<\/p>\n
Some of the earliest forms of genre writing that appeared in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were utopian in scope. Although Egypt traditionally led the way with new norms in regional literature, this fresh burst of ideas had been brought on by unrest in the wider Middle East. Syrian and Lebanese writers fleeing religious and political persecution, writes <\/span>Amr Aboelsoud<\/span><\/a> drawing on the literary criticism of <\/span>Saad ElKhadem<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>settled in Cairo and experimented \u201cwith the novel and other genres that were previously unknown in the Arab world. They \u2026 took up themes and motifs that were still untouched, such as free love, adultery, and the emancipation of women. With these \u2018romances\u2019 they attracted more readers and diverted them from the traditional literary genres. Nevertheless, both the traditional reservoir of themes, motifs, and styles as well as the new, adopted themes, and forms contributed to the development of Arabic literature in the direction of modernity.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Today popular forms of genre fiction encompass romance, horror, suspense, and speculative writing, with the latter including sci-fi and fantasy, and further sub-categories of alternative history and time travel. <\/span>Is the<\/span> graphic novel genre fiction as well? For many, genre fiction is escapism pure and simple. But can the form hint at solutions, and suggest a possible way out? Through the mechanisms of reading and dreaming, surely an individual has the possibility of stealing themselves to harsh realities. The writing may be varied, but in the end it comes down to the power of storytelling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon to Iraq and Afghanistan, forms of genre fiction morph. They hold a certain power because of how writers, whether in the region or the diaspora, reflect and often react against the social mores and political settings. This special double issue of The Markaz Review closes the turbulent year of 2024, and suggests critical green shoots for starting afresh in 2025. Alongside wide ranging short stories, excerpts from novels, and new English translations are critical essays on politics and art, some of which feature artists who dare to go to the moon. In many ways all of the work included here are visions of our tiny planet at a time when ongoing war in the region has left many scared, angry, and depressed. The mission statement for Harlequin, one of the most popular publishers of romance fiction in the US \u2014 \u201cEmotion and intimacy simmer … experience the rush of falling in love\u201d \u2014 only begins to capture the range of feelings and experiences in the romantic stories included in TMR 47.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The issue\u2019s centerpiece fiction is \u201cNot a Picture, a Precise Kick,\u201d from Mansoura Ez-Eldin\u2019s novel <\/span>Akhyilat Athill<\/span><\/i> [Shadow Specters] (2017), translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Fawzy and Fatima ElKalay. After visiting Kafka\u2019s House, in Prague, a man and a woman meet on a park bench. Both are writers but the woman is in a daze. Newly arrived from Cairo, she realizes that she has been walking around places in a foreign city that she recognizes from her dreams. At home, Camelia has endured an eventful love affair and unwanted pregnancy. Ez-Eldin\u2019s Akhyilat <\/em><\/span>Athil<\/span><\/i> is a meta novel that considers the nature of writing, gender, and identity.<\/span><\/p>\n The next story, Huda Hamed\u2019s \u201cEnvy,\u201d translated from the Arabic by Zia Ahmed, is again about the failure of romance. But the two people in intimate conversation, the soon-to-be divorced daughter and her mother, dissect an ailing marriage not from inside but from the view outside. How can a dissolution like this be justified to an extended network of family and friends? In deeply conservative cultures when marriages fail, there should be a dramatic, no-turning-back story to tell, which enables a wife to save face and lessen her family\u2019s disgrace. Surely an argument over the Persian rug isn\u2019t enough justification on its own. Yet, mother and daughter come to an understanding. Hamed is one of Oman\u2019s best-known women writers. She tells unusually nuanced stories that shed light on not widely known female experiences, like her young <\/span>Besara woman<\/span><\/a>\u2019s coming of age story, published in TMR 43.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Continuing on the theme of romance, a tale of thoroughly modern queer love takes its title \u201cAs Much of Life As the World Can Show\u201d from a quote by Samuel Johnson about 18th-century London. In an excerpt from <\/span>Fil Inocencio Jr.\u2019s first novel of the same name, a chance encounter, fevered SMS messages, and international travel brings together one man from the West coast of the US, and another from Amman, Jordan. They meet in gay Arab London, a setting rarely written about in mainstream fiction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The protagonist here, in love, hasn\u2019t forgotten the trauma of non-acceptance in his own life and reminds his lover\u2019s Arab friends of theirs, as he makes a case for those badly maligned and targeted in Trump\u2019s America \u2014 the trans community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These are storylines that won\u2019t be found in run of the mill western romances. But love in the Middle East has many opposites that seemingly coexist and intertwine; they can be both stifling and liberating; full of wonder yet filled with immense disappointment; not entirely inclusive for now, but multi-faceted with the underlining hope they might become so.