychical representation of refugees represents Jarrar’s effort to present those which are missing in the codified form of agencies. Jarrar also explores the tension embedded in the life of self-exiled individuals who are exiled by their own wish or decision.

Melancholic Lives of Exiled Individuals In contrast to perennial mourners, Jarrar represents self-exiled characters such as Brigitte and Peter as deeply melancholic figures throughout the course of the novel. In the course of the novel, self-exiled characters, Brigette and Peter willingly move to the Arab world, accept Arab traditions and customs wholeheartedly while denouncing their affiliation with

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their original homeland. However, the region’s fragile state, damaged by war, begins to impact their lives in different ways. They do not mourn the loss of their home countries, primarily because they willingly displace themselves. Even after losing the loved objects of their lives, they struggle to survive in the dominant culture, refusing to renounce their affiliation to their original homeland and so become melancholic. Their melancholia therefore “becomes a protective gesture” (Ruti 641) that articulates the melancholic’s “militant refusal to allow certain objects to disappear into oblivion” (Eng and Han 695). Thus, unlike Freud’s conception of melancholia as “an enigmatic psychic condition” whereby a melancholic subject identifies with the lost object and “incorporates the lost object into its own ego so as to be able to hold onto it internally even when forced to relinquish it in the external world” (Ruti 639), I argue that Brigette and Peter’s melancholia emerge as “an incipient political act” which aims to give security and a sense of self-worth to those whose identities are under attack and erasure (Ruti 641). When analyzed in terms of Abraham and Torok’s Poetics of the Crypt, the crypt of both Brigitte and Peter remains intact initially because Syria for Brigitte and Lebanon for Peter “had lived up to all [their] expectations at first, as an authentic Arab country that remains largely faithful to its heritage” (Jarrar 16). Both of them wholeheartedly accept Arab traditions and lifestyles in order to be a part of Arab society. For example, Brigitte herself wants to move “to Damascus to live and raise a family as a welcome adventure” because “she was fascinated with [Arab] culture, longed to discover a world far outside her own European upbringing” (Jarrar 16). Similarly, Peter leaves his job as a physician in America and comes to Beirut for “the person [he] love[s]” (Jarrar 127). He even learns Arabic in order to fit in. After Peter moves to Lebanon and Brigitte moves to Syria, both lose their true identities and start to miss the authenticity of their lives. The example of Brigitte and Peter shows Jarrar’s effort to represent the indelible mark of exile. In Freud’s conception, after the loss of the loved object, a melancholic “narcissistically” identifies with the lost object because a melancholic’s “love for the [lost] object cannot give up though the object itself is given up” (Freud 250). Consequently, a melancholic’s libidinal attachment with the lost object splits his ego and he remains “dissatisfied with the ego on the moral ground” which hinders the process of ego development too (Freud 247). On the contrary, the loss of Brigitte and Peter “erects a secret tomb inside” them in which their “loss is buried alive in the crypt as

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a fully-fledged person complete with its own topography” (Abraham and Torok 130). They remain unspeakable and inexpressible because they attempt to encrypt their wounded subjectivities. Both characters keep their crypts whole even though it is constructed with the bricks of illusion that they are accepted in the Arab world as they are. However, in reality, they know they have developed “a metaphorical second skin that protects” them (Jarrar 8). As long as they could hold their crypt intact, there was no melancholia in their life and they lived a double existence. As Peter says that “my true self appears to me only in bits and pieces, like flashbacks in a film, incoherent but sharp-edged, revealing as much as they manage to hide from me” (Jarrar 9). Their crypts break open when they are viewed as outsiders by their own loved ones but instead of “lowering the self-­ regard” (Freud 243), I argue that they adjust their losses by taking what Khanna suggests are substantial steps toward a better future. For instance, once while arguing about the Arab world’s “unholy mess,” Peter comments on its worsening conditions in a very harsh tone, and Hannah interrupts him to say he appears “to be on the outside looking in” (Jarrar 110). Upon hearing this, Peter frowns, “his face turn[s] red” and he responds to Hannah in “harsh and uncompromising” way: “Why can’t I talk frankly about what I see happening around me?” “Does being an American mean I have to keep quiet or that I won’t be accepted into this society anymore?” (Jarrar 110). Similarly, upon hearing Anas’ remarks that “they just don’t understand us, these foreigners” (126), Peter receives a blow to his “crypt” and he “feel[s] that [he] ha[s] to struggle against [his] true self to gain acceptance,” yet he is not accepted and is considered as other (Jarrar 127). Likewise, “despite the rejection [Brigitte] faced,” she “left her home and stuck by [Anas] all these years because she cares about [Anas]” (Jarrar 128). As the war becomes intensifies, Brigitte “wants to get the children out of a country at war” (Jarrar 4). Brigitte and her children become the victims of a bomb blast and are injured while Anas is away (Jarrar 183). At that moment of the blast, she realizes “the illusion” that Arab people maintain in order to stay in their homes “that one is safe inside one’s own home” and she decides to leave with her children. She wants Anas to join them, but he refuses. Anas does not want to leave Syria and even accuses Brigitte that “she doesn’t feel the way [he] do[es] about Syria” because “it’s not her country” (Jarrar 4). Upon hearing this, the walls of her crypt crumbles and her melancholia becomes a public display. Therefore, she left “before Anas had a chance to return and forbid it, before anyone became aware of her plan to do so and she lost her resolve” (Jarrar 118) because

