R A Y A | agency for Arabic literature
Interview conducted by Nahla Al Agli for Shubbak festival’s blog, in July 2017.
An ugly shadow side of Libya’s history is that it was a slave market route for centuries under Ottoman rule, way before the Italian occupation and prior to Libya’s declared independence in 1951. Growing up in Libya, children might still hear stories from elders about the black maids who used to work in their household or about distant cousins in Africa who carry their same recognisable surnames.
There would be no elaboration on the reality of the trade that …
A unique powerful tale from Syria, through the eyes of a girl who cannot stop walking.
Through Farid Abou Chaar’s desperate attempt to get published in Beirut, a humorous story about the end of this industry.
There is ultimately one kind of fear: The fear of fear. The psychological depths of fear and anxiety brilliantly explored in a novel set in contemporary Syria.
Index is without a doubt a literary achievement. The novel explores the limits of literature, and the impossibility for words and for any narrative to convey the extent of the destruction and the feeling of loss.
This piece is taken from Refugees Worldwide, an anthology of writing commissioned as part of a project run by the International Literature Festival Berlin. Published in The Guardian on August 22, 2017
My sister, whom I haven’t seen for more than two years, told me she was going to cross the sea in a rubber dinghy. She hung up, not wanting to hear what I thought. She merely said something profound and sentimental and entrusted her three children to my care in the event that she drowned. A few minutes later …
The Shell, by Moustafa Khalifa, is published in English by Interlink, USA (2017):
“From 1982 to 1994, Syrian topographer Khalifa was incarcerated in his country’s infamous Tadmur Military Prison, and his decision to present his experiences as fiction results in a document both haunting and bold.
The National, March 29, 2017
he Baghdad Eucharist is a short read but one that lingers long in the mind due to its characters’ candid testimonies. Antoon entrances with both his lavish set-pieces and tight thumbnail sketches. Maha’s miscarriage, together with Youssef’s doomed love affair with a Muslim girl 20 years his junior, show suffering of a different kind. Antoon also manages to convey Youssef’s anguish at the felling and burning of Baghdad’s date palms – “so that the Americans can see the snipers and the snipers can see them”.
Translation by Marilyn Booth.
“Hoda Barakat’s THE KINGDOM OF THIS EARTH turns to the history of Lebanese Maronite Christians, from the Mandate period to shortly before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1970s. This scene, occurring very early in the novel, precedes a tragedy that will mark the family at the centre of the story, whose history of village pre-eminence puts them at the centre of local rivalries around class, land ownership, water rights, and gender politics. The ancestral past remains part of the present, as the children …