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Horror is another hugely popular form of genre fiction, and in this issue of TMR, these types of stories too take on telling cultural specificities. Natasha Tynes is from a Jordanian family. For her scary gastronomic short story, \u201cThe Head of the Table,\u201d she draws on her father\u2019s reminisces of eating the traditional meal of mansaf, made with lamb, rice and pine nuts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The power of horror, it seems, lies in the upending of the familiar, or injecting fear into the perfectly innocent \u2014 even nature. The chinar tree (<\/span>Platanus Orientalis),<\/span> originally from Greece, is known as the <\/span>\u201cTree of Hippocrates\u201d due to its medicinal properties. Fourteenth century Islamic preachers journeying from Iran to Kashmir brought its seeds to Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n The short story \u201cThe Curse of the Chinar Tree,\u201d by Shamsia was translated from Dari by Abdul Bacet Khurram. The ailing health of a chinar tree outside a family home in rural Afghanistan mirrors the sickness growing inside, as a malevolent, shiny black stone possesses the family\u2019s patriarch. All the ingredients of obsession are in play: the tensions between religion and madness; frightened children, and an unspoken threat of ever looming violence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Not all forms of genre have remained popular throughout the decades. Regional gumshoes from Cairo to Tunis were once modeled after Western favorites Sherlock Homes and the private detectives in Agatha Christie novels. However this has changed as editor of ArabLit, Marcia Lynx Qualey, reveals in \u201c<\/span>Salacious Criminality \u2014 Trench-coated Detectives, Rogues, and Smoking Guns,\u201d <\/span>a specially commissioned essay for TMR 47.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One reason for the decline has been the nature of governance in the region. Qualey writes, \u201c<\/span>… toward the end of the 20th century, traditional police and detective novels lost much of their glamor. One reason might be the way the genre can take the side of police and repressive state institutions. Toward the end of the 20th and early 21st centuries, readers were more likely to find prison novels in Arabic than police procedurals, as many serious novelists seemed more interested in humanizing prisoners than allying themselves with jailers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n As sleuthing in literature became less prevalent, sci-fi never lost its appeal for writers and artists in the Middle East and beyond.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Elizabeth Rauh\u2019s \u201cTraveling Crafts: The Moon and Science Fiction in Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art\u201d <\/span>was first published for the Aga Khan exhibition, <\/span>The Moon: A Voyage through Time<\/span><\/i><\/a> (2019). Guest curated by Christiane Gruber with curator Ulrike Al-Khamis, the exhibition was the first to explore the centrality of the moon in Islamic faith, science, and arts, in honor of the <\/span>fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11\u2019s historic moon landing when Neil Armstrong made that \u201cgiant leap for mankind.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSpeculative narratives, otherwise known as science fiction or the \u2018literature of ideas,\u2019\u201d Rauh writes, \u201coffer projected re-imaginings of human experience by depicting new or imaginary technologies, time and space travel, alien beings, and utopian or dystopian worlds. Besides literary works, science fiction offers artists visual tools to imagine \u2014 or reimagine \u2014 the world as it was, is, or will be.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The many artists who fell under the spell of Earth\u2019s little sister range from Sudanese artist Ibrahim Saleh and the founder of Iraqi modernism Jewad Selim (1919\u20131961) to Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Their film, <\/span>The Lebanese Rocket Society<\/span><\/i> (2012) revives forgotten history. In the early 1960s, a pan-Arab project with scientists and technicians from Armenia, Iraq, Jordan, Jerusalem, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon produced the first rockets from the Arab world. These traveled to Low Earth Orbit \u2014 an altitude of 1,200 miles or less, within a period of 28 minutes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The featured artist for TMR\u2019s special double issue is Larrisa Sansour, who appears as an astronaut in her video <\/span>A Space Exodus<\/span><\/i>. Sansour, known for subverting easily recognizable Western pop culture, music and film in her work, soars above the Earth accompanied by a Middle Eastern-ized version of Richard Strauss\u2019s <\/span>Thus Spoke Zarathustra<\/span><\/i>. This was the original soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick\u2019s film <\/span>2001<\/span><\/i>, from which Sansour takes her inspiration and imitates \u2014 except for her final destination. This astronaut artist is not headed towards a black monolith past Jupiter, but Earth\u2019s moon, where she plants the flag of Palestine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Following Sansour into deep space is May Haddad\u2019s intergalactic girl-messenger Carna. In the tradition of <\/span>Star Wars<\/span><\/i>, \u201cA Galaxy Run in 30 Minutes Or Less\u201d is the prequel to an earlier story of Haddad\u2019s, \u201c<\/span>Ride on, Shooting Star<\/span><\/a>,<\/span>\u201d which appeared TMR in 2022.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The best sci-fi borrows heavily from other genres as well. Published in Egypt in 1972, <\/span>Qahir al-Zaman<\/span><\/i> [The Conqueror of Time] by Nihad Sharif<\/span> is considered one of the earliest sci-fi novels written in Arabic.<\/span> On reading the first ever excerpt from the novel translated into English by TMR senior editor Lina Mounzer, our editor in chief Jordan Elgrably described it as \u201cquite creepy and fascinating\u201d because of its \u201cair of reality.