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“the car bomb was the last straw” (Jarrar 122). Being disappointed and mistreated by their own loved ones, the crypt starts to disintegrate and Brigitte’s and Peter’s egos—which constitute their self-esteem and their tolerance toward the “mayhem, oppression and displacement” in Syria and Lebanon respectively—begin to crumble. Readers could sense “a deep dissatisfaction rising in [them], a longing to escape” the Arab world. As Peter says “sometimes I wish I were much further away from it” and “I want to get away from all this madness” because “I feel so frustrated at what’s going on” (Jarrar 110). At this juncture, Brigitte’s and Peter’s ego and their grievances manifest themselves as public grievances and “well worth the entire universe” which affect not only their lives badly but the life of their loved ones too (Abraham and Torok 136). This is how grief moves from one generation to the next, which is known as transgenerational transmission in which parents “plant specific images into the developing self-representation of the child” (Volkan 47). Since Peter does not have children, his melancholia affects only him. In comparison to Brigitte, he seems to control his melancholic state easily as he himself says: “I believe it’s been easy for me because I’m a man. For women like Brigitte, there are number of conditions and rules they have to abide by before they’re recognized as worthy of being the wives of Arab sons and mothers to their children” (Jarrar 127); consequently, he “banish[es] his melancholia” and stays in the Arab world by finding certainty in Hannah (Butler 30): In the eye of the tempest that is living in the Middle East, it is not so much the pace that often leaves [Peter] breathless but rather the intensity of life, the necessarily concentrated state of being that at once tosses and tames his soul. Within this turmoil—or at least with the constant threat of it—he has often himself lost with only Hannah as his anchor. (Jarrar 124)

However, in Brigitte’s case, I argue that her melancholic state is, in Butler’s term, “putting the other at risk” (Precarious Life 30). Consequently, her son Marwan and her husband Anas become more Syrian as a reaction to her melancholia. Therefore, when she flees to Berlin at the time of the bombing in Damascus, her son Marwan “longs for the skies of home and the familiar streets sheltered below, for the smells of Damascus” (Jarrar 145). He quickly moves away whenever “his mother reaches out to touch him” (Jarrar 144). Unlike Peter, Brigitte’s sense of grief badly affects her children and even drives them away. For instance, after Anas’ death,

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Marwan “feels the need to blame someone for the tragedy and has decided to settle the guilt squarely on his mother’s shoulders” (Jarrar 215). Although he knows that his father dies in the bomb blast at the Syrian border, he considers his mother responsible for his death and “speaks to her only when absolutely necessary and even then, does so in a voice filled with disdain” (Jarrar 215). Given this context, it can be said that Brigitte “unconsciously ‘deposit[s]’ [her] traumatized self and object images related to dislocation into the developing self-representation of [her] child” (Volkan 47). Sometimes, the way parents perceive their traumatic conditions and the way they transmit their anxiety and fear into the developing self-representation of a child may cause him/her “to evolve as a living statue” (Volkan 48). For example, by abandoning her own daughter due to the fear of war, Fatima makes of her a “living statue” who survives the trauma of the Arab Spring in Syria, “a living repository” (Volkan 50) of a tragic Syrian history, and therefore, she is named as “Hayat, meaning life” (Jarrar 277). Unlike children of holocaust survivors in Israel who were given to someone else for care after the death of their parents, Fatima entrusts her daughter to Anas even before her death and makes her a living statue. During the holocaust, many parents unconsciously transmitted their trauma into their children, “investing them with all their memories and hopes, so that they become ‘memorial candles’ to those who did not survive” (Wardi 1). In the same way, by keeping Wasim with herself, she frees him from the legacy of the Arab spring and chooses the life of a memorial candle for her daughter, a living example of the Arab Spring’s refugee crisis. On the other hand, Brigitte does not let her children become living examples of the Syrian crisis and overcomes her melancholia by accepting the loss. She reaches out to Beirut for “Anas’s exhibition to go ahead as planned” (Jarrar 254) and even says to Hannah and Peter that “I need to put things right with Anas’s family. His parents and sisters may be very angry with me right now but Rana and Marwan are all they have left of Anas and I don’t want to keep the children away from them” (Jarrar 254). Meanwhile, she also comes to know from Fatima—a refugee, with whom Anas has a conversation about his personal life once at Hannah’s place— that Anas intended to go to Germany before his death to “be with [his] family no matter what” because “he couldn’t live without [Brigitte] and children” (Jarrar 261). Upon hearing this, “Brigitte opens her eyes wide in astonishment” (Jarrar 260). The loss she undergoes changes her

