{"id":35885,"date":"2025-01-17T11:09:42","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T09:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=35885"},"modified":"2025-08-19T15:42:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:42:16","slug":"radwa-ashours-classic-granada-now-in-a-new-english-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/radwa-ashours-classic-granada-now-in-a-new-english-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Radwa Ashour\u2019s Classic Granada<\/em> Now in a New English Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"
A trilogy of novels form an astonishing work of Arabic and world literature that covers 100 years, against the backdrop of 16th century Andalucia, and reverberates in the wars of conquest and occupation taking place today.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Granada: The Complete Trilogy\u00a0<\/span><\/i>by Radwa Ashour, translated by Kay Heikkinen
\n<\/span>Hoopoe<\/a>\u00a02024
\nISBN 9781649033765<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Guy Mannes-Abbott<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

The arrival of Radwa Ashour\u2019s complete <\/span>Granada Trilogy<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Thulathiyat Ghirnata, <\/span><\/i>1994\u20135), in a new English translation by Kay Heikkinen and on the 10th anniversary of Ashour\u2019s death was a big moment. It was published during the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, whereby a long arc completes a circle of horror with the participation of all major “western” powers, which is unfair to the trilogy and its author in some ways but urgently and overwhelmingly appropriate too. Ashour wrote of how images of the US-led bombing of Baghdad in 1991 gave her the image of naked helplessness that <\/span>Granada<\/span><\/i> begins with. It\u2019s an image of catastrophe from which this trilogy unfolds with irresistible affect, imaginative precision and haunting import.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hoopoe\u2019s handsome edition comes with a useful introduction by Marina Warner, who refers to the book as \u201cmonumental\u201d and a \u201cmagnum opus of prose fiction,\u201d both terms that generated hesitance in me as I began to read. However, they suit what <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> the central and definitive achievement in Ashour\u2019s striking body of work, which stretches across short stories, straight autobiography, novels including novel assemblages of fiction and memoir, three untranslated volumes of critical writing, and excellent translations of husband Mourid Barghouti<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s poetry into English, not to mention a long career as Professor of English at Ain Shams University in Cairo.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Granada<\/a>
Granada<\/em> is published Hoopoe\/AUC Press<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If I restrict myself to only one essential accompaniment to <\/span>Granada<\/span><\/i>, it would have to be Ashour\u2019s last novel <\/span>The Woman from Tantoura<\/span><\/i>, 2014 (<\/span>al-Tanturiya, <\/span><\/i>2010), which shares the same translator and a comparable catastrophe in the ethnic cleansing and erasure of the village of Tantoura near Haifa in coastal Palestine by Zionist militia in 1948.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately, Ashour\u2019s great novel is garlanded with others situated in regional cultures and historical contexts that necessarily engage catastrophes of finely drawn individual as well as collective kinds, but do so with ever-buoyant resistance. Those stories take place in and out of prisons, on islands, in Paris, throughout Palestine, often in Cairo, in Muslim and post-Muslim Granada, Andalusia, Valencia and Columbus\u2019s so-called \u201cNew World.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ashour was unavoidably aware of the <\/span>Nakba<\/span> of 1948, the catastrophe deepening and widening in 1967, as well as the so-called Gulf War of 1991 when she was writing what became <\/span>Granada<\/span><\/i>, and yet her trilogy stands independent of all these events. They function as rich allusions and additions to Ashour\u2019s sinewy fictive blend of archival acuity with what Warner describes as, \u201cintimate, empathetic\u201d witness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/b>The Fall of Granada<\/h4>\n

The trilogy is set in the middle of catastrophic events that bring to a conclusion in 1492 seven or eight hundred years of Muslim rule, cultural achievements and dissension, or commence the purgatory of a century-long ending populated by <\/span>Moriscos <\/span><\/i>(forced converts to Catholicism)<\/span> that leads to a final expulsion in 1609. After torching Rondo and M\u00e1laga, huge well-equipped armies from Castile and Aragon in the north of the Iberian peninsula reach the last bastion of Granada\u2019s independence, the Alhambra Palace, to formalize a treaty of surrender with a ruling elite of wazirs, generals and scholars representing Sultan Muhammad XII.<\/span><\/p>\n

