KU Leuven
Faculty of Arts
Department of Literary Studies
World Literature, Contrapuntal Literature
May Hawas
Dissertation submitted to the Department of Literary Studies
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in Literature
Supervisor:
Prof Theo D’haen
May 2014
Abstract
Drawing on some of the ideas of Edward Said and Paul Gilroy, this study argues that
“contrapuntal reading” (Said 1994) and an understanding that literary cultures are formed
through a process of transnational 'call and response' (Gilroy 1994) are necessary for an
approach to World Literature (Damrosch 2003). Focusing on the relation between
Postcolonial theory and World Literature theory, the study will ‘world’ five well-circulated
texts of the past half century: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Milan
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous
Conditions (1988), Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage (1999), and Amitav Ghosh’s In an
Antique Land (1992). The study will explore the various ways that protagonists have sought
to overwrite univocal nationalist paradigms or “predatory identities” (Appadurai 1995),
particularly in times of political conflict, and by constructing transnational imaginaries such
as gender solidarity, internationalism or shared histories. These alternative or larger
communal and political affiliations are classified into ‘cross-nations’, ‘supra-nations’, ‘global
nations’ and ‘everyday’ nations.
Chapter 1 compares the vision of the ‘international’ community in Milan Kundera’s The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964),
presented as a ‘supra-nation’ in the former and a ‘cross-nation’ in the latter. By considering
the romances of the two novels as tropes for individual, societal and national assimilation,
this chapter will examine how the main protagonists react to particular political stands taken
by governments and political parties. Set against the Prague Spring and the Suez Crisis,
respectively, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club posit the
romances as ways to resist popular nationalist rhetoric. The chapter will delve into possible
connections between Czechoslovakia and Egypt in the 1950s-60s, the contagion of protest in
the decade of the sixties within and outside Europe, and the ideas of world solidarity that
would colour international political alignments at the time, and would prompt new
transnational imaginaries, often in resistance against the local political status quo.
Chapter 2 looks at the use of landscape in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988)
and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from Cairo to America (1999) to
explore the ‘subnational and transnational’, ‘universal and specific’ (Pizer 2006) points of
dialogue in the gendered journeys of acculturation and conditioning. Touching on the
intersections of race, gender, nation and religion, the chapter compares the way protagonists
address local issues by drawing on an ethical ‘global nation’ of gender. Adopting Georg
Brandes’s metaphor of a comparative literary ‘telescope’ (Larsen 2012) which can be
maximised and minimised at will, the chapter moves in smaller concentric circles from the
globe to the individual to examine how the protagonists ‘go glocal’, appropriating and
describing landscapes to reflect the formation of their identities and resistance to their
political situations. The argument thus proceeds from natural landscapes being designated as
natural resources, then (national) territory, eventually narrowing to ornamental private
gardens, the home, and finally the bedroom.
Chapter 3 examines how culture is essentially produced by crossing borders, geographically
and temporally. It argues how Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) offers an
organisational framework to studying key travel writing in Arabic produced during the tenth
to the fourteenth centuries. Moving back and forth across centuries, and in light of Ghosh’s
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call for a united world culture and a resistant, subaltern historiography, the chapter describes
how travel writing circulated across the interlinked system of flourishing towns of the region
(Abu Lughod 1989) to eventually form a popular read/recited 'canon' of belles-lettres for a
‘sub-elite’ common reader (Mottahedeh 1980; Toorawa 2004; Schoeler 2009). The chapter
discusses how the travellers and their texts complicate the concept of a ‘homogenous’,
monolithic dār al-islām (abode of Islam), and teases out an alternative, secular literary
history of Arabic-Islamic letters today. This ‘imagined community’ of transnational,
‘intermediate’ relations working beyond political borders (those of the nation-state in the
present, and of the pre-modern town centres of the past) is referred to as the ‘everyday
nation’.
The conclusion rises to the challenge of emphasising the theoretical work of Easterners on
cultural encounter by introducing Taha Hussein’s vision of World Literature as mode of
cultural exchange and production. It compares Hussein's ideas on World Literature to the
critical debates and objectives of World Literature theory as it is understood in this study, and
shows how Hussein’s work might shed light on the five modern works treated in the
analytical chapters.
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Table of Contents
Introduction. A Clarification of Terms
Chapter 1. Love in the Time of World Crises: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable
Lightness of Being and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club
1
29
Chapter 2. Gender Resistance as World Literature: Individual and Global Landscapes
in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage
89
Chapter 3. Circumnavigating the Canon: Amitav Ghosh’s Antique Land between
‘Elliptical Refraction’ and ‘Double Mirrors’
138
Conclusion. World Literature: Negotiation and Equilibrium
193
Notes
221
Works Cited
243
Dutch Summary
278
3
Gratitude
I would like to thank my supervisor Prof Theo D’haen without whose conscientious
supervision and guidance my own ‘Bildung’-in-the-world would have taken a very different
and undoubtedly much more provincial route. It would have been privilege enough to gain
from Prof D’haen’s wide experience and penetrating academic insight if he had not also been
a pillar of support: unstinting with his wise advice, unflinchingly patient with a four-year
flood of questions of varying degrees of ignorance, unfailingly kind in pointing out my many
and recurrent mistakes, and unceasingly tolerant of my academic whims of fancy. Above all,
Prof D’haen introduced me to the pleasures and challenges of World Literature which has
formed not just the core of my present dissertation but has overhauled many of my past
assumptions and has effectively shaped my future interests. I couldn’t have asked for a more
wonderful advisor or stellar example, and I am grateful to him for all. I fully intend to remain
I think, one of his student-albatrosses, even at a long distance.
I would also like to thank Prof Ferial Ghazoul for agreeing to take me on, yet again, and for
travelling from Cairo. Prof Ghazoul has been a mentor malgré elle to me in many ways. To
her I owe learning the values of perseverance, pragmatism, and keeping sight of the
objective. An academic and teacher of dynamic energy and humbling acts of kindness, Prof
Ghazoul’s example will never leave me, even though I left her department some time ago.
There is still gratitude galore to be expressed, and I would like to thank Prof Ortwin de Graef,
officially, the Vice Dean of Graduate Research, unofficially, the ‘Elvis of Literary Criticism’,
for his support, his advice on where I might (successfully, as it turns out) seek research
funding, and his helpful comments on my work in my second year.
I would not have been able to come to Belgium had it not been for an IRO scholarship, and I
would like to acknowledge the way this grant has supported me and undoubtedly many others
to further our studies.
Finally, my family, whom I can never thank enough for anything, have put up with what
seems to have been a four-year bad mood. My mother Maha, my father Nabil, my brother
Ahmed, and my husband Bassam have withstood it all: the tantrums, the whingeing, the
untimely absences, the last-minute changes of plans, the various ‘sorry-I-can’t-I’m-doingmy-own- thing-in-Belgium’, but also the peculiar combination of PhD stress with
revolutions, curfews, electricity shortages and erratic flight schedules. Mum and Bassam in
particular, this would not have been possible without you. And Mum, this one’s only for you.
Any mistakes can be blamed on the muse.
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Introduction
A Clarification of Terms
This study argues that ‘contrapuntal reading’ is essential to a World Literature
approach. By ‘worlding’ a number of well-circulated texts of the past half century, the study
will explore various ways protagonists have sought to overwrite univocal nationalist
paradigms and counter ‘predatory identities’, such as through gender solidarity,
internationalism or shared histories. It will examine how protagonists evade and resist what
they have learnt through their national conditioning in order to transcend limiting nationalist
identities or otherwise restrictive imagined collectivities popular at the time of writing, and
locate themselves as individuals with larger communal or political affiliations.
What is Contrapuntal Literature?
One way of envisioning the perspective of World Literature might be to consider it as
literature that is essentially contrapuntal. In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said presents
the idea of ‘contrapuntal’ reading as a way to reveal the discrepant cultural experiences
expressed in the text, and simultaneously as a way out of the essentialist binaries which
certain critical reading might enforce:
A comparative or, better, contrapuntal perspective is required in order to see a
connection between [for example] coronation rituals in England and the Indian
durbars of the late nineteenth century. That is, we must be able to think through and
interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and
pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of
external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with others. (36)
To find out how dominant cultures maintain dominance over periphery cultures (in both the
colonial past and how this past may play into present postcolonial and metropolitan identity
5
discourses), Said argues that a revisionist but also future-oriented reading needs to be
adopted. Accordingly, the “cultural archive of empires” needs to be read with a synchronised
awareness and sensitivity to both the metropolitan history being narrated as well as the other
histories against which, but also alongside which, the hegemonic history acts (56).
Contrapuntal reading then, focuses on the main experience narrated in the text with an eye to
the other experiences it suppresses or alongside which it takes place and revisits the past with
an eye to the present and future.
Said explains his musical analogy further:
In the counterpoint of Western classical music, various themes play off one another,
with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting
polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the
themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work. In the same
way, I believe, we can read and interpret English novels, for example, whose
engagement (usually suppressed for the most part) with the West Indies or India, say,
is shaped and perhaps even determined by the specific history of colonization,
resistance, and finally native nationalism. At this point alternative or new narratives
emerge, and they become institutionalised or discursively stable entities. (59-60)
In this manner, reading with an awareness of the intertwined geographical/cultural
expansions of empires, that is, both the propagation of superior and distinctive national
cultures and the continuous resistance to them: a) renders a deeper reading of the colonial
experience –imperialist and resistant– by which both metropolitan and colonised histories and
cultures were shaped, b) gives voice to the silenced or ‘suppressed’ engagement with ‘Others’
in the text, and c) potentially decentres the institutionalised (metropolitan, racial, ethnic, etc.)
experiences which are posited as pure and prior, incognizant or emulative of, or indifferent
to, each other.
Published in the same year as Culture and Imperialism but focusing on black studies,
Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic resisted the exclusivist tendencies of both the nationalistbound thinking exemplified in traditional Euro-American ideals of ‘modernity’ as well as
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what Gilroy regarded as the worst excesses of racial purity in ‘black nationalism’. Like Said,
Gilroy criticised the obliteration of the distinctive black historical experience within the
experience of (Euro-American) modernity. Moving from the institution of slavery as the
source of migrating labour by which ‘civilisations’ have always been built to late nineteenth
and mid-twentieth century black literature, culture and emancipation movements, Gilroy
argued that the development of black culture in its diasporic and migrant communities in
modern times created models of cultural flux and innovation integral to the idea of modernity
itself. Hence, he states, “the time has come for the primary history of modernity to be
reconstructed from the slaves’ point of view” (55), not simply by including a number of black
narratives in the canon to be studied, but by calling for an acknowledgment of the
“inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas” through conversation and reciprocity (xi).
Delving into the work of key black artists and philosophers, Gilroy examined how they
contributed to avant-garde cultural movements of the twentieth century by drawing on
modern Western ideas but also by resisting the ‘project of modernity’ itself in order to
express the ambivalent existence of black communities as being within the West but not quite
of the West.
It is in a chapter on black music that Gilroy uses a similar ‘contrapuntal’ analogy as a
way of approaching black artistic expression: call and response. “Antiphony (call and
response) is the principal formal feature of …[black] musical traditions…. a bridge from
music into other modes of cultural expression, supplying…the…keys to the full medley of
black artistic practices” (78). He clarifies the pattern with quotes from Toni Morrison, who
refers to this movement in her writing as “slapping and embracing, slapping and embracing”
(78), and Ralph Ellison who calls it “a cruel contradiction….of individual assertion within
and against the group…[representing] his identity: as individual, as member of the
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collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition” (qtd. in Gilroy 79). Gilroy explains how
call and response is essential to the making –and reading– of cultures:
[T]here is a democratic, communitarian moment enshrined in the practice of
antiphony which symbolises and anticipates (but does not guarantee) new, nondominating social relationships. Lines between self and other are blurred and special
forms of pleasure are created as a result of the meetings and conversations that are
established between one fractured, incomplete, and unfinished, racial self and others.
(79)
These ‘new, non-dominant social relationships’, the ‘democratic’ manifestations of
‘communitarian’ practices resemble Said’s potential ‘alternative or new narratives’ which by
repetition (and further variation) become ‘institutionalised or discursively stable entities’.
Drawing on the call and response pattern, Gilroy illustrates how certain black forms
of music in the 1960s, for example, could bring Africa, America, Europe and the Caribbean
seamlessly together. He then concludes:
The very least which this music and its history can offer us today is an analogy for
comprehending the lines of affiliation and association which takes the idea of the
diaspora beyond its symbolic status as the fragmentary opposite of some imputed
racial essence. It is revealed to be a place where, by virtue of local factors like the
informality of racial segregation, the configuration of class relations, and the
contingency of linguistic convergences, global phenomena such as anti-colonial and
emancipationist political formations are still being sustained, reproduced, and
amplified. This process of fusion and intermixture is recognised as an enhancement to
black cultural production by the black public who make use of it. (95)
Gilroy’s contention seems to be that the fusion and intermixture demonstrated by call and
response is essential to an understanding of how culture in general works and is produced, but
also how resistance works within, through and against networks of dominance, and vice
versa. In a globalised world antiphony itself has changed from being a tidy ethnicallyencoded dialogue. Not only has the original call become increasingly harder to locate, but
groups of sounds all compete with each other so as to give the most suitable reply. To
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privilege the primary call (and response) is to forget that communicative expression is neither
a unique essence (110) nor is it undifferentiated heterogeneous babble.1
Both Gilroy and Said prioritise the need to revise or re-read texts from the periods of
rising nationalism and national-resistance movements in order to examine and question the
dominating objectives of cultural histories that propagate nationalist purity, as well as to
render visible the ellipses and silences of an all-too-complacent idea of progress that does not
mention by whose loss ‘progress’ is gained. Gilroy and Said envision, however, certain
aspects of the communal or national cultures which are supposed to ‘play music together’ so
to speak slightly differently. For Said, the centrality of the nation as a political unit essential
to the production and circulation of the texts (narrating ‘experiences that are discrepant, each
with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal
coherence and system of external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with
others’) entails that the different cultures or contributions are to be seen as independent but
not purist or exceptional; interconnected but not necessarily assimilative into either one unit
or a new ambiguously-hybrid third; and finally, culturally interdependent where one culture
depends on the image of the other to construct itself. Texts then are to be read “with a
simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other
histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts” (Said
Culture and Imperialism 56). Gilroy’s essentially non-national or transnational concept of the
black Atlantic, however, prioritises the subversively a-nationalist “intermediate concepts,
lodged between the local and the global, which have a wider applicability in cultural history
and politics precisely because they offer an alternative to the nationalist focus which
dominates cultural criticism” (Gilroy 6). Gilroy, then, focuses on rejecting the essentialism of
any, particularly racial, culture, even if it is, has become, or for that matter might become a
nation-state.
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The analogies of ‘contrapuntal’ and ‘call-and-response’ reading are significant for
what these views attempt to transcend of the solid binaries often marking Postcolonial,
subaltern, post-Soviet, etc., critical endeavours. Despite suggesting a ‘harmonious’ (the word
is not ideal) or organised textual whole, these movements or musical conversations highlight
the very important conflicts and transactions that have shaped cultures, whether through
colonialism or enslavement, through spread of religion or trade, or by consent or coercion.
Postcolonial studies in its earliest ‘disciplinary manual’, Ashcroft et al’s “hypercanonised”2
work on Postcolonial theory, presents the characteristics of postcolonial writing as that which
delves deeper into native cultures, re-works colonial art forms, and ‘writes back’: countering,
or rather de-centring, the literary nationalism of the great European powers by posing firstand third-world cultures as primarily, and hence, essentially, antagonistic. Viewing different
literary cultures contrapuntally, however, acknowledges the political antagonism that
Ashcroft et al. pose, but refutes that this antagonism lies between essentially discrepant
entities. Rather, contrapuntal or call-and-response reading seeks to examine the relations of
political resistance, where being opposed does not necessarily mean being opposite, and
where political resistance aims to throw out the bathwater of political dependence but save
the baby of political attachment.
As a natural corollary to their objectives, the first places to revisit indicated by both
Said and Gilroy are the texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Said
(who also goes back further in time) the texts of empire at its heyday (‘the cultural archives
of empires’ as he puts it) show the inescapable presence of the colony at the peak of supposed
imperial indifference; and so by reanalysing the archives which narrated the rise of global
forms of dominance, with the aim of searching for the experiences of the colonies, a wider
decentring project of literature and literary history might be achieved. For Gilroy, focusing on
the almost century-old heyday of black resistance underscores the intrinsic presence of black
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culture in all cultures, and aims to decentre notions of purist ‘white’ or ‘black’ cultures. As
Gilroy rather exasperatedly puts it: “If this appears to be little more than a roundabout way of
saying that the reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the
Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were
not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other,
then so be it” (2).3
As Postcolonial theorists have called for revisiting the colonial archives, so World
Literature theorists have called to revisit the (already variable) list of Western best works, or
the Western canon. To bring the perspectives of contrapuntal reading or call and response to
bear on the efforts of ‘expanding’ the Western canon in the field of World Literature, reading
the ‘canon’ contrapuntally, which contains the ‘classics’ or culturally-emblematic texts
repeatedly and most particularly ratified by empires and nation-states, also brings forth the
many different local literatures, each with their subjective experiences, already subsumed
within the ‘Western’ canon: preceding it, responding to it and proceeding alongside it.
Reading World Literature: Contrapuntally
When David Damrosch’s pointedly-titled “Rebirth of a Discipline” asserts that
founders of Comparative Literature like Hugo Meltzl and Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett had
global objectives, namely, to “counter the literary nationalism of the European great powers:
first, by widening the field to include masterpieces of other cultures…and second, by
expanding the European arena to include the literatures of smaller countries” (5), he taps into
precisely that which key theorists in Postcolonial and related disciplines (often working under
the established umbrella term of Comparative Literature) have been doing for the past
decades. Since the flagship Orientalism (1978), Postcolonial theory has often worked to
expand the range of read material particularly from ‘minor’ cultures, has adopted revisionist
11
readings of texts often aiming to highlight the texts’ submerged ‘Others’, and has gone
further back in time to revisit the ‘classics’ (Young 2001; Robbins 2012b).
Prompted by the historical circumstances of ‘nation-making’ in the late colonial, early
postcolonial and Cold War periods, one of the particular concerns of Postcolonial theory has
been to re-examine the cultural flux that went into ‘building’ the nation-state, and later, at
least in some countries, went into reforming the state and building citizenship. Since the
process of cultural flux and transnational literary reciprocity had been one of the early
debates discussed by key figures of the modernist national movements in colonised countries,
one of the subjects for critical enquiry post-independence has been the pluralist (or
contrapuntal) cultural landscapes of the colonial/postcolonial period –in other words,
‘modernity and its discontents’, both as historical process and as a historical consequence.4 In
this context key works from related disciplines such as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
(1982) became essential to much Postcolonial theory, revitalising its examination of nationformation and nationalism, and making integral both the relation of print culture (particularly
the novel) to the nation, as well as the state of ‘fantasy’ required to construct and maintain
‘national sentiment’ and affiliation.
While the works of Damrosch (2003; 2009a; 2009b (ed.); 2009c), Casanova (2004)
and Moretti (2000; 2003) seem to spearhead discussions on World Literature there has
appeared quite a large corpus of key texts on the topic in the past two decades, either singlyauthored such as those of Apter (2006), Pizer (2006), Rosendahl Thomsen (2008), Kadir
(2011), and D’haen (2012d), or multi-authored such as those by Prendergast et al (2004),
Behdad et al (2011), Papadima et al (2011), and D’haen et al (2012c; 2013). Key works on
the topic share the underlying proposition that World Literature concerns texts which have
circulated widely across borders, often through translation, and have affected cultures outside
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their local communities. Bringing to the fore markets and readership as the practical toolkit
by which culture is transferred, transmitted and transformed, Damrosch describes a
movement of ‘elliptical refraction’, that is, a contrapuntal reception of a single work or
author, whether in international circuits or in pre-modern times, “for established classics and
new discoveries alike” (What is World Literature? 5).
In Damrosch’s approach, contrapuntal reading connects the metropolis to the
colonised culture, but also connects cultures whose histories are intertwined by other ways
than colonialism in order to examine how these diverse networks shed light on the way the
texts function as literature. Since these networks are neither a-historical nor fixed, changing
in directional flow and modes of transfer (see, for example, Appadurai (1996)), the ‘link’
between, on the one hand, Postcolonial theory, which focuses on the relation between
metropolis and colony, and is seen as primarily ‘political’, ‘engaged’ or ‘ethical’, and on the
other hand, the ostensibly more a-political ‘World Literature’ approach that traces the
trajectory of a work as it moves from (any) one location to another, remains ripe for the
picking (see Young 2012; D’haen 2012d 133-51).
An approach that makes use of the best of Postcolonial theory and World Literature
would be to read texts contrapuntally, with an eye to highlighting the submerged or
suppressed ‘Other’ in texts that circulate, and therefore have some influence outside their
local cultures. Focusing on the submerged, less apparent ‘Other’ in the text, and comparing
the texts with related ‘Othered’ texts in the world, entails revealing and prioritising the minor
cultures embedded within and interacting with major cultures. This approach refutes the
presupposition that just because a comparison has been made then the texts automatically
become ‘of’ equal cultures, and therefore makes resistance to homogeneity, whether on the
level of the text (considered nationally-representative), on the level of the world market
(considered a compendium of equally-placed contributors), or on the level of the canon
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(considered as regional –Western or Eastern), a primary condition of what Aamir Mufti has
called a “global comparativism” (Mufti “Global Comparativism”).
By virtue of the common objectives of Postcolonial theory and World Literature, to
read world literature contrapuntally might mean to highlight the resistance to the dominant
exclusionism at the heart of the national imaginary, even as the nation-state remains mediator
and organising framework. To read world literature contrapuntally entails challenging the
idea that a world text is a product circulating simply and solely in an ‘arena’ of ‘free’
competition between equal and consenting players, but also challenging the idea that
‘national’ literature itself is the select output of equal, representative and analogous
individual contributors. To closely examine texts that travel means keeping an eye on the
discordant, interdependent cultural-historical experiences narrated by the texts, and also
mapping them to become aware of larger analytical patterns, whether through mapping
translation markets, free or forced trade, expansion of modern or ancient empires, free or
forced mobility of peoples, or otherwise. Finally, to read the world in the text, or to ‘go
glocal’ contrapuntally is not simply to acknowledge a wider, expanded literary canvas, but
also to acknowledge that, as Shami puts it: “[T]he global and local are interpenetrated
realities, and transnationalism and ethnonationalism are intertwined solidarities, sentiments
and practices…[T]o see global/local processes and trans/ethno-nations in terms of
schismogenesis, as categories that progressively divide populations in time and space, is to
miss the way that they not only inform one another but actively construct one another” (104).
The consideration of there being a minor or less-apparent Other is important, as many
of the moves to revisit the international or cosmopolitan horizons of Comparative Literature’s
founders by theorists of World Literature make clear (see, for example, Damrosch “Rebirth
of a Discipline”). Such re-readings have found it useful to recognise that the global
aspirations of Comparative Literature’s key figures and their motivations to seek new
14
international limits relate not a little to their own positions as Others: as exiles and migrants
(such as Auerbach and Wellek), as bicultural scholars (such as Posnett), or as specialists in
non-European, particularly Oriental, disciplines (such as Goethe, or more recently, Etiemble).
Highlighting the Other as active participants in world culture-making, however,
makes it important to discuss specifically the different concepts of World Literature theory
appearing outside core countries. Tagore’s understanding of World Literature cannot have
been an exception, and he can be joined by at least Taha Hussein from Egypt (more in the
Conclusion) and José Lezama Lima from Cuba.5 Like their theorist counterparts in Europe
and the US, it is important to take notice of what might have motivated such figures in their
diverse times and places to encourage a comparative approach to literature, or to question
where the incentive and perhaps requirement to weigh and balance, compare and contrast
various literary cultures came from. The conditions for such aspirations towards the great
wide world of a ‘comparative-international’ are as significant for less-spoken languages
outside the postcolonial paradigm which need to ‘compete’ or dialogue, depending on whom
you ask, with global ones, as it is for pre-colonial global ones, such as Arabic, which, as they
became global, interacted with and consumed smaller ones (more in Chapter 3).
Implicit within Damrosch’s definition is “not just …how such literature circulates far
from its birthplace but also…how it then crosses paths with local, earlier literary traditions,
transforming them while, concurrently, being transformed in the process” (Ricci 498). One of
the underlying issues dealt with by Postcolonial theory is the transformative process of
‘national’ cultures, and the way they came into a political state-of-being with the
appropriation of ideas and cultural artefacts from other cultures, rooted as these nationmaking endeavours, dilemmas or disasters have been in the necessity of adapting to an
increasingly widening network of connections.
15
From this perspective Gilroy and Said of course have not been the only key writers to
theorise the inherent interplay of modern cultures. Other theories of such cultural flux include
Lionnet’s métissage (1989; 1995), Bhaba’s concept of the hybrid and the ‘unhomely’ (1994),
Pratt’s “contact zones” (1992) and the concept of the subaltern reformulated (and later
expanded) by Guha and others in Subaltern Studies (1982 to present).6 The musical
analogies, however, of contrapuntality and call and response offered by Said and Gilroy7
stand out for their refutation of the idea of two essentialist forces which, connected or
disrupted by colonialism, create a fuzzy transnational third form, an idea appearing, for
example, in such theories as Bhabha’s hybridity and Lionnet’s métissage.8 Drawing on
Caribbean and Latin American resistance literature, Lionnet’s idea of métissage reuses the
initially inferior concept of ‘half-castism’ as a source for cultural subversion and political
empowerment. Like Bhabha’s notion of the ‘world literature of diasporic communities’, the
literature of the métisses offers an opportunity for a new transnational: a global
empowerment for those living ‘in the margins’ as being essentially different from those in the
centre, but rather than essentially pure, this time, always essentially blurred. These semiglobal and distinctive solidarities reflect precisely the essentialist ethno-identitarian premises
that Said and Gilroy decry. Instead, Gilroy and Said seem to make clear that different cultural
imaginaries, primarily racial for the former and national for the latter, are as necessary for the
appearance of new and future cultural forms as they had been integral for the appearance of
older ones. Both Gilroy and Said then stress that the process of cultural flux is multivocal,
reciprocal and of a long duration. This reciprocal pattern differs from, for example, Bhabha’s
theory of hybridity which seems bi-vocal and reactive from beginning (mimicry) to end
(hybridity). For Gilroy and Said the analogies of contrapuntality and antiphony (including the
hybridity or métissage the larger cultural process itself may include) attempt nothing less, if
16
used as an analytical approach to texts, than a ‘global comparativism’, a ‘planetary’
Comparative Literature (Spivak).
From the perspective of Said’s idea of contrapuntal reading and World Literature
theory’s geographical ‘border-hopping’, that is, by going further back in time, expanding in
space, and revealing the plural experiences suppressed in the text, it is possible to see that
there has always been a world literature occurring through exchange and fusion. The Bible is
a case in point.9 A world text, however, is not the same as a discipline of World Literature,
and the precise significance of transnational and comparative approaches is that they
emphasise long-standing and reciprocal textual and cultural connections and exchanges
between the peoples of the world. Ultimately, this requires revisiting transnationally-shared
cultural pasts, modern or pre-modern, with the intent of revealing the submerged experiences
of Others.
As Djelal Kadir’s Memos from the Besieged City demonstrates, world literature,
world writers –Great literary writing and narrative from pre-modern times to the present has
always involved, in a contrapuntal movement, the Other. Kadir himself takes up Said’s term
in his conclusion: “Comparative literature’s mission…is contrapuntally dual –at once
integrative and analytical. The discipline draws its vigor and focus from contending
pluralities of difference and commonality, its raison d’être grounded in highly self-aware
tasks of discovery, detection, recognition, differentiation, classification, and juxtaposition”
(205). In this way contrapuntal reading has as its objective reaching an awareness of the
transactions, interventions and transformations of and between local and trans-local cultures
in the form of the author, on the level of the text or in the community. As such Said’s
Orientalism moves from Dante to al-Jabarti and Auerbach; Kadir’s Memos moves from
Rashiduddin Fazlullah to Nicholas of Cusa and Hannah Arendt; Lionnet’s Postcolonial
Representations moves from St. Augustine to Nietzsche and Maryse Condé. In much the
17
same way as World Literature posits that “seen together with Sophocles, Kalidasa, and
Brecht, Shakespeare looks different than when he is viewed only in the company of
compatriots like Marlowe and Jonson” (Damrosch “Frames for World Literature” 3), so
Postcolonial theory has sought to show that in the company of Othello, Shylock, Cleopatra
and Caliban, characters like Desdemona, Antonio, Caesar and Prospero, too, look different.
Trans-border comparative work anchored by postcolonial consciousness takes this further by
showing how Othello looks different when the play travels ‘onwards’ back to the countries of
the ‘moor’ (Ghazoul The Arabization of Othello).
In the past few decades new global imaginaries have arisen; ‘the world’ as it
frequently tends to do, has changed once more. Consolidation of immigrant communities
(and the debates in different countries over the free movement of peoples and immigration
laws); intensive migration of labour; the continuation of communal violence from war to
terrorism (and the debates around civil wars and foreign policy) have inevitably entailed
more refugee, migrant and diasporic communities. The increasing linkage of networks
through mass communication which has made such communal restlessness more immediately
and more highly public has contributed too to reconceptualisations of the interconnectedness
of the world. Simultaneously, Orientalism as the flagship work for Postcolonial theory itself
has become a world (critical) text producing profuse scholarship. The constructed Orient –in
Said’s 1978 text largely North Africa and the Middle East– had become much larger by
Orientalism’s twenty fifth printing (1994). The Postcolonial has become ‘global’ in a way,
and more of the previously colonised/represented in imperialist discourses have identified
themselves as postcolonial, including post-Soviet states but also Russia itself (vis-à-vis
Western Europe), Japan, China, Ireland and India (Said “Preface”). This globalised
interconnectedness of scale and speed prompts a heightened reconsideration of the literature
that it produces (see, for example, Krishnaswamy and Hawley).