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forever, and she decides to “stay on in Beirut” because she feels “it’s the right thing to do” as “this is where [she] belong[s]” (Jarrar 269). Freud argues that melancholia involves a “pathological tendency to deny the reality of [this] loss,” and consequently, the melancholic is unable to grieve or mourn which hinders any future course of action (639). However, this hardly seems to be true in the case of Brigitte and Peter because neither of them acknowledges the loss of their home country and both remain melancholic. Despite their deep melancholia, they progress toward the future and submit to transformation. Peter and Brigitte demonstrate identity as a continuous progression that continues to mold itself according to changing circumstances. Like Freud’s melancholic subject who fails to mourn, Peter and Brigitte also do not mourn for the loss of their homes because they redirect their emotional connections toward “new objects and endeavors” (Ruti 639). It might be assumed that their efforts to maintain a good relationship with the Arab people can be categorized as “the symptoms of redirecting [their] love for the lost country” (Kanwal 3); but once they are indicted as outsiders by their loved ones, they can no longer conceal their melancholic state and it becomes public knowledge. Given this context, I would argue that despite their losses, Brigitte and Peter tend to submit themselves to transformation without overlooking the lost object. Their losses are integral parts of their lives; Anas’ paintings and his children are for Brigitte a constant reminder of his tragic death, yet her effort of permanently moving to Beirut and maintaining a good relationship with Anas’ parents is a means of “making up in some way for the loss of Anas” (Jarrar 270). Similarly, Peter’s decision to stay in Beirut, even during “difficult years” (Jarrar 271) reinforces Lindsey Moore’s claim that “melancholia and mourning might be put at the service of a more inclusive conception of national and global communities” (17). In this regard, I consider mourning and melancholia as productive or regenerative sites. The way Peter and Brigitte adjust themselves in the midst of turmoil and the way they assert themselves in the Arab world reveals another consciousness that exists between the center and the margin. Jarrar attempts to give full recognition and identification to a minority community (exiles) by bringing this another consciousness in her narratives. What began in the Arab Spring as demonstrations in favor of dignity, freedom, good governance, and justice descended into widespread violence and the collapse of several states such as Libya and Syria. The Arab

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Spring started as a conceptual revolution that claimed: “human rights not by the power of international human rights law, but by the power of human beings” (Hamd 2). However, by framing the Arab Spring revolutions through the lens of human rights, Jarrar’s and Haddad’s writings demonstrate that human rights are subjected to massive violations during the course of events. “The continued widespread and systematic violation of human rights” is condemned frequently by human rights organizations, yet no tangible or practical steps to stop the violation of human rights are ever seen in the Arab world (Kritsiotis 83). According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ article one, “human rights are applied equally and indiscriminately to every person, irrespective of his or her race, sex, religion, ethnic or social origin, language, nationality, age, sexual orientation, disability or any other distinguished character” (Hamd 4). Nevertheless, these human rights are dismissed outright in the Arab region. However, hope remains high that the Arab Spring will achieve its high ideals because of the newly awakened citizenry, particularly youth, who know their basic human rights. Arab writers, in this regard, play a significant role in the Arab awakening because of their preoccupation with society and politics. As the renowned writer Naguib Mahfouz proclaims, “in all my writings, you will find politics. You may find a story which ignores love, or some other subject, but not politics; it is the very axis of our thinking” (qtd. in Aboul-Ela 340). Given this context, the novelists treat notions of individualism and identity from a human rights perspective in their narratives. In so doing, I argue that both writers fulfill Deleuze and Guattari’s dictum that in minor literature, minor writers speak on the behalf of a neglected collectivity. Their literature “finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collectivity, and even revolutionary, enunciation” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 17). Through their engagement with a specific minority community, Jarrar’s and Haddad’s work expresses “another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Both novels are bound to identity politics and locate those people and their cultures that are on the margin. Anglo Arab Novelistic responses to the Arab Spring shows that Post-Arab Spring literature is particularly politically charged, and foregrounds the political dissidence and social problems that prove to be the spearhead of the Arab Spring. The selected writers in this book are retroactive mouthpieces for millions of people who are suffering unimaginable injustices. Through the