Granada<\/em> opens with the sight of a mutely naked woman in the streets that bookseller Abu Jaafar reads as an omen before rumors of bodies seen in the town\u2019s Genil River circulate after just one general refuses to sign the treaty of surrender and storms out of the palace. Visions and prophecies are countered by a flashback to the arrival of a newly orphaned boy named Naeem, whom Abu Jaafar has taken on as an apprentice in his business. Reality intervenes again when a body is retrieved from the river: \u201cThe eddies of the river had swallowed up what hope remained, the community had been scattered, and the people had been orphaned.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ashour has dropped us right into the middle of turmoil, agitated insecurity and eddying stories in her characteristic way, without official or authorial narrative frameworks. Instead there are stories within stories drawn along by people to people entanglements. With the arrival of another orphan Saad, from a family of Malagan silk-weavers, Ashour offers a typical response to impending erasure:<\/span><\/p>\n

He became convinced that nothing was ever lost, and that the human mind was a marvelous box \u2026\u00a0 preserving incalculable, innumerable things: the smell of the sea; his mother\u2019s face; faint yellow rays piercing green vine leaves, wet with raindrops; threads of silk on his father\u2019s loom; his grandfather\u2019s cough in the morning; the laughter of the little girl; the taste of a green almond; a broken jar from which oil flowed; a bead detached from the string of prayer beads, rolling toward him in his hiding place behind the cupboard.<\/span><\/p>\n

This long quotation exemplifies the undeclared foci of Ashour\u2019s work and this novel in its resoluteness; the scribe or copier\u2019s \u201cradical conservation\u201d as she called it in her essay, \u201cEyewitness, Scribe, Storyteller\u201d \u2014 that was published in 2000. The scrappy smallness of its detail; the preserving and passing-on under impossible circumstances relates to what philosopher Emanuele Coccia describes in <\/span>The Life of Plants A Metaphysics of Mixture <\/span><\/i><\/a>as a \u201cpoint of life.\u201d That is, \u201cthe world is the breath of the living. All cosmic [meaning planetary] knowledge is nothing but <\/span>a point of life <\/span><\/i>[<\/span>vie<\/span><\/i>]<\/span> (and not just<\/span> a point of view <\/span><\/i>[<\/span>vue<\/span><\/i>])\u201d<\/span> with its false god\u2019s eye perspective on things.<\/span><\/p>\n

Coccia is writing about plant life here as well as Life as such, but this is a useful way to think through Ashour\u2019s ability to engage histories freed of obsolete framings by the merging of essential qualities of life bit by bit in compelling networks of human stories from below and specifically from below surfaces that include the ground. Stylistically this is the \u201cinterplay\u201d of dark and light that she attributes to the arabesque (Ashour, 2000), but it embodies more than style.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, as the deadline to comply with those that Ashour only ever calls \u201cthe Castilians\u201d looms, the people of Granada \u201cwatched the mass emigration of the nobles, the prominent, and the rich. It was a tumult, a fevered face of buying and selling \u2026 swords inherited from grandfathers and grandfathers\u2019 grandfathers.\u201d They watch Christopher Columbus\u2019 triumphal parade through the city squares, stirring \u201centhusiasm and fear of that new, unknown world discovered by the man riding on his horse.\u201d Glass cases of gold dust and ingots are followed by \u201cthe captives \u2026 people who live in the new world!\u201d who walk \u201cwith deliberate steps, their hands tied\u201d retaining \u201cthe elegance of their stature\u201d and \u201ccolored feathers fixed in bands around their heads.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The Age of Modernity has commenced!<\/span><\/p>\n