18
By pushing the period of ‘globalisation’ or global networks a little further backwards,
to the beginning of the twentieth century when empires were at their widest, Elleke
Boehmer’s “Global and Textual Webs, or What Isn’t New About Empire” questions
globalisation’s historical time-frame and linear chronology. Although globalisation is often
seen as “an entirely new, unprecedented phase” coming as the latest phase after the heyday of
imperialism, and then after the triumph of the ‘small nation’ (14), Boehmer suggests instead
that globalisation might have begun a little earlier, for the beginning of the (last) century too
had been marked by a previously unseen pace of networking that both connected the power
structures or controls of empire as well as the global resistances to it. Such global resistances,
(networking between metropolis and colony but also between colony and other colony) “were
always already operating within [empire’s] grids, appropriating and subverting [its]
transnational forms of operation” (23).10 As such, periods of ‘national liberation’ such as the
period from 1947 (India’s independence) to 1989 (the fall of the Soviet Union) where the
‘small nation’ rules supreme is not an end point but “a historically aberrant period, or at least
a digression from the increasingly more globalised phase in which we again find ourselves”
(23).
A longer, more deeply examined history of ‘globalisation’ as a mode of worldnetworking, then, but also a longer history of empire, and a longer history and future of
resistance: it is arguably here that Postcolonial theory and World Literature may most
obviously conjoin, and where contrapuntal and call-and-response reading may avert the
ostensible dangers of essentialist polarisation of the former and the threat of universalising
deracination of the latter. Following from a longer history of empire: early modern and premodern empires were not homogenous (although they are sometimes conceived as such when
posited as ‘precursors’ of modern national identities) and allowed the circulation of world
texts that have in modern times often been adopted as founding ‘national’ canonical works
19
(more in Chapter 3). To go back in time, from the critical perspective in the present, is to
weigh down and privilege these canonical texts (and our understanding of the cultures which
produced them and in which they have circulated) with the accumulated interpretations of
and insights into the silences of history.
To look forward too is important, particularly since national resistance has continued
after 1989. Postcolonial cultural production or theory does not simply end with the
termination of political occupation of various areas: let alone if occupation has ended only in
some areas (McClintock 1992; Said 1994b; Shohat 1997); has left behind, as part of the
imperialist inheritance along with good roads and sturdy administrative centres, rabid
political divisions (Carroll et al), has sustained political alliances which have threatened
stability and democracy in the once-colonised regions; or may have receded only to reemerge in different frameworks such as neo-colonialism and dependency (Hardt and Negri;
Young 2001 44-56). More widely, neither the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989-91
which was followed by secession movements and civil strife around central and eastern
Europe, nor the dissolution of major European empires in the 1940s-90s and the rise of the
‘small-nation’ dictator in the third world, have signalled the end of the exclusionary and
exceptionalist nationalist rhetoric that had initially characterised and marked the expansion of
modern empires. Such rhetoric still underlies, and not very subtly, superpower rhetoric as
well as the political rhetoric of those now-independent states whose governments have failed
to instate democracies and who are content to reaffirm the discourses of cultural binaries and
imperialist conspiracy theories for their own local political agendas. Moreover, in states
around the world, within Europe and outside it, multilingual and multireligious populations,
not necessarily or strictly ‘postcolonial’, have also chosen to resist under-representation in
what they perceive as a state which has become too ethnically-nationalist (and socioeconomically imbalanced), as, for example, in the respectively-specific situations of
20
Quebec/Canada, Flanders/Belgium, Scotland/UK, and Catalonia/Spain. The local and
regional respective situations are of course vastly different. Yet ‘post-Postcolonial’
resistance, if conceived as a wider discourse for political and cultural emancipation and
liberation, for inclusion in power structures, or as a continuing site for struggle of restless
nationalisms appears as an integral part of ‘nation-making’ in the form of calls for national
liberation, national secession, national citizenship, asylum rights and otherwise. If the
principle of liberation was not ground enough for a more global comparison of resistance,
such movements themselves have often been interconnected and mutually inspired (more in
Chapter 1).
In its potential political affiliations, rather like gender studies to which it has often
been linked, Postcolonialism has offered an additional chance for literary studies to be
directly active within the ‘real’ world. The implication of globalised literary study (see Said
“Globalising Literary Study”) potentially points to a sensitised awareness of the continuous
changes in political economy and in networks of cultural interdependence and information
transmission. This sensitised awareness too might suggest that much of the responsibility of
the resistant, sceptical or worldly impulses of the discipline lies on the role of the critic,
exemplified perhaps by a stance of constant vigilance to one’s own centrism. The specialised
reader then, rather than being a surveyor who is interested in all the world’s stories, however
many, becomes instead someone who makes of reading literature an ethical choice (Said
2001; Robbins 2012b; Appiah). Making reading an ethical matter seems also another way out
of essentialist ‘ethnic’ discrepancies for it entails revealing, acknowledging and highlighting
the attempts at resistance around the world, across the first-/third- world divide. Despite the
seeming obligation to question the dominance of ‘Western’ culture, no region or peoples has
had a monopoly on resistance and critique. Whether adopting an ethical engagement might be
the kind of intellectual pursuit everyone may aspire to adopt, resistance, Postcolonial, World
21
–contrapuntal literature, in its constant objectives to decentre and subvert but also to extend
and connect makes the study of literature itself more pertinent, ethical and ‘rooted’.
Postcolonial theory, World Literature or reading the Other across borders and against
homogeneity constructs a world that seems epidemically beset with the kind of national
complacency that would guarantee the cultural extermination of others, but it also reveals a
world equally and simultaneously beset with a tenacious resistance to complacency, cultural
monocentrism and images of stultifying, unidirectional cultural flows.
Resisting Homogeneity
Many detractors of World Literature (Spivak (2003); Tanouhki (2008); Figueira
(2010))11 and its various disciplinary approaches seem to focus on its demerits as a
pedagogical practice in the North American academy. Master lists of best works that address
monolingual students (the bi-and tri-lingualism often required by top universities aside) offer
an alarming vision for literary specialists who fear that this might push the comparative
literary perspective into a non-contextual, a-historical survey-type approach. Some probably
also see it as ringing the death knell of their own particular niches of study, especially in light
of the dependence of such niches, like others, on economic relations between the US and the
rest of the world (with the direction of supra-university funding into scholarship on certain
areas of the world rather than others). Such fears within the national pedagogical domain are
beyond the scope of this study, although it will be noted that they have not only appeared
with the popularity of World Literature (see, for example, Toorawa “Why I am not an
Africanist”).
Particularly pertinent to this study, however, is the overlap between World Literature
and Postcolonial theory in their focus on resistance against cultural homogeneity and national
chauvinism. “Criticism is worldly and in the world so long as it opposes
22
monocentrism…[that is] working in conjunction with ethnocentrism, which licenses a culture
to cloak itself in the particular authority of certain values over others” (Said “The World, the
Text, and the Critic” 53). Or as Moretti puts it –a critic whose reading approaches seem to lie
on an opposite plane from Said’s: “The point is that there is no other justification for the
study of world literature but this: to be a thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge
to national literature –especially the local literature” (“Conjectures” 68). As alarm bells still
ring from detractors of World Literature who feel naturally sceptical of statements of good
global intentions, proponents of World Literature argue that pedagogical anthologies of
World Literature actually aim to resist the limitations of (usually monolingual) national
canons (Damrosch “Comparative Literature/World Literature”), that, moreover, World
Literature is a method of reading and perspective, not a sum of works or a flat picture of a
world landscape (Hillis Miller; Kadir 2012)), and that World Literature can actually be used
to destabilise the centre in which the ‘fixed foot of the compass’ is set (D’haen 2012b; Kadir
2012). To expand in range, to expand in time, to focus on reciprocal transactions, and to work
on decentring primary assumptions: such visions, wide-ranging as they are, hardly seem to
aim at imperialist hegemony.
In a conversation with Gayatri Spivak, David Damrosch specifies three potential
problems of World Literature in aspiring to transcend the national-bordered matrix: “The
three intertwined problems are that the study of world literature can very readily become
culturally deracinated, philologically bankrupt, and ideologically complicit with the worst
tendencies of global capitalism”. He adds, wryly, “Other than that, we’re in good shape”
(“Comparative Literature/ World Literature” 456). On the other hand, the intertwined dangers
of Postcolonial theory (although not by its skilled practitioners) around the world has been to
polarise European/non-European as essentially opposite, to dwindle into nostalgic
constructions of the ‘past’ in the face of the disappointments of the present, and to cater to the
23
consumption of the Western, particularly North American, academy –dangers which point to
precisely the inability to overcome the first/third world dependency matrix (D’haen (2012a);
Dirlik; Gikandi). One might add, ‘Other than that, we’re in good shape’.
To read resistance contrapuntally is to note that it occurs together with, in the same
cultural domain as, and often with the same tools as dominance. Tracing works and writers as
they move outside of their local communities stresses that borders –political, disciplinary,
epistemological– are permeable. Tracing the refraction of works inside a particular urban
‘centre’ may produce a surfeit of accounts of the same old ‘world metropolises’, and yet this
dreaded influx has not happened, and the accounts that have appeared (see, for example,
Casanova), besides being valuable for what they did discuss quickly elicited critique for what
they did not (Prendergast 2001; Kadir 2011 178-80; Damrosch 2003 27). Examining texts
‘glocally’ by focusing on the global cultural convergences within a text problematises and
resists the ‘purist’ ethnic ideal in national cultures, implicit even in those states which have
bravely attempted to represent their multicultural populations.
In this study, resistance to ‘national chauvinism’ refers to the protagonists’ refutation
of the purist ideal that still lies at the heart of definitions of political (particularly national)
identities, whether ethnic, linguistic, religious, or gendered. ‘Resistance literature’ in Barbara
Harlow’s early formulation (1987) is defined as literature that considers at its crux the
struggle for national liberation and independence on the part of colonised peoples in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which participates in these struggles by demanding
recognition of its unique literary position and by questioning or subverting the creative and
academic norms and canons in the West. Departing from the work of the likes of Fanon,
Cabral, Kanafani and Césaire, Harlow’s book cannot even by today’s ‘global’ standards be
described as simply ‘national’ in scope, particularly as she intentionally chooses material –
prison memoirs, poetry, short stories– “largely excluded or ignored…in traditional
24
departments of literature organized according to ‘national’ criteria…[and] even in
comparative literature” (xvi). Her geographical scope too is large, comparing as it does
writers across Central America, Africa and the Levant.
Resistance beyond or after national liberation struggles12 might refer to a cultural
engagement with what Appadurai calls “predatory identities”: “large-scale group identities
that seem to require –as a rigid requirement of their mobilization and force– the restriction,
degradation or outright elimination of other identities, usually numerically, culturally and
constitutionally ‘minor’ ones” (“The Grounds of the Nation-State” 133). Appadurai focuses
on how these predatory identities are worked out through the form of the modern state in
relation to territory (thus becoming ‘predatory nationalisms’) and ultimately result in
violence: “From the United States to Papua New Guinea, some plausible answer has had to
be supplied to answer the question: what magic halo distinguishes this group of modern
citizens from the next one? Pressures to cleanse internally and expand imperially are
frequently exercises in supplying answers to this question” (134).13 In their different contexts,
Gilroy refers to this as the ‘racial purity’ espoused by black nationalism, Said as ‘nativism’turned-millenarian “if the movement has any sort of mass base, or…small-scale private
craziness” if it does not (“Yeats and Decolonization” 82). The repetition of exclusivist and
exceptional claims (which encourage the rise of ‘predatory identities’) put forth by national
selfhood, carried by the sometimes-embittered political-economic intertwinement (in its
diverse forms) of today’s ‘global village’, ensures that, simply put, what goes on in one part
of the world is either everyone’s problem ‘if it turns millenarian’, or may eventually be
everyone’s problem, even if for now it is still some ‘small-scale private craziness’. A
politically-sensitive (and not necessarily ‘correct’) World Literature approach that extends the
best of Postcolonial theory is one that might focus on extending the notion of resistance to
predatory identities.
25
The Texts
The texts dealt with in this study might all be termed as ‘postcolonial’ since they
engage with national liberation struggles either overtly, as is the case of Milan Kundera,
Waguih Ghali, Leila Ahmed and Tsitsi Dangarembga, or covertly, as is the case of Amitav
Ghosh. More importantly, however, they belong to World Literature, resisting as they do
many levels of oppression of liberty whether during national struggles of liberation or postindependence, both by the coloniser and by the colonised. The works manifestly resist the
facile polarisation of people into victims and victimisers. In their cultural transactions and
modes of circulation, the works can be seen to “[operate] in a multi-dimensional space, in
relationship to four frames of reference: the global, the regional, the national, and the
individual…[with all four frames], moreover, continually shift[ing] over time, and so the
temporal dimension serves as a fifth frame within which world literature is continually
formed and reformed” (Damrosch “Frames for World Literature” 496).
Thus, Waguih Ghali resists both British imperialism and Nasserite Arab-Egyptianism;
Milan Kundera resists Sovietisation but also the pitfalls of post-1960s Czechoslovakian
nationalism; Leila Ahmed and Tsitsi Dangarembga resist static identitarian positions as
gendered subjects of colonial and postcolonial regimes; while Amitav Ghosh resists a worldknowledge divided and segmented into national canons and periods by posing a ‘globalised’
literary corpus and history that reaches from the twelfth century to the present. Considering
the texts in their political contexts makes it important to discuss where the protagonists locate
themselves as members of the nation, that is, as nationalists, but also as the state’s first critics.
Such protagonists resist discourses that espouse blind nationalism, national exceptionalism or
ethnic purity at the same time as they assert the importance of the state’s sovereignty. As
these protagonist-nationalists argue that a nation-state is defined in relation to similar states
26
and as a member of a world collective, reading the texts requires locating the nation-states
referred to within larger frames of international politics and culture.
An attempt has been made to select texts coming from different parts of the world, all
of which have circulated and been translated and adapted outside of their local communities,
and some of which are considered representative of their ‘genres’. They have also been to
various degrees considered as ‘classics’, ‘masterpieces’ and ‘windows on the world’
(Damrosch What is World Literature? 1-35). All of them engage critically with pivotal
questions of World Literature and world culture: shared histories and the meaning and onset
of modernity, the impact of translation and adaptation on reception, the migration of people
and their works, and the nature and value of literature whether as an academic practice or
creative pursuit.14
Although emphasis has been given to history in parts of the ‘Middle’ East and Africa,
with Egypt appearing in the texts as theme, regional centre and cultural crossroads, the
discussion aims primarily to read these geographically-rooted texts in order to show how they
travelled to other parts of the world; to compare and link the texts with other creative works
outside of their ‘home’ cultures; and to dwell on the cultural links between the Middle East
and other cultures. Thus, the works of Ghali, Ahmed, and Ghosh all allude to Egypt and
Egyptian literature in one way or another. Yet Ghali’s novel is compared to Milan Kundera’s
to shed light on the political situation of Czechoslovakia and the wider literary history of
Europe. Ahmed’s memoir is compared to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel to discuss the
formative influences of nature, gender, race and education in the Rhodesian struggle for
national liberation. Ghosh’s twentieth-century anthropological travelogue on Egypt is used as
a critical organising tool to approach mediaeval and early modern travel texts written in or
translated into Arabic from Baghdad, Sicily, Persia, and Andalusia. Additional effort has
been made to show how the discussion may be taken further by alluding to other creative
27
works published in or on different places, sometimes in the main discussion, but more often
through endnotes. The emphasis on the Middle East and Africa is only meant to emphasise
the locations of these regions in the world.
The main five works dealt with also share to varying degrees a preoccupation with
individual formation as the subject of national (and, because the nation exists in the world,
therefore worldly) conditioning. The preoccupation with the fantastically-fluid German term
Bildung, a term that has crossed international borders but has often retained its original
language, appears in the novels in the brooding, restless relation posited between the
experiences of the protagonists and the changing nation-states; it also seems integral to the
discussions of resisting ‘predatory identities’ in this study particularly in light of the tensions
inherent in World Literature theory between world literature being simultaneously a mode of
aesthetic appreciation, pedagogy and ethical engagement. The connection between Bildung
and nation-formation was made clear from early on both in Germany and elsewhere, with its
namesake narrative of individual freedom and self-actualisation, the Bildungsroman,
appearing reflective of the actualisation of the political community (the nation) and from
there, the universal well-being of, well, Being. Bildung is supposed to narrate “the
acculturation of a self –the integration of a particular ‘I’ into the general subjectivity of a
community, and thus, finally, into the universal subjectivity of humanity” (Redfield 38; qtd.
in Vermeulen and de Graef 249). In most of these works too, Bildung, in its own uneasy
location between a form of free self-actualisation on the one hand, and a form of imposed
institutionalised education (or the systems of education taking place under the aegis of the
free state) on the other, takes on added significance for the not-so-free protagonists in a notso-free colonised state and who themselves are often the products of primarily Western
systems of education. These protagonists therefore, often find themselves having to negotiate
their self-actualisation within a system of education that was politically designed precisely to
28
limit the political self-actualisation of people ‘like’ themselves, that is, the colonised, often
non-white, subjects. As all the works chosen are autobiographical to various degrees, they
also touch implicitly upon the contested relation between autobiography or life-narration and
the Bildungsroman.
Chapter 1 will compare the vision of the ‘international’ community in Milan
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the
Snooker Club (1964). By considering the romances of the two novels as tropes for individual,
societal and national assimilation, this chapter will examine how the main protagonist in each
novel reacts to the particular political stands taken by peers, political parties and
governments.
Love experiences are a recurrent motif in narratives concerned with formation. In
Bildungsromane love affairs signal sexual autonomy that is integral to the functioning,
development, maturity and all-rounded heterosexual well-being of the usually male
protagonists. Love constitutes one or more necessary hurdles in the acculturation process, and
relates directly to the protagonists’ urban, modern and national conditioning. Successful love
affairs have often pointed to the protagonist’s ‘moulding’ along correct lines and his eventual
ability to function as a responsible citizen who will, along with and because of a suitable
partner or spouse, also be the progenitor of future suitable citizens. By the same token, failed
love affairs have often signified that the individual is at odds with the norms of society and is
therefore flirting with disaster, a state which, again depending on the zeitgeist, could point
out the individual’s naiveté (give him time and experience and he will toe the line), his
eternal alienation, or his inability to adapt to societal values because these values themselves
need rethinking (see Moretti 1987; Buckley; Beddoes; Swales). In the past few decades, in
postcolonial novels of formation, love stories have often been used as metaphors for national
conditioning, whether as a conscious departure from the Bildungsroman or as an extension of
29
the organic (and convenient) national ideal of the family being a nation writ small (see
Summers; Sainsbury).
Set against the Prague Spring and the Suez Crisis, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
and Beer in the Snooker Club respectively posit the romances as ways to resist emerging
popular nationalist rhetoric. The novels transcend these parochial nationalist imaginings and
offer alternative visions of national identities: deeper visions, by personalising the political
discourse to an individual’s personal lived experience of the nation, and more comprehensive,
and implicitly greater, ones, by locating the nation in a wider ‘world’, specifically in relation
to international players. Ghali resists Nasser’s anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist Arabism with an
image of individual cosmopolitanism that combines or tries to combine the elite ‘good life’
with social justice, and Kundera resists Czechoslovakian nationalism and Sovietism by
(re)locating Bohemia within a lost, Edenic pan-European heritage. These counter-national
imaginaries suggest that any integral understanding of the political identities of the Czech
Republic and Egypt necessitates locating these countries as essentially part of the world.
More specifically, it requires defining what larger political Selves these nations are affiliated
to and what political Others they are not. This transnational approach to nation-imagining
may be described as ‘supra-national’ in Kundera’s case and ‘cross-national’ in Ghali’s.
Chapter 2 will look at the use of landscape in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous
Conditions (1988) and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from Cairo to
America (1999) to explore the ‘subnational and transnational’, ‘universal and specific’ points
of dialogue in the gendered journeys of acculturation and conditioning. Touching on the
intersections of race, gender, nation and religion, the chapter will compare how the
protagonists address local issues by appealing to a shared ethical or moral world of gender, or
what may be called a ‘global nation’. Narrating stories of women’s lives in women’s spaces,
the protagonists move towards education, independence and social status, but also to the
30
world of the imagination, and they come to understand that to be worldly means to be able to
empathise with the local and the global.
Going, as Damrosch puts it, ‘glocal’15 the women protagonists explore individual
formation in light of gender issues and within a specific national context. They thus transcend
the nation to a more global ‘solidarity’ of women by qualifying (rather than effacing) the
political question of the texts from one of national citizenship (what does it mean to be
Zimbabwean, Egyptian or English) into one of gender codified by national and postcolonial
paradigms (what does it mean for the narrator to be a woman of the world at a specific time
in Zimbabwe, Egypt, England and the US?). Moving in smaller concentric circles from the
globe to the individual the chapter will examine how the protagonists appropriate and
describe landscapes to reflect the formation of their identity and resistance. The argument
thus proceeds from natural landscapes being designated as natural resources, then national
territory, before narrowing down to smaller constructed, boundaried landscapes, such as
ornamental private gardens, the home and finally the bedroom.
Chapter 3 will examine the way culture is essentially reinvigorated and produced by
crossing borders, geographically and temporally. It will discuss how Amitav Ghosh’s In an
Antique Land (1992) sheds light on, stands in dialogue with and offers an organisational
framework to studying key travel writing in Arabic produced in the 10th-13th century
Afroeurasian world by the region’s (s’) various inhabitants. The chapter presents some of the
historical writings which Ghosh cites in Antique Land and in his essay on the same subject in
Subaltern Studies, and examines the writings in light of Ghosh’s call for a united world
culture and a resistant, also subaltern historiography. As an example of transnational,
‘intermediate’ relations working beyond political borders (those of the ‘nation-state’ in the
present, and of the pre-modern ‘town centres’ of the past) this mode of imaginary community
might be called the ‘everyday nation’, not the exceptional one, but the (arguably large)
31
numbers of undocumented real people who have not necessarily spoken for the ‘nation’.
Moving back and forth across centuries through the organising lens of Ghosh’s work, the
chapter describes how travel writing circulated in the flourishing town centres of the region
over centuries to construct a popular read/recited 'canon' of belles-lettres for a ‘sub-elite’
common reader. The chapter discusses how the travellers helped construct the ecumenical
concept of 'dār al-islām' (abode of Islam) for their multi-lingual and multi-religious readers,
and, in equal measure, how the travellers by their free mobility and narration, as well as their
incentives to travel and write, actually complicated the idea of a homogenous, monolithic
‘abode of Islam’. This idea of a homogeneous ‘Islamic world’ often used in political and
academic discourse to denote one large uniform region is arguably a fallacy that besets
common discussions of Arabic literature and feeds popular Islamism today.
Finally, the conclusion will summarise some of the previous analysis but will also
look forward to future routes for critical thought. It will attempt to rise to the challenge
pointed out in this introduction: the need to delve into the theoretical work of Easterners who
have had, precisely because of colonial history, all the incentives ‘in the world’ to compare
and juxtapose cultures. Focusing on an article published in English by Taha Hussein, the
‘Dean of Arabic Letters’, but also alluding to his prolific work in Arabic and French, the final
chapter will introduce Hussein’s vision of World Literature as an international mode of
cultural exchange and production, and a standard for national allegiance. Hussein's discussion
of World Literature will also be used to shed light on the five modern works, for they all
stand at a poised point of what Hussein calls 'equilibrium': between ancient heritage and
modernity, past achievements and future aspirations, individual creativity and collective
tradition, and national rootedness and international attachment.
32
Chapter 1
Love in the Time of World Crises:
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club
Literature, let’s say, entertains history, the way we entertain an idea; it also entertains itself, never at a loss for
conversation or amusement; and in its more radical forms it invites history to think again.
Michael Wood, Children of Silence (13)
They speak of politics as ‘facts’. As though no one had explained to them the difference between ‘facts’ and that
‘reality’ which includes all the emotions of people and their positions. And which includes also triangular time
(the past of moments, their present, and their future). They speak of politics as the decisions of governments and
parties and states, like the eight o’clock news.
Politics is the family at breakfast. Who is there and who is absent and why. Who misses whom when the coffee
is poured into the waiting cups. Can you, for example, afford your breakfast? Where are your children who have
gone forever from these their usual chairs?....What reproach do you wish to utter? And what reproach do you
wish erased?...Who imported this small, shiny teaspoon from Taiwan?....Politics is the number of coffee-cups on
the table, it is the sudden presence of what you have forgotten, the memories you are afraid to look at too
closely, though you look anyway. Staying away from politics is also politics.
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah (43-44)
This chapter will compare the use of romance tropes in Milan Kundera’s The
Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964)
to resist the popular nationalist rhetoric surrounding the Prague Spring and the Suez Crisis,
respectively. The novels transcend parochial nationalist collectivities and offer alternative
visions: more pertinent ones, which juxtapose the political discourse with an individual’s
personal, lived experience of the nation, and wider ones, which locate the nation vis-à-vis
other nations, among international players and as part of a more universal political-historical
discourse. These counter-national imaginaries suggest that any understanding of the political
identities of Bohemia and Egypt necessitates locating these countries as part of a wider
world. Yet the transnational ‘world’ imaginaries Kundera and Ghali suggest are very
different. ‘Supra-national’ in the former and ‘cross-national’ in the latter, these perspectives
suggest different ideas of political affiliation and the political Other.
33
Love and Bildung
As formation narratives, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker
Club depict two individual journeys of national conditioning. The link between the ‘novel of
education’ and nation-building has often been drawn, with the Bildungsroman (perceived as
having been formally ‘launched’ with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795-96)), the rise of the
nation-state, and the rise of the novel being more or less synchronous.16 There is still some
debate about what specific formal or thematic characteristics are indispensable to the
Bildungsroman (see Swales; Buckley; Beddows), including opinions that the term
Bildungsroman may refer to quite different things in different literary traditions (see Miles;
Gottfried and Miles), or may be a form that ceased to exist in the twentieth century (see
Moretti The Way of the World).
Nevertheless, the references to Bildungsroman remain, as does the link between
Bildungsroman, ‘nation-building’ and societal affiliation –a link clearly indicated in recent
works referring to the ‘European’ (Summerfield), ‘Spanish-American’ (Doub), ‘African’
(Collins) and ‘Arab’ (Hallaq; al-Moussa) Bildungsroman. Despite the different languagecultures and sometimes periods these studies work with, they share a common understanding
of the Bildungsroman similar to that described by one of its earliest proponents, William
Dilthey: “The…[Bildungsromane] all portray a young man of their time: how he enters life in
a happy state of naiveté seeking kindred souls, finds friendship and love, how he comes into
conflict with the hard realities of the world, how he grows to maturity through diverse lifeexperiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about his purpose in the world” (Dilthey
5:336). Additions or changes to this ‘core’ formula are then considered as culturally-specific
and intentional deviations, such as the ‘feminist’ Bildungsroman (Bolaki), the ‘feminist
British’ Bildungsroman (Fraiman), or the ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘Russian’ and ‘British’
Bildungsroman (Moretti The Way of the World).
34
Towards the ends of ‘attaining certainty about his purpose in the world’, the
protagonist then needs to experience, or find, by Dilthey’s formula, friendship and love –
rehabilitative social relationships which signal the protagonist’s assimilation into society and
adaptation to its mores, and therefore indicate that society itself is flourishing with the wellbeing of its individuals. Love affairs become part and parcel of the development process,
integral to the formation of the individual and the well-being of the nation. In this formula the
love affair becomes a trope for two ‘kinship’ myths at the same time: the nation-kinship
myth, that is, the idea of the family being a nucleus unit of the nation, and the Bildung myth,
or the ability to form a suitable relationship indicating one’s potential to achieve social
assimilation and lead a meaningful existence. The successful love affair often points to the
protagonist’s ability to function as a responsible member of society, a citizen proper who
will, with a suitable spouse, be the wise progenitor of future suitable candidates for the
nation. Hence, J H Buckley, writing specifically on the English Bildungsroman, states that
the protagonist needs to go through at least two love affairs or sexual encounters in order to
signal his progress to social maturity: “one debasing, one exalting, [and both] demand[ing]
that in this respect and others the hero reappraise his values” (17). Meanwhile Franco Moretti
expounds on this idea by arguing that love relations in nineteenth-century novels of formation
were presented differently among various ‘national’ corpuses according to social mores and
artistic traditions; the common depiction of adultery in the French Bildungsroman was
countered, for example, by marriage in the English Bildungsroman of domesticity (Moretti
The Way of the World).
Rather than a full cycle of growth to maturity, the formation narratives in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club offer more accurately and
simply a cognitive transition, a move from one point of ‘knowing’ to another, where maturity
is not necessarily the resolution but an off-chance and the real focal point is the process of
35
gaining experience. The protagonists’ political conflicts and their moment(s) of selfenlightenment are dramatised and posited as somehow representational of a collective
experience (hence the ease with which both texts have been read as ‘national allegories’) and
the general ‘human condition’. By depicting individuals who are strongly sceptical of the
state’s ideals of national belonging, the novels do not simply depict the assimilation or lack
thereof of the protagonist-citizen, but stress the seemingly inevitable conflict between
individual and community, community and governing-structure. As part of the nation but also
as an intelligent worldly outsider who is able to critique it, the individual can consequently
refute popular or emergent ‘national’ histories and what such histories threaten of
historiographic distortion and collective forgetfulness.
The two protagonists, Tomas from The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Ram from
Beer in the Snooker Club, thus attempt to transcend the noisy rhetoric and jargon of
politicians and state-politics in order to address the more important matter of locating
individual identity vis-à-vis the nation-state and the larger world. Developing as political
events rage in the background, the love stories at the heart of the novels bring these identity
affiliations to the fore. The significance of political crises is that they serve to temporarily
mobilise the nation (or at least much of it) and later, perhaps for centuries and even
atavistically, become part of the rhetoric of national self-definition. Because the protagonists,
caught in the urgency of the political situation, are also questioning the fundamentals of their
countries’ political policies, the decisions they take towards women gain political resonance,
creating the personal-political dimension which exemplifies the nation as an individual lived
experience in juxtaposition with, or even in contradiction of, the collective experience
claimed by state propaganda and historical accounts.