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medium of literature, their voices are finally heard. Therefore, this minor literature is always collective in the sense that it works as a specifically collective enunciation. I believe this is the essential difference between the Post-Arab Spring minor literature and major Arabic canonical literature such as The Book of Khalid by Ameen Rihani and The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. In Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, David Lloyd defines major literature in terms of ethics, “since ethics involve the capacity to judge as from the perspective of archetypal man” (20). According to him, the major work directs “towards the production of an autonomous ethical identity for the subject” (20), whereas the forms of articulation in Post-­ Arab Spring literature “call into question the very terms in which canonical (major Arab) literature is defined” (Lloyd 20). In other words, the narratives of Post-Arab Spring literature “ethical identity is generally refused” (Caterson 91). Instead, one can see artistic production of a new statement, which means a kind of precursor of a community and often a nation in formation. The analysis of the selected Post-Arab Spring minor literature reveals that the uprising has provoked Arab writers to question the established order through their writings. Arab writers have always been the victims of censorship and cultural sensitivities. The autocratic regime feels threatened by them, exercises violence against them and eventually, a whole generation of Arab writers from different regions of the Arab world faces either exiles or obscurity in their own countries. Despite the existence of severe censorship, Arab writers remain socially and politically engaged, and continue to write with a purpose, thus pushing the boundaries of the regime and society through their work. Post-Arab Spring minor literature does not only address the political system and state repression, but these writings also challenge stereotypes and deeply held taboos and denounce inequalities that exist between the handful majority and a large minority. This is, in fact, a distinguishing feature of the emerging Post-Arab Spring literature that it is more engaged with the marginalized section of the society: homosexual, refugees, prisoners, activists, writers, travelers, and so on. Given this context, I believe that these writers perform role of public intellectuals who “diagnose and challenge states of oppression and silence” (Sakr 5). In Representation of the Intellectual, Edward Said states that the intellectual:

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Represents all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behaviour concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violation of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously. (Said 11–12)

Said’s intellectuals include Anglo-Arab authors who rise against oppression and revolt against the totalitarian regime by exposing it through their narratives. These authors could see the darkness and obscurity of their time and helped to unveil the gravity of oppression, instability and uncertainty in the pre- and Post-Arab Spring Arab worlds through the forms of their narratives. These emerging narratives accurately express the present time’s uncertainty and demonstrate that the 2011 revolution was a major factor for change in narrative strategies, themes, and literary modes of representation.

CHAPTER 6

Post-partum

A minor practice must then be understood as always in process, as always becoming—as generating new forms through a manipulation of those already in place. —Simon O’ Sullivan (4)

Like minor practice, Post-Arab Spring literature is a way of writing and an experimental usage of language; it is a process of writing rather than a finished product. As described earlier, it is more accurate to call it minor writing rather than minor literature for this reason. Such a designation may help us to understand the aesthetics of the emerging narratives of the Arab Spring and to comprehend the layers of meaning that these writers intend to convey. Post-Arab Spring literature, as an example of minor writing, pushes itself against the edges of conventional representation, forcing its limits, to create new and diverse narratives. The creative process of Anglo-Arab authors negates Deleuze and Guattari’s axiom that “the only expression gives us the method” because the writing process should not be considered simply a set of universal features to be followed by every writer (16). Instead, I believe that the writing process functions as a mean of “subjective determination that belongs to a particular writing machine” (Lambert 96). In the context of the Arab Spring, diverse social movement is organized which is often hard to categorize, as it is a “network of informal relationships between a multiplicity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1_6

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of individuals and organizations” (Diana 387) having a distinctive collective identity; therefore, for Anglo-Arab authors “it is only the situation that really matters” the most minus the expression (Lambert 42). I argue that the writer, as a free subject, represents certain people and his/her subjective determination means his writing style varies which eventually gives rise to a larger determination of expression as evident in my monograph. In this regard, one cannot deduce a single universal method from the larger determination of expressions that can be applied to all writings or all writers. Contemporary Arab writers are involved in the uprisings in many ways other than their writings per se. As the Syrian writer Sammar Yazbek says: “I am a writer, and I am supposed to be concerned with my books and my writings, but I am currently obsessed with the blood flowing in the streets, how the food will get to those who need it, what will happen to the millions of the displaced on the streets, how aid will get to the children that are dying. What about the refugee camp?” (qtd. in Vericat 14). For this reason, I disagree with what Robert F. Worth claims in The New York Times article “The Arab Intellectuals Who Didn’t Roar” published in October 2011, namely, that Arab intellectuals were conspicuously absent from the uprisings. I argue that Intellectuals, particularly literary figures, have been and continue to be deeply involved in the revolutionary wave. They assumed leadership roles in protests and organized many activities for the representation of civil society. They also demonstrated extraordinary courage in confronting the oppressive structures of their governments through their stories, which have helped as catalysts for change. These writers have also worked to counter the negative depictions of protestors in government-influenced presses, where they have been depicted as foreign conspirators and vandals. These writers and intellectuals have in fact been key agents within the Arab Spring and have helped to provide a different perspective from what regional experts and policymakers try to present. The analysis of the undertaken works also shows that Anglo-Arab authors as public intellectuals analyze the situation to generate new ideas and use their writing skills and position to further the cause of the revolution. By calling forth an excluding community, I believe that this literary machine then prepares the way for revolution. In fact, the selected Post-­ Arab spring minor literature calls into being the revolutionary machine yet-to-come. While I am writing, the process of change in the MENA region is still evolving, the future is pregnant with possibilities even though old accommodations are rearing their heads in places. It is hard to know

