Heart Deserts: Memory and Myth between Life and Death in Asharaf al-Khumaysi’s Manafi al-rabb and Miral al-Tahawi’s The Tent

The principality of the desert and Bedouin figure in Manafi al-rabb and The Tent mark their new-consciousness departure from anchoring Egyptian modern selfhood to predominant imaginings and conjectures of Egypt as deeply entrenched in agrarian roots and/or urbanized spaces in colonial and postcolonial contexts. While Manafi al-rabb challenges the disjunctions between life and death, body and spirit, and reality and myth through the its main character’s discovery of their connectedness in the magical desert realm, The Tent re-inscribes female inspirational and creative enterprise in contemporary male-dominated Bedouin culture. It also contrasts the value of women’s creative work in Bedouin cultural memory and heritage—as they appear in legends and folktales—with their current subordination. This chapter examines how both novels emphasize the significance of human love and unity between the self and the other by highlighting the destructive effect of the modern cultural conditions that split and disjoin them.

History and Representations of Otherness in Idris ʿAli’s al-Nubi and Bahaʾ Tahir’s Sunset Oasis

Al-Nubi and Sunset Oasis re-write the past experiences of Nubian and Amazigh minorities with postcolonial and colonial institutions, respectively, to reveal their unjust policies of “differentiation” and/or eradication of difference. The novels depict critical and dynamic areas of interaction and tension among their racially and culturally diverse characters, on one level, and among the allegedly homogenous Nubian and Amazigh communities, on the other, to disrupt essentialist perceptions of these significant groups. The distinct character of each novel lies in what Walter Benjamin describes as the authors’ “craftsmanship” and ability to draw from experience, theirs or others’, in storytelling. The chapter identifies that ᶜAli treats Nubian subordination from a shaᶜbi/public writer’s position, while Tahir adopts an intellectual’s stance in addressing the Amazigh’s. It examines how ᶜAli’s and Tahir’s commonality of goal and critical perspective, yet difference in treating state marginalization of both Nubians and Amazigh translate in their unique aesthetic choices.

Reading Cosmopolitanism in Yusuf Zaydan’s Azazeel and Muʿtazz Futayha’s Akhir yahud al-iskandariyya

Foregrounding the histories and experiences of ethno-religious minorities, the Copts’ in fifth-century Egypt in Azazeel and the Jews’ in the twentieth century in Akhir yahud al-iskandariyya, both novels simultaneously challenge conventional cultural and historical narratives of Egypt and highlight these groups’ global particularities. This beyond-the-nation literary reflection situates these groups within a larger, all-too-familiar, and fallible humanity and underlines the interplay between empire, nation-state, religion, and power. Examining these intricacies, this chapter pays attention to how both novels speak to rising exclusionary nationalisms and puritanical isolationism on the basis of religion—whether practiced in historical imperial or modern nationalist contexts. Set in Alexandria, which is celebrated as a cosmopolitan center, the novels disclose the city’s historical instabilities by mirroring the tumult lives of its fictional inhabitants. The characters’ uncertainties, global vagrancy, and subversion of established bodies of knowledge are connected to Rebecca Walkowitz’s conceptualization of a critical strand of cosmopolitanism.

Epilogue: New Directions

Following the January 2011 events, new directions in Egyptian novelistic production have emerged and, in their turn, commanded visibility and critical attention. This epilogue attends to these new directions by posing relevant questions like: Do the novels produced in the post-2011 period align with or break from the new-consciousness novel? How do they operate in Michael McKeon’s dialectical framework of historical change and the definitional volatility of the novel? Where do minorities’ concerns exist in their purview? Delineating the tribulations and ambivalences surrounding this historical moment, the epilogue examines forms and spaces of what Mariz Tadros calls “unruly politics,” where citizens continue to subvert authority and continue their protest. It identifies how unruly politics are aesthetically rendered in three post-2011 novels, Hisham al-Khashin’s Jirafit (2014), Basma ʿAbd al-ʿAziz’s The Queue (2016), and Muhammad Rabiʿ’s Otared (2016) and argues that they preoccupy with brining all citizens to their figurative negotiation table.

Historical Transformations: Framing a New Consciousness in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.

The Irrecuperable Heterogeneity of the Present in ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani’s The Yacoubian Building and Chicago

Two novels by author ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani are jointly analyzed to illustrate a multi-dimensional mapping of difference and asymmetries of power in domestic and public spheres as well as across local and global settings, Cairo in Yacoubian and Chicago in Chicago, all during times of resurgent essentialist perceptions of the self and the other. This juxtaposition delineates ineradicable interdependence between global margins and centers and how al-Aswani’s aesthetic construction of fictional worlds is with an unrelenting commitment to reality, observable to readers who are familiar with the spatial and cultural particularities of Cairo and Chicago. The nonconformist treatment of sensitive themes like sex, alcohol consumption, women’s subordination, and homosexuality has stirred controversy within certain literary and cultural circles, if not disqualification of al-Aswani’s works from possessing aesthetic value, despite the works’ unprecedented popularity as best-selling novels. This chapter discusses this novelistic phenomenon while inviting new critical considerations of what defines adab.