36
Two Transnational Communities
Both novels recount similar plots of (younger) men facing politically-determining
choices, and although both men resist the minimizing nationalist ideologies concurrent in
their countries and seek to widen them into transnational concepts, the two novels give
different perspectives of the transnational. Kundera transcends the post-Prague Spring state to
envision a ‘supra-nation’ of Europe, a regional bloc that he perceives as a world in itself. He
emphasises the shared nation myths of Europe and Bohemia to resist the Orientalisation of
Czech culture behind the ‘Eastern Europeanness’ of the Wall, Iron Curtain, Orthodox
Church, or Slavic semantic family (Kovačević), and works into his argument a small
nation/large nation discourse17 that calls to save Czech history from local provincialism on
the one hand and foreign barbarism through Russification on the other. Kundera’s supranation transcends the local-national level by asserting that the cultural boundaries of the
Western European bloc actually include more of the peoples of Europe, but restricts this
expansion by considering Europe not just as a regional bloc in the world but as the world: the
maker of history and the marker of time. What happens outside Europe’s geographical
boundaries happens as if on another planet, occasionally noteworthy like an infrequent
eclipse but otherwise distant and unconnected. Perceived as global, Kundera’s supra-nation is
presented from the top down, emphasising the grand narratives of history even as it questions
them, and often heavily engages in totalising power discourses of distinctiveness and
exceptionalism.
In Beer in the Snooker Club Waguih Ghali constructs a ‘cross-national’ vision of
Egypt which opposes the political discourses and slogans in Nasser’s state, from anti-Zionism
to Arab socialism, by highlighting all the communal and individual identities these discourses
exclude. The cross-national perspective transcends the nation by linking individuals together
around the world, focusing on a common ‘humanity’ rather than common ‘citizenship’. The
37
novel resists political labelling by pointing to myriad contra-definitions of what it may mean
to be ‘Egyptian’. Ghali’s cross-nation is depicted as a personalised alternative to, and
confessional escape from, the political situation. As such, Ghali’s cross-nation describes
Egyptian society not from the top down, but by digressions and divergences, often through
chance encounters with representatives of Egypt’s classes and communities: street boys and
rich playboys, and janitors and cultural attachés. At its most general the novel expresses
Ram’s nostalgic lament for a lost communal knowledge and way of doing things. Although
he clearly critiques Nasser’s regime, the narrator fails to offer a precise political alternative
(or, tellingly, a clear narrative closure). As Kundera, via his supra-nation, expresses
weariness of both the Czech Communist Party and the Czech dissident intellectuals, and
transcends or resists the political situation by weaving his narrative into broader Western
philosophies, Ghali’s cross-national vision expresses weariness with nationalism in general,
and wishfully dreams of a global cosmopolitanism.18
Kundera seems to accept the division of the world into political alliances based on
homogenous cultural traditions and ethnicities; what he has more trouble with is where the
Czech nation (or Bohemia) is placed. Because the political strength and therefore the
historical image of ‘small nations’ is so precarious, the novel’s protagonist Tomas wishes for
either greater freedom to choose his own political destiny or the freedom to forego choice
altogether. Ghali, on the other hand, resists the distinctive East/West dichotomies that would
in his time eventually be named the Cold War, and which would place Egypt, probably
beyond any degree Ghali imagined, at the crossroads of whimsical political pigeon-holing:
today anti-Zionist, pro-Jewish and pro-Palestinian, tomorrow anti-Zionist and proPalestinian, and the day after, anti-Jewish and pro-Palestinian; today pro-British and French,
tomorrow anti-imperialist; today pro-American, tomorrow anti-Western; today indifferentArab, pro-Soviet; tomorrow pro-Arab, anti-communist. Rather than desire stronger political
38
agency, Ram, the main protagonist, yearns to bring down the political binaries that bind
people into marked-out mutually-exploiting groups.
Both cross-nations and supra-nations embody different visions of a ‘world’
perspective. They can also be seen to draw on the different ‘international’ conceptions
common through the twentieth century, particularly apparent during the Cold War period in
regional alliances whether intended for expansionist political power such as the USSR, or for
the sake of defending oneself against similar superpowers, such as NATO. ‘Sovietism’ and
the concomitant communism affected Czechoslovakia and Egypt in the 1950s-60s in
radically different ways, but projected in both countries a similar political discourse on local
and foreign policies. This discourse proclaimed “internationalism and
condemned…chauvinism in [its] ideology, programs and propaganda” (Tomaszewski 67). At
the same time: “[It] tried to gain the confidence of the major nations of each [allied] country
by playing on patriotic feelings and the traditions of the majority including the traditions of
national struggle for independence and/or unification...a task of reconciling the national
tradition with internationalist ideology and current political needs” (Tomaszewski 67).
Soviet influence took various political forms according to each country’s particular
situation. In Czechoslovakia, which was eventually directly annexed as a satellite state, the
popularity of Sovietisation was always tentative, primarily as Russia had frequently appeared
in Czech history as an unsatisfactory but ‘lesser evil’, a saviour from other hostile, often
German(ic), powers. Although the Communist Party had won the elections of 1946,
consolidated its hold on power in the coup of 1948, and quickly commenced refashioning
Czechoslovakia into an extension of the Soviet entity (Sayer 14), even Czech and Slovak
communists in sympathy with Russian ideologies had had early on “ideological difficulties
with Karl Marx’s derogative opinions about their nations and his condemnation of national
movements (notably in 1848) among Slavic nations” (Tomaszevski 68). In Egypt, Russian
39
culture was familiar in literary and journalistic circles, while Egyptian communists, often
working illegally, had helped spread Soviet ideas (Ginat), but after the Suez Crisis the Soviet
Union came to be seen as a formidable ally against ‘Western imperialism’, clinched as the
relationship was with agreements of trade, military and monetary aid, and the exchange of
professionals and soldiers. Inasmuch as Egypt was actually able to determine its own destiny,
in the 1960s it was still much freer to steer its own course in relation to the Soviet Union than
was Czechoslovakia. Indeed, the polemics of non-alignment could even afford Nasser a dual
privilege. The first was of cracking down or continuing to crack down on communists in
Egypt (and thereby eliminating political dissent). The second was of kowtowing to Soviet
influence by advocating socialism and adopting such measures as the haphazard re-division
of national wealth and nationalisation (thereby increasing his own and the army’s populist
appeal) –all in the autocratic set-up eventually dubbed ‘Nasserite socialism’.
‘The March of Protest’
The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club deal with the
political forces that shape an individual’s identity. Both novels present strong historical
background, focusing respectively on two events which had transnational political
reverberations: the 1968 Prague Spring and the 1956 Suez Crisis. The first, “the most radical
social experiment in the communist Eastern bloc during the turbulent events of 1968, brought
Czechoslovakia to the centre of world attention” (Sabatos 1827). Coming to symbolise
resistance to the Soviet/communist dystopia, the Prague Spring would become a symbol for
non-violent resistance and (later) anti-communist protest. The Suez Crisis largely signified
the end of British (and later) French colonial influence in the Middle East and North Africa,
pushed Gamal Abd El Nasser and the Arab cause temporarily to the forefront of international
politics, and would become a popular symbol for anti-imperialism. Both were appropriated
40
locally as national symbols and signalled an end of an ‘era’. Havel’s description of 1968, for
example, carries the same resonances as Ghali’s depiction of 1956 in Beer in the Snooker
Club:
It was the end of an era; the disintegration of a spiritual and social climate; a profound
mental dislocation. The seriousness of the events that caused this transformation and
the profound experiences that came with it seemed to alter our prospects completely.
It was not just that the carnival-like elation of 1968 had come to an end; the whole
world crumbled…[O]ut of the rubble of the old world a sinister new world grew, one
that was intrinsically different, merciless, gloomily serious. (Havel 8)
Both events were considered historical landmarks of regional significance in their
time, and had immediate local and regional economic effects. Traditionally thought of as
distinct, the two are at least indirectly related.19 The Czechoslovakian alliance with the Soviet
Union post-World War II would enable the USSR to harness Czechoslovakian industrial
plants. In 1955 the arms which the USSR agreed to supply to Nasser would come from
Czechoslovakia (hence the name ‘the Czech arms deal’ or sometimes ‘the Egyptian-Czech
arms deal’). The news that Nasser had obtained huge numbers of weaponry from the Soviet
Union (although supplied by Czechoslovakia) aggravated the British and French for what it
signified of Soviet influence in the Middle East, probably helping to precipitate the attack on
Suez. The attack on Suez exacerbated Arab-Israeli hostility; and a continued series of wars
caused wide-ranging international-alliance restructuring, culminating in the embargo on oil
production by Arab oil-producing states during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. Although it had
already been a project in the making, the creation of a European Regional Development Fund
was hastened by the ‘oil crisis’ (which had made the price of oil shoot up for the oilimporting US and European countries). The Development Fund was hastily launched in
1974-75 with the purpose of transferring money from richer to poorer European countries,
aiming to develop Europe’s infrastructure within the expanding EU borders, and with the
41
ultimate objective of harnessing the potential of the whole bloc for some form of economic
autonomy. Such movements for integration eventually helped (further) popularise and
politicise EU discourse (despite reservations) from the 1960s until the recession and which
Kundera, in the 1980s, taps into so vividly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: the belief
in a united European actor for the sake of peace and prosperity.
Beyond their regional contexts of political resistance, the events in Prague and Suez
were also caught up in contagious waves of mass protest not in fact inherent to one or another
‘region’. Seen in a larger context, the raging sixties protests in Europe were part of the
international resonances of protest in the post-War period (and which had in turn been
preceded with more than sixty years of high-profile mass protest movements around the
world): protests all calling for liberation from different oppressions. Highly-publicised
resistance movements, whether non-violent, violent, or non-violent-turned-violent, had
appeared early on, for example, in the British colonies such as the Indian Rebellion (1857),
the First Pan-African Congress in London (1900) with a follow-up in Versailles (1919), the
populist protests for independence in Egypt and Sudan (1919), and the rise of Ireland’s Sinn
Fein. Just like the resistance movement in one British colony could influence that in another
British colony, such movements could also influence others in non-British colonies, and
sometimes the precise forms the protests took could influence calls for emancipation in noncolonial contexts. The connections between many of these struggles around the world have
been explored.20 The African American Civil Rights movement in the United States, for
example, started in the last few years of the nineteenth century and (not unrelatedly) reached
its apex in the 1950s-60s, spurring self-styled Civil Rights movements in other countries
although adapted to a colonial context, such as Northern Ireland in the 1960s. The struggle
against apartheid in South Africa would be inspired by the African American Civil Rights
movement, but also by the liberation struggles of sub-Saharan African countries and
42
Gandhi’s call for passive resistance. The feminist movement in the UK and the US had had a
long history too of non-violent resistance, and would eventually spur self-styled marches for
women’s rights in the colonies in the early twentieth century (with feminist slogans and
demands often suitably reworked in line with the national struggles for liberation).21
The Cold War period was marked by newly-minted, or re-minted as the case may be,
international alliances, whether across previously hostile powers (such as The European Coal
and Steel Community in 1951) or between newly-independent states seeking new support
systems and ‘third ways’(such as the 1952 Bandung Conference). The rise of ‘international’
political alliances based on temporary and changing mutual interests often meant that certain
crises would impact hitherto distantly-connected countries, which now found themselves
allies in mutual (and novel) resistance objectives.22 These new mutual objectives would often
be accompanied by cultural exchange.23 Despite these alliances for peace and mutual benefit
the Cold War marked a continuation of strife in much of the world. All through the century
this translated into higher numbers of refugees and migrants, and larger and wider-spread
diasporas. Homes were found for re-settled war victims at the expense of the new
dispossessed, just as socialist restructuring and sequestration replaced former powerful elites
with new ones.
The ‘contagion’ of resistance against all kinds of oppression then in one or another
part of the world did not happen suddenly or in isolation. The symbols and consequences of
resistance were often captured in people’s imaginations through the images of street protest
and smiling politicians’ handshakes which often circulated in international newspapers, but
debate around such issues also took place in boardrooms and in parliaments, some of whose
represented publics had invested interests overseas. It is not therefore incidental or unrelated
that the French, British and Israeli assault on Suez, for example, would prompt large-scale
protest in England, that hundreds of thousands would protest the Vietnam War in London,
43
Paris, Berlin and Rome, or that in the year 1968 it would appear as if a domino-effect of
protests had hit Europe. It was no coincidence either that student protest in the 1960s and
1970s was as common in Paris as it was in New York24 and Cairo.25 Further motivating the
impetus for ‘solidarity’ (and the effectiveness of the idea of ‘solidarity’ as a catchphrase)
were the sceptres of communism and socialism, which had long moved beyond the ‘haunting’
stage and were comfortably ensconced in state capitals.26 The march of (street) protest in
1968 in Prague was only one manifestation of a wider global flux.
Accompanying the images and news of the protests were trans-border culture
innovations and transmissions that in an ‘international’ era did not simply flow from one
direction, whether east or west, to another. It helped that leading intellectuals of diverse
resistance movements resided in Paris and London as much as they did in Alexandria, Delhi,
Martinique, and Buenos Aires, and their works were quickly translated as the works (and
their writers) travelled. Kundera himself, for example, writes of the Czech Writers’ Union,
the alleged “hotbed of the counterrevolution”, inviting Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García
Márquez and Julio Cortázar in 1967 (The Curtain 81). He mentions reading Márquez for the
first time in Czech translation (The Curtain 81), and reading, at the age of seventeen, Aimé
Césaire in a “Czech avant-garde magazine” (The Curtain 157).
The Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements, and Pan-Africanism, for
example, coming on the heels of and embedded within the African American Civil Rights
Movement, took place in the US, London and Paris as much as they did in Haiti, Martinique
and South Africa early in the twentieth century. Black writers were quickly translated from
English and French in countries around the world looking for inspiration for their own
struggles. It is also well documented that writers made a point of making public appearances
and speeches at international meetings and congresses, sometimes relocating entirely to the
metropolis, such as black American writers who relocated to Paris including James Baldwin
44
and Richard Wright, or the pan-African newspapers established by West Indian and
Caribbean writers in London and Paris (Elizabeth).Yet the call for black rights also travelled
to Arab countries such as Egypt. Leading African intellectuals such as Frederick Douglass
had visited Egypt as early as 1887 in search of a pre-plantation African civilisation of
symbolic significance to their cause, while Richard Wright, the first black writer of world
fame, was quickly translated into Arabic. (This was, it must be remembered, at a time when
the United States did not have as large a sphere of influence in North Africa and the Middle
East as it does today).27 On the academic literary level in the early to mid-twentieth century
the direction of intellectual ‘internationalism’ had already been set in motion in Europe and
the US by the first major comparatists and scholars who for diverse reasons in their times and
places had adopted, and adapted into criticism and literary history, an international
‘consciousness’ of the world (Damrosch 2006; D’haen 2012d). The ‘new international’
created by transportable images of populist or organised resistance movements within the
reproducible model framework of the nation-state, transmitted via improved means of
communication, increasing resettlement and migration, and quickly-forged international
alliances was manifested in such cultural flows.
Hence, as enraged masses took to the streets in 1960s France, Germany, England,
Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia, they iconized for subsequent decades the
counterculture and a revolution in social norms about war, clothing, music, drugs, dress,
formalities and schooling. They also, however, echoed the footsteps, the slogans and the calls
for freedom that had filtered into global public discourse through the media, music, art, and
literature, and sometimes via visitors and immigrants, from distant connected places. When
Ram in Beer in the Snooker Club remarks on the shock of the Suez war that “of course the
Africans and Asians had had their Suezes a long time before us…over and over again” (58);
or when he reflects that learning about “oppressed people in Africa and Asia and even some
45
parts of Europe” taught him to see himself as a member of “humanity in general and not just
as [an Egyptian]” (52-3) he refers to the urgent debate on worldwide political affairs that
made the situations in these otherwise ‘distant’ cultures analogous, and could therefore make
ideas of resistance ‘contagious’.
Fifty years on, a shared vision of multi-directional cultural impact seems muted, as
has appeared, for example, in analyses of the mass protests in the Arabic-speaking world that
have otherwise taken up quite a lot of news space in the past few years. With the rise of one
mass protest after another starting 2010 in the Middle East and North Africa, the (as always
transferrable) demonstrations and strikes were eventually dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’ by the
international press in remembrance of the European Spring of Nations of 1848, and in
adherence to the linear view of historical progress that only moves from ‘West’ to ‘East’. The
front page of The Economist (June 29-July 5 2013) depicted precisely what this linear history
was supposed to look like, dubbing it ‘The March of Protest’ (see below):
46
In this clever design the figure of the French Marianne (caricatured from the Eugène
Delacroix painting “Liberty Leading the People” (1830)) is followed by the 1968 protests in
Europe and America, the Velvet Revolution in the USSR and finally ‘everywhere’(with
signposts on the bottom pointing to Cairo, Istanbul and Rio). While this is a front cover and is
in no way meant to stand in for in-depth historical-political analysis, the page captures the all
too common lack of linkage between different parts of the world. Milan Kundera writes
precisely with this view on the march of the ‘novel’s history’. Ghali, on the other hand,
attempts to fill in the ellipses.
In Egypt, in the early phases of the January 25th Revolution (2011), Egyptian
commentators had compared, if superficially, the protests rocking the Arab world to the
47
Velvet Revolution in 1989. As more Egyptians became disillusioned with the period of chaos
that followed it, the analogy quickly changed (if not quite appropriately) to the Prague
Spring. As even more time went by, the phrase ‘Arab Spring’ was eagerly picked up by much
of the Arab intelligentsia who appropriately amended their place in ‘world’ political history
by taking it back a few centuries, and conjured new analogies with the French Revolution and
the American Civil War (as appropriate). The connection between the people who protested
in Prague in 1968 (originally simply asking for reform) and those who protested in 2010-11
in Tunisia and Egypt (also initially demanding reform), has been momentarily forgotten –
tenuous and tentative as all such cultural connections can be.28 The link between those who
protested the attack on Suez in 1956 and those who protested the Soviet occupation in Prague
in 1968 remains even more distant.29
The reception and circulation of the two politically-emblematic novels under
consideration, resonant as they are of the atmosphere of protest and people-power of the
sixties, reflect the political tides and trends of the local and world markets in which they
appeared. In Kundera’s case the many responses that chose to focus on the depiction of the
Prague Spring in his work would later affect his writing directions to a noticeable degree.
Ghali’s text, disregarded, forgotten or maligned in Egypt, was virtually unknown outside
some very few English literature departments until quite recently (when it is now enjoying a
comeback), which is a shame since it is not only well-written but quite unique (Enany 86),
“in a class of its own” (Soueif and Massad 74), one of “the most penetrating novels in
English on the Arab world” (S. Antonius 123), or, as Ahdaf Soueif puts it, “one of the best
novels about Egypt ever written” (“Review” n.pag). The Anglo-Arab corpus has been until
recently noticeably smaller than that of the Franco-Arab, and independent Egypt has never
been blessed with freedom of expression, all of which, added to Ghali’s shady political
background30 and his short life, helped push the novel to the sidelines.
48
Part and parcel of this reception has been the novel’s and the novelist’s links to Israel.
The direct sympathy for the Israeli cause expressed in Beer in the Snooker Club might have
fallen on more sympathetic ears a mere decade before the novel’s publication in 1964,
particularly so since Ghali’s protagonist emphasises loss on both sides: “Imagine a third of
our income being pumped into an army to fight a miserable two million Jews who were
massacred something terrible in the last war. So what if ...[Nasser] becomes unpopular? He is
strong enough to take unpopular steps. Besides, you know, we Egyptians don’t care one way
or another about Israel” (202).
Earlier in the century such a statement might have been obvious to many Egyptians.
Although it tends to be forgotten by both Egyptians and non-Egyptians, there had, after all,
been palpable initial sympathy among Egyptians towards Zionism.31 Moreover, for Jews and
non-Jews in Egypt before Suez and despite the 1948 war, there had yet appeared to be an
automatic, generally-supposed and self-evident connection (even among the Jewish
community itself) between the particular situation of the Jews of Egypt (or even of the
Middle East) and the state of Israel.32 “It is important to remember that Sephardim, for
example, who had lived in the Middle East and North Africa for millennia (often since before
the Arab conquest), cannot be seen as simply eager to settle in Palestine and in many ways
had to be ‘lured’ to Zion” (Shohat 46). Yet after Suez, and certainly by 1964 and onwards, a
sympathetic stance such as Ghali’s would have been an alienating position to take. The
Israeli/Arab wars had gone on for too long. The Western powers supporting Israel, notably
Britain, France and also the US, and with whose imperialist rule Israel’s authority had
become synonymous (particularly after Suez), had failed the peoples of the Middle East/
North Africa for too long. Nasser’s popularity was at its highest, especially after his ‘success’
in Suez, but generally for having given back the ‘Arabs’ their pride by his outspoken critique
of ‘Western imperialists’. The keywords of the hour were socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-
49
Zionism and anti-capitalism. Contrary to Ram’s assertion, that ‘we Egyptians don’t care one
way or another about Israel’, the Egyptians, living under a politically-precarious State, whose
sons were being sent out to fight in Palestine, who saw the Israeli issue as something that lay
at the heart of the Arabs’ relationship with the Western coloniser, who could see dispossessed
Palestinian refugees arriving among them, and whose sentiments had also been for some time
subjected to the daily inflammatory propaganda of the media and of fascist organisations,33
appeared to care very much about Israel after all. Written in the language of the coloniser,
sympathising with every type of community Nasser and many of his numerous cult-like
followers had heckled, tortured, expelled, or resisted, and featuring a protagonist whose only
pleasure seemed to be loafing about, Beer in the Snooker Club did not match any of the
popular keywords.
Nevertheless, and in spite of the hostile political discourse surrounding it, there might
still have been a chance even if only in the thriving underground scene for Beer in the
Snooker Club had it not been for 1967. Three years after the novel was published the most
debilitating defeat of the Arab armies (Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian) marks the moment
when “a matter of six days”…propel[led] the Arabs into the Third World”. 1967 was the
moment when “to be an Arab meant a sense of defeat, profound shock, and bewildering
uncertainty” (Said Politics of Dispossession xiv). At such a time, when the Jewish population
had been systematically expelled from the Middle East and North Africa, when for the first
time in Egyptian modern history voluntary large-scale migration would rise noticeably
among the remaining Egyptian citizens themselves (Amin), Ghali’s idealist imaginings would
have been received with at least incredulity. The tide for the elitist, secular, liberal
cosmopolitanism such as had been popular earlier in the century had turned. The flags of the
populist Egyptian nationalist movement which in the 1919 protest marches against British
50
occupation had been emblazoned with the image of an intertwined crescent, cross, and Star of
David were decidedly a thing of the past.
In contrast, Beer in the Snooker Club received some success at the time of its
publication in England, France and the United States, and a Hebrew translation appeared very
early on in 1965. It helped not a little that the Jewish characters fit neatly into Zionist
discourse down to the gender symbolism of the nation and the emasculation of the Jew in the
Diaspora. While Edna is physically violated and her family’s possessions sequestered, Levy
is deprived of the chance of a scholarly career in Arabic and supports himself by teaching
(wealthy) Egyptians how to read and write Arabic because they suddenly needed to be able to
master the language in Nasser’s Egypt. Meanwhile Edna’s husband is imprisoned, shot and
permanently disabled, and so has to seek refuge in Israel. Such feminisation and victimisation
of the Jewish people make foundational Israeli nation-building myths.
The book’s early international reception would enable Ghali to visit Israel as a
reporter right after the Six Day War in 1967, ‘the only Egyptian allowed (voluntarily) into
Israel for fifteen years’, as Ghali writes in his diary. His subsequent two Times articles
(written from England) do not tend to acquit either camp, a position which eventually would
result in his being publicly accused of having ‘defected to Israel’ by a representative of the
Egyptian government in England (Diaries n.pag). Had he returned to Egypt Ghali would have
been sent to jail or one of Nasser’s bulging concentration camps (Soueif “Goat Face” 11). A
talk Ghali later gave on the BBC and some of the feverish entries in his diary mark a change
in attitude, namely the understanding that there would be no peace settlement or compromise
extended by fast-growing Israel. Ghali, however, prepped to some extent perhaps by his own
circle of anti-Zionist Israeli activists in London including the likes of Shimon Tzabar,
Michael Almaz and Aki Orr (see Diaries) seems to have retained hope in Oriental Jews to
oppose what had by 1968 become a debilitating situation of polarities. The tally included: a
51
continuously increasing number of dispossessed Palestinians in refugee camps in Palestine,
Lebanon and Jordan; decades of occupation of and forced settlement on Palestinian/nonIsraeli territory; decades of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist behaviour in the Middle East and
North Africa, in which the Arab nationalist movements had by now stopped making the vital
difference between ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’; the dilemma of many Sephardim and ‘Oriental’ Jews
who, even if they travelled to Israel would be inferior citizens within the Zionist state (Shohat
“Sephardim in Israel”); and finally, the continuous inefficient and incapable handling of the
Arab states of the Palestinian cause, not least by the political Palestinian representatives
themselves (Said Politics of Dispossession).
Caught in the dialectics of what has become known (too) simply as ‘the Middle East
crisis’, veiled with the mysteriousness of Ghali’s own life, Beer in the Snooker Club has until
quite recently been fated to be more popular outside its ‘home’ soil, where it has often been
read as a ‘historical period piece’, a diatribe against Nasser’s state, and an exemplary sample
of a common kind of nostalgic Middle Eastern cosmopolitanism.34 A recent translation of
Beer in the Snooker Club into Arabic appeared late in the Mubarak-era in 2006, marking the
country’s normalised ties with the US and Israel, an ipso facto resignation towards the
Palestinian situation, and a space for government critique (particularly if it was a previous
government). From a cultural perspective the novel’s re-emergence may also indicate the
emergence of new generations of readers whose battles are not those of the Nasser era, a
growing space for new understandings of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that surpass the
polarised depictions of the past,35 and enough elapse of time for collective community
nostalgia towards ambiguous ‘earlier better eras’. The novel’s subsequent reprinting by
Serpent’s Tail in 1986, a series of translations into about seven languages appearing over the
past decade, and the novel’s frequent positive reviews and listings in university syllabuses in
courses around the world reflect the widening market receptivity to ‘world’ and postcolonial
52
literature. If Ghali had lived to write more, or if his biographer (in whose flat Ghali finally
committed suicide in 1968) had published Ghali’s journals posthumously as the novelist had
willed, perhaps the circulation of Beer in the Snooker Club would have taken a different
route.36
In contrast, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (French and English editions 1984;
Czech edition 1985), published when Kundera was already a known author, appeared at a
time when there was great sympathy towards the occupied Soviet satellite states or, perhaps
more precisely, great hostility towards the Soviet Union. Galvanising onto the bestseller lists
in France, England and the US as soon as it was published, early reviewers praised the novel
both from a Right and a Left-wing perspective; proponents of the first view approved
Kundera’s condemnation of Sovietisation, those of the second opinion admired Kundera’s
condemnation of mass cultural consumption and his early communist leanings, while both
considered him a key activist for his work within the Czech Writer’s Union and the Prague
Spring. Kundera was accorded a place within the community of Eastern European political
émigrés taking refuge in France, and comparisons were quickly made to the great European
masters (particularly those who had lived for a time in France) including Diderot, Sterne,
Proust, Kafka, Beckett, T. S. Eliot and Orwell. It did not harm Kundera’s literary reputation
that he acquired a cachet as handsome and brooding, noted early on in a trail of photos, book
reviews and interviews and still referred to today.37 The Unbearable Lightness of Being has
been translated into at least eleven languages, and was dramatised into a ‘major motion
picture’ in 1988. Finding that the novel was persistently read within the context of Cold War
politics,38 and finding himself at the same time continuously asked where he felt most ‘at
home,’ or to whom he was writing, Kundera spent a number of years negating both that
politics should be a literary yardstick or that he was an exile. He finally embarked on a media
silence for twenty-five years, only broken briefly in 2008 to defend himself against new
53
political allegations. The situation has helped aggravate his position among Czech artists and
politicians who for diverse reasons and to various degrees consider The Unbearable
Lightness of Being ‘unrealistic’ and Kundera as a political ‘sell-out’. Kundera was granted
French citizenship in 1981. By 1991 scholarly discussions and reviews of Kundera
emphasised his location as a ‘European’ writer, no regional tag included (Sanders), while
book jacket blurbs often refer to him as a ‘Franco-Czech’ author. Over the past two decades
Kundera has virtually eliminated reference to specific political events in his novels, has
adopted French as his written language, and has manically supervised and edited translations
of his novels into the languages he can speak for fear of misconstruction, yet The Unbearable
Lightness of Being remains his most translated work, and Kundera’s “popular appeal, critical
success, and moral authority…[remain] closely tied to his Czech background” (Sabatos
1841).
Whose ‘Testament Betrayed’?
Although the authors’ politics (assumed or real) and the political market have aided or
hindered the circulation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club,
both works rather ironically centre on their protagonists’ political freedom of choice and
celebrate dissent from mainstream ideology.39 The love relationship is a common trope in
narratives of national conditioning, not least because of what it reveals of the protagonist’s
character as he ostensibly takes the first step to form a traditional prototype unit of the nation:
the family. At times of perceived political crisis, popular concern about the basic symbols and
mythologies of the ‘nation’ rises dramatically, with women –considered as “symbolic bearers
of the collectivity’s identity and honour” (Yuval-Davis Gender & Nation 45), and being
intimately related to matters of sexuality, reproduction and upbringing– coming to the
54
forefront.40 Romance narratives then tend to be common metaphors for the process of
national or social conditioning in novels worldwide.41
On a medical mission in a small town, Tomas, a doctor from Prague, meets Tereza,
and from this coincidental encounter, love is born. Tereza follows Tomas to Prague, sleeps
with him on the first date and eventually marries him. Caught in the turmoil of the Soviet
occupation, Tereza and Tomas try to achieve marital happiness (if only Tomas would stop
philandering or Tereza would stop minding about it) and political stability (if only the Czech
nation would return to its rightful historical place in the centre of Europe). The novel is
divided into seven parts, alternatively narrated by different narratorial voices that often act as
counterpoint to each other, including an omniscient author-narrator (who sometimes
addresses the reader directly), and the several third-person narrators of the four main
characters: Tomas, Tereza, Franz and Sabina. The sections do not follow chronologically
from each other, (the ending, for example, is revealed about two thirds of the way through the
novel), and this, along with the obvious break from one section to another and clearlyindicated switch between points-of-view highlights Kundera’s preoccupation with
experimentation in the novel form. The skill of The Unbearable Lightness of Being partly lies
in this sometimes jarring combination: a deeply engaged political analysis and historical
description of the events of 1960s Czechoslovakia is juxtaposed with the author’s voice
reflecting on abstract philosophies and literary history and declaring that the whole work is a
fictional art form.