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where the future of the Arab Spring will necessarily lead; the emerging Post-Arab Spring literature, however, speculates about the future identities of Post-Arab Spring societies. This literature is itself still in its embryonic state, and it is for this reason that I term it an emergent Post-Arab Spring minor literature. Although, with the passage of time the active resistance of protestors and activists is worn out, the more passive intellectual resistance of the pen has continued. Arab writers and intellectuals have struggled for change through their work and have brought about a cultural revolution. There is a newly found freedom that has yielded to an explosion of creativity as evident in the undertaken writings. It is hard to imagine what the uprisings will bring in the long term for writers but with the Arab uprisings, Arab writers are now free to express, they can travel and can arrange and organize literary activities in their countries. The detailed analysis of undertaken writings shows that the Arab Spring awakes the undying thirst for dignity, justice, and freedom, which will express itself with or without violence. There are many factors behind a new cultural awakening after the repressive cultural structure in which literature was strictly censored previously. One significant element is the changing landscape of the publishing industry. Local publishing industry is evolving in the Arab world. One such example is hoopoe fiction which is an imprint of AUC (American University of Cairo Press). Hoopoe fiction publishes fresh and original stories of the MENA region that reimagine history and challenge the state discourse. The prevalence of emerging themes concerned with the lives of young people in the MENA region, their socio-political problems, the boom of internet technology and the way it affects the lives of people, are some important factors that can shape the direction of further research.

Coda: Post-Arab Spring Narratives This monograph has provided a critical analysis of the emerging Post-Arab Spring literature using the critical-theoretical framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature. This theoretical framework has been chosen because of its compatibility with the paradigm of Post-Arab Spring narratives. Although produced by marginalized Arab immigrant writers, Post-Arab Spring narratives subvert the dominant established system of Arab writings. The political and collective facet of these minor writings helps to provide an insight into the regimented Arab world and the aftermaths of the various Arab revolutions. Their deterritorialization

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of language, through techniques such as cinematic narratives, sensory language, metaphor, magical realism, metafiction, and journalistic technique, helps to highlight the ways in which so-called stuttering and experiments with the English language are elements of linguistic deterritorialization by default. This study is built on the assumption that Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory of minor literature from an analysis of western writings, and that to use the same theory in the context of Anglo-Arab literature would be limiting and restrictive in terms of my own Arabic focus. My book thus revisits Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature and reformulates it according to the emerging literature and thereby contributing toward the development of a critical-theoretical framework suited to the analysis of Post-Arab Spring literature. While this research has attempted to study Post-Arab Spring literature, it has necessarily restricted its analysis to writings produced by immigrant writers who retain a strong affiliation with their home countries during and after the Arab Spring. I particularly focus on the way these writers perform deterritorialization of the major language, English, in their writings. The preceding chapters have demonstrated that contemporary Anglo-Arab writers displace the literary convention of the global language, English, through accretion, elaboration, and enrichment. For instance, Alrawi uses mathematical expressions to explain the mysteries of life; Rakha enriches the English language by borrowing words like motion and energy from science. Through linguistic experimentation, I argue that they minoritize the major tongue to portray their societies and cultures. The previous chapters have demonstrated that the narrative techniques and stylistic choices of contemporary Anglo-Arab writers contribute to a renewal in the stylistic conventions of minor literature. At the core of this book was the desire to study an eclectic mix of Post-­ Arab Spring narratives, including broadly postmodern, personal, urban, and humanitarian narratives, all of which question the traditional narrative modes and strategies of Arab literature. By presenting this eclectic mix of narrative styles and themes, my book seeks to increase understanding of contemporary Arab society and speaks to the multifarious issues raised by Post-Arab Spring novels. This study is inherently novel as the undertaken works are recently published and as yet critically unexplored. At the thematic level, I highlight the voices and the plight of those who have never been granted authority either in the real world or in the literary texts. In the preceding chapters, I demonstrate that contemporary authors place themselves in the position of those who have always been