After the elites flee, Abu Jaafar introduces his world to us by setting out through the gates, down to the river, paying attention to the fortresses and palaces, \u201c<\/span>cypresses, palms, and stone pines<\/span>\u201d<\/span> on one side of the river, \u201cfigs, olives, pomegranates, walnuts and chestnuts\u201d on the other, noting the buyers and sellers, the perfumers, potters, glassmakers, brass merchants, and goldsmiths, entering the cloth bazaar to contemplate the linens, wools and silks, and finally making his ablutions to pray in the Grand Mosque before returning \u201cto the papermakers quarter where his shop was.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We meet Abu Jaafar\u2019s family, generations of which animate the coming century and hundreds of pages, most notably his daughter and spiritual heiress Salima, the principle character of the first part of the trilogy, in whom Abu Jaafar <\/span>and <\/span><\/i>Radwa Ashour place their hopes. In childhood Salima queries Columbus<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s recent discovery, saying it is not a \u201cnew\u201d but \u201cdifferent world.\u201d Ashour continued, \u201cWhen she wanted something, she kept on asking for it and insisting, never flagging or tiring, and she did not give up or allow anyone to stop her until she got it.\u201d Abu Jaafar lives for Salima\u2019s mind; \u201ca mill that never ceased turning, observing, contemplating, questioning and becoming absorbed in thought\u201d and begs his son Hasan to become \u201ca great writer like Ibn al-Khatib, so they will record your name together with Granada\u2019s in every book.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cardinal Jimenez arrives to tighten the occupier\u2019s grip in 1499, staging the conversion of Hamid al-Thaghri \u2014 rebel of Rondo and M\u00e1laga \u2014 in \u201cthe mosque of Albaicin, now named the Church of San Salvador.\u201d Thaghri\u2019s mortified followers \u201chad built a small, warm room for him in their hearts \u2026 which he filled with his heroic feats and his justice.\u201d The Castilians begin raiding books from mosques and schools, \u201cthe Alhambra and Jewish Granada,\u201d gathering them in carts from all quarters. Abu Jaafar and other booksellers respond by securing their books in \u201ca number of places; mountain caves, the ruins of abandoned houses, and basements of homes,\u201d but the Castilians burn many more cartloads in the main square at unbearable cost.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Record what?<\/h4>\n

In Ashour\u2019s excellent and often quoted essay subtitled, \u201cMy Experience as a Novelist,\u201d her credo is contained in the main title: \u201cEyewitness, Scribe and Storyteller<\/a>.\u201d This references an obsession to record \u201cas the ancestors did. Record what? A geographical space dense with a resonant history, a composite of past and present, overlapping territories constitutive of an emotional and moral space for self-awareness and self-definition.\u201d She identifies this as a generational trait in response to 1967; when her generation was \u201cdenied and disfigured,\u201d making their writing \u201ca retrieval of a human will negated.\u201d The town of Granada has a particular resonance in Arabic and Palestinian literature \u2014 think of Darwish\u2019s \u201c<\/span>Andalusia of the possible<\/span><\/a>\u201d \u2014 but for Ashour it provided, as she writes in her essay, \u201ca means to explore my fears, impotence and also the chances of survival through resistance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Granada, <\/span><\/i>both of Abu Jaafar\u2019s children marry. Salima marries Saad and they become distant as she buries herself in books and he leaves to join the rebels in the mountains. Hasan, her pragmatic brother, marries Maryama, daughter of a \u201cpraise singer.\u201d<\/span> While Maryama develops a reputation for acts of cunning defiance, Salima has larger if equally constrained visions:<\/span><\/p>\n