In the love story Tereza stands as a symbol for the nation, and reflects the many ways
women have figured in national discourse. Her chronic devotion to Tomas makes her
“constitutionally unable to disobey” him, her unchangeability posits her as an Ideal tradition
that should not be betrayed, her infant-like dependency on Tomas makes it necessary for him
to rescue her, and her rootedness to a pristine countryside makes the latter place a refuge
55
from the vicissitudes and corruption of the capital. If envisioned as a kind of ‘national
narrative’ with the family (or the couple) at the centre, the role and figure of women stands as
inherently “atavistic”, forever caught in an “anterior” time (McClintock “No Longer in
Future Heaven”). In this setting, Tereza’s “anachronism”, as it is alluded to in the novel, is
significant: mirroring the ideal ‘Bohemia’ or the ‘essence’ of the nation, she exists in the
present only to seem strangely out of place. The choices Tomas must make towards Tereza
(to marry or not to marry, to betray or not to betray, to save or not to save, etc.) are presented
through the dualist binaries at the core of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of which is
weakness and strength. Tereza (as a supreme nation symbol) needs to be saved by Tomas
(standing for the nation’s strong manly citizens), but must also be strong (distinctive,
constant, appealing, etc.) enough to interest him (them) in the first place.
The recurring Judaic/Biblical metaphor of the child in the bulrush basket (6, 10, 203)
first appears in the opening scene as Tomas stands by the window, thinking of whether or not
to proceed with the affair with Tereza, and gains much of its potency from these binaries:
She seemed a child to him, a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with
pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed. (6)
….
Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket
and sent downstream. Tomas did not realise at the time that metaphors are dangerous.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love. (10)
On the one hand, Tereza is weak. This is evident in her encounters with men where she rarely
instigates the action: as a dance partner with Tomas’s colleague (16), in the affair with the
mysterious engineer (138-59), and against her voyeur stepfather (42). On the other hand, the
child in the bulrush basket is weak only theoretically. There is no question of the child being
abandoned and left to die; divine miracles require happy endings. The narrator’s reflection
that “[i]f the Pharaoh’s daughter hadn’t snatched the basket carrying little Moses from the
56
waves, there would have been no...civilization as we now know it!” (10) is tongue-in-cheek.
Tomas may feel sorry enough for the ‘child’ but he is drawn to it like Pharoah’s daughter is
drawn to baby Moses: inevitably. This ‘love of fate’ or ‘amor fati’ (20) is the source of
Tereza’s power. The nation does not only need its strong men to fight for and cultivate it, it
demands that they do so. The strength of even the smallest, politically weakest and most
dependent nation lies in the manic pull this “mad myth” exerts on its members. Tomas’s
relation to Tereza, a mix of “hysteria” (7), “love” (7), “compassion” (20) or an urge to “lie
down beside her and want to die with her” (7) is akin to Benedict Anderson’s nationalist
sentiment created through a fantasy of kinship: “a fraternity that makes it possible . . . for so
many millions of people not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”
(Anderson 6). When Tereza leaves her small town to approach/offer herself up to Tomas in
Prague (prompting Tomas’s introspection by the window) it is implicitly inevitable that
Tomas take her in with her suitcase; indeed, he himself at some point is not quite sure how it
comes about. When Tereza abandons Tomas later in Zurich and returns to occupied Prague,
Tomas feels obliged to take yet another life-changing decision to follow her for his own sense
of wholeness.
Because of these binaries the connection between Tomas and Tereza is
simultaneously described as tug-and-pull, action and response. As Tomas cheats on Tereza,
she stands on a par with Czech destiny in European history, and becomes, rather literally with
the Moses metaphor, a ‘testament betrayed’. Tereza’s victimhood often parallels the
historical moments highlighted in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: beloved Prague now
occupied by the Russians and forsaken by its leaders, glorious Bohemia now divided and
past, ideal Europa kidnapped and ravished, and naive Czechoslovakia sacrificed in Munich.
Tereza’s victimhood parallels the betrayal of the Czech people by neighbouring European
powers: whether in the early invasions by European Empires or at later times, with the larger
57
European nations’ failure to honour their defence treaties with Czechoslovakia. Tereza, or the
Czech ‘ideal’, is also betrayed by the Czech nationalists themselves who are too ready to
overwrite Czech history with new narratives: by affiliating it to Russia such as “wellmeaning” Communist government officials during the Cold War, or by stressing the Czech
Republic’s smaller ethnicities at the risk of its wider European affiliation, or by the Czech
dissenters narcissistically advocating protest for protest’s sake rather than for real political
change. As Tomas sticks by Tereza’s side: as he marries her, follows her across borders,
mourns Karenin with her, refuses to sign a petition because getting involved with politics
would upset her, and moves to the countryside to please her, he dies, as Sabina puts it “as
Tristan, not as Don Juan” (121). Metaphorically speaking, he has rescued Moses from the
river; symbolically speaking, he has remained true to Bohemia’s Europeanism by refusing to
accede to other, local and narrower political allegiances; and novelistically-speaking, the
author has attempted to dialogue with the greater literary history of the European novel.
Thus, Kundera locates the individual in the nation, and the individual and the nation
in history. Sections of philosophical musing expressed by an I-narrator (often introduced as
the voice of the author himself) ponder the plight of individuals caught in difficult decisions
and reflect on the fate of ‘small nations’ held at the mercy of more powerful ones. The
ineffectual nation-hood system of mother- or fatherland that stresses newly-defined local
identities is dismissed in favour of the idea of a ‘world’-nation –Europe being the world–
with the warning that that too will die if its culture turns totalitarian, and a homogenising
supra-national discourse effaces the diversity of smaller nation-states within the bloc.
Kundera’s challenging of the Orientalisation of Czech culture, with the Czech people
pictured as some sort of small and undistinguished exotic relatives of Western Europeans,
and his insistence that Bohemia, or Central Europe, is the birthplace of much that is
considered quintessentially ‘European’ from the Reformation to avant-garde art has made his
58
voice one of resistance for many of the ‘minor’ cultures of the continent. Kundera’s novel
makes manifest too the appeal and tension inherent in the idea of a united Europe. At its best
the relation between the small and larger nations of Europe is one of intercultural dialogue,
where diversity brings about the flowering of great philosophies, music and the novel form
(its EU parallel being that integration entails libertarian human rights, economic prosperity,
etc). At its weakest a pan-European discourse reveals the inconsistencies in speaking of a
‘united’ continent’ as it glosses over which countries are represented, when and how, and
which countries’ interests gain priority in times of trouble. So pan-European discourse can be
dangerous at both ‘extremes’, in its divisiveness, if it distances Eastern and Central European
peoples from Western European culture and disregards their contributions to mainstream
European thought, or at the other end, if it centralizes culture and steamrolls over the
diversity of the peoples in the Continent.
The Judaic/Biblical metaphor aptly reflects Kundera’s transcendental supra-national
perspective: transnational as he counters a localised Czech nationalism (specifically that of
the Czech/oslovak Republic during the Cold War) by stressing the shared European ‘world’
of specific ancient or classical religions; and supra-national as he limits that vision, by
dismissing the connections these religions and their intellectual heritage might determine to
‘non-Europe’, whether located within or in propinquity to ‘Europe’ (such as many ‘Eastern’
European nations, as well as Russia),42 or located outside of Europe, ‘the rest of the West’.
Thus, in the statement quoted above, “[t]here would have been no…civilization as we now
know it”, civilization refers to European civilisation although the two religions he speaks of
were neither born in Europe nor restricted to Europeans, and although the myth he speaks of
is shared in exactly the same narrative version by a third religion in the so-called Abrahamic
tripartite: Islam.43 Read long enough, Kundera’s European supra-nation would have one
believe that Pharaoh’s daughter plucked Moses from the Rhine.44
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The same metaphor delineates too the literary world or literary history45 in which
Kundera has repeatedly shown he would like his work to be read, that of the ‘European
novel’,46 that is, “not only novels created in Europe by Europeans but novels that belong to a
history that began with the dawn of the Modern Era in Europe” (Testaments Betrayed 28):
I speak of the European novel not only to distinguish it from, say, the Chinese novel
but also to point out that its history is transnational; that the French novel, the English
novel, the Hungarian novel, are in no position to create autonomous histories of their
own but are all part of a common, supranational history that provides the only context
capable of revealing both the direction of the novel’s evolution and the value of
particular works. [Italics in original] (Testaments Betrayed 28)
This European novel then, is ‘transnational’ and ‘supranational’ but still distinctive from ‘the
Chinese novel’ or that from Japan and ancient Greece. Why? In Kundera’s view the
European novel is a child of the (European) “Modern Era” which started with the break from
a European Christian, particularly Catholic, past: anything that comes before seems irrelevant
to the European novel. Anything that comes after, such as the “1920s and 30s authors of
North America” or the “60s of Latin America,” is a reaction to the European child of the
European Modern Era, and, as Kundera writes in his critical collection Testaments Betrayed,
although “a bit foreign to European taste”, may be tentatively considered “an extension of the
history of the European novel, of its form and of its spirit, and … even astonishingly close to
its earliest beginnings…the old Rabelaisian sap” (30).
“Astonishingly” is the key word here. There is no question, none, in Kundera’s
worldview that the ‘Rabelaisian’ spirit or the Christian beginnings may have emerged from or
been influenced by any cultures from outside of Europe, although in later modern times (but
only after the ‘end’ of the modern era in Europe) and in exceptional circumstances, he does
allow North Americans and Mexicans in as “non-resident contributors” (Wood 70). There is
no consideration that the split between the mediaeval European Christian world and the
beginning of the secular Modern Era, or in Kundera’s words elsewhere, the tension between
60
“Catholicism and scepticism” which “defined Europe” (Kramer n.pag) was influenced or
spurred on by the writings of or even conflicts with any culture outside of Europe. Kundera’s
idea of culture, particularly novelistic culture, seems monolithic, deterministic, and the
exclusive property of small groups which are identified as either European or torch-bearers of
European culture.
To clarify the boundary of this ‘supra-nation’, rather than consider where Kundera
locates ‘non-European' culture, it may be useful instead to look at how he assesses the novels
actually allowed to be ‘an extension of the history of the European novel’, such as Salman
Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
A situation unique in history: Rushdie belongs by origin to a Muslim society that, in
large part, is still living in the period before the Modern Era. He wrote his book on
Europe, in the Modern Era –or, more precisely, at the end of that era.
Just as Iranian Islam was at the time moving away from religious moderation toward a
combative theocracy, so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the
genteel, professorial smile of Thomas Mann to an unbridled wellspring of Rabelaisian
humor. The antithesis collided, each in its extreme form. (Testaments Betrayed 25)
Kundera seems so desperate to escape being considered a national representative or some sort
of Czech provincial in the wider world of letters that he aggrandises a European collective
enough to provincialize anything outside it instead. “How to define ‘provincialism’?” He asks
in a more recent essay on World Literature, and answers: it is “the inability (or refusal) to see
one’s own culture in the large context” [italics in original] (The Curtain 37). It might be
added that it is also the inability to perceive a larger context to one’s perspective of a ‘large
context’. Although Kundera often praises Rushdie as one of the writers of the ‘global south’
(and the allusion to Rabelais whom Kundera considers one of the founding fathers of the
European novelistic tradition shows how highly he regards Rushdie’s work), Kundera always
carefully locates such texts against or in relation to a progressive determinacy of linear
development started and measured by European civilization. There is a difference here
between having a perspective from a centre, which everyone has, and which is arguable,
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defendable and negotiable, and between defining a region, as Kundera does, as the world that
matters (in the same time, no less, as he resists this ‘world’s’ denigration of his own ‘small’
culture). There is a difference too between considering European culture as the civilised
world’s culture, with world-European borders, a world-European market and its own worldEuropean novelistic and historical time –which is problematic enough albeit still defendable–
and between seeming to refer to the culture of the European peoples as if it were a result of
some centuries of in-breeding, which it certainly is not. One of the main reasons after all that
European culture has been and remains a great culture is because of its globality: its
interactions, its worldliness, and its world-wide dissemination and appreciation. Kundera’s
rationale behind this integral ‘supranational’ cultural unity carries all the subtlety of the
nationalism of the stud-farm, propelled by the inherent (Romantic) idea of ‘national’ culture
as a seamless, organic cultural unit, but which itself belies the actual potential for unity of a
political region as a rational consensus on common laws and culture, and to which belonging
is, to a certain extent, voluntary and pluralist.
Why is the Modern Era capitalized? Because it is identifiable as a European locus of
novelistic time starting from Cervantes through Rabelais and Central European culture to the
rest of the world where texts written by those sensible people, such as Rushdie, produce for
the ‘children of Europe’ new examples of a European craft by dealing consciously with the
history of the European novel. But why does Rushdie’s ‘Muslim society’ live ‘in the preModern Era’? The assumption that in the subcontinent there is no ‘modernity’, by any
common definition of what modernity may mean, seems dubious, particularly bearing in
mind the Indian subcontinent’s centuries-old cultural prosperity and industrial power, despite
or even because of its terrible historical burdens. (It is in this context supremely ironic that
the Prague Spring context which established Milan Kundera’s international fame had at least
some of its origins of non-violent resistance in India). Kundera also dismisses the literary
62
traditions in South Asia which boasts in some form or other of an unbroken tradition of oral
and written art that spans some two and a half millennia (Pollock), the vast cultural and
economic prosperity of the ancient trade routes, and, if all these do not count, assumes
moreover that some 350 years of various European occupations from the fifteenth century to
the middle of the twentieth did not leave a single common (multi-directional) cultural
footprint. Moreover, why do Rushdie’s origins come from outside the European Modern Era?
His father was a Cambridge-educated lawyer and businessman; his mother a teacher. His
father intentionally adopted the name ‘Rushdie’ from ‘Ibn Rushd’ (Averroes) who is
sometimes claimed as the founding father of Western secular thought, for his writings
prompted the tension between religion and scepticism –the ‘two poles’ that ‘define’ Europe
and start the ‘Modern Era’ as Kundera would have it. Yet Rushdie still comes from a preModern Era, and writes The Satanic Verses in Europe towards the ‘end’ of the Modern Era
(ostensibly when such writers, despite being “non-European in taste”, and coming from ‘premodern’ societies, ‘began’ infiltrating the European-world market). So much for Averroes.
If this kind of vision is traditional enough and certainly not unique to Kundera,
although it might be uncommon in such a widely-read author today, further on in the piece on
Satanic Verses quoted above, even more logical confusion appears. Kundera writes: ‘Just as
Iranian Islam was at the time moving away from religious moderation toward a combative
theocracy, so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the genteel,
professorial smile of Thomas Mann to an unbridled wellspring of Rabelaisian humor’
(Testaments Betrayed 25). When did the Iranian Islamic Revolution ‘move away’ from
‘religious moderation’ toward a ‘combative theocracy’? The Satanic Verses appeared in
1988, nine years after the Iranian Revolution; the regime the Revolution had itself overturned
(rather than gradually ‘moved away’ from) was not one of “religious moderation” but forced
‘anti-clericism’ and had as much in common with ‘religious moderation’ as Khomeini’s
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subsequent regime had with liberation; and finally, ‘combative’ of what? The logical
disconnection continues: ‘so, with Rushdie, the history of the novel was moving from the
genteel, professorial smile of Thomas Mann to an unbridled wellspring of Rabelaisian
humor’. Rushdie and Rabelais? Possibly . More accurately: Rabelais, the 1001 Nights, Latin
American magical realism, the Old Testament and the Quran –at least– prompt Rushdie’s
novelistic storytelling. Canonising Rabelais (or Rushdie for that matter) as a national
‘founding father’, or the Quran, as a national ‘founding text’, makes the literary canon
parochial and insular –beset with precisely the kind of ethno-political affiliation that Kundera
tries to transcend for himself and his own work.47 The syncretic process of all cultures, the
way they are created by the appropriation of artefacts and meanings from other civilisations
and their own internal heterogeneity is acknowledged by Kundera as only possible within
strict ethno-European borders.
The ‘Voyage-In’
Beer in the Snooker Club takes the form of a Bildungsroman. Distanced from his local
community by the colonial education he has received, a Cairene flâneur goes on a journey of
learning accompanied by his best friend, faces certain hurdles which cause him to have a
minor epiphany, indulges in a few affairs, some good for him, others less so, and finally
marries, or at any rate, proposes marriage to an old girlfriend. Beer in the Snooker Club is
also a classic literary ‘voyage-in’, depicting the protagonist’s journey to the metropolitan
centre, his lack of integration there, and his return to the ‘margins’. In Culture and
Imperialism Edward Said describes the concept of the ‘voyage in’ as “the conscious effort to
enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it
acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten history….carried out by dozens of
scholars, critics, and intellectuals in the peripheral world” (260-61). Sometimes third-world
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critics and artists contributed to and reformulated major avant-garde movements with the
result of transforming in fundamental ways diverse fields of modern enquiry and common
perceptions of the experience of modernity. Said argues that such a movement was largely a
form of resistance to the colonial culture, a way of “dealing frontally with the metropolitan
culture, using the techniques, discourses, and weapons of scholarship and criticism once
reserved exclusively for the European” (293; see also Fanon 1976). Since many third-world
writers locate themselves from within the European culture they critique whether by physical
location or by education, Said sees that their texts need to be read contrapuntally, “according
neither [culture] the privilege of ‘objectivity’ to ‘our side’ nor the encumbrance of
‘subjectivity’ to ‘theirs’” (312).
If the concept of the classic Bildungsroman as it first arose aimed to show a young
man growing gradually into his national/cultural community and from there his larger
universal role in humanity (and there is some debate on the objective of closure), Ghali’s
Bildungsroman shows in fact the opposite: alienation from family, community, nation and
‘humanity’ at large; and this situation is directly linked to the loss of his ‘birthright’ (of
‘mother tongue’, citizenship, etc.) due to colonialism. The more ‘experience’ Ram gains on
his voyage to the metropolis, the more he understands what he has lost. A genre that has
travelled across borders and languages and often acquired different forms in diverse parts of
the world, the Bildungsroman has been appropriated repeatedly by artists identifying
themselves as writing from locations of resistance with precisely this end in view, such as for
instance the Spanish-American, the African and the feminist Bildungsroman (see Doub;
Collins; Bolaki, respectively).48
Ram travels from Cairo to London where he gains first-hand experience of his
second-degree status in the world of the ‘white’ man, before returning to Cairo and finding
himself alienated there as well because of the English ‘knowledge’ he has acquired. He
65
‘writes back’ to the Empire, criticising British imperialism for having formed him in its
image and then refused to accept him. Finding that his love affair with Edna, a Jewish
Egyptian woman, is doomed to fail in a 1950s Egypt that will eventually expel its Jewish
community, Ram ‘writes back’ to the new Egyptian military class. He critiques Nasser’s
government for spouting the best of the time’s egalitarian socialist rhetoric and practising its
worst excesses, torture camps and nationalisation included. Aware of his alienation from both
cultures Ram builds a potential nation in the imagination (as British imperialism had built one
for him of Britain before), a cross-section of all he finds favourable in both cultures: the
structures for political stability, secularism and intellectual opportunity of the West, and
Ram’s own lived experience of the pluralistic tolerance, camaraderie and wealth of upper
class Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century. Ram’s cross-nation appears as global
multiculturalism with a socialist face –a utopian ideal that the ending of the book itself wryly
mocks.
Rather than a homogeneous supra-national concept such as the pan-Arabism Nasser is
drawn shoving down everyone’s throat,49 Ram’s nation presents any combination of the
various social groups in Egypt, divided, as far as the members of these groups are concerned,
hierarchically into semi-recognisable strata. Ram seems to view these sub-communities as
forming a whole by existing exclusively alongside and overlapping with each other. Unlike
the outward-looking public vision of supra-nations, Ram’s cross-national vision is inwardlooking, personal in tone, and can best be described as ‘milieu politics’. His rather picaresque
mingling among ‘Egyptian society’, polite or otherwise, represents one social milieu after
another: rich Egyptian landowners working alongside, or in league with, the British
administration, European settlers and small professionals (Turks, Armenians, Greeks),
indigenous non-Muslim Egyptians (Jews and Copts), peasants working the land, and even the
students, who were often mobilised in political protest at the time. The sum of all of these
66
together stripped of their social inequality is Ram’s socialist-inspired idea of a whole
community; a political concept that acknowledges all of these is his ideal nation-state, and
that is what he seems to pose as an alternative to any homogenous national identity. To
transcend the nation Ram delves deep into himself, and rather than make the personal
political, makes the political personal, even if he dwindles into banality:
Egypt to me is so many different things. Playing snooker with Doromian and
Varenian the Armenians, is Egypt to me. Sarcastic remarks are Egypt to me –not only
the fellah and his plight. Riding the tram is Egypt...How can I explain to you that
Egypt to me is something unconscious, is nothing particularly political, or...or...oh,
never mind. (190)
The key to Ram’s self-knowledge lies with Edna who plays a part in Ram’s Bildung. The
idea of knowledge in its many aspects –whether self-knowledge, institutional forms of
gaining knowledge like schools, knowledge of the world or worldliness, or the existential
dilemma of one’s presence and purpose in the world– is integral to Beer in the Snooker Club.
Ram perceives himself as a fundamentally unhappy person because of what he learns.50 Not
only does Edna introduce Ram to politics, sex and travel, but she highlights for him the
significance of knowledge itself. Coming from the same upper social class, Edna encourages
Ram to question its economic injustices; a student of the same British education system, she
indirectly pushes home to him why this is as much a cause for lament and condemnation as it
is a sign of privilege. Edna also enables Ram to go to Europe where he first becomes aware
of himself as a colonial ‘subject’. She introduces him to love and love-making, a fundamental
concept of experience in the Bildungsroman. She introduces him to politics by imparting to
him a new critical consciousness of the world. Finally, she teaches him about knowledge
itself as she gains access to his previously solitary reading experience, suggests things for
him to read and encourages him to critique them. From the beginning of their meeting, Edna,
Ram’s personal formation and politics are one and the same thing.
67
Ram’s voracious reading enables him and his best friend and literary counterpart Font
to dream of ‘living’; and ‘life’, as is the case of the third-world elite almost everywhere,
means ‘life in Europe’ or ‘the West’. In one of the most lyrical passages in the book,
innocence and experience, awareness of self and other merge ironically and contrapuntally as
Ram describes how his imagination about other cultures was first awakened. Blending
together a series of distinct nationalist clichés, the passage is rather long but it is worth
quoting:
The world of ice and snow in winter and red, slanting roof-tops was beginning
to call us. The world of intellectuals and underground metros and cobbled streets and
a green countryside which we had never seen, beckoned to us. The world where
students had rooms, and typists for girl-friends, and sang songs and drank beer in
large mugs, shouted to us. A whole imaginary world. A mixture of all the cities in
Europe; where pubs were confused with zinc bars and where Piccadilly led to the
Champs-Elysées; where there was something called the ‘bourgeoisie’ and someone
called the ‘landlady’; where there were Grand hotels and Fiat factories and bullfighting; where Americans were conspicuous and anarchists wore beards and where
there was something called the ‘Left’; where Christopher Isherwood’s German family
lived, where Swedes had the highest standard of living and where poets lived in
garrets and there were indoor swimming pools.
I wanted to live. I read and read and Edna spoke and I wanted to live. I wanted to
have affairs with countesses and to fall in love with a barmaid and to be a gigolo and
to be a political leader and to win at Monte Carlo and to be down-and-out in London
and to be an artist and to be elegant and also to be in rags. (54-55)
In what it portrays of the yearning to experience Europe and the synonymous relation
between ‘the West’ and ‘knowledge’, Ram evokes the Egyptian equivalent of the ‘Grand
Tour’ for most wealthy bicultural Egyptians of the time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the Grand Tour was an ideological exercise aiming to “round out the education of
young [British] men of the ruling classes by exposing them to the treasured artefacts and
ennobling society of the Continent. Usually occurring just after completion of studies at
Oxford or Cambridge,…[it was] a social ritual intended to prepare these young men to
assume the leadership positions preordained for them at home” (Buzard 38). The Egyptian
young man of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could travel to England or France
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after appropriate schooling, and become –here the complication of inferiority culture comes
in– not exactly cultured, but, with his first-hand experience of the centre, almost validated
and polished enough to take on some of the imperial culture’s mission on his return to his
own country.
Ram gradually leaves behind this one-directional, cultural mimicry of national
stereotypes to acquire a more critical ability to assess the political situation of Egypt-in-theworld, and it is Edna too who initiates him in this journey of political becoming. Unlike many
of his contemporaries Ghali does not reuse the same ‘chaste and spiritual East’/‘materialist
and whore-ish West’ binary so prevalent in the anti-colonial discourses of early and midtwentieth century Egypt. Ram does not reflect on the love affair with Edna, even if
unsuccessful, as a kind of ‘impossible’ love allegory to symbolise the impossibility that
‘East’ and ‘West’ should ever politically meet.51 Instead, Ram resists both essentialist
nationalisms. Ram’s politics start from what he calls “harassing the English troops at Suez”
(43), a participation he describes in a routine-like manner as quite apolitical: “I had no
politics in me then. I didn’t consider the Egyptian revolution and getting rid of Farouk to be
politics” (48), although the incident would result in the death of three of his friends. He
describes the almost naive fervour that caught hold of him and Font when the revolution
started: “The only important thing which happened to us was the Egyptian revolution. We
took to it wholeheartedly and naturally, without any fanaticism or object in view” (52). Their
reaction is ‘whole-hearted’ because the one consensus in all definitions of nationalist
sovereignty is that the collective and political sources of government should be congruent,
and accordingly, for Ram, rooting for one’s ‘own’ camp rather than the other becomes a
‘natural’ action.
Then Edna appears, and Ram begins to envision politics as agency and responsibility
on a global scale:
69
To begin with Edna’s politics were not noticed by us at all, but gently she talked to us
about oppressed people in Africa and Asia and even some parts of Europe, and Font
and I started to read political books with more interest. The more we read, the more
we wanted to learn and the more ignorant we felt. We learnt, for the first time, the
history of British imperialism and why we didn’t want the British troops in the Suez
Canal area. Up to then we had shouted ‘evacuation’ like everyone else, without
precisely knowing why evacuation was so important. Gradually, we began to see
ourselves as members of humanity in general and not just as Egyptians. [My italics]
(52-53)
As Edna teaches him about politics, she becomes politics, and his passion for her,
reciprocated, realised or otherwise, is projected onto politics. As he tells her “I loved you and
that was the main thing in my life. It was when you would suddenly leave and I imagined I
had lost you for good, that my anger at things political became personal” (187).
For Ram, loving Edna or getting into a love relationship with Edna is engaging in
politics. The symbolism of the victimised Jewish Egyptian woman here carries a different
even if related significance to the victims of anti-Semitism. When Ghali defends the right of
Jews to settle in a national home, he defends it from a ‘contrapuntal’ perspective: one, on a
global level, that finds particular sympathy for the victims of fascism. He also defends it,
however, with a particular ‘Eastern’ understanding. As a Copt, his perspective is touched by
his belonging to a religious community which has had its own political grievances with the
Egyptian state, and which had started a dialogue for political representation and citizenship of
its own from the beginning of the nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century. As an
Egyptian, Ghali knew very well that the Jewish community in Egypt was one of the oldest in
the world, that the secular liberal Egyptian nationalist movement early in the century had
rightly claimed the three religions as part of Egyptian nationalist identity, and that the
persecution of this community was a violation of the imagined ‘fraternity’ of the supposed
nation. As an Egyptian of a certain class, Ghali had also lived through or directly inherited
the many contradictions and failures of Egypt’s short-lived liberal period, where the primary
spokesmen of Egypt’s leading class –Muslims, Christians and Jews– seemed simultaneously
70
subordinate to the British and in complicity with them and other non-Egyptian residents in
exploiting the Egyptian poor (or at least some of the poor). Finally, as an Egyptian who
actually lived at a time when refugees and immigrants from around the world had settled in
Egypt and made it prosper, the party-sponsored and later state-sponsored xenophobia on the
rise in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the expulsions and persecutions of those deemed to
be non-Egyptian must have seemed like a populist and violent mercurial mood-change.
Ghali’s advocacy of tolerance occurs at intersections of political grievances and
misalliances, economic conflicts of interest, and long-standing issues of legal representation
and justice. Ram’s position on Israel and his relation with Edna are caught in these
intersections; intersections which are local, but which are also, in their ethical considerations,
and in the inseparable entwinement of local Egyptian politics with colonialism, global. As
Ram understands the globality of these intersections, he can reject the local solutions offered
by the Nasserites with a counter-imaginary (more philosophical than political) ‘cross-nation’.
Edna then pays for Ram and Font to travel to England and fulfil their dream of
‘living’, and the journey to the centre is a shock. Relatives of their old headmaster treat them
as Political Others even as they befriend them; an ex-officer who had been based in Suez
drives their second-class humanity home to them by calling them “filthy wogs” and “ruddy
Jews” (84-102); the Home Office Aliens Department is staffed with “the rudest people on
earth” (82), and before they leave, Suez happens. Ram’s reading, however, enables him to
connect all the other Suezes in Africa and Asia, as well as the people –English, French,
Jewish, etc.– who were not personally responsible for, and who even protested and otherwise
condemned the military aggressions caused by their governments. This is partly where his
cosmopolitanism lies: in the incapability of choosing one camp over another like any extreme
nationalist.