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marginalized figures: prisoners, writers, protestors, activists, lesbian and gay people, refugees, and exiles. I explicate the ways these minor writers invent missing and silenced people of the world through different narrative techniques and strategies, as when Hamilton and Rashidi use literary journalism to make street hawkers, activists, and protestors audible, or when Haddad and Jarrar invent autofictional characters to highlight the voices of refugees and LGBTQ+ people. I also illustrate the ways these writers push language to its limits to give expression to the ineffable. For instance, Anglo-Arab authors embellish their writing with color and sonorities to paint and sing the silenced reality. Reading Post-Arab Spring narratives as minor literature, I have detected a number of minoritarian strategies. Language is deterritorialized not only by fusing Arab and English at the semantic level, but also through different narratological strategies such as the cinematic narrative (attention is paid to light and sound as Hamilton narrates the revolution in his novel), the use of magical realism and metafictional devices, or the incorporation of journalistic techniques. Contemporary Anglo-Arab writers’ writings speak from within English language and from the marginal position of deracinated subjectivity, upholding the codes of global agency (the English language) while at the same time exposing the fact that these codes are not sufficient to represent the Arab world. These writers introduce minor characters who stand against the hierarchical structures of their bureaucracy and government in order to dismantle them. These minor or insignificant characters are seen as engaged in the ordinary political struggle against the major identity categories. Previously Arab writings are mostly motivated by the experience of not belonging to one place. For instance, academic Wail Hassan has analyzed immigrant narratives. He demonstrates that immigrant writers, such as, Fadia Faqir, Leila Aboulela, and many more like them, who stand between the country of origin and that of the adoptive country can assume the role of mediators, or in other words, cultural translators. In line with him, Dalal Sarnou has also analyzed Anglo-Arab women writings and shows that their writings “succeeded in constructing cross-cultural bridges between the West and the Arab world” (79). In her edited book Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature, Layla Al Maleh offers a wide-ranging overview of Anglophone writings from its inception until the 9/11 era. Moreover, in Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, published in 2017, Lindsey Moore brings together novels and memoirs of the half century to

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give a deeper historical understanding of Arab uprisings and their aftermaths, whereas in Anticipating the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies, Rita Sakr explores a range of novels and memoirs from Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt to reveal discontent and injustices, thus anticipating and envisioning the political upheaval. However, political events of the last decade, along with a major rise of refugees, have altered the political, literary, and geographical landscape, which eventually influence the content and style of Arab literary expression. With so much writing being published in the last decade, I believe that it is very important to review these works critically, to reflect on the emergent themes and to speculate its future directions. Hopefully, the research space opened within this monograph is diverse. Not all Post-Arab Spring narratives necessarily function as minor literature: certain Arab texts exhibit majoritarian tendencies and serve the interest of political leaders. There are many other potential texts which I am unable to select because of the limitations of my study. For example, The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz represents a new wave of surrealist and dystopian fiction from Middle Eastern writers who are also grappling with the chaotic aftermath of the Arab Spring by staying in their country of origin. Taking into account that the paradigm of Post-Arab Spring literature studied in this book is implicated in both global economic and political processes, further reading would contribute to both Arab literary and revolutionary history. With each passing day, Anglo-Arab writers are communicating stories which need to be analyzed and criticized within their material and cultural context. This book has sought to examine the minoritarian strategies used by Anglo-Arab writers; future research can explore the new ways of inclusion of minor literature in the world literature. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of minor literature remains under-­ utilized in interpretations of postcolonial literature in general and in Anglo-Arab literature in particular. In this book, it provides a critical-­ theoretical framework for reading Post-Arab Spring literature, as well as for uncovering the minoritarian aspects of Post-Arab Spring narratives which might have otherwise remained undetected. It has also enabled a more distinctive reading of Post-Arab Spring literature in terms of bringing ignored and silenced voices to the foreground and the way diverse narratives emerge and thus act as a collective enterprise. Moreover, I believe that Post-Arab Spring literature is emerging literature and it deserves scholarly attention.

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Index1

A Abdel Aziz, Basma, 170 Abu-Salim Prison, 39, 40, 51, 53, 58 Activists, 3, 8, 10, 28–30, 32, 33, 40, 46, 47, 54, 59, 86–88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 102–104, 113, 116–120, 122, 124, 134, 162, 167, 169 Alrawi, Karim, 8, 22, 61–92, 168 Anglo-Arab authors, 2, 9n3, 11, 12, 14, 14n5, 16–18, 21, 33, 60, 92, 99, 125, 163, 165, 166, 169 Anglo-Arab writings, 11, 66 Anticipating the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies, 170 Arab journalists, 8, 98 Arab revolution, 3–7, 16n8, 21–60, 67, 82, 93–95, 99, 102, 121, 125, 136, 138, 148, 167 Arab Spring, 2, 3, 5–7, 12, 18–25, 27–35, 39, 61, 63, 67, 69, 75,