She was stifling in the prison of a vile time when acquiring books was a crime subject to punishment\u2026 she waited until night descended and the household went to bed, then she lit the lamp and read and her prison grew larger, expanding gradually until the bars disappeared in the light of the sun that shone from the book and from her intellect.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a prison of time itself, she says cannily but \u201cbitterly, staring into an ancient time that took its children by the hand to large libraries, to the patronage of a wise ruler, to travel that could satisfy the heart\u2019s longing for the scholars of Egypt and Syria.\u201d She returns most often to Avicenna\u2019s <\/span>The Canon of Medicine<\/span><\/i> amongst her ten meager books and searches for more<\/span>.<\/span><\/i> In these ways, \u201cshe heeds the vile age\u2026 and then she does not.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Critic Eric Calderwood in <\/span>On Earth or in Poems, the Many Lives of al-Andalus<\/span><\/i><\/a> explores the import of Salima\u2019s bookishness, expanding on Ashour\u2019s notion of \u201cradical conservation\u201d to excellent effect. He reminds us that \u201cas a model for Salima\u2019s education, Abu Jaafar looks to the example of Aisha bint Ahmad, one of the illustrious <\/span>adi<\/span><\/i>\u0304<\/span>bas <\/span><\/i>of al-Andalus. Salima thus emerges as a figure of \u2018radical conservation,\u2019\u201d an homage to these historic \u201cforemothers\u201d and a continuity rather than a \u201crupture from tradition.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This expands the significance of Ashour naming Saad and Salima\u2019s daughter Aisha \u2014 the product of a fleeting return from Saad\u2019s rebel base \u2014 in the early 16th century. Hassan records his niece\u2019s birth officially with a Castilian name; \u201cEsperanza (hope). Sometimes he would call her Aisha, sometimes Esperanza, and Amal (hope, in Arabic) a thousand times.\u201d Meanwhile the Castilians renew demands to convert or depart. Maryama persuades the family with her stark refusal to leave, even at the cost of \u201can entire life whose vocabulary had become accusations and sins!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Prison of Time<\/h4>\n

Saad is caught, tortured and imprisoned for three years, during which \u201cdesolation \u2026 you see your loved ones more, because there is plenty of time, and because they come to you out of concern for you in your trial and allow you to contemplate their faces as long as you like.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cOn Sticks, Straws, and Lanterns: Reading Radwa Ashour in an Egyptian Prison<\/a>,\u2019\u2019 former Egyptian political prisoner Abdelrahman ElGendy wrote of how valuable Ashour\u2019s insights about prison time were to him inside Egypt\u2019s notorious Tora Maximum Security Prison. \u201cHer words shaped \u2014 even saved \u2014 my life in prison,\u2019 he wrote, specifying her essays and <\/span>The Woman from Tantoura<\/span><\/i>, which transported him to its \u201ccore\u201d beyond mere historical recovery; \u201cits scents, tastes, the distinct feel of its dust kissing one<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s bare feet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

ElGendy continued: \u201cRadwa<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s work prompted me to question: Where do untold stories go? If they never find an ear, do they cease to exist?\u201d This prompted his own writing against the \u201cradical hopelessness\u201d he felt, the acceptance of which was also liberating. He cites Ashour again, from her late as-yet-untranslated memoir <\/span>Athqal Min Radwa <\/span><\/i>(2013), written during the January 2011 revolution while battling cancer: \u201cThere<\/span>\u2019<\/span>s always a chance to crown our efforts with an outcome other than defeat, so long as we resolve not to die before we<\/span>\u2019<\/span>ve sought to live.\u201d Untold or unrehearsed stories reside in boxes within boxes invoked as tools of \u201cradical conservation.\u201d <\/span>Granada\u2019s<\/span><\/i> Saad bears prison time, as Ashour wrote, \u201cbecause that amazing box in his head was able to give him jewels that glittered and shone in the darkness of the prison.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Granada <\/span><\/i>it is now 1527 and Saad has been released only to discover that Salima has been taken in by the Inquisition on charges relating to \u201cblack magic.\u201d We know the date because it is on the judgment pronouncing her guilt, after proceedings that Salima regards as \u201can absurd game run by eccentric idiots.\u201d Punishment is death by fire, which is scheduled for the same square that Granada\u2019s books were burned in earlier.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The first part of the trilogy ends here, with Aisha being told a familiar story by Maryama about a tree in heaven that harbors as many green leaves as \u201cpeople on the earth.\u201d It is \u201ca large tree, Aisha, and leaves fall from it and other leaves grow, without stopping.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Return. Depart. Remain.<\/h4>\n