71
The Voyage Out Again
The interest both protagonists take in women is prompted by the failure of the
political situation as they see it. They turn away from the failed system of (natal/national)
‘filiation’ to an alternative ‘affiliation’ by seeking romance on their own terms. The
protagonists’ political detachment is initiated by a ‘generational’ disruption. The absence of,
or conflict with, parent figures distances them from the home, hearth and ‘herd’52 –in Ram’s
case reminiscent of the scenario in the classic Bildungsroman which often prefigures the
protagonist’s journey. Tomas has had a painful divorce, is estranged from his son, and has
been disowned by his parents, while Ram has lost his father to debt and death, dislikes his
matriarch aunt, despises his cousin, and is dependent (or “sponges” as he puts it) on his
family. Because of their political disenchantment and familial alienation, the now
‘emasculated’ male protagonists turn to the women to save themselves from being social
pariahs, to start a new community (even of two) with a new vested authority for personal (and
now embittered) self-empowerment.
Tainted by post-colonial or political violence, sex at once acquires exploitative
functions and marks defensive and aggressive attempts to regain a violated masculinity.53
Ram, with characteristic airiness, wonders how Font and Levy could speak about useless
politics when there was a woman present: “Doromian the Armenian once said that most men
have their brains in their instruments and I wondered why Freud took so many volumes to say
just that…I go about pretending otherwise, but the fact is, no matter how important the
subject I am discussing, let a beautiful woman appear and I know where my brain is” (34).
Conquered sexually, the women make possible the victory over territory, the coloniser and
the emancipated-but-corrupt colonised. Sex becomes symbolic for political activity, an
attempt to assert the masculinity of the narrators in the face of their political powerlessness.
In this sense both texts revolve around the phalluses of Tomas and Ram which may be put
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out of action by the totalitarian or supremacist cultures they live in. Their sexual activity
becomes a celebration and revival of their virility, perhaps one reason why both narratives
have their misogynist moments. Beyond the main romance or love triangle in each novel both
men take some care to explicate their other (naturally successful) relationships with the
opposite sex.
Tomas begins by explaining the secret of his sexual success to an absurd rule of
threes: “Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you
maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks
apart” (11). The sexual theorizing continues until Tomas seems to perfect sexual infidelity to
the extent that it is portrayed as matter-of-fact and everyday, which perhaps it might have
been in certain experimental communities in the sixties. Tomas is surgeon and cartographer
rolled into one as he slits open women with surgical precision and reveals new worlds (1934).54 The systematic cataloguing of Tomas’s sexual encounters towards the end of The
Unbearable Lightness of Being makes an organised list worthy of Robinson Crusoe; the
series of his orgasmic visits as a window washer ends with a neat tally: “Two hundred, give
or take a few….That’s not so many… I’ve been involved with women for about twenty-five
years now. Divide two hundred by twenty five and you’ll see it only comes to eight or so new
women a year” (192). Tereza’s horrific dreams and her constant unhappiness cannot change
Tomas. His adultery only stops when he tires of it; his virility, the narrator is careful to make
very clear, still functions perfectly, but his soul is tired. The decision too is portrayed
dulcetly. Tomas does not stop cheating on his wife when he gets older as much as he ‘retires’
from his life as Don Juan, in much the same way as he retires to the suburbs.
The choice of women denotes the borders of Tomas and Ram’s transnational
imaginary. All of Tomas’s partners with the exception of Sabina remain unnamed. All are
posited as either aesthetic experiments (to be viewed, assessed or allegorised from a
73
distance), and above all, all seem to come from Tomas’s vaguely European borders. Yet who
are these two hundred-odd women? Do any come from Czechoslovakia’s many minorities?
At one point a woman ‘with a German accent’ calls Tomas at home, an accent suggestive,
one might initially think, of national issues, considering the position of German-Czechs or
German-speaking Czechs for at least a hundred years in different political ‘eras’ during
Czech/oslovakian nation-formation, whether as the largest elite ‘minority’ during the AustroHungarian empire, and after its break up, or as a voting bloc largely supportive of the Sudeten
German Party in 1938. Yet that is the only time Tomas’s mistress calls him, and the incident
is the last time we hear about either her or the accent. Who the women are is not as important
as the fact that Tomas is performing. Although they appear to have taken up quite some time
in Tomas’s life, these scores of women remain nameless and largely silent except to
occasionally mutter acquiescence. They fade into the background of the story quite easily,
making what could have been an otherwise scintillating tale of Tomas’s sexual feats (two
hundred affairs over some two hundred pages would border on another genre) seem oddly
nonchalant. At the end of the day Tomas’s world of women seems really to be the Bohemian
triangle of Tomas, Tereza and Sabina set in the world of the European cultural supra-nation.
His choice between them, to be ‘Don Juan’ or ‘Tristan’ as it is described in the novel, is a
choice of whether to ‘betray’ the ‘literary’ testament of Moses and follow Sabina (who rejects
any sort of political affiliation whatsoever) on her liminal path to the European back of the
beyond, that is, the United States, or to save the ‘ideal’ Tereza (who rejects Czech state
politics after the Prague Spring) by retreating with her into the Bohemian countryside.
Rather than represent normality the relationships with women in Beer in the Snooker
Club are often meant to surprise and shock, and are directly linked to the political dilemma of
resisting or assimilating with the state. Sexual violence appears immediately with the first
piece of information given about Edna: she has been whipped in the face by an Egyptian
74
police officer. Ram’s reaction when he learns this is at first hysteric defensiveness. “So
bloody what?” He shouts. “Aren’t there bloody officers in Israel?” (35) Then he breaks down
in face of “the uselessness of it all and the unfairness of it all” (36) –or in Césaire’s eloquent
phrasing elsewhere: “the awful futility of our raison d’être” (2). Towards the end of the novel
when Ram momentarily breaks down and carries his colonised burden to another woman, the
only lucid complaint that he can make as he shouts uncontrollably is that Edna has been
whipped by an officer. A projection of the rage within as much as it is a denouncement of the
Egyptian state’s corruption and the inevitable violence of national/mass hysteria, the
whipping underscores Ram’s feelings of political chaos and incapability.
Unlike Tomas, Ram names and describes the women he sleeps with, marking the
‘worlds’ he circulates in. The obvious point of comparison with Edna is Didi whom Ram
ends up marrying, (a similar love triangle appears in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
between Tereza and Sabina) but Ram also has affairs with Lady Tannerly, Caroline and
Shirley, and it is no coincidence that they are all Westerners. Western women come to
represent, or at least seem to represent to Ram, a culture that is for the moment doubly
reprehensible, being affiliated to the coloniser (unwanted) and female (weak). Lady Tannerly
is married to that eternal figure of ridicule, the British civil servant, and is known for her
peccadilloes with younger Egyptian men of the Gezira Club whom she introduces to the
‘terrible disenchantment’ of first-time sex. According to Ram, Lady Tannerly is not even
worthy of the epithet ‘mistress’, “you just fuck her” (128). Portrayed slightly more humanely,
Shirley’s main fault is being engaged to Steve Warden. Having been insulted and hit by Suezarmy officer Steve (who also stands for the coloniser in general) Ram sleeps with the
former’s fiancée in a defensive attempt to injure the supremacist culture and meet it on its
own violent terms. Although Ram explains the Shirley affair as the only closure possible to a
certain type of day, it is more an attempt to avenge the inculcated sense of wrong in his
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Egyptianness, to defeat his insecurities, and decolonise his past.55 When Ram returns to
Egypt, the figure of Shirley is replaced by American Caroline, married to yet another figure
of ridicule, the American social helper, who, Ram presciently implies, represents the new
power in Egypt.56 Resenting Caroline because of her easy dollars, nerve-grating accent, and
the new ‘world order’ that she unintentionally represents, Ram is suddenly struck full of
‘white women wisdom’:
It seems difficult to imagine that there was an age when man was gallant to woman
and kissed her hand and her desire was a command. To me, it is a little bit possible to
imagine such a time, because gallantries, in Egypt, are still practised after a fashion
and welcomed by the women. But I know that to be conspicuously gallant to the
average European or American woman, makes her despise you. (133)
The solution seems to be: despise them first, and if you can also make fun of their husbands,
as Ram does of Jack, then so much the better.
Nor are Ram’s sexual encounters ever ‘casual affairs’, the names or faces of these
women can never be forgotten, and usually incite commentary and critique on the social
structures they reflect. That sex can only be casual poses ethical or moral questions. Thus,
Font becomes angry with Ram when the latter spends the night with Shirley, and accuses him
of being like all those spoilt wealthy Egyptian boys with nothing on their minds except
having a good time. This is also partly why the men’s adolescent encounters with sex are
tinged with secrecy and a comic desperation as they muster up enough courage –and pocket
money– to steal a few moments with a prostitute. Too rigid a conformity to ‘proper’ sexual
mores, however, is also mocked; it is after all, even in Egypt, also the sixties. At the Gezira
Club where local marriage prospects are met and made, Ram notes wryly that very properly
the Muslims marry Muslims and Christians marry Christians. Teasing his Cairene friends for
being virgins, he makes fun of his countless girl cousins at the French convent schools who,
for all their extravagant make-up and stylishness outside the school gates, would remain
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virgins until they got married. Meanwhile, his mother, widowed in her thirties, ‘that
miserable widow’ having properly ‘sacrificed’ her life for her son by not marrying again,
masturbates during siesta time when the stillness of the heat makes her loneliness unbearable.
Despite the preoccupation with and significance of sexual prowess, it is the main
romances in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club that take
centre place particularly because of how much they, as experiences essential to the
protagonists’ formative integration into society, push Tomas and Ram to introspection. As
Tereza and Edna prompt Tomas and Ram respectively to make personal, political or
politicised decisions, the men, contemplating their options, realise the gulf between
themselves and the state, and sense the ambiguous and fleeting nature of perception, and so
they digress into philosophy, heightening and drawing out these moments into long periods of
self-contemplation. The split point-of-view expresses their continuously developing states of
knowledge. It is as if the omniscient narrator, having ceased to be all-knowing, splinters into
many selves, none of them having the same assurance of the old, and all of them in dialogic
relation to each other.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera’s multiple narrators (introduced in the
very first line as Tomas ponders his relationship with Tereza) highlight the experimental
artistic artificiality of the text, and draw attention to the novel as a work of art. Kundera’s
multiple narrators –Tomas (the first person, autobiographical narrator), the omniscient
narrator (the fictional artist), and the author (the master-artist)– stand as pseudo-personas of
each other.57 The multi-perspective narration presents a smooth, fluid but fluctuating and
obvious movement from one point of view to the other, manifesting a constant tension
between perspectives and questioning the veracity of all perception. Tomas is in a sense
many protagonists mulling over the same ideological dilemmas, primary among which is the
question of where the individual should stand vis-à-vis the nation, and where the Czech
77
people should stand vis-à-vis Europe. The narrator recounts Tomas’s dilemma via the
medium of narrative, as the artist-god, doing what Tomas does to his patients with a scalpel,
but endowed instead with omniscient knowledge and agency. The narrator makes Tomas’s
lightness bearable because the former has captured with Tomas’s individuality a fictional
possibility and writes it into the continuous history of the novel. The author, meanwhile, has
drawn a sketch (partly a memory or a trace of past sketches in endless recurrence), has
shaded it in with new artistic possibilities, created a new outline altogether, and perhaps even
set a mould for a pattern. In their diverse actions, perspectives and authorities the multiple
narrators explore the novelistic process of creation, but also problematise the sense (or crisis)
of existence at the heart of both The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker
Club: that of confused men in solitude facing moral decisions which have large political
consequences.
The question Tomas poses as he decides between his individual freedom, love’s
obligations and the state’s dictates is often a choice between individual identity and collective
norms. Since possibilities for the artistic representation of individual identity are endless,
Tomas’s decisions become complicated with optional selves –Sabina, Franz, Tomas’s son–
all potential fictional Tomases on the creator artist’s divine canvas, and all battling out the
same questions of individual and national identities within the same political situation. The
move between the characters’ perspectives effects a kind of dialogism between them, creating
characters, all different but all posing as potential realisations of one or another idea of the
omniscient narrator, himself a persona of the author’s:
It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters
once actually lived. They were not born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a
stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying
‘Einmal ist keinmal’. Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach. (37)
….
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are
born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human
78
possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something
essential about.
But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself? …. The characters in my
novels are my own unrealized possibilities. (The Unbearable Lightness of Being 215)
The many potential ‘selves’ draw attention to the transitory, tenuous and individualistic
nature of cognition (and by extension any decisions taken based on that cognition), and
simultaneously refute the holistic tendency of nationalism to collectivise individuals and
make them one univocal mass.
Meanwhile Ram specifies the moment in England (where Edna has first made him
yearn to go, and then paid for him to do so) when he first feels his consciousness of things
divide into two, one experiencing the action and the other observing and assessing (Beer in
the Snooker Club 68). In contrast to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the first-person
narrative voice in Beer in the Snooker Club as it highlights the precise moment of disjuncture
draws attention to a contradictory (or contrapuntal?) plurality in Ram’s personality. This
‘split into two’, described by Ram as a felt moment of experience rather than an
experimentation with the novel form, makes Beer in the Snooker Club (despite being subtitled ‘A Novel’) read more like a personal memoir. The double narrative voice points to the
dualist perspectives of awareness resulting specifically from the protagonist’s journey to
England.
I…wondered whether meeting these people and receiving their hospitality was really
enjoyable. That moment …was the very beginning –the first time in my life that I had
felt myself cleave into two entities, the one participating and the other watching and
judging. (68)
….
I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of the imagination; my own
actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play. Both
audience and participant in one –a fictitious character. (Beer in the Snooker Club 60)
This cleavage marks Self and perceived Self. From then on Ram’s awareness of himself as
‘two entities’ makes him wonder if anything he experiences is ‘really real’, and makes him
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suspect that everything he does, from ordering a drink to refusing to seek employment or
taking an unwavering political stance, is an act, what he frequently refers to as a “gimmick”
(68). Multiple layers of consciousness in Beer in the Snooker Club draw attention to the
unreliability of Ram’s perceived experience. Rather than the primarily aesthetic value that the
multiple-narrator technique holds for Kundera, (although the artistic preoccupation is there
too, as seen in Ghali’s metaphors ‘character in a book’, ‘my own actor in my own theatre’,
etc.), it conveys thematically the troubled process of formation of the colonised subject postindependence.
While the precise moment Ram ‘feels his soul split into two’ occurs about a third of
the way into the narrative, the alternate perspectives appear from the beginning, narrating and
commenting on Ram’s journey, poignantly underlining his loneliness and alienation. They
help describe a neither-here-nor-there hybrid space, a personal-national space which is
ambiguous and slippery. Telling his story in retrospect as he sits in a bar in Egypt, Ram
writes:
The mental sophistication of Europe has killed something good and natural in us,
killed it for good…forever. To me, now, it is apparent that we have, both Font and
myself, lost the best thing we ever had: the gift of our birth, as it were; something
indescribable but solid and hidden and, most of all, natural. We have lost it forever.
And those who know what it is, cannot possess it…Gradually, I have lost my natural
self.…We left, Font and I, for London. For dreamed-of Europe, for ‘civilization’, for
‘freedom of speech’, for ‘culture’, for ‘life’. We left that day and we shall never
return, although we are back here again. (60)
Preceded by a confusion of past and present events the impressive prolepsis of the last line
asserts a new imagined moment of time and place. What Ram means simply in the last line is
that going to London was an experience that changed him forever. Yet the prolepsis spoken
in the present time of narration to refer to the future of an event that happened in the past
problematizes the linear chronology of time, as well as the fixed geographical literality of
space. So there emerge multiple Londons: the London that Ram knows before going, the
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London he experiences when he arrives, the London he travels from, the London he takes
back with him (as he sits in Cairo). With its mixture of tenses, the prolepsis mixes up time to
highlight that the ‘space’ constructed or imagined through knowledge is individualistic,
ongoing and varying.
This uncertainty of one’s place in the world is Ram’s imagined national space,
inhabited, as he sees it, by all those (postcolonial) people like himself who have lost the ‘gift
of their birth’ (or have alternatively, inherited it, in Kiran Desai’s memorable title “the
inheritance of loss”). What is the ‘gift of birth’? It is the assurance that some people have of
the narratives of national History, and their places within it. In contrast, there is no such
tenuousness in Tomas’s or any other character’s perception in The Unbearable Lightness of
Being; every character is certain of his or her position within or rather antipathy towards the
nation at a certain moment in time, (even if the nation itself, in the ‘endless returns’ of
history, might perish).58
This certainty of one’s place in the nation is also reflected in the individual’s or
protagonist’s views of the coloniser. Although the narrators in both The Unbearable
Lightness of Being and Beer in the Snooker Club criticise the occupation of their countries,
the former narrator’s critique of imperialist culture is different from that of the latter. Ram
sees Europe, particularly Britain, as an occupying empire to be resisted, but also as a culture
that he feels affiliated to. An Anglophile who views Western culture as something from
which profit and pleasure is to be gained, Ram sees himself as belonging to the ‘West’ by
virtue of a shared humanity. On the other hand, the authorial narrator in The Unbearable
Lightness of Being views Russia only as an alien occupying Other, an opposite culture, an
aberrant deviation from Bohemia’s true and proper historical course, just one more conqueror
of Bohemia and proprietor of Bohemian history.
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A discussion of the nation-state requires discussing the city, considered as a site for
national sovereignty as well as for modernity, a figure for the modern condition and that of
the avant-garde and also a microcosm for the global.59 The supra/cross perspectives appear in
the ways the authors use the capital and countryside, the locales where the love affairs take
place. Ghali’s Cairo is a lived, rather elite Cairo; his highly autobiographical vision of an
upper class Cairene family is strengthened by direct allusions to families and places that
resound of a faded prosperity but live on in the names of streets and residences, scholarships
or statues until today (as well as in the proliferating and rather self-laudatory memoirs and
conferences on the subject in the present). The power of his cosmopolitan vision as resistance
lies in how he tries to subvert the highly public Nasserite rhetoric by describing the highly
private salons and clubs of the leisured Egyptian classes during the 1940s and 50s. Ram
mentions old, wealthy and politically affluent Coptic families such as Doss and Nackla, chic
café-bars and restaurant rooftops (some still bearing the same names today but having lost
their glory) such as Groppi’s bar and the Semiramis hotel rooftop.60 Ram’s Gezira Club is
still alive and functioning but the faces have changed as Egypt’s middle class has grown and
new members have brought in their often conservative pastimes with them. Ram makes
concession only to the public monuments of the pyramids and the Sphinx, and even those are
personalised as he parodies how history is (re)written, and speaks of how he and Edna
strolled around them “like English couples at Brighton” (43). Ram replaces Nasser’s publicrousing speeches with fleeting images of Egypt’s many classes, drawing private or
personally-experienced ‘communities’ to counter ‘euphoric’ nationalist rhetoric.
Meanwhile Kundera’s narrative resists the political status quo by making the political
situation of the Czech nation (and Europe) susceptible to overwriting and overhaul by a
greater force: the grand march of History; every public figure, monument or political event is
marked by the possibility of imminent disappearance or dismissal. There is nothing
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mentioned in The Unbearable Lightness of Being about Prague’s literary circles or small
avant-garde theatres which Kundera knew so well and which often became sites for political
dissent. Instead, Kundera describes the public façades of central administration: town squares
and political borders, national rivers and central stations, and anonymous or renamed streets
and spas, spires and cemeteries. Rather than describing them with a vague nostalgia, Kundera
writes bitterly of how they have been defaced, wrecked, bombed or wiped out, renamed and
forgotten, or left as reminders of Czech weakness during wars. Instead of the nationallysymbolic Sphinx and pyramids being pushed into the background by the personal (if
gimmicky) image of two lovers strolling around them, the personal histories of Tomas and
Franz are wiped out by the viciously irrelevant inscriptions which their relatives add to their
headstones, their lives made as light as the wings of the moth flying too close to the candle in
the ending scene.
The protagonists’ affinities to capital and countryside too, differ in the texts by virtue
of the women’s influence. Tereza views Prague, for example, as a site for experience that is
soured by bad politics. She moves to Prague because it represents a possible life with Tomas;
she leaves because the Russian occupation makes her helpless; she returns to Prague because
she cannot live without the security net of what is familiar; she leaves again for the
countryside because the latter supplants the capital in her mind as a place of freedom and
authenticity. Her perceptions of the city change with its fluctuating political equilibrium:
“[Prague] was the most beautiful city in the world” (143), its sounds are “faint and sweet, like
thousands of distant violins” (145), but it grows ‘ugly’ with foreign occupation; so too, is her
emotional stability determined, as she feels ‘happiest’ during the Prague Spring (possibly the
only event in Czech history that passes muster for Kundera) and helpless and effaced in
Switzerland. Tereza’s unhappiness in certain places also pushes Tomas to relocate with her
despite his own career problems.
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It is the chapter entitled “Soul and Body” which marks the peak of the affinity
between Tereza and the city: the chapter captures the extent to which the national dream has
soured, and reads like an aubade to Prague with Tereza standing in the centre. “Soul and
Body” is a decided farewell to a beloved city where ideals have become impossible, played
out against the backdrop of the evocative sounds of the city and violin music. The chapter
starts with the story of Prochazka being harassed to death by the police. Next, Tereza finds
herself indulging in a passing sexual encounter that she regrets, but suspects wildly that she
has been manipulated into by the state and its secret police. Tereza’s two dreams then
reiterate her unhappiness about Tomas’s intolerable infidelities. She decides to leave Prague.
The chapter ends with Tereza waking up early and, “grief-stricken”, watching the nationallysymbolic Vltava61 running slowly out of the city carrying some of Prague’s monuments and
landmarks along with it. Tereza resorts to the countryside to seek the ‘authentic’ national
experience after the capital’s national ideal has been lost. The idyllic stereotype or myth of
that vague terrain for urban citizens called ‘the country’ depicts it as the seat of what is
‘authentic’ or ‘original’ about cultures, the source for folkloric music, costumes, values, and
other national traditions,62 and draws on a traditional, even clichéd, paradigm of the city as
the centre for vice, change and experience as opposed to the country as a source of innocence,
authenticity and perenniality, peopled with ‘simple’ folk who crack jokes about their pet pigs.
The paradisiacal model the ‘countryside’ connotes and to which Kundera, not without irony,
directly alludes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being with his discussion of the “idyll”, also
builds on the Judaic/Biblical tradition he takes as a common European myth of descent. More
physically even, in many areas of the connected and shared countryside in Europe,
particularly in the context of the free movement of peoples, it is easier to imagine (note,
imagine) borders blending and being forgotten.
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This perspective is vastly different from Ram’s. The growth and urbanization of urban
and rural areas in Egypt has been highly discrepant (one of the reasons why migration to the
capital over the past decades has created a polluted monster of some twenty million
residents). For many town-born Egyptians who have no direct experience of the countryside,
the experience of the millions of farmers/peasants living in the towns, villages, rural centres,
shanties, etc. along the Nile seems far removed from their daily lives –even if at the time
Ghali was writing the entire population of Cairo was ‘only’ about two and a half million, and
snatches of agricultural land and open fields could still be spied between the suburbs and
downtown areas. What the Egyptian peasantry has really offered for modern Egyptian
nationalist history is a hugely-versatile, easily-manipulated nation symbol and nation myth
(as well as a huge voting bloc): the epic of a vast majority tilling the land and slaving for an
indifferent minority ruling class since the pharaohs. Even if Ram was part of the landowning
class, whose fortunes indeed depended wholly on the land, such classes usually leased their
land to farmers but had no direct hand in overseeing it. Like millions of city-bred fellow
Egyptians, Ram has in fact no personal experience of country life, the supposedly ‘authentic’
source of the national tradition.
This is why it is significant that it is Edna, the rich Jewish woman holding a British
passport, who makes Ram identify with this side of Egypt, telling him of her relationship
with her nanny’s son, Adle, in the village, and how they are caught and punished by her
parents, and that Adle eventually dies in the war with Israel. To ‘discover’ these Egyptians,
Ram has to “disguise” himself in “Arab” garb and go native. Even if his ideas of socialist
democracy (as popular in Egypt, as both Font and Edna show, as they were in Europe in the
fifties and sixties) make Ram prioritise the problem of redressing the economic inequalities in
Egypt, he draws attention to the way the symbols of peasantry and countryside were
efficiently and insincerely evoked and manipulated for the purpose of mass mobilisation by
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Nasser: “The word ‘Egypt’ evokes in you, I suppose, a scene of a fellah [peasant] trudging
home in the twilight, a spade over his shoulder, and his son leading a cow behind him. Well,
Egypt is a place where middle-aged people play croquet (128)”.63 Reading between the lines
evokes a more prominent sense of identification with another part of Egypt, namely Upper
Egypt, or the south, to which most Copts trace their ancestry, truly or mythologically, ‘as far
back as the Pharaohs’. Although Ram identifies himself as Coptic, he does not highlight
Coptic problems in Egypt, but he does bring up Upper Egypt (where one uncle still lives) as a
possible last refuge where he and Edna can live together in peace (like Tomas and Tereza in
the refuge of the Bohemian countryside).
E. M. Forster wrote in 1927 that had it not been for marriage or death novelists would
have been hard pressed to end their novels; and with much of the same resignation Kundera
marries and then kills off Tomas and Tereza and Ghali marries off Ram to Didi, marking the
culmination of the love affairs at the heart of the novels. The two protagonists seem to learn
that resisting ideas which smack of the herd will compel them to liminal societal positions,
and for the sake of sane communal belonging they commit themselves to a partner over
whom at least they have some measure of control. Tomas ultimately wishes for anonymity
and reprieve with an understanding partner in tow: “[Tomas] longed for a holiday. But for an
absolute holiday, a rest from all imperatives, from all ‘Es muss sein!’ If he could take a rest (a
permanent rest) from the hospital operating table, then why not from the world operating
table” [italics in original] (228). He aligns himself with Tereza rather than the more exciting
Sabina to metaphorically save the child in the bulrush basket but also to save himself from
being abandoned, for Sabina offers no long-term solace even for the similarly lonely. Defined
by her own dictionary understanding of ‘betrayal’, Sabina will never ‘keep ranks’. As he
moves further and further to the margins of society, out of the medical profession, away from
the capital, and into the Edenic countryside, Tomas can towards the end of his life declare his
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freedom and autonomy to his supportive partner in their secluded world of two: “‘Missions
are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it’s a terrific relief to realize you’re
free, free of all missions’” (305). Or as Kundera puts it elsewhere: “[H]uman life as such is a
defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it.
That –that is the raison d’être of the art of the novel” (The Curtain 10). Tomas’s position is
less political engagement than an ironic celebration of banality, of an understanding of
‘human defeat’.
Ram stresses his world-weariness almost from the opening page, and his decision to
marry comes when he wishes, like Tomas, for ‘a rest from all imperatives’: “Oh, blissful
ignorance. Wasn’t it nice to go to the Catholic Church with my mother before I ever heard of
Salazar or the blessed troops to Ethiopia?” (36). Finding out that Edna is married to an Israeli
who has been wounded trying to escape from a prison in Egypt, and realising that Edna’s
political engagement is as inevitable as it is self-destructive pushes Ram to leave her: “I
realized the extent of my love for her and also realized that we would have to part. I saw her
bullied by nationalities and races and political events and revolutions and dictatorships and
particularly by her own vague idealism” (122). After the novel-length longing for Edna and
incessant self-contemplation, Ram’s decision to marry Didi, who only appears towards the
end of the book and whose complacency and political righteousness Ram finds infuriating,
sounds rather abrupt. Rich, complacent, comme-il-faut Didi, however, also offers peace and
“serenity”, disengagement. (The word ‘serenity’ is significant, featuring in Ghali’s chilling
suicide note as a word he had always loved, and a state which, by his act of suicide, he looks
forward to achieving (Soueif “Goat Face” 11; Ghali Diaries n.pag)). So Ram tears up the
discriminating photos of Nasser’s concentration camps he has hidden under a floorboard,
promises Didi he will “give up that other business”, and offers to marry her if she will
support him and his mother. For some reason Didi agrees to this less than charming proposal,
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(Ram, like Tomas, thinks his success lies in his sex appeal), and Ram celebrates his
upcoming nuptials by meeting his friends for a game of snooker in much the same way as the
novel started. He has met the human imperative that makes people social animals –on his
own terms.
The positioning of the solitary individual in what Michael Wood calls “a site of
chosen loneliness, of freedom and kindness, a model of democratic exemption from the
hustle of totalitarian or merely busy politics” (2) helps to situate history as something against
which individuals are pitted, a situation they are committed to changing but a state of being in
which they are ironically also helpless. The responsibility of the engaged intellectual may
require addressing political issues, but as a fictional ‘type’, the protagonist addresses politics
‘existentially’ rather than actively. Hence the protagonists engage only superficially in
politics: as solitary individuals with no supporters, history happens around and above them.
Ram’s relationship with Edna, what he describes as “un amour like literature engagé” (17172), fails precisely because of engagement; while Tomas’s supervisor makes Tomas’s
foremost responsibility clear to him with the first spot of political trouble: “You know as well
as I do…that you’re no writer or journalist or saviour of the nation” (173). The popularity of
Sartre’s ‘committed literature’ had spread like wildfire around the Arabic-speaking world in
the mid-forties, finding fertile ground in the political turbulence of the Middle East. While
culture in Czechoslovakia had always tended to be deeply engaged with philosophical
thinking, artists active in the ‘cultural renaissance’ of 1956-68, mostly in their thirties and
forties, carrying the burdens of decades of occupation and ‘socialist realism’, similarly found
in committed literature a malleable method to address social ills and become the “conscience
of the nation”. 64 Such writers also found an audience more than willing to listen.65 Yet for all
their political commitment it is political responsibility and representation as a raison d’être
for art that Ghali and Kundera’s protagonists precisely resist.66
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In a context when being communist, and then socialist, was seen as a call to resist
fascism, social injustice, exploitation and the rest of it, both novels are heavily concerned
with resisting the post-communist state and what have now become the iconicized
characteristics of the ‘party-state’: censorship, government corruption, secret police, or
‘totalitarianism-general’. Such issues are vehemently critiqued. Nevertheless, the narrators’
primary position seems to be one of estrangement from the absurd world of the state, a
particular characteristic of post-war societies, perhaps, but also one that comes from existingin-the-world, or world-weariness.67 Without dismissing the centrality of political engagement
to the narratives, and inasmuch as any novel is not political (as the Mourid Barghouti
epigraph to this chapter lyrically puts it),68 it is highly unlikely that there was a historical
moment in most societies that did not appear to be either ‘in crisis’ or ‘in transition’,
particularly if it was in transition between one crisis and another.