87–89, 92–96, 100, 101, 114–122, 127–163, 165–168, 170 The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, 21 Ashour, Radwa, 32, 129, 130 Al-Aswany, Alaa, 4 Authoritarian regime, 3, 4, 6, 34, 35, 103 Autofiction, 8, 24, 82, 129–131 B Badawi, M. M., 9, 61 Bauman, Zygmunt, 131, 131n2, 152 Beirut, 128, 134, 135, 151, 152, 155, 156, 159, 160 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 71, 89, 149 Book of Sands: A Novel of the Arab Uprising, 8, 14, 15, 22, 61–92 Butler, Judith, 123, 145, 147, 158

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Younas, Post-Arab Spring Narratives, Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27904-1

183

184 

INDEX

C Cairo, 21, 23, 27–29, 40, 41, 44–46, 48, 55, 58, 82, 93n1, 94, 96, 97, 99–117, 119, 122–125, 131 Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 12, 21, 25–27, 29, 40–47 Chambers, Iain, 148 Chomsky, Noam, 110 The Chronicles of the Last Summer, 8 The City Always Wins, 8, 93–126 The Clamour of the Dead, 80–84 The Crocodiles, 8, 14, 61–92 D Dabashi, Hamid, 21, 89 Deconstruct, 2, 11, 35, 74, 133, 134 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 10, 11, 13–20, 32–34, 63, 73, 92, 96, 97, 105, 106, 110–112, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 133, 148, 151, 152, 161, 165, 167, 168, 170 Deterritorialization, 1, 2, 13, 14n5, 15, 19, 20, 33, 48, 64, 112, 122, 123, 167, 168 Dictatorship, 4, 48–50, 54, 56, 62, 92, 120, 121 Dissident, 52–54, 104 E Egypt, 2, 7, 21, 23, 28, 37, 38, 40, 42–44, 55, 62, 84, 86, 87, 91, 95, 96, 99–102, 105, 107–122, 124, 170 Eib, 138, 147 El-Belad, 44 Endo-colonialism, 52 Eurocentric language, 64 Exiles, 8, 24, 126, 128–130, 132, 134–136, 148, 150, 152, 156, 160, 162, 169

F Female genital mutilation (FGM), 76 Flashback, 39, 41, 43, 157 Foreshadowing, 35, 43, 44, 50 Freud, Sigmund, 137, 142, 145, 151, 156, 157, 160 G Gay, 15, 24, 86, 90, 126, 128–148, 169 Government, 3, 17, 30, 41, 42, 51, 67, 70–72, 87, 91, 93, 95, 100, 101, 104, 106–108, 110–114, 117, 118, 121, 123–125, 132, 147, 150, 166, 169 Graffiti, 16–18, 42, 113–116, 118, 119, 125 Guapa, 15, 24, 127–163 Guattari, Félix, 1, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17–21, 32–34, 63, 73, 92, 105, 106, 110–112, 123, 125, 131, 133, 148, 151, 161, 165, 167, 168, 170 H Haddad, Saleem, 8, 15, 23, 24, 126–163, 169 Hamilton, Omer Robert, 8, 23, 46, 82, 93–126, 169 Haram, 142 Harvey, David, 93, 115, 125 Homonationalism, 136 Homosexuality, 130, 135, 140–145 Humanitarian narratives, 20, 126–163, 168 Human rights, 7, 8, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 29n1, 32, 34, 43, 46, 47, 49, 54, 59, 93, 96, 115, 128, 131–133, 136, 137, 161

 INDEX 

I Identity, 14, 15, 24, 34, 38, 52, 55, 68, 69, 83, 87, 108, 109, 127, 128, 130–141, 135n3, 143, 144, 147–153, 156, 160–162, 166, 167, 169 Immigrant authors, 7, 9–11 Islam, 9, 72, 72n5, 128, 142 J Jacquemond, Richard, 16 Jameson, Fredric, 34 Jarrar, Nada Awar, 8, 23, 24, 126–163, 169 Journalistic fiction, 99 K Kafka, Franz, 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 33, 96, 106, 127 Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, 11–12 Khalifa, Khaled, 4, 5 In Praise of Hatred, 5 L Laghod, Lila Abu, 115 Lebanon, 7, 128, 134, 151, 152, 156, 158 Lefebvre, Henri, 94, 101, 114, 125 Lesbian, 24, 86, 90, 128, 134, 136, 139, 169 LGBTQ+, 3, 8, 10, 24, 136, 148, 169 Libya, 2, 5, 5n1, 7, 22, 28–31, 38–40, 47–59, 116, 149, 160, 170 Literary journalism, 98, 104, 169 Lloyd, David, 9, 12, 162