The remaining shorter books of the trilogy, <\/span>Maryama<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>The Departure<\/span><\/i>, center on Maryama and nephew Ali, the son of Aisha and Maryama\u2019s son Hisham. <\/span>Granada<\/span><\/i> has become a saga of \u201cerrancy,\u201d in <\/span>Saidiya Hartman\u2019s usage<\/span><\/a>: \u201cthe social poiesis that sustains the dispossessed\u201d in their search for \u2018\u2018a place better than here\u2019\u2019 while <\/span>“<\/span>inhabit[ing] the world in ways inimical to those deemed proper and respectable.\u201d It turns out that the \u201cvillage Sheikh\u201d of al-Jaarfariya knew other members of Ali’s family, who first fled to the village and then to Fez, and offers sanctuary to Ali too. \u201cThen the days passed and one morning he noticed that though he was \u2018the stranger\u2019 he was no longer strange. He had begun to cultivate the earth, waiting for the season of olives to pay his debts, buy his clothes, and make sure of his provisions.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I can only imagine reading this thirty years ago and now recall the ways in which Ashour has written about closed regimes of literal prisons and non-literal imprisonment in <\/span>Blue Lorries<\/span><\/i> (<\/span>Faraj<\/span><\/i>, 2008), from which the protagonist Nada emerges hurt but defiant, strong and uncowed, having \u201csought to live.\u201d Ashour is unerringly good inside these minds and those like Ruqayya\u2019s, the central character in <\/span>The Woman from Tantoura<\/span><\/i>, facing dispossession, displacement, and death from every direction in the early days turning to years of the Nakba, and yet always making the same gamble on living. Ashour\u2019s work embodies this refusal to abandon, this same story within a story to be radically conserved in a chest within a chest for future planting in freshened earth.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chaotic and\/or Composite Terrain<\/h4>\n

Radwa Ashour has written of being \u201cborn in<\/span> Manila el-Rawdah<\/span>, <\/span>an elongated stretch of land which knits the two sides of the river in Cairo\u201d with views of Pharaonic pyramids, Byzantine, Islamic and Coptic monuments and of dwelling in multiple languages. At the southern tip of the island stands \u201cone of the oldest Islamic monuments in Egypt\u201d the \u201cNilometre\u201d or \u201c<\/span>al-Mequiass<\/span><\/i>,\u201d<\/span> vital for land irrigation. Thus, \u201cto tell my story was to include that composite experience which constantly incorporated the old in the new.\u201d Or, once again, \u201ca composite of past and present, overlapping territories constitutive of an emotional and moral space for self-awareness and self-definition.\u201d The way in which these composite elements subvert all boundaries is also a description of Ashour\u2019s work as crystallized so powerfully in <\/span>Granada.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i>There may be a further dimension to this in Michel Serres\u2019 figure of the <\/span>harpedonaptai<\/span><\/i>, \u201cwhose role was to venture with their measuring rope onto the muddy floodplains of the Nile, after seasonal floodwaters had abated,\u201d as <\/span>I wrote in a previ<\/span><\/a>ous essay<\/span><\/a>. Serres grew up on the Garonne river outside Bordeaux, working on his father\u2019s dredger against the regular flooding there. He continued in <\/span>The Natural Contract<\/span><\/i><\/a>, \u201cSince the flood erased the limits and markers of tillable fields, properties disappeared at the same time. Returning to the now chaotic terrain, the <\/span>harpedonaptai<\/span><\/i> redistribute them and thus give new birth to law.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

If we assemble \u201cradical conservation,\u201d creative resistance, \u201csocial poeisis,\u201d and muddy redistribution together, we can imagine routes, even horizons, beyond the endgames of Modernity in climatic breakdown and genocidal horror. <\/span>Granada<\/span><\/i> is primarily an astonishing work of Arabic and world literature, but in the nowness of a translation for the 2020s, it\u2019s also a marker of the catastrophic moment from which all our presents emerge. Read it to enjoy Ashour\u2019s brilliant conjuring of points of life at Granada\u2019s height and precipitous fall, but also as a resource for what is to come if, as she said before her own death, \u201cwe resolve not to die before we<\/span>\u2019<\/span>ve sought to live.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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