The disillusionment with political engagement is evident in the distant tone the
narrators adopt when describing their ‘experiences’, particularly, as this chapter has shown,
with women.69 Ram’s wry humour, his detached elitism and public-school moralism is
reminiscent of the British “intelligent comic novel” (Lodge n.pag), an artistic pose that could
be represented by such figures as Kingsley Amis, and a time when making strong political
statements was a subversive activity, collectively performed in solidarity, but was also and
above all, an opportunity for a cynical self-deprecation that was somehow disengaged and
terribly witty. Meanwhile Tomas’s sole interest in politics seems broadly philosophical
(should Czech Communists take the blame like Oedipus?) while Czech history happens
‘elsewhere’. Kundera’s sensitised self-consciousness loses political activism somewhere in
the dense palimpsest of highbrow literary and philosophical ideas. The texts celebrate above
all the ‘average man’ (or intellectual) who could be ideally just that; who lived in a reality in
which the smallest manifestations of everyday culture were not saturated with politics. It is at
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this point, when the ‘average dissenter’ of the angry 1960s aspires not to make political
postures, shout political slogans, or take part in political marches but idealises instead a
mundane everyday reality like starting a relationship, going out for a drink, or practising a
profession, that he/she becomes a critical intellectual, as removed from his/her space and time
as rooted within it. For both protagonists can see that there is something rather fake,
pretentious and aesthetically off-putting –‘kitschy’ in Kundera’s phrasing, ‘gimmicky’ in
Ram’s– about impassioned masses of people, even a mass of ostensibly intelligent
individuals, carried forward by the irrational feeling of what Kundera often calls ‘ecstasy’.
Rather than a struggle for what is right, it resembles too much a struggle for righteousness, a
kind of ‘moral exhibitionism’.
Appearing towards the end of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Franz’s march
with the ‘international community’ in Cambodia takes this idea of committed protestors and
intellectuals doing more harm than good to farcical proportions; the scene also makes a jibe
at Havel’s slogan of ‘living in truth’70 which Franz takes as his motto. The march in
Cambodia is depicted complete with exaggerated stereotypes: sensationalist journalists,
posturing actresses, glib politicians and well-meaning but uncomprehending ‘humanitarians’.
This is followed by the drawn-out story of how Franz dies, ‘not with a bang but with a
whimper’. Franz does not get injured on the life-threatening political march but is mugged as
a tourist in Thailand. He does not mercifully die at once but is hospitalised, completely
dependent on others, back home. He is accompanied in hospital by a wife who hates him; and
his tombstone inscription will deny what had seemed to him to be the most meaningful act of
his life. To ‘live in truth’, Franz dies for kitsch.
A similar although less bitter fate awaits Font in Beer in the Snooker Club. Ram tells
of finding his best friend Font pushing a barrow in the Cairo streets. “There he was then.
Selling cucumbers. Cucumbers of all things. Of course I understood. He was Jimmy Porter.
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We had seen the play together in London and there he was, a degree in his pocket and selling
cucumbers”…. ‘Font’, I asked in English, ‘what do the other barrow boys think of Virginia
Woolf?’” (15). Like Jimmy Porter who abandons his studies to eventually run a small sweet
shop, and equally, Edna in Beer in the Snooker Club, one of the wealthiest women in Egypt,
who travels on the third-class tram because it is a sign of equality, Font is a romanticised
socialist, ‘living for his beliefs’, but doing no practical good. Unlike Franz in The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, however, Font meets less drastic ends. Asked by an old school friend in
Cairo to run his snooker club, Font thus spends his time wiping snooker tables with old
copies of, of all things, the Literary Supplement. Ram does not spare himself the gentle
mockery of his own ‘gimmicks’ either. Having narrated Egypt’s troubled half century,
scandalised the family, and got embroiled in at least two failed relationships, Ram’s (sad) tale
intentionally ends with what one assumes to have been meant as a devastatingly witty parting
shot at his own political sincerity: “And then I went to Groppi’s [for a whisky]”.71
Faced with the option-turned-obligation of being pigeon-holed within one national
identity or another, the protagonists find themselves caught in a series of tensions between
action and decision, individual self-determination (what the protagonist ‘I’ feels like doing)
and state determination (what the protagonist feels the state obliges him to do); or what the
individual (devoid of historical determination) potentially might have done and what the
state, similarly de-historicised, potentially might have been; or, finally, what the individual
would like to do, and what society or the nation would like the individual to do. Finding
themselves in a constant state of liminality as the options they are given seem increasingly
stultifying, the protagonists imagine a time and place where they would not need to make
such choices. Rather than give their opinions on decisions taken around roundtables and in
political headquarters, the protagonists of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Beer in the
Snooker Club stress precisely the distance they feel from those discussions and headquarters.
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The novels emphasise that from the individual’s viewpoint there appears a rift if not an
outright contradiction between the ‘nation’ and its ‘individuals’, a discrepant hyphen between
the ‘nation’ and the ‘state’, and a gulf between the individual’s lived perception of
community and the state’s self-propagated image. The novels emphasise too, that resisting
national affiliations or transcending them requires locating the nation in a larger world
perspective: that is, both relating the nation to other nations, as well as defining the ‘world’
itself: its parameters, its literature, who it includes and who it forgets. For Kundera the larger
perspective takes the shape of a supra-nation and is rendered in the context of canonical
literary history, while Ghali’s counter-imaginary is constructed as a cross-nation and is
rendered in terms of a weary, old-world cosmopolitanism.
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Chapter 2
Gender Resistance as World Literature:
Individual and Global Landscapes
in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage
Feminist practice…operates at a number of levels: at the level of daily life through the everyday acts that
constitute our identities and relational communities; at the level of collective action in groups, networks, and
movements constituted around feminist visions of social transformation; and at the levels of theory, pedagogy,
and textual creativity in the scholarly and writing practices of feminists engaged in the production of knowledge.
Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (5)
So history is spread out beneath [the] surface, from the mountains to the sea, from north to south, from the forest
to the beaches…[R]esistance and denial, entrenchment and endurance, the world beyond and dream. (Our
landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history).
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse (11)
In his admirable exposé of the development of Weltliteratur (2006) John Pizer
examines the concept coined and practised by Goethe and antecedents in Germany, and
discusses how it later developed during the twentieth century in the US. Pizer suggests that
one of the critical objectives of World Literature in its recent re-emergence (also initially
intended by Goethe) is to locate the interchange between ‘universal’ and ‘specific’,
‘transnational’ and ‘subnational’ elements in a literary work. World Literature would then
offer a way to discuss texts within a global but not generalist framework, and to draw out the
“linguistic/cultural alterity” (7) in texts without being limited by the too-narrow confines of
perceiving a purely national literature. On the same topic Svend Erik Larsen discusses an
analogy used by Danish comparatist Georg Brandes. According to Larsen, Brandes defined
World Literature as the kind of locally-anchored literature that transcends its local constraints
and opens up to a translocal world, yet one that gains its value (or “vigor”) by being firmly
rooted in its historical context. The approach required by World Literature needs to look at
the work as if through a telescope with differently functioning glasses on either end, one end
magnifying the text’s contextual specificity and the other diminishing it by distance
(Larsen).72
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Clearly, “the move away from singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary
conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject
positions –of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual
orientation– that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world” (Bhabha Location of
Culture 2). How can such different subject positions be negotiated simultaneously? In her
article “Besides the West: Postcolonial Women Writers, the Nation, and the Globalised
World”73 on the crossovers between (postcolonial) gender studies and transnational
discourses, Elleke Boehmer suggests at least one way in which gender in particular may link
in productive ways such ‘subnational and transnational’ or ‘specific and universal’ elements.
Focusing on Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, Boehmer argues that by engaging with their
condition as women specifically in relation to the nation or to a nationally-circumscribed
space, writers succeed in addressing issues of belonging that have both trans-local or global
resonances, and thereby are able to suggest various modes of cross-border affiliations.
This chapter will look at the ‘subnational and transnational’, ‘universal and specific’
points of dialogue in the gendered journeys of acculturation and conditioning whereby
several women protagonists move towards education, independence and social status and
come to understand something about their individuality, their local/national communities and
their places in the world. Touching upon the tensions between nation and globe pervading
discussions of World Literature, the chapter will compare how Tsitsi Dangarembga’s
Nervous Conditions (1988) and Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from
Cairo to America (1999) address local issues by drawing on or appealing to a shared ethical
or moral world of gender, what, for the purposes of this thesis may be called, a ‘global
nation’.74 Going, as Damrosch calls it, ‘glocal’75 the women protagonists explore individual
formation in light of gender issues and within a specific national context. They thus transcend
the nation to a more global ‘solidarity’ of women by qualifying (rather than effacing) the
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political question of the texts from one of national citizenship (what does it mean to be
Zimbabwean, Egyptian or English) into one of gender codified by national and postcolonial
paradigms (what does it mean for the narrator to be a woman of the world at a specific time
in Zimbabwe, Egypt, England and the US?). This chapter proceeds in smaller concentric
circles from the globe to the individual, using Brandes’s proverbial ‘telescope’, to examine
how the protagonists appropriate and describe landscapes to reflect the formation of their
identity and resistance to their political status quo.76 The view thus moves from natural
landscapes being designated as natural resources, then national territory, before narrowing
gradually to smaller constructed, boundaried landscapes, such as ornamental private gardens,
the home, and lastly, the bedroom.
Born in 1959 in what was then Rhodesia, Tsitsi Dangarembga was educated for a
short time in England as a child, moved to Rhodesia to receive her A-levels, moved back to
England to start medicine at Cambridge, before returning to what had become Zimbabwe to
take up psychology at the University of Zimbabwe. With the support of the international
network of women’s institutions (Sugnet 47) Nervous Conditions swiftly became a bestseller
and was acclaimed as ‘the first novel in English by a Zimbabwean woman writer’. It was also
quickly categorised as a classic Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, representational of
Africa and African women in general, Zimbabweans in particular and black Zimbabwean
women at its most specific –as indicated by all except two of the fourteen review-quotes
accompanying the 2006 Ayebia edition. Featuring on many syllabi on women’s studies,
postcolonial literature and African writers in universities around the world, one author
described it as “canonical…even ubiquitous” (Mustafa 389; see also Hassan; and Gallagher).
Semi-autobiographical, the novel’s time frame almost runs parallel to Dangarembga’s own
lifetime. Tambu, the main protagonist and narrator is a Shona peasant girl living in colonial
Rhodesia in the 1960s-70s (when Dangarembga herself would have been a child). Tambu
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leaves to the mission school near Umtali where her uncle is the headmaster, moves into her
uncle’s house and shares a bedroom with her second fictional self, the slightly older cousin
Nyasha who has recently returned after having spent five years in England (like
Dangarembga herself at about that age). A few years after, possibly early or mid-1970s,
Tambu wins a scholarship to the exclusive Young Ladies College of the Sacred Heart (a
similar institution to the one in which Dangarembga herself had taken her A-levels). As the
book closes on Tambu’s first years at the Sacred Heart, Zimbabwe is on its way to gaining
independence. Some nine years later, narrative time and real time come together: the year is
1988, Dangarembga has turned 29, and Tambu’s adult voice begins recounting her firstperson novel in retrospect, looking back at the past, but making clear that her journey to
awareness was “a long and painful process…whose events stretched over so many years”
eventually bringing her “to this time when I can set down this story” (208).
Written as a memoir, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from
Cairo to America presents a comparable formation narrative. Growing up in 1940s Cairo,
Ahmed goes to university in England, moves on to teach in the UAE, and then relocates to
the US where she finally settles. Frequently stopping in her memoir at moments when she has
reached peace with herself whether in relation to her parents, the colour of her skin or her
society and class, Ahmed realises that her journey of self-knowledge has taught her that the
self is plural, changing and continuous: conceived at a threshold of what might be called,
following from Lionnet (1989; 1995), métissage:77
For the truth is, I think that we are always plural. Not either this or that, but this and
that. And we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousnesses a convergence
of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time and this place and
moving like rivers through us. And I know now that the point is to look back with
insight and without judgment, and I know now that it is of the nature of being in this
place, this place of convergence of histories, cultures, ways of thought, that there will
always be new ways to understand what we are living through, and that I will never
come to a point of rest or of finality in my understanding. [Italics in original] (Ahmed
25-26)
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Ahmed’s river metaphor (‘we always embody in our multiple shifting consciousness a
convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time and place and
moving like rivers through us’) can productively be extended to compare ideas of nature,
education and cultivation in the two works and how they are used to evoke combined
delineations of self/nation/world.
The first few pages of both works are dominated by descriptions of the natural
landscape.78 From the river where Tambu first plays and bathes and does the laundry to the
kitchen where she cooks, cleans and sleeps, and from the garden where Leila plays to her
grandparents’ house where she grows up with the family, the narratives tell the stories of
women’s lives in women’s spaces. Women appropriate geographical space (landscape) into
social space; and because the narratives are politically-charged, the act of designating social
spaces becomes a political act, thus reflecting the complex interrelated issues of gender, postcolonialism and literary expression.79 Land of course, has always been the physical and
conceptual site for colonial, and political in general, conflict:
Underlying social space are territories, lands, geographical domains, the actual
geographical underpinnings of the imperial and also the cultural contest. To think
about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this
occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is
what empire in the final analysis is all about. At the moment when a coincidence
occurs between real control and power, the idea of what a given place was (could be,
might become), and an actual place –at that moment the struggle for empire is
launched. This coincidence is the logic both for Westerners taking possession of land
and, during decolonization, for resisting natives reclaiming it…[and affirms] both the
primacy of geography and an ideology about control of territory. (Said Culture and
Imperialism 93)80
In this manner women’s geographic space, whether imposed or self-imposed, makes the
‘land’ they live on, use or are affected by, a social space inherently tied to their designated
positions within the political community or nation-state, and bearing further particular
political signification if that state is colonised.
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According to Nira Yuval-Davis “it is the differential access of different collectivities
to the state which dictates the nature of the hegemonic national ethos in the society” (Gender
and Nation 2), and this shows in the women’s appropriation of space in accordance to their
places in the colonised society. In Tambu’s case, for example, women’s-only places have
been marked out at the river probably by the women for their own convenience because such
spots are suitably shallow for washing laundry, drawing water for cooking and cleaning and
minding children.81 The women’s ‘designated’ areas suit their societal responsibilities, and
imply their roles within the family order, and within the larger organised ‘society’ that is
maintained or condoned by the state –as unpaid labourers, for example, (who use the river to
water their land), or as girls with unequal access to education (who mind the babies and help
their mothers with chores as their older brothers go to school).
As black Zimbabwean women, a move to change or abandon these ‘women’s places’
becomes a move to change their roles in society and therefore protest against their political
status-quo. Attitudes such as Tambu’s, who avoids these places because they remind her of
her unremitting chores, point to an engagement with various issues at the same time: feminist,
racial, national, postcolonial, third-world, etc. Because these women have also marked out
these spaces themselves, however, for their convenience (to save time, for example, or to
seize the chance to socialise), the sites also become with familiar and repeated practice places
of empowerment and exclusion. So while Tambu avoids them, other women can take refuge
in them and find solace and support in the company of family members and friends. The
places then stand as an alternative to services that state infrastructure might have provided for
the women such as day care centres or even public education systems and medical support.
Only when a series of small shops opens nearby do the women abandon their favourite places
at the river because now they have become too exposed to passersby, and not exclusionary
enough.
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The form of Ahmed’s memoir often borders on the mystical, an impression furthered
by her frequent allusions, including epigraph and concluding quote, to the works of Rumi, the
thirteenth-century Muslim Sufi mystic, an epitome of a figure who was at once one and
plural.82 Like other mystic and Sufi poets, the general theme of Rumi's thought is essentially
that of the formative concept of (re)union with the beloved/master (the primal root) from
which/whom the mystic subject/slave has been cut off. Often making use of music, poetry or
dance as a path for reaching God, the Sufist aimed to go on a mystical journey of spiritual
ascent through mind and love to the Perfect One. In this journey the seeker symbolically turns
towards the truth, grows through love, abandons the ego, finds the truth and arrives at
Perfection. The seeker then returns from this spiritual journey with greater maturity to love
and to be of service to the whole of creation indiscriminately and regardless of beliefs, races,
classes and nations. Seven centuries later and despite what it would seem to offer of a
spiritual, highly localised poetic taste, Rumi’s poetry in 2007 was claimed as the most
popular in the United States (Haviland).
Ahmed’s metaphor in likening the ‘convergence of traditions, cultures, histories
coming together…like rivers through us’ is mystically apt, suiting well the journey to
oneness with nature or the life force. It also makes it easier to locate the versions of practised
or spiritual Islam recounted in her book (such as the belief in pacifism) which stresses
connectedness to the world and empathy for humanity as a foundation for doctrine. Selfknowledge for Ahmed appears as a way of being in the world and can mean affirming one’s
connectedness to all things, and the connectedness of all things to each other, comparable to
the connectedness and mutual well-being in the Bantu philosophy of ‘unhu’ that
Dangarembga weaves into the sequel to Nervous Conditions.83 By evoking the process of
Sufi spiritual self-revelation the river image in Ahmed’s metaphor expands its common
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metaphorical use in English for the life force and aptly brings out the journey of formation in
her narrative.
Ahmed’s references to Sufism too give a segue into the notion of plurality as a way of
resisting socio-cultural dominance. Sufism implicitly offers an understanding or acceptance
that one is actively in charge of wider discourses of change but also subservient to the status
quo. Arising in the first few centuries of Islam, Sufism spread rapidly as both counter-culture
to a politico-judicial, highly-specialised doctrinal Islamic learning, and an assimilative culture
of Muslim faith, (and still healthily if sometimes furtively exists in the same tradition). “How
can we grasp”, asks Chantal Mouffe (in the context of women’s movements within national
liberation struggles), “the multiplicity of relations of subordination that can affect an
individual if we envisage social agents as homogenous and unified entities? What
characterizes the struggles of these new social movements is precisely the multiplicity of
subject-positions which constitutes a single agent, and the possibility for this multiplicity to
become the site of an antagonism and thereby politicized” (Qtd. in Sugnet 34). Being aware
of oneself as both agent of and accessory to social change, of being part of a counter-culture
that lies in propinquity to the mainstream culture, and as being formed by this national
culture, that national culture and the necessary overlap between them, requires potentially
understanding in Ahmed’s words that ‘we always embody in our multiple shifting
consciousnesses a convergence of traditions, cultures, histories coming together in this time
and this place’ (26).
More territorially, another river weaves through Ahmed’s memoir, and that is the
Nile, considered in Egyptian heritage from folk songs to classic literature, from everyday
expressions to national songs, and from Pharaonists to Arabists, as quite literally the gift of
life.84 Herodotus once said or is reported to have said, as every Egyptian schoolchild knows,
that ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile’, and Egyptian schoolchildren are not allowed to forget it
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even if in many schoolbooks Herodotus’s name itself often goes unmentioned. The ‘key of
the Nile’ or the ‘key of life’ is represented in hieroglyphs by the ‘ankh’ symbol (☥) and is
often depicted in the hands of the deities of the afterlife offering resurrection to the deceased.
Although the meanings of the Ankh sign are still contested85 it is often taken to refer to the
pivotal role of the Nile in the civilisations that have lived on its banks.
The Nile with its life-giving properties regulates Leila Ahmed’s Cairene childhood for
her family house is framed by “lush and tranquil countryside” watered by the Nile on one
side, and desert on the other (15). Caught at the conjunctions of histories Ahmed frequently
refers to, the house with its garden stands between the (timeless) desert and the encroaching
urban sprawl of Cairo, but also ten minutes away from the ancient obelisk of Heliopolis, and
the ancient tree of Matariya, where Mary is said to have rested on the Holy Family’s flight to
Egypt. Ahmed’s childhood landscape seems to conjure up major discourses of the early
Egyptian nationalist movement: the intertwined ancient histories and stories of Islam,
Judaism and Christianity (and those with the –Hellenized– Pharaohs), and the chaotic sprawl
of the modern capital growing with alarming, unplanned speed as a series of ‘cities’, each
overwhelming the other. Cairo’s resident Europeans to whom it mostly owes its ‘belle
époque’ are suggested too in the mention of Heliopolis, an ancient site but also an affluent
neighbourhood built by a Belgian aristocrat.
The Nile or more generally the river in Africa has held a central place in world
writing from antiquity onwards.86 In Said’s analysis the river in Africa has figured in novels
emblematic of relations between Africa, Asia and Europe such as The Heart of Darkness
(1899), further taken up by Tayyib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1956) and
Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River Between (1956). As such, A Border Passage offers an implicit
textual Nilean link in a literary tradition of intertwined African-world histories resonant with
migrating cultures, both ancient and modern.87
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In an article on women’s writing from Zimbabwe including Dangarembga’s, Mabura
argues that various works “exhibit a de-silencing of women through landscape and a finding
of womanist spaces of refuge in it, spaces that are liberatory and enable women to perform a
psychological, economical, and even a bodily emancipation” (88). For Tambu the river
Nyamarira locates her place in the world, bringing in a ‘convergence of traditions, cultures,
histories’ to show her ‘multiple shifting consciousnesses’. In Zimbabwe, which is nested
within four major river systems, and as is the case in most strongly agricultural societies,
rainfall, rivers and great expanses of water are highly sacral places. For Tambu the river
Nyamarira, her first landscape and the widest, borders the homestead and defines her life in
different ways. It is where the women water the gardens they grow for food, and fill water
drums for drinking and cleaning, carrying them home for their families. It is a spiritually
magical place, the place for revitalisation and cleansing, like a pre-Christian, or more
specifically in this context, pre-colonial form of baptism. It is a source of childhood freedom
and adventure for Tambu, of life ‘before the white wizards came’ (and after which, bathing in
public places would be considered indecent or primitive), a symbol of time immemorial and
the sheer love of the land. For these reasons Tambu loves its ‘deep cool places’ that men and
children use for bathing, and when still brave enough, before her “breasts grew too large”,
she would on impulse take off her dress, which was her only piece of clothing, jump into the
river “and swim blissfully” (4). This is the Nyamarira she elegizes as she leaves for the
mission, perhaps realising subconsciously that it would problematise her relation to her native
land. This is the Nyamarira she comes back to, at the end of the book, to bid farewell before
she leaves for senior education at the Sacred Heart College.
Nyamarira also depicts her first choices between submission and resistance. It is at the
banks of Nyamarira that Tambu will first show aversion to being restricted to the ‘women’s
places’. The river there has the same life-giving properties as its other spots, for Tambu’s
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mother and aunt themselves head to this place of sisterhood to ward off debilitating illness,
but it also constructs the gendered burdens of ‘women’s work’ (bearing and raising children,
housework, and providing water for the whole family), a life that Tambu refuses to be
trapped in. It is literally with Nyamarira’s blessings that Tambu sows the seeds for her first
major act of resistance. She brings water from it for her own garden, planted to raise her own
school fees despite her family’s objections, by rerouting the water from its regular path and
teasing it into two tiny “sisterlets” to water her small patch. With this action the landscape
begins to narrow from the wide unboundaried expanse of cool rivers and beaten wooded
paths to the smaller, usually poor plots of land cultivated by black Rhodesians for small-scale
agriculture and to sustain their families. For this vision, however, Brandes’s proverbial
‘telescope’ needs to zoom in.
Landscapes cultivated for utilitarian purposes or farmed spaces stand as a source of
prosperity through one’s hard work, and link the women to the nation through territory: the
river systems, to varying degrees and in different respects, being national landscape symbols
of Egypt and Zimbabwe. The link between women and agrarian land is doubly significant
because land rights, distribution and redistribution have been for almost two centuries a vital
part of political, economic and, subsequently social restructuring under colonisation and
decolonisation.
In Ahmed’s text, although there is less of a direct link to manually working the land,
laws towards farmed land make and break her family’s fortunes. Her Turkish/Circassian
mother’s wealth comes from their lands in al-Fayyum “the rich, fertile oasis a hundred miles
or so southwest of Cairo” (93). This island of prosperity where her grandfather farmed
grapes, oranges, lemons, bananas and tangerines (106) is of course to be sequestered by
Nasser who, upon coming to power, ‘righted’ the injustices of the system of land ownership
with his vicious land reforms, or more accurately, played what would become his
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‘agricultural popularity card’ by stripping rich landowners of their land and re-distributing it
among certain Egyptian communities.88 By dispossessing them of most of their farmland,
nationalisation largely impoverishes Ahmed’s family, and by dispossessing them of the
house, it brings down the walls of the harem (the women’s part of the estate). On her paternal
side, Ahmed’s father had achieved financial prosperity and social affluence from the land,
having been a distinguished hydro-electric engineer and chairman of the Nile Water Control
Board. In what Ahmed describes as “a heroic attempt to avert catastrophe and preserve for
future generations the riches that Egyptians had enjoyed, and depended on, for their lives and
their civilization since the beginning of time” (20), Ahmed’s father opposes the High Dam
(Nasser’s industrial popularity card) for ecological reasons. This incurs Nasser’s wrath and
sets off her father’s persecution and subsequent loss of career and fortune, and gradually, his
drawn-out illness and death.
Further complicating the situation was that part of British endeavours in Egypt had
been to modernise the agricultural sector, and they had effectively done so, generating great
wealth for investors both local and foreign. Once the British occupation ended, Egyptians of
landed wealth were commonly accused of having been complicit with the British
administration. The landed wealth of Ahmed’s family then brings in issues of class which
would reach their heyday in the fifties and sixties. Such ‘class’ discussions converging
around agricultural laws, remaining largely chaotic and unresolved in Egypt’s unstable
economic problems makes ‘nationalisation’ still a recurrent populist call as an easy ‘solution
for the underprivileged’ in the cockeyed political debates of the present day. (With the
differences entailed by the situation of the white settler colony, there is a comparable history
of ‘nationalisation’ of land in Zimbabwe, and even today fear of sudden nationalisation in
Mugabe’s state has often kept away alternative sources for foreign investment in a land rich
in minerals).
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In Dangarembga’s novel the description of the family’s subsistence too is directly tied
to the context of land (a theme the author takes up in her film “Hard Earth: Land Rights in
Zimbabwe” (2002)). Farming land in Zimbabwe “has been a contested site with far-reaching
implications in the socioeconomic and political scenario, first between Africans of different
ethnicities, and, subsequently, between these Africans and European immigrants” (Mabura
89). It is no coincidence that land labour in Nervous Conditions is performed by women. In
many sub-Saharan communities, and Shona women were no exception, agriculture was
traditionally a task that pertained to food production and therefore belonged in the women’s
domain, so much so that in Zimbabwe “[t]he thriving peasant agriculture [initially met by
colonial settlers]…was, for the most part, the work of African women” (Schmidt 3). (Today
land remains a contested site for women’s citizenship rights under President Mugabe).
On the small farming land near her father’s house Tambu’s early lessons with her
grandmother encapsulate the complex links between gender, land, race and nation. In these
early private sessions Tambu learns how to work the land for the family. She does not shy
away here from ‘women’s work’ or women’s communities as she does with her mother at the
river. One reason is plain: this grandmother tells her stories, history that “could not be found
in the textbooks” (17), and is able to cultivate Tambu’s mind (along with her green thumb)
and therefore empower her with the oral histories of women. The seclusion afforded by
women’s communities, devoted to nature and nurture, mark rootedness and resilience,
sustainability and continuance, the wisdom of generations, and the self-reliance that denotes
great strength of spirit as well as a realisation of one’s weakness against larger forces of
history. The storytelling that goes hand in hand with daily toil creates one of those moments
of plurality Ahmed refers to, new points of ‘convergence’ between subnational and
transnational.
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The figure of the grandmother and her storytelling is highly symbolic. Traditionally in
Shona societies the elderly connoted wisdom and affinity with the ancestral spirit world.
Grandmothers and older women played an important part in grandchildren’s education,
taking charge of them while the mothers performed their chores:
It was the grandmother who taught the children accepted manners and social roles and
instilled in them the values of their culture and the importance of their history.
Grandmothers instructed young girls on sexual matters and marital duties….Before
the advent of missionary education, evening folktales (ngano), told by old women to
gatherings of children, were one of the most important didactic tools in Shona society.
Through ngano, songs, riddles, and other games, the grandmother conveyed the
appropriate roles of and relationships between members of families, lineages, and
other members of the social order. …the educational value of the ngano was
recognized by the children’s parents, who accepted the premise that they could ‘not
withdraw the children from a story-telling session merely to send them on a trifling
errand’. (Schmidt 23)
Storytelling then highlights an alternate source of knowledge, the oral knowledge of women
to be used as a source for alternate histories.
The grandmother’s history describes the gradual gender role shifts and societal
restructuring in Rhodesia created by colonial settlement on agricultural land and economic
reorganisation. Having lived on the land before and after the ‘white wizards’ came, the
grandmother tells of how the community was pushed from the places where the soil is ripe to
the “grey, sandy soil of the homestead, so stony and barren that the wizards [themselves]
would not use it” (Nervous Conditions 18). Indeed, “the Native Reserves Commission,
established in 1914, recommended not only a massive reduction in the acreage set aside for
Africans but the removal from the reserves of most of the fertile, well-watered land in close
proximity to markets and communication routes, and the substitution of impoverished, arid
land in remote, tsetse fly-infested areas” (Schmidt 69). Tambu’s grandmother’s story
describes how, enticed by the ‘white wizards’’ promises of lucrative reward, her husband
tried working at one of their farms only to find he had been “enticed into slavery” (Nervous
Conditions 18). Helped by political intervention rather than market forces,89 the ascendancy
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of European agriculture over African peasant agriculture had pushed more African men to
seek wage labour that was at best insufficiently paid. Since such a system favoured single
men without encumbrances, strategic resources such as land, labour and cash income slowly
ceded into male hands, with the result that women’s status and opportunities for socioeconomic power eventually declined (Schmidt). So when her husband runs off to work in yet
another colonial economic model, that of the mining town, Tambu’s grandmother and her
children are thrown off the farm by the white settlers/owners.