185

M Macondo in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, 67 Magical realism, 8, 16, 19, 22, 61–92, 168, 169 Mahfouz, Naguib, 57, 80, 144, 161 Marches, 34, 56, 65, 70n4, 116, 117, 122 Marginalised, 2, 6, 10, 11, 13, 22, 24, 33, 62–65, 86, 90, 91, 125, 126, 128, 135, 135n3, 150, 162, 167, 169 Maspero, 42, 117, 118 Massacre, 29, 39, 42, 47, 58, 59, 104, 109 Matar, Hisham, 7, 21, 22, 25–60 Maulana, 71, 72, 72n5 Melancholia, 137–139, 142, 145–147, 154, 156–160 Memoirs, 5, 7, 21, 22, 25–42, 45, 47, 48, 50, 53, 55, 59, 60, 80, 129, 130, 169, 170 Memory, 11, 21, 22, 25, 32, 34–36, 38–40, 46, 48–50, 54, 58, 59, 108, 129, 131, 136, 145, 146, 152, 159 MENA, 56, 95, 95n2, 100, 132, 166, 167 Metafiction, 8, 16, 19, 22, 61–92, 168 Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 78 Metaphor, 6, 13, 16, 19, 35, 37, 49, 51, 58, 60, 63, 64, 92, 96, 104, 125, 126, 134, 168 Midan, 40, 42 Midnight’s Children, 66, 71, 77 Minority, 9–11, 14, 18, 33, 34, 62, 63, 66, 102, 123, 125, 133–135, 160–162 Minor literature, 1, 2, 6, 9–21, 10n4, 23, 24, 27–35, 41, 47, 49, 53, 56n10, 59–163, 165–170

186 

INDEX

Minor space, 23, 122–126 Modern Arabic Literature, 9, 61 Moore, Lindsey, 160, 169 Morrison, Toni, 66 Mourning, 47, 137, 145, 147–155, 160 Mubarak, Hosni, 30, 38, 43, 62, 100–102, 107–111, 113, 117, 121, 124 N Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, 169 Nationalism, 9 Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, 9, 162 Neoliberal, 23, 94, 95, 100, 101, 105–115, 124 Nubian community, 87 P Perennial mourner, 154, 155 Personal narratives, 7, 20, 25–60 Politics, 2, 3, 6, 17, 29, 31–34, 49, 63, 65, 69, 75, 77, 90, 91, 98, 100, 101, 105, 110–112, 118, 119, 128, 161 The Politics of Aesthetics, 3 Postcolonial, 2, 4, 10, 12, 21, 52–54, 63, 65, 66, 101, 170 Postmodern narratives, 20, 22, 61, 91 Prisoner, 3, 10, 27, 33, 34, 41, 48, 53, 58–60, 77, 90, 91, 162, 169 Protest, 2–4, 23, 27, 28, 30, 42, 44, 46, 56, 67, 69, 85, 86, 100, 104,

111, 112, 115–118, 120–123, 138, 148, 166 Public spaces, 94, 107, 113–123 Q Qaddafi, Muammar Al, 5n1, 30, 48, 49, 51–55, 57, 59 Queer, 134–136, 138, 139, 141, 148 R Rakha, Youssef, 8, 22, 61–92, 80n6, 168 El Rashidi, Yasmine, 23, 93–126 Refugees, 3, 6, 8, 10, 24, 124, 128–132, 134–137, 148–155, 159, 162, 166, 169, 170 Repressive regime, 4, 29n1, 75, 89, 118 The Return: Father, Sons and the Land in between, 22, 28, 47 Ricoeur, Paul, 33, 36–38 The right to the city, 93, 114–122 River Nile, 104, 106 Rushdie, Salman, 66, 68, 71, 77 S Sadat, Anwar, 101, 106–108 Said, Edward, 61, 162, 163 Sakr, Rita, 4, 5, 12, 89, 162, 170 The Sand Child, 71 Seif el-Islam, 51, 55 Sensory language, 15, 16, 35, 37, 45, 46, 97, 134, 168 El-Sisi, Abdel Fateh, 117, 119, 122 Soueif, Ahdaf, 7, 12, 21, 22, 25–60, 93–94 Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), 42, 117

 INDEX 

Syria, 2, 5, 7, 57, 98, 99, 102, 116, 132, 149, 151, 154, 156–160, 170 T Tahrir Square, 17, 23, 28, 29, 40, 42, 45, 46, 55, 89, 97, 100, 115, 118, 121 A Thousand Plateaus, 17 Time and Narrative, 36 Trauma, 24, 47, 59, 92, 129, 133, 136, 148, 150, 159

187

U An Unsafe Haven, 24, 127–163 Urban narrative, 20, 23, 93–126 Urbicide, 23, 94, 124 V Visual memories, 35, 49, 50 Y Yazbek, Samar, 5, 98, 99, 102, 166