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the novel, Dr. Halim, who is intent on unlocking the secrets of cryopreservation, keeps a diary. The novel\u2019s protagonist and the reader are pulled in by entries like this one: \u201c<\/span>And as I poured the water out of the cold glass, an idea struck me\u2026 The refrigerator cools meat of any kind to keep it from spoiling. And refrigerated meat of course consists of the flesh of dead or slaughtered animals. Would it one day be possible to use it to preserve a living body? The question opened up new horizons before me \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Qahir al-Zaman,<\/span><\/i> written by Sharif during the last years of Gamal Abdel Nasser\u2019s rule, is thought to be political allegory. Dr. Halim\u2019s cryogenic experiments on small mammals is a metaphor for Egyptian society <\/span>\u201cas stagnant, figuratively frozen in its obsession with the past,\u201d according to <\/span>Ian Campbell in his book <\/span>Arabic Science-fiction<\/span><\/i>, from 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n In cities like Cairo the past lives on in streets, gates and quarters that still bear the names given to them in medieval times. Walking through these and writing about them are akin to time travel. Like the moon, effortless, inexplicable sudden jerks through time backwards and forwards have long fascinated Arab writers. According the translator and writer Michael Cooperson, the first time-traveling novel in Arabic is <\/span>Hadith Isa bin Hisham, <\/span><\/i>[<\/span>A Period in Time<\/span><\/i>] by<\/span> Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (1858-1930). Cooperson is also the translator of Khairy Shalaby\u2019s novel, <\/span>The Time-travels of the Man Who Sold Pickles and Sweets<\/span><\/i> (2016), an excerpt of which has been included in this issue, under the title, \u201cThe Man with the Samsonite Briefcase in Medieval Cairo.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Khairy Shalaby named the main character, Ibn Shalibi, after himself. His novel is one architect and historian Nasser Rabat considers in his new book <\/span>Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project<\/span><\/i><\/a>. He writes, \u201cIbn Shalabi\u2019s obsession with a spatially and historically confined past (Fatimid, Ayyubid, but mostly Mamluk), however, has an underlying motive. His time travel is actually a rescue mission. Its deeper intention is to conscript the entire Egyptian Islamic history in order to recuperate the authentic Egyptian national character.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Ibn Shalabi meets not only Arab historians Ibn \u2018Abd al-Hakam (803\u201371), Ibn Taghri-Birdi (1411\u201370), and the Orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole (1854\u20131931) but the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Naguib Mahfouz (1911\u20132006). However it is the Mamluk historian and biographer al-Maqrizi who makes repeated appearances in the novel. As Nasser observes, he \u201chas been lodged in modern Egyptian consciousness as the true keeper of Cairo\u2019s history across the ages.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Another city that looms large in the Arab consciousness is Beirut. The euphonious graphic novel by Barrack Zailaa Rima, translated into English by Carla Calarg\u00e9\u00a0and\u00a0Alexandra Gueydan-Turek, also\u00a0from earlier this year, contains a trilogy of comics all on Beirut, from 1995, 2015, and 2017.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In her review of <\/span>Beirut<\/span><\/i>, TMR critic Katie Logan delves into the question of boundaries between graphic novel and genre fiction: \u201c<\/span>Reviewing <\/span>Beirut <\/span><\/i>for an issue on genre is especially fitting, with an important caveat. As comics theorists assert often and with force, comics and graphic novels are not in themselves a genre …What makes comics such a compelling art form is the way they adapt and contort to contain a host of genres. Inside the graphic novel are unlimited possibilities for narrative structure and graphic representation, possibilities Rima exercises with visible abandon throughout <\/span>Beirut.<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Like sci-fi, fantasy is another form of speculative fiction. Instead of defying the laws of nature and physics, it offers instead the improbable. The cyber-punk story \u201cGhosts of Farsis\u201d by Hussein Fawzy, translated into English by TMR\u2019s managing editor Rana Asfour, includes as one of its characters a learned, talking duck.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps more unlikely than a loquacious bird is the main character of Adam\u2019s much-maligned wife in Parand\u2019s short story \u201cEve,\u201d translated from Afghan Dari by Abdul Bacet Khurram. Eve has had enough of being blamed for original sin and decides to leave Purgatory. She doesn\u2019t go to Paris or New York but to Kabul, where she not only watches the fate of the homeless woman holding a dead baby, but becomes her. Both Afghan women writing for TMR 47, Parand and Shamsia, the author of \u201cThe Chinar Tree,\u201d are members of the development <\/span>Untold Narratives<\/span><\/a> project that works with \u201cwriters marginalized by conflict.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/white-spacer-300x16.jpg\"){kind=spacer}
<\/span><\/p>\nLove, Love, Love<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nFright Show<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nDisappearing Detectives<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/b>Fly Me To the Moon. Or at Least around the Earth<\/h4>\n<\/span><\/p>\nActivating History<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/p>\nSpeculations<\/h4>\n