Left to shift for herself in a socio-economic structure that could often prove hostile for
a single woman, no less for a mother of six, the grandmother hears about a third colonial
structure built by “beings similar in appearance to the wizards but not of them, for these were
holy” (19). She takes one son to them (Tambu’s uncle Babamukuru) to work on their farm in
the day and study in the evening. The missionaries are surprised to find him “a good boy,
cultivable, in the way the land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” (19) and so
push him to further his education. The rest of course is history. Tambu’s lessons of ‘the road
to success’ learnt from her grandmother offer yet another overlapping narrative: the code of
discipline, respect for authority and hard work. The missionaries had come to Africa to ‘save
African souls’, and “[t]oward this end, Africans had to learn the virtues of hard work,
discipline, and obedience to authority” (Schmidt 10). These lessons are instilled in her uncle
Babamukuru (and later, Tambu herself) through missionary education but the overlap is of
course that such mores were already inherently ‘African’. That is why Tambu realises that
Babamakuru’s story is one of success even before she starts mission school: Babamukuru has
succeeded, the Shona way, the native way, through hard work, discipline and respect for
authority. The grandmother’s story deftly weaves issues of colonialism, race and gender in a
history of Rhodesia.
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As Tambu tends to her crop, rather than (or in addition to) being an overworked,
unpaid and unappreciated labourer for the family, she also exercises her native right to till the
land and dispense with her own time. Because her grandmother’s agricultural lessons enable
Tambu later to raise money for her own school fees despite her family’s obstructions, she is
also learning to create opportunities for herself through her own hard work, and to resist selfimposed inhibitions, societal or colonial.
The storytelling of Tambu’s grandmother will also instil in Tambu, in the ‘communal’
way that generations pass on morals and values to future generations, a steam-valve defence
system against the shock or rupture of colonisation (and colonial education), a family history
or rootedness of her own. The extent to which her England-bred cousin Nyasha often longs
for and lacks this inheritance is something Tambu has yet to understand, apparent in the way
Tambu is utterly perplexed at Nyasha’s delight in learning basic local skills such as how to
make clay pots. If society can neither be ruled by what Victor Turner called the “liminal”
(marginal, prophetic, and alienated figures) nor rigidly ruled by “structures” (ossified norms
and mainstream institutions) some alternation between both is essential.90 The link that
Tambu manages to retain between life at the mission and life at the homestead and the ability
to root herself in the positive aspects of native land embodied in her grandmother’s storytelling enables her to see missionary education as a miraculous opportunity for social
mobility and emancipation. Tambu’s grandmother herself has given Tambu the organicist
metaphor for progress: rooted and nourished by Nyamarira and fertile soil, Tambu’s growth
in the social system is modelled on the ‘success’ story of her uncle Babamukuru, who,
‘cultivable like the land’, had once grown into his own. Tambu’s rootedness at least at this
early stage saves her from the nervous condition of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ like
Babamukuru and the nervous condition of the liminal like Nyasha.91
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To zoom in closer with Brandes’s ‘telescope’: over the course of the girls’
development in A Border Passage and Nervous Conditions the view of the land shifts again
from farmed plots of land to those cultivated for ornamental or aesthetic pleasure around
houses or estates. This view of the landscape is often intricately linked to acquiring a
European acculturation that is both beneficial and detrimental, foreign and native.
Ornamental gardens or owned gardens always indicate their owner’s social status.
The prosperity of Ahmed’s family in their secluded Ain Shams neighbourhood shows
from the large garden they own. Massive in size and variety it was filled with “pine,
eucalyptus, apricot, mango, tamarind, oleander”, its winding paths filled with “roses,
bougainvillea, wisteria” (15). Depicting a rather lonely childhood, the garden marks Leila’s
seclusion as the youngest of her much older siblings, the financial and social exclusiveness of
her family, and the geographical remoteness of their residence from the chaos of Cairo.
Ahmed speaks of the garden as a place of refuge, but it was also a status symbol from which
her family took great delight and profit. For Ahmed it was a playground, where her earliest
childhood companions were the trees, to each of which she would bid farewell before leaving
to Alexandria for the summer. Her mother and father, the first an ‘avid gardener’, the second
an intellectual attuned to natural beauty, would also entertain friends there. Nanny, Ahmed’s
first teacher (like Tambu’s grandmother), would also make jams out of the fruit in the garden,
which the children would eat as they came back from school while waiting for lunch to be
prepared.
In retrospect Ahmed realises that the garden had been a childhood dream of her
father’s who had bought the land and planned it himself; it had been intended “like English
[schooling], and all the English books with which [he] had surrounded us” to “nourish and
free imagination” (27). Trimmed and clipped into order, this landscape is a place of bounty,
“somehow”, as Ahmed puts it “located exactly on the edge and borderland between
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imagination and the ordinary world” (182). Years later the ‘untended’ garden Leila finds on
her return from England marks the disintegration of her father’s health and fortune propelled
by the intrusion of Nasser’s politics. “The garden was derelict, overgrown in places and
desiccated in others, [with] fruit lying rotting in the grass”, she writes, and even the gardener
was “ageing” (197). With the destruction of the geographic space the garden’s function as a
social space for creativity, productivity and social activity ends as well, and this is marked by
the loss of her father’s mental agility, of her mother’s homemaking and sublimation, and of
Nanny’s lessons in the productivity of simple work.
The first thing Tambu notices after she has left the homestead and as she approaches
her uncle’s house are the conifers, canna lilia and lilies planted in the front garden. It is her
first experience of landscaping rather than landscape: the need for (and luxury of) “planting
things for merrier reasons than the chore of keeping breath in the body” (64) and she is
prepared to embrace it. Cultivated to European tastes, the landscape signals that Tambu is to
acquire the polish, the tastes and the sophistication of the metropole-in-Africa. As far as
Tambu is concerned, the status and influence her education might eventually grant her far
exceed any position she might otherwise occupy ‘traditionally’. The respect her uncle and
aunt have for education and their understanding of the privacy and peace needed for study,
the library she can now access and the orderliness of routine, coupled with the example
Maiguru affords as she tends to her aesthetically-organised garden, all mark Tambu’s first
real introduction to the secluded pleasures of cultivating the gardens of the mind: the need
for, and luxury of, reading things for pleasure rather than for instruction or necessity. These
markers also signal the transition from the women’s communities of oral knowledge to
women’s communities framed by textuality.
The landscapes reflect the ways women may mould or perceive spaces as their own
through narrative (oral, written or a mixture of both), and so produce and share knowledge –
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called by any other name, from ‘wisdom’ to academic research. In recent scholarship, interest
in oral culture has often appeared in a second-wave search for local sources for knowledge. In
Zimbabwe, for example:
The second stage in the search for African perspectives [after written colonial or
liberational histories] involved a change in both subject and methodology. …Rather
than relying exclusively on testimony filtered through and distorted by colonial and
missionary intermediaries, African perspectives were sought directly, through oral
testimony [although such perspectives were usually exclusively male]. (Schmidt 2)
If considered a ‘pre-literacy’ system of knowledge, oral culture becomes fleeting and doomed
to disappear if not written down quickly enough (see, for example, Ong in a specifically
European context), and so both Ahmed and Dangarembga stress the importance of
documenting their own stories, and the women’s stories that formed the life of the
community. Oral culture, however, is also and more importantly an alternative and
accompanying kind of knowledge and knowledge practice within societies, not simply a
binary ‘earlier’ phase to literacy. In addition to providing valuable research material for
ethnography or history, oral culture, consciously adopted by the usual ‘subjects’ of
ethnographic research, is offered in these two works as resistance against the infallibility of
institutionalised ways of knowledge.92 Hence, both in mode and material, for the two
narrators oral culture is also a woman’s culture and locates women as agents telling and
writing the stories of their communities.
Ahmed’s memoir stresses the importance of writing down the oral and transitory,
from the hidden narratives of the harem to personal/national/gender history determined by
political imperatives, both as a way for self-knowledge (therapy) and agency (resistance).
Ahmed goes as far as to distinguish completely (and somewhat formulaically) between
women’s (oral) communities and men’s (written) communities and the kinds of knowledge
both of them produce, sustaining parallels between the function of the ‘harems’ she
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experiences in Zatoun, Alexandria, Abu Dhabi and Girton College. She also suggests that the
representation of such (oral) communities of knowledge are constructed by men’s (textual)
communities, creating structured bodies or fields of knowledge that the women themselves
would later take for granted, such as in the fields of History and Islam.
At this point in the narratives, as the communities of learning are juxtaposed, the
vision from the ‘telescope’ zooms closer, and space narrows further to the interiors of the
home or school, with the natural and cultivated landscape lying somewhere beyond them.
The landscape beyond the closed spaces often carries its own significance, but structured or
organised knowledge, whether oral or written, takes place within walls. Ahmed likens, for
example, what went on in the two ‘harems’ she experienced as she was growing up in
Alexandria and Zatoun –from the shared space and lives that encouraged women to support
each other, share advice, solve problems and engage in community projects– to the “harem
perfected” at Girton College, not the harem imagined by Western male sexual fantasy or the
nattering dens of leisure imagined by Eastern men, but a community where older women
presided over the young, served by other women, and where “the absence of male authority
was permanent” (183). (Meanwhile, outside the Egyptian harem, beyond the walls, lies the
exclusive prosperity of her grandfather’s estate, while outside Girton College lies the
imaginative release of the ‘sheer green loveliness of England’).
In her maternal family’s estate ‘Zatoun’, no men could venture into Ahmed’s
grandmother’s visiting room where the members of her maternal family and their children
would go frequently. In the summer house in Alexandria where the entire family would
remove for the holidays, the men, working during the week, could only visit sporadically or
over the weekends. While the harem in Western literature and art has often been painted as
intrinsically ‘oriental’, exotic and primitive (as would have been the Shona women’s-only
bathing spaces in the river), a women’s-only college like Girton was more acceptable, despite
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having been constructed along similar lines, in effect, to suit male-conceived ideas, in this
instance, ideas of elite enclosed professional spaces for academics:
In Alexandria, as at Girton, the women devoted a good part of their time to analyzing,
discussing, and taking apart words, meanings, motives, characters, consequences,
responsibilities (though in Alexandria their seriousness was leavened with much
laugher) and to reflecting on where the moral heart of an issue lay…[I]t was real
people’s actual words and real people’s characters, motives, and intentions that were
taken apart and put together again…it was real people whose lives might well be
profoundly affected as a result of the burden of their talk, the conclusions they came
to, the advice they gave, the actions they then took….At Girton, on the other hand, it
was fictional people, people in books and novels and plays, whose words and actions
and motives and moral characters we analyzed endlessly. Obviously this was not an
activity that, in any direct sense anyway, sustained anybody’s life or actual
circumstances....That same activity essentially, practiced at Alexandria and Zatoun
orally and on living texts to sustain the life of the community, was called by outsiders
to the process –by men of the official Arabic culture and by Westerners, men and
women– idle gossip, the empty and even sometimes evil, malicious talk of women,
harem women. That same activity, however, practiced by the women of Girton on
written, not oral, texts and on fictional, not living, people was regarded as honorable,
serious, important work. For the women of Girton no longer practiced it in the manner
that women in their culture, too, once did –orally and to sustain life. They practiced it
in the manner and tradition of men, as their own colleagues (and men down the
centuries) had –in relation to written texts rather than living people, as a profession.
(191-92)
Ahmed here criticises various perceptions of women’s communities: one, the idea implicit in
Orientalist perspectives that the kind of (often indigenous) knowledge produced by the third
world, or women of the third world, is ‘not knowledge’ compared to the knowledge the first
world produces. Two, from local perspectives these women communities are also seen
negatively, held solely to be idle meetings for gossip and trivial work, and undeserving of
real notice.
In the case of Tambu, the same significance is given to women’s communities and the
same criticism is levelled at those who dismiss them, although the idea is rendered
differently. Instead of the resolute and essentialist dichotomy between men and women’s
communities given in A Border Passage, the narrator of Nervous Conditions debunks the idea
that important meetings can remain completely isolated or segregated. The supposed men-
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only meetings, for example, are neither solely attended by men nor in any case even very
important. In the men-only family council which meets at Tambu’s homestead to discuss the
‘problem’ of aunt Lucia’s pregnancy, for example, other women of the family including
Lucia herself have been excluded, at least hypothetically, because they are not important
enough for ‘serious talk’. In actuality, however, the women who want to sit in on the meeting
end up doing so and having their say. Not only does Lucia barge in and offer the solution (to
her own dilemma) but she also manages to heave up one of the men by the ear and make him
a laughingstock. Tete, one of the family matriarchs, is allowed in from the beginning. The
first thing Tete does when she leaves the council is to report to the rest of the women, only to
cause much laughter as they all mock the men. Meanwhile, Maiguru, invited by her husband
to sit down at the same meeting, actually refuses, making clear that a place of privilege is
only valuable by common consent, which is why, perhaps, she is rarely absent from the
women’s gatherings. The women’s-only communities portrayed in both texts, however, are
always regarded by outsiders as unimportant, and in both texts some of the women interiorise
this inferior opinion.
Ahmed critiques how women interiorise this inferiority. She compares convergent
modes of writing and reading history/ies, most particularly the oral history of Islam as she at
least had experienced it and the written texts of Islam propagated by the ‘learned’. Because
religion and religious culture are embedded in power relations, gender and sexuality are in
turn central issues for control and resistance in the arena of religious culture (Yuval-Davis
Gender & Nation 43). Ahmed extends her analogies oral/written, practised/theoretical,
women’s spaces/men’s spaces, and knowledge production/knowledge authority to what she
refers to as ‘women’s Islam’ and ‘men’s Islam’. As men’s ‘written texts’ of Islam (and the
Muslim women scholars who followed this tradition such as Zaynab al-Ghazali) were used to
delineate women’s social positions, the silenced ‘oral’ women’s Islam highlighted spirituality
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and privacy of belief, and was often (although not always) a tool for spiritual peace and selfrealisation. By assimilating unquestioningly the patriarchal textual knowledge largely written
and institutionalised by men, women working with written texts may dangerously cater to and
further instate a knowledge of the world that is biased and gendered.
Even in its title A Border Passage draws attention to the multiple literary traditions it
dialogues with: the memoir, the journey, the ‘voyage-in’ and Sufi writings. In thinking of A
Border Passage as a memoir, for example, it may be productive to think of it alongside
women coming-of-age memoirs and autobiographies in the Arabic-speaking world,93 AngloArabic autobiography,94 or, generally, women’s autobiography. It may also, however, be
useful to think of it in the context of some of the work done on alternative sources of
knowledge, not least those projects that have documented oral histories of women such as the
communal history that Tambu’s grandmother tells, and precisely the kind of un-narrated
living testimonies going on in the harems of A Border Passage. Such projects appeared as
early as the 1970s to respond on a grassroots level to a fear that certain forms of knowledge
or ways of life would disappear if not documented, but also as a revisionist impulse aiming to
address one-sidedness in academic or mainstream knowledge sources.95
In both Dangarembga’s and Ahmed’s works the impulse to move from aural
knowledge to written knowledge appears in the act of transcribing as a self-conscious way of
writing down one’s history which seems to be under threat, and with the protagonists
claiming to listen to women’s unwritten stories and finding it imperative to tell or narrate
them.96 Storytelling brings to the fore in numerous ways the complex process of inheritance
from one generation to another. It is significant that Tambu’s mother neglects to cultivate her
plot of land except in times of dire necessity, for over the course of European settlement the
pre-colonial, female-dominated African peasant economy, no competition for the
government-privileged settler agriculture, severely weakened. Agricultural profit eventually
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became too meagre for the women workers to bother about. Whether for the better or for the
worse, this mode of living does die out or change fundamentally. Tambu’s grandmother’s
oral knowledge, her stories, living patterns, lessons, histories of the past die with her unless
Tambu can perceive them as relevant to her own formation, part of her identity as a woman
of that time and place.
Similarly, Leila receives her first meaningful initiation in the community’s spirituality
from her grandmother who teaches her two or three short verses of prayer, takes her on the
roof to ‘watch for angels’, and imprints an image in Leila’s adult mind of a quietly pious,
constantly praying woman. The adolescent Leila refuses to listen to her mother’s story,
however: “I remember [my mother] …saying…that she too would have liked to have been a
writer. It was too late for her now, she said, but sometimes she thought about her life and how
interesting it had been and wished she could write it all. Maybe I could write it for her, she
said, maybe I could write the story of her life. ‘I’d tell it to you and you could write it’, she
said (74)”. Leila rejects the idea with some repulsion. It is only later on in life that she
realises what she has lost: a natural connection and continuance from a previous generation,
which she could then build on or reject rather than need to construct from a ruptured past.
This is precisely the rootedness to community (through oral culture) that Nyasha’s education
too has effaced. Ahmed asks:
How would I have known then that those who bring into their lives and into the
shaping of the consciousness of others their own deepest thoughts and feelings and
moral imagination, create out of their own lives texts, oral, evanescent texts that are
every bit as rich and sustaining as the most celebrated written texts? How would I
have known this then? I did not know, I did not know, I did not know. (75)
The inheritance then is partly lost, partly one of loss, as Ahmed herself admits, even
as she self-consciously makes her own narrative a communal history to be passed on:
“Walking through this…I suddenly [felt] this sense of loss –measureless, measureless loss–
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sweep through me”. The action of narrating and transcribing, however, is a protection from
that loss, and so Ahmed adds quickly: “And so that, O my daughter, is what happened. That,
in those years, is what happened to us” (270). (The word ‘daughter’ is figurative: Ahmed
does not have children). Loss then, properly narrated, also becomes a natural part of how a
generation continues. The ‘impulse’ to write and to narrate, to construct a history out of
absence or loss, locates the individual autobiographical work in a wider community, with
self-knowledge referring to community-knowledge as well. In a postcolonial context,
autobiography (for men and women) and its journeys of empowerment and disempowerment
seems to have tended to directly define the individual in relation to a community, often with a
view to record, revise or rewrite its history (Lionnet Postcolonial Representations 22-24;
Mohanty Feminism Without Borders 77-84). The imperative to write becomes not just a
personal compulsion but a communal responsibility. As Tambu puts it at the end of the book,
as she is leaving Umtali: “Don’t forget, don’t forget, don’t forget. Nyasha, my mother, my
friends. Always the same message. But why? If I forgot them, my cousin, my mother, my
friends, I might as well forget myself” (191). Both Ahmed and Tambu write to tell their own
stories but also consciously to transcribe the stories of their women ‘communities’ caught in
intersections of class, race, religion and nation.
Although Dangarembga makes no clear-cut dichotomy between women’s oralreligious communities and men’s written-religious communities like Ahmed does, Nervous
Conditions examines how the religious textual world complicated the roles and status of
Shona women caught between patriarchal Christian textual culture and a patriarchal Shona
oral culture. In Tambu’s case, for example, life at the homestead with the open learning
spaces at the river or on the land is compared to life in her uncle’s house with its enclosed
designated spaces for study and reading. Babamukuru’s treatment of his wife, daughter and
niece suggests how Christian missions, in this part of Africa the ‘newer’ (although by no
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means the unwanted) religion, changed or complicated the ‘traditional’ community’s
patriarchal structures, sometimes for the better, at other times for the worse,97 but in any case,
changed them structurally. Although this is more carefully examined in the sequel through
the time spent at the Sacred Heart College, even in Nervous Conditions Headmaster-Uncle
Babamukuru’s civilisational mission brings the problems of a patriarchal colonialism into his
own house. Babamukuru’s socio-political and educational responsibility makes it imperative
that the girls under his care exhibit orthodox or ‘decent’ behaviour, and so enforces a much
stricter discipline on Nyasha and Tambu compared to what the countless other cousins
experience at the homestead, undoubtedly exacerbating the pressure on volatile Nyasha that
will eventually lead to her breakdown. Yet it is at the mission too, that Tambu becomes
versed in a cleaner, more comfortable lifestyle, and so she is also able to see the benefits of
authority and of ‘non-indigenous’ education. For Babamukuru to come fully realised into the
picture, however, the view from Brandes’s proverbial telescope needs to zoom in yet again,
and the scene of the home narrows to the bedroom.
From the land, landscape, territory and garden, moving inward in smaller concentric
circles, lies the home, another locale for the prime national symbol of the family unit (see
Boehmer 2005; McCintock 1991; Skurski; Nagel), and a spatial entity in which gender issues
link the location of girls/women in local patriarchal family systems hierarchically under the
nation-state, or on a horizontal comparative perspective to other family structures or systems
around the world. Of all the places delineated as a ‘woman’s place’, the bedroom seems the
most traditional, even a “performative” space,98 and is often for these women a place where
they perceive themselves through the eyes of their immediate other. For the women
protagonists the bedroom brings into the narrative the haloed societal structures of sex and
the taboos surrounding the female body; the privacy of the bedroom also allows the women,
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however, to develop their intellects, and thus explore their developing identities into women
of the world.
Tambu’s life at the mission is often directed by events happening in the bedroom,
which, as opposed to the awe-inspiring living and dining rooms, offers her a private woman’s
space she can learn in and from. It is actually the first time Tambu gets her own ‘bedroom’.
On the reserve she used to sleep on the kitchen floor, which she shared with her siblings and
often her mother who was too tired to move to the bed at the end of a long day’s work. The
cooking-sleeping area is an extension of the women’s meeting places at the river and on the
farmland, a functional space where the normative societal role of women is circumscribed.
Later at the mission, however, Tambu has a bed and bath to call her own, fitted with the
‘modern conveniences’ of light switches and adjoining bathrooms. It is in this bedroom that
she begins to mature, a process marked, perhaps appropriately, by what she calls her “first
love-affair” with her cousin: “the first time I grew to be fond of someone of whom I did not
wholeheartedly approve” (79).99 Her alter ego, Nyasha, besides being a pivotal character in
Tambu’s formation is also her unrealised potential, the ‘nervous condition’ to which the
native is susceptible, and many of Tambu’s decisions are taken intentionally with the aim of
avoiding Nyasha’s downfall. The bedroom is where she hits puberty (comforted by Nyasha),
and where she witnesses the taboo-breaking moment (paralleling the declaration of the
novel’s opening line) when the sanctity of the woman’s space is violated and so the family
unity breaks down.
Babamukuru flies into a rage because his daughter has been dancing with one of the
Baker boys. Tambu watches the “dreadfully familiar” scene where Babamukuru calls his
daughter Nyasha a whore and slaps her, and the shocking moment when Nyasha hits her
father back. The final violation of her private growing-up space by yet another man makes
Tambu reflect bitterly:
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I followed her to the servants’ quarters….I feeling bad for her, thinking how
dreadfully familiar that scene had been, with Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to
whoredom, making her a victim of her femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at
home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize. The
victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn’t depend on any of the things I had thought
it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them. Even heroes like Babamukuru did
it. And that was the problem....You couldn’t ignore the fact that she [Nyasha] had no
respect for Babamukuru when she ought to have had lots of it. But what I didn’t like
was the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as
opposed and inferior to maleness. (117-18)
The inevitable sin of ‘whoredom’ comes from women being required in the nation and often
in politicised religious discourses to carry a ‘burden of representation’, “as they are
constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour, both personally
and collectively….Women, in their ‘proper’ behaviour, their ‘proper’ clothing, embody the
line which signifies the collectivity’s boundaries” (Yuval-Davis Gender & Nation 45; also
Anthias et al Racialised Boundaries 113). When Babamukuru hits his daughter, he brings
down the weight or sin of womanhood on her shoulders, and accuses her of being dressed
‘improperly’, of acting ‘improperly’ with men, and of making him look bad in the eyes of his
peers. By striking back, Nyasha rather too literally puts up a fight against the haloed structure
of what Tambu calls ‘respect’: respect to one’s elders, parents and, particularly, fathers.100
‘Respect’ of course in itself is a good thing, but in this case it means a concurrence to what
seems like, in Tambu’s words: a ‘universal victimisation of femaleness as opposed and
inferior to maleness’.
Yet Babamukuru is also enacting less universal roles which Tambu has not yet
realised. Babamukuru punishes Nyasha for transgressing society’s patriarchal values in a
colonised state. First, as a missionary member he is carrying on the Victorian-era prudery that
was often implemented far longer and much more strictly in the colonies than it was in
Britain. Second, as a missionary-educated African, he sees himself as part of the white man’s
mission to save and civilise his brother and sister Africans, to train the former to become
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good labourers and the latter to become good wives and mothers.101 Nyasha’s adolescent
flirtations signal a threat that she might, despite her training and ‘education’, regress to her
‘natural’ state, the supposedly inherent depravity and lewdness of the black woman and the
genetic indolence of the ‘Native’ that was discussed so fervently in Rhodesian politics since
the occupation in 1890. Third, Babamukuru’s reaction carries with it as well the very real fear
of Nyasha becoming illegally involved with one of the Baker boys, who is, of course, white.
Hovering over Rhodesian political discourse for decades was the ‘yellow peril – the
“miscegenation as a result of sexual relations between European men and African women”
(Schmidt 157).
As an educated Rhodesian Babamukura is a member of the local elite (a class created
by the infrastructural changes in society post-occupation) but it is a class that is still
subordinate to the white population.102 Alan Baker, with whom Nyasha has been flirting, is a
reminder of Babamukuru’s uneasy societal position. Alan’s missionary father and
Babamukuru’s colleague, Mr Baker, has used his influence to guarantee a scholarship for
Nyasha’s brother at an exclusive mostly-white school. A daughter who resists her father’s
authority in a way that is not socially acceptable would embarrass him in the eyes of the
Shona community. By getting into sexual trouble, a daughter, even of a black missionary
headmaster, would be seen under colonial social and legal laws as simply degenerating to the
inherent promiscuity of the African. This would be doubly problematic if she got involved
with a white man when, for various reasons, the state did not legalise to any satisfactory
measure the sexual relations between African women and European men, although the
relations between African men and European women were legally forbidden (Schmidt). In
Shona society Nyasha’s relationship with Alan Baker, had it actually come about, and since it
would never have been legalised by the dictums of the colonial state, would have simply been
seen as prostitution.
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In the verbal skirmishes between Nyasha and her father until this point, Babamukuru
had often asked ‘do you want to embarrass me?’ or ‘what will people say?’ The real difficulty
is that he strives for the respect of two, not always concurrent, communities (a problem which
becomes more evident in the sequel as he is simultaneously labelled a sell-out and a patriot).
Babamukuru’s situation, symbolising the black-skin-white-mask problem,103 is played out in
his (gender) conflict with Nyasha. No one sees these intersections, what Grewal and Kaplan
call “scattered hegemonies”,104 more clearly than Nyasha, and thus she becomes the
embodiment of Fanon’s/Sartre’s statement from which the novel’s title and epigraph are
taken: “the condition of the native is a nervous condition” –by Babamukuru’s consent.
When Babamukuru hits Nyasha, it is the beginning of Nyasha’s breakdown. In a
moment of double violation, Babamukuru tears down the security of ‘women’s space’ by
physically overpowering the girls in their private bedroom (like President Nasser had done by
sequestering the women’s harem in A Border Passage) and Nyasha violates society’s
complacent boundary of ‘respect’, thereby propelling her into that very lonely sphere of
individualism and adulthood. The incident with Babamukuru starts Nyasha’s regression into
‘liminality’. She gradually realises that she is not simply resisting local patriarchal structures,
which would have been hard enough, but that she, as a multiple victim of sexism, racism,
colonialism, and ‘illimitable’ etcs, is also resisting another victim in a sort of double-mirror
of atrocity. Thus she is pushed to mumble in her final breakdown that she does not want to
hate her father, insisting: “It’s not his fault”. Putting on a Rhodesian accent, she mimics
hysterically what she imagines her father had heard as he grew up: “He’s a good boy, a good
munt. A bloody kaffir” (204). The dilemma which her reading and intelligence have
unearthed makes her utterly lonely and strips her of the comfort of any collective belonging –
social structures, family, women’s communities or missionary-schools– from which she may
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draw strength. “Look what they’ve done to us”, Nyasha whispers to her parents, “I’m not one
of them but I’m not one of you” (205).
The bedroom and sometimes bed that Ahmed shares with her nanny give Leila her
first and longest grown up-childhood companion, a close if authoritative friend. The bedroom
is where Leila is induced to wait for angels, where she sees religious faith in practice as
Nanny reads the Latin Bible, and where Nanny tells Leila her first stories. It is also the place
where Leila is punished by her frenzied mother after the Freddy incident that belatedly
precipitates Leila into womanhood. Leila’s ‘original sin’, the accusation of whoredom, is
committed at the mature age of eight. The incident is described in detail: Leila’s mother hears
that Leila has been harassed by twelve-year old Freddy. The mother panics, hits Leila, forbids
her from playing outside, and takes her to a “special” doctor for a virginity test. From then on
Leila perceives her mother to have distanced herself from her daughter almost completely, as
if Leila were “innately bad” (80), not worth loving. It is a feeling that seems to have gone on
for years until at a later age Leila manages to come to terms with it, understanding that her
mother was, like anyone, both subject and object of history, a woman at the plurality of
convergences of her place and time.
It is in the bedroom too, that ostensibly most private of (women’s) places, that these
girls acquire a new kind of resistance, the intellectual expansion of horizons, a worldly
literary landscape that demands an ethical questioning of the boundaries constructed around
them: their first ‘love affair’ with worldliness. There too, the women share stories, creating an
intimate women’s community of solidarity and support. Leila’s first example in how to
empathise with other people through (good, it seems) storytelling composes her first major
lessons in ethical values.
It was Nanny, too, who told me stories….The usual fairy tales, or versions of
them. One of our favourites…was a version of…King Lear…. I liked the story in part,
I am sure, because it was about the triumph of the youngest, my own position among
my siblings. But it also encapsulated something essential about Nanny and her values.
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It was a story about honesty and integrity, about valuing these qualities above
everything else, and it implied a distrust of people who cared too much about money.
It also implied that simplicity and hard work, salt, simple things were, in the end, the
real prizes. (52)
Leila’s nanny tells her stories, hardly an unusual thing for a nanny –but what were the
‘usual’ fairytales? By mentioning the story that was an oral version of King Lear, Ahmed
points to the fluid movement between ‘textual’ and ‘oral’ and signifies the ethical dimensions
that (particularly childhood) narratives elicit, for although the ‘usual fairy tales’ which Leila
listens to were not the ones Tambu hears from her grandmother, it would seem they invoked
the same or similar values of resilience, perseverance, responsibility and justice. As Leila
receives the ethical wisdom from Nanny that she will later absorb from literary texts, the
ethical wisdom Tambu receives on the land is supplemented and stressed in the bedroom by
(bookworm) Nyasha, Tambu’s first vocal female supporter, and her first source for story
books.
By framing the formative experiences of childhood within reading and listening to
stories, the bedroom also frames the very personal relation between the solitary reader and
the book and the reaction to and formation by literature. One of the uses of World Literature
as a kind of reading practice (or experience) then becomes the release from ‘provinciality’ –
but also ‘an opportunity for action’ (or resistance):
World literature is in essence an ethical project because, like the larger project of
cosmopolitanism to which it belongs, it asks us to imagine or act out an ethical
relation to the world as a whole. That entails, as Damrosch suggests, a critical
estrangement from one’s own nationality, with its ‘present concerns and modes of
reading’, but an estrangement that must always remain incomplete. ‘We never truly
cease to be ourselves as we read’….Set against ‘other times and eras’, as it is here,
being oneself also signifies occupying the present tense. And being a self-in-thepresent-tense signifies two quite different things…the [release from]
provinciality….[and] the opportunity for an action”. (Robbins “Uses of World
Literature” 391)
Oral knowledge guided and supplemented by school and family pushes the two women to
become readers, evoking, in their pursuit of reading in the peaceful and private islands of
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their bedrooms, broader intellectual horizons. As learning one’s ABCs marks the beginning
of literacy, reading books sows the first seeds of the cultivation of the solitary intellectual,
and love of reading signals precociousness and a kind of receptivity to ideas that
differentiates the protagonists from other characters. Literature seems to ‘do something’ to
these girls, to show them not what ‘Life’ was, but what ‘Life’ might be, and what they would
not allow ‘Life’ to become. It is also the love of reading that brings in the colonial critique at
the heart of the two texts and to which the exploration of the women’s own identities and
belonging is crucial, since the first stories the girls mention reading are the ‘usual’ (in
Ahmed’s words) children’s books –‘usual’ that is, to those who have had what is now called
a ‘colonial’ education, but also universally ‘familiar’ to those who did not, such as the premissionary Tambu.
A schoolgirl at the British school of Cairo in the 1950s, whose school emblem
proudly claimed ‘Ducit amor patriae’ or ‘Love of our country guide us’, (‘which country’ is
a moot point),105 Ahmed would experience the nearest thing to a transplanted English public
school in Egypt. As a child she remembers reading Enid Blyton (141), Winnie the Pooh, The
Wind in the Willows (138) and The Way of All Flesh (143), describing her childhood
awareness of things as being “at home in English books, English ideas, Jane Austen, Dickens,
Winnie the Pooh, George Eliot, Adam Bede” (171). Meanwhile in Nervous Conditions,
Tambu immerses herself in “Nyasha’s various and extensive library”, where she samples
“everything from Enid Blyton to the Brontë sisters” (94), The Wind in the Willows (96), and
Little Women (180). The essential reading list for all three girls seems to include Kenneth
Grahame and Enid Blyton, followed at a later stage by at least one ‘major’ woman writer, and
of course Shakespeare (appearing in The Book of Not); but one does not ‘read’ Shakespeare,
rather Shakespeare looms in their literary background rather like God. Leila, for example, is
“taught” Shakespeare along with Composition, (reading the master of English literature while
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mastering the English language) from a Mr Beard who was known for being very tough and
whose duty it was to cane the boys (147). Meanwhile Tambu’s major educational trauma
occurs at the Sacred Heart College when her right to the much-coveted trophy for English
literature is passed over unfairly in favour of a white schoolmate –the same schoolmate who
has stolen Tambu’s copy of, significantly, Julius Caesar.
For Tambu, who is finally able to study in peace in a household that respects her
books and study times, and with the help of Nyasha’s example, reading gives her the first
approximate image of “of a young woman of the world” (94). She is motivated to keep
herself ‘clean and tidy’, this time, not in the spirit of organisation and productivity of the
Shona matriarchs but the clean and tidy domesticity of missionary education and colonial
discourse. 106 She is encouraged to organise her mind, and comes to read of things that she
“had always known existed in other worlds although the knowledge was vague” (94).
Reading allows Tambu to construct a ladder of social mobility for herself, out of the
homestead to the world of self-determination, or using Tambu’s synecdoches: away from
“her brother and the mealies”, her “mother and the latrine and the wedding” (182), to a wider
world of opportunity granted by the loved-hated representatives of European powers in
Africa, and the institutionalised tentacles of the much-loved ‘Western’ canon. For of course
the British or ‘Western’ in general was never simply a ‘hated’ presence in the colonies.
Tambu’s and Leila’s reading is as much a passion and a salvation as it is a systematic
educational requirement. As Tambu writes of her desperation to “escape” her mother’s
“entrapment” (1), Leila writes about the “deeper, more obscure dread” that she would end up
trapped in her mother’s life (20-21). Literature offers them their first systematic, solitary
intellectual ‘escape’, the conscious realisation of the possibilities and potentials created by
the imagination.
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If “the shaping of autobiographical narrative, and particularly of oral remembering is
a basic part of cultural learning in childhood” (Chamberlain and Thompson 8); and if most of
the books that shape our imagination most forcefully are those read in childhood, then these
child narrators touch upon vital intersections of aural and read, reception and narration, life
writing and memory. The child narrators then describe a vital period of character-formation.
As Guérard put it: “World Literature begins, not in the graduate school, but in the nursery”
(Guérard 4). Elsewhere: “Cosmopolitanism begins in the nursery, with Aesop, Brer Rabbit,
the Grimm Brothers, Andersen, Pinocchio; it continues through adolescence, with Jules
Verne and Alexandre Dumas; it reaches the masses, with the Bible and Les Misérables” (qtd.
in Vaugeois 63). The reading material noted here portrays the formative landscape of the
mind. The ‘children’s’ books, like those by Enid Blyton, Kenneth Grahame or A. A. Milne,
signal the early inculcation of an acquired new ethos. Literature or reading that makes the
child-protagonists transcend their local landscapes opens up their minds to the world and
makes their future resistance individual and global –even as the readers remain in their
bedrooms. To extend a not very original analogy: if the connection to the land through
orality, textual or lived experience makes the protagonists’ ‘earthly’, literature opens them up
to new horizons and makes them worldly.107 As Damrosch puts it:
The borders of world literature are formed at once on a global scale and at the most
individual level, made and remade in the shifting relations between world-wide
capital flows, national publishing industries and university systems, and the personal
preferences of individual readers, who may be drawn to very different works for all
sorts of reasons. The ultimate boundary of world literature is found in the interplay of
works in a reader’s mind, reshaped anew whenever a reader picks up one book in
place of another, begins to read, and is drawn irresistibly into a new world. (“Frames
for World Literature” 513-14)
Yet by reading the texts, the texts themselves are also validated as world literature.
By reading and commenting on what these texts have meant to them with the full force of
their own local cultures –written and oral– these girls make their cultures part of the critical
perspective necessary to deal with these once ‘Western’ classics. If Tambu reads Julius
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Caesar, a text written by an Englishman partly about the struggle of (originally) Roman
generals over their southern African empire, then by reading into it her own betrayal under
empire, as a black Rhodesian student whose academic merit (in English) has been discredited
in favour of a white student, the text’s status is further validated as an example of world
literature.
In the works dealt with, the ‘reading lists’ of ‘masterpieces’ are emblematic of the
spread and transplanting of centralised education systems from first-world countries to others,
making the ‘Western’ classics at once familiar and new. Read and taught in the colonies in
the same way as they were in their host cultures, and regardless of the political relations
between metropolis and colony, the children’s ‘classics’ offered a plethora of iconic images
that would become and in some cases still are familiar to English-reading children around the
world.108 The references to The Wind in the Willows in particular seem apt, since Grahame’s
work eulogises the natural (English) landscape as a site for striving for and contemplating the
luxurious “country of the mind” –the phrase is Grahame’s (Thum).109
This was not a one-way circulation route. The education (and reading lists) received
by Tambu in 1960s-80s Rhodesia near the Nyamarira, or Ahmed in 1940s-50s Egypt near the
Nile may have fired their imaginations for an English landscape and English ‘lifestyle’, as
they at least conceived it, but their counterparts near the Thames had long gone to the West
Indies with Treasure Island (1881-1883), to the dark ‘jungle’ with The Jungle Books (1894),
and to Africa and the North Pole with Doctor Doolittle (1920-50). Such readers were flying
fighter planes in Germany and France in World War I but were also visiting Brazil and Peru
in peacetime with Captain Biggles (1932-68). Even in 1988 after most colonies had gained
their independence, and about the same time as Nervous Conditions and A Border Passage
were published, a young English girl called Matilda first discovers the joy of reading (in the
privacy of her bedroom) by travelling to Other places.110 In parallel to the girls ‘overseas’
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short decades before, Matilda’s vision of the world is widened by travelling “on olden-day
sailing ships with Joseph Conrad”, “to Africa with Ernest Hemingway” (not France, Spain or
the US) and “to India with Rudyard Kipling” (Dahl 15). The relation of the girl-protagonist to
landscape in Roald Dahl’s Matilda incidentally compares well with Ahmed and
Dangarembga’s (very different) texts. In Matilda too, the landscape offers a parallel
telescopic movement from the wide untamed ‘English’ countryside to socially-emblematic
private gardens, to the seclusion of the bedroom, the storytelling circle of her teacher, and so
on. Although written as a children’s book, issues of colonialism, race and class are
suppressed within it, such as the references to property, especially suburban property and ivycovered Victorian houses, and disposable income, but also to Britain’s world relations and its
settler and non-settler colonies, specifically to the US, Australia, India and Africa. Matilda’s
creator himself had had first-hand exposure to the colonies not least as an RAF pilot during
World War II but also as an employee of Shell posted in Africa, and possibly, as a spy.
In a primary reading, local literature that is based on its writers’ own
‘provincialisation’ of the world (in Chakrabarty’s words,) whether covert or overt in the text,
encourages its (infant) readers to open up to new horizons, and at least potentially makes
them more knowledgeable of other contexts. By travelling outside of local contexts the texts
themselves become world texts, read by new non-local readers around the world, who
‘provincialise’ these new cultures and respond to them with the knowledge of their own local
cultures.
As the girl protagonists proceed into stages of advanced education, the landscapes
reflect the different experiences of colonisation in Egypt and Zimbabwe, and the relationship
of the ‘British-empowered’ members of each society to the colonial state. Much less violent
than in Zimbabwe, the British occupation in Egypt was not accompanied by a change in the
larger community’s religion and language, and despite the manifest racism in judicial and
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bureaucratic matters, issues of race did not include such nefarious legalisations as pass laws,
segregated land or forbidden marital relations. Coming from an admittedly privileged milieu
Ahmed can thus speak of being ‘at home’ in all things English (141). When she reaches
Girton College to pursue her undergraduate degree Leila feels she has arrived somewhere
very familiar, where all her framed spaces are comparable to those she inhabited before, from
the green landscape to the closed women’s community or “the harem perfected” as she calls
it. She writes: “Life at Girton was in fundamental ways deeply continuous with the
assumptions, beliefs, and ways of living that had hitherto framed the world as I knew it”
(180). Of course, she adds, “this was ‘England’, a place with its red roofs111 and woods and
fogs and rain that I’d already lived in, in my mind, through all those years of losing myself in
English books” (180). The pursuits too were the same: “the meditative, inward mood of
Girton, for instance –this place of books, gardens, quiet, trees– was very like that of Ain
Shams” (180). Even the natural landscape complete with bird song and small animals seems
familiar (italics mine):
“I felt at home…[T]o this day, probably because of Girton, I love the English
landscape around Cambridge as much as I love any landscape –even Egypt’s.
Different as they are, for me they share an underlying similarity. Flat, dark earth, rich,
fertile, furrowed fields cracked and parched –even in Cambridge– in a dry
summer…[T]he look of the earth and trees and the shapes of leaves and the shadows
they cast on the ground were deeply familiar –and [I heard]… again familiar birds,
some of which I recognized from childhood in Cairo, birds going back and forth in
their migrations between Europe and Africa.” (183)
Setting aside for a moment the dubious physical similarity found between the Cambridge and
Cairene landscapes, it is significant that British presence in Egypt as experienced by Leila in
her childhood schooling and reading makes the English landscape outside of Egyptian
territory when she finally arrives there a familiar ‘homely’ place; her alienation on Egyptian
territory happens primarily because of the 1952 revolution which officially signals the end of
British presence. Finding herself out of place particularly as a ‘black’ migrant in the Enoch
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Powell period, Leila’s memoir attempts to reconstruct what it may mean to be both ‘at home’
and out of place at the same time.
This is a far cry from Tambu’s own feelings which reflect a very different experience
of British colonisation. As mentioned before, when she first arrives at her uncle’s house on
the mission, the property of England in Zimbabwe, Tambu’s framed spaces change
dramatically. The natural landscape becomes cultivated; her chores change from family
labour to studying and reading; her sleeping space changes too from a kitchen floor to a
bedroom of her own. As she moves away again, this time to the Sacred Heart College where
she has received a scholarship, the landscape changes more drastically (this is developed in
the sequel). Her aunt’s front garden almost explodes in size to become a wide boulevard of
trees and neatly organised avenues. The “majestically spacious” grounds, what seemed like
“hundreds of acres of land”, manage to intimidate even the usually overconfident
Babamukuru (196). The carefully laid-out grounds (including netball and tennis courts)
enclose the “bright and shimmering white” buildings, balancing a strict control of the
elements with the odd exotic indulgence:
We drove….to a thicket of conifers that seemed to signify that within this rich
kingdom we had left the province of the physical and entered the realm of mental
activity, because beyond the trees was a roundabout at the top of which stood the
school buildings….The roundabout itself was serenely green with a lavish,
permanently moist lawn, the latter relieved in places carefully selected so that the
green would not be too monotonous, by flowering shrubs. Delicate mimosa fluffed
puffs of yellow and silvery white, robust poinsettia splashed patches of crimson and
peach against the green. Two swans cruised elegantly across a pond in the middle of
the lawn and later I found there shoals of goldfish, goldfish which were not a pale
imitation but definitely gold. Their rich, ruddy glow flitted in and out of water weeds
in the company of more exotic species that shot flashes of red and blue and silver
through the gold. I was enchanted, so obviously so that Nyasha thought she ought to
remind me that I had come to school and not on holiday. (196-7)
At this point Tambu feels she has been admitted into heaven. Then: “Anticipation.
Disappointment. I looked and looked and searched carefully through the crowd, but I could
not find a single black face…except of course for the porters…carrying trunks, but none of
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them offered to carry mine” (198). This lush wealth is not intended of course for Tambu,
although the wishful thought always hovers at the back of imagination that it might have been
hers in a different linear History. She is then shown her new sleeping space and once again
the framed space marks a new social grouping. The bedroom she had shared with Nyasha
changes into a dormitory, at once a less private and more vulnerable layout than the bedroom
in her uncle’s house, but also one located in the ‘African dormitory’ which is segregated from
the white students (along with, the sequel makes clear, the ‘African bathrooms’). Tambu is on
African territory but not ‘at home’; there is a home in this paradise for everything from
‘Roman’ arches to “exotic” species of fish, but not “a single black face”, except, poignantly,
in the labour. Her learning spaces change too. Nyasha’s bookshelves which had previously
seemed so well-stocked now become overwhelmed by a large library, clean, bright, quiet and
stocked with hundreds of books, the most Tambu had ever seen in one place, and it is here for
the first time, in the potential ‘world’ that is bigger than (but certainly not unrelated to) the
nation and the individual, that Tambu feels ‘at home’. These new framed spaces are
completely different from what Tambu has been used to, and show a hierarchal gulf between
the colonised and the coloniser that is simply not portrayed in Leila Ahmed’s memoir.
Nervous Conditions stops before Tambu has reached her full intellectual or critical
‘maturity’ although she shoulders the responsibility of adulthood much earlier than Leila.
Leila’s adult reading takes her one step further, makes her ‘aware’ of the connectedness of
things and the importance of ethical responsibility towards a common humanity. Leila’s
maturity is fostered by the critical and comparative stance she acquires from intense further
reading: European literature, French critical theory and American feminism; readings on the
‘Arab’ world and Egypt, on Islam and oral cultures, as well as on history and politics,
imperialism and race. It takes the narrator of A Border Passage the reading of a lifetime to
come to terms with being at home in cultures that seem at times antagonistic by
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understanding that ‘national’ culture, individual culture, is plural, not this or that but this and
that.
As ‘classics’ of many canons, books (whether for children or adults), and consumed
avidly within the privacy of the readers’ bedrooms, sometimes even in precise defiance of
their parents’ wishes (as Nyasha reads D H Lawrence), depicted a canonical ‘world’
landscape that was remote and yet, in its human values and themes, often very familiar. As
the narrators’ mature into their bicultural political selves, their reception of texts changes,
from seeing in their reading material aspects of ‘native’ and ‘adopted’ culture, to seeing in it
a set of antagonistic cultures, and to eventually reading into it an understanding of the
contrapuntal rather than the hierarchal relation of cultures.
One of the factors that unites Dangarembga and Ahmed as authors in their particular
and respective gender struggles is the view from the ‘overseas colonies’, and the gender
struggle resonates with other political issues of national liberation and post-colonialism.
Bicultural by education, these intellectual protagonists portrayed in the works both belong
and do not belong to their communities, but stand at a (manipulative) distance to produce
analysis and critique.112 The women’s intellectual landscapes range wider and wider, from the
sole individual suffering unequal educational opportunities as a girl in a village in Zimbabwe
to the ‘nervous condition’ suffered by girls like Nyasha who have ‘read too much’ about
imperialism, to a wider Africa in which racism, colonialism and sexism are integral identity
issues, to a wider world in which they are global issues. In the same manner, a solitary and
privileged girl playing in a garden in Egypt grows to suffer under a corrupt Egyptian
government that nationalises her family’s fortunes, proceeds to engage with the theme of
loneliness of immigration, and then issues of religion in men and women’s communities, and
so on. The critique may be perceived as moving subnationally and then transnationally in
concentric circles with the individual at the centre through larger and larger affiliative
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clusters of individual, nation and globe –or in a reverse movement inwards. The centre-point
of the ‘individual’ then is also, and not without irony, the centre-point of the globe.
From Individual Woman to Global Women
The global community of women shows itself in many ways, and creates informal
private spheres for bonding and relationships which are often constructed under normative
public frameworks. The opportunities for close or particular female relationships can appear
in diverse institutions of female-dominated spheres, with the polemics of and causes for such
companionship changing over time and from one community to another.
The transnational community for women embodied in the (not always agreed-upon)
core ‘values’ of feminism including the call for women’s rights as human rights has offered a
potential form of ‘bonding’ which has manifested in various trans-local institutions and
groups around the world, often with the words ‘global’ or ‘regional’ in their names or in their
agendas. Groups have also networked in the international community under, for example, the
UN Decade on Women, seeking wider forums and platforms for dialogue and representation.
The main problem faced by a global vision of women’s issues is that the
acknowledgement of a hugely spread, established, and diversely-formed movement that has
had to work in its various time-spaces to address fundamental issues uniting all women
threatens the viability of targeting and engaging with sub-global, subnational particulars (a
concern Ahmed herself discusses in A Border Passage). This tension remains in feminist
studies despite the critical theory which has emerged in contexts of black feminism and thirdworld feminism, and which has ranged from concepts of ‘sisterhood’ for social change
(hooks) to socialist ‘solidarity’ against class and racial particulars (Mohanty 1991; 1997) and
to ‘empathy’ in comparative studies (Lionnet 1995).113 Subnational particulars work to
complicate and blur a ‘universal’ code of ‘women’s rights as human rights’, causing the
certainly undesirable and very real risk of eliminating dialogue all together, or on the
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grassroots level, eliminating the possibilities of reform or relief (See Jayawardena; YuvalDavis 1997).
Complications of bridging local and global contexts include, for example, when
women’s organisations in developing countries or minority groups decide to ‘put off’ the call
for woman’s rights until the situation of their countries or communities has stabilised, or
choose to ‘link’ their demands to issues of ‘wider’ relevance.114 In other situations some
women’s groups reason that certain liberational discourses are either simply not relevant to
their agendas for reform, or that identification with such discourses might actually impair the
groups’ cause within society for reasons of social taboos. In postcolonial contexts global
linkage has also historically been problematic because feminism has often been tied up in
complex and different ways with the movement for national independence, and therefore it
uncomfortably and uneasily straddles the divide in nationalist discourse. In the heyday of the
national liberation movements the feminist activists might be represented in the private
sphere as the ‘inner’ strength of the ‘nation’ that is traditional and essential and has been
untouched by the coloniser, but who pragmatically need to act within the public sphere (the
infrastructure of modern government that must be Europeanised to keep up with the
coloniser) as protestors, soldiers, workers, teachers, etc. The nationalist argument concerning
the position of women in ‘modern’ society in such states is often posited not on identity but
on a difference with the perceived forms of cultural modernity in the West (Chatterjee The
Nation and its Fragments 117). Once direct foreign rule ends, the issue fades in the
background of public debate in the now-independent states, and simply fails to arouse the
same degree of public passion that it had a few decades before (Chatterjee The Nation and its
Fragments 116).
Within many postcolonial states, the feminist movement in the public sphere, which
after independence now calls for more direct ‘public’ rights of citizenship, comes across a
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nationalist discourse within the state that, at least in Egypt and Zimbabwe, all-too-easily
posits (or dismisses) ‘feminism’ as a ‘Western construct’. Calls for women’s rights are then
rejected as ‘Western’, in the sense, if ‘sense’ is the word, of the same ‘Western’ powers that
had robbed the state of its autonomy before; and therefore such calls are claimed to be an
imposition if not outright dangerous, and are refuted with a ‘precolonial traditionalist’
discourse even more limiting than before. Ironically, problematically, and precisely because
the clean-cut division of any aspect of a culture into ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ is reductive and
simplistic, these governments’ responses to feminist activists have often been themselves
moulded on colonial preconceptions (which in turn were globally spread because of the wide
networks of empire) of what exactly being ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’, ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’
means.
Nevertheless, it is precisely feminist reactions to these hurdles, the consistent attempts
by feminist activists, academics, literary figures, etc., around the world to sustain networks of
resistance along trans-local lines that offer cause for optimism. Such attempts, because of the
global linkage they assume via discourses of modernity, human rights, and the various
ideological premises of different religious sects, are still attacked in their various respective
communities for ‘imitating Europeans slavishly’, and for trying to impose ‘foreign’ ideas on
local national communities in an act of either self-imposed neo-colonialism or colonial
conspiracy. (This accusation is then often further supported with the statement that many of
such groups are funded by institutions based in the West). The answer has been to interpret
the local, globally, that is, for example, not to justify feminism by supposedly global or
universal religious precepts, but to justify local religious precepts by using global feminism.
In Zimbabwe, for example, as Anna and Ezra Chitando’s “Weaving Sisterhood:
Women African Theologians and Creative Writers” shows:
The call for African women to adopt critical approaches to the Bible is a result of the
fact that many men appeal to it in order to justify oppressive patriarchal
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practices…Many African men cite the Bible to defend the oppression of women
claiming that this is consistent with the divine will. Furthermore, they accuse African
women who champion the rights of women as being uncritical imitators of ‘decadent
European/American culture’. (29)
Such women theologians have been inspired by their African creative writer “sisters” such as
Dangarembga to revisit and condemn the texts and rituals –both Christian and traditional
African– used to oppress women. Christian African feminists and the feminist revisions of
religious narratives then allow women a space in the (now public) sphere of political religion
which they might be able to subvert for their purposes (Yuval-Davis Gender & Nation 65).
The efforts of women to construct and engage with gender-sensitive religious
discourse in Islamic feminism can be placed in a comparable situation. As an intellectual
voice, Ahmed, like the field of gender studies from within which she writes, is muted
compared to traditional mainstream Arabic and Islamic approaches. Like the Chitandos
quoted above, Ahmed in an early article had angrily complained of the attacks on feminism
from conservative Islamists working within or outside the West:
“[T]he Islamic movement…designates feminism among all the aspects of the West
and of Westernization that it generally abhors, as most specifically worthy of its
hatred….The …Middle East is…justified in its anger at the Western world's
aggression, bigotry, and exploitation. But to target feminism as ‘Western’ and as
particularly repugnant and evil is to skilfully exploit that anger in the service of
confusion, as if justice and the idea that it must be extended to all humankind,
wherever such ideas arise, can be called ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’”. (“Western
Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem” 532-33)
Today, however, Ahmed is an established academic (she is at the time of writing Professor of
Divinity in Harvard University) and is considered a founding figure of the relatively new and
quickly expanding field of ‘Islamic feminism’. Ahmed’s key text Women and Gender in
Islam (1992) was translated into Arabic (sponsored by the Egyptian Supreme Council of
Culture) in 1999.115
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In much the same way as there is fertile common ground used through various power
structures for oppression –empire, religious institutions, states, etc.– then there is also fertile
ground for common ideals of women’s resistance. Creative writers from around the globe
have invariably resorted to such common ground to discuss biological, social, political and
regional concerns –and the common imperative to narrate. As Tambu and Ahmed make clear:
it was neither one ‘man’ nor one ‘sex’ who did the oppressing, nor is the world divided
clearly into ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’. Texts that have been read or taught across the wide
spectrum of women’s studies can enable cross-cultural meeting points, conditioned by
specificities, which enable the kind of women’s philanthropy initiated by the ‘haremcommunity’ to be compared to that offered by the béguinage/begijnhof. This is not an attempt
at either universalisation or globalisation or, more damningly, generalisation, but a way to
appreciate the overlap between women’s issues and (shifting) political and cultural identities
on a global scale, and to counter political and cultural identities that are often still gendered.
“Rather than a simplistic melding of identitarian political categories”, a trans-local view of
gender and resistance makes “a statement about the complexity of identity…and of
transnational identities…where multiple forces come to bear on the formation of an
individual and her perceived place in the world” (Parker and Young 10). Rather than the idea
of women’s solidarity in gender becoming a preconceived constructed category under which
individual cases can be subsumed, gender is one category among many to which individual
women resort to achieve solidarity, not as a formulaic and unchanging category but, like the
concept of the ‘nation’ itself and intrinsically connected to it, “a viable space for political
self-expression” (Boehmer “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent” 175). In the same manner, a
global ‘gender’ also complicates individual ideals of equality, fairness and justice with a
gender-sensitive vision of a global political consciousness and agency.
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The marvellously arresting first line in Nervous Conditions: “I was not sorry when my
brother died” sums up the hatred and frustration felt by anyone whose entire ambitions had
been constantly and consistently thwarted by one person, but by the first paragraph the
narrator voice implies that it was neither one person who did the hating, nor was it one person
who did the oppressing, nor indeed, are the groups of people in either camp divided simply
into those who hate and those who oppress. ‘We are always plural’, Leila Ahmed says, ‘this
and that’ (25), and this plurality comes from an awareness of the convergence of traditions,
cultures and histories within us. Tambu is an African woman, a young Shona peasant girl, a
Rhodesian, a Zimbabwean, a student, a missionary student and a black student receiving a
colonial education. At her most global, her most irate, her most passionate moments (and the
taboo-breaking assertion that she did not regret her brother’s death is one of those) the
narrator’s voice defines itself from within its ‘femaleness’, which is the strongest point of
contact of all these convergences. By the first paragraph Tambu is quick to single out the
female element. For even though the novel is about the death of Tambu’s brother and many
other events: a huge range of histories, whether private, national, regional and global, Tambu
says that the novel is really about the women’s histories: about her “escape and Lucia’s”,
about her “mother’s and Maiguru’s entrapment”, and about Nyasha’s attempt at rebellion (1).
Only afterwards does Tambu begin to locate some of the ‘convergences’ or, as she calls
them, ‘the facts as [she] remember[s] them’ (1), exploring the layers of her identity as a
woman in and of that time and place. So in an endless elliptical movement Tambu tells her
individual story as a woman in the same time as she tells a global story, and an endlessly
growing global story, of women.
Resisting patriarchy at one moment or the other many of the women in these texts
find themselves uniting even if unintentionally and at least in sympathy against the solid
barrier of chauvinism. As Tambu and the women sleep in a smoky kitchen, plough the land
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manually because the men are too lazy to bring out the machines, pay for school fees
themselves because the father has spent the money elsewhere, mend the leaky roof of the
homestead because the men cannot be bothered, Ahmed’s women have to live within
stultifying religious regulations defined or ratified by men, from marital laws to social taboos.
Bonded in these collectives, boundaried by social constructs, many a female member must
have thought as Tete does, one of the family matriarchs in Nervous Conditions, shaking her
head and laughing conspiratorially with Tambu’s aunts at the goings-on in the men’s family
meetings: “Those men, aiwa! Those men!” (150).
If while narrating gender the women protagonists in Nervous Conditions and A
Border Passage tell of how they became rather than were born women, individual formation
is also a way of narrating how these figures became a certain community, and as such, their
narration is a way of clarifying the fluid and linked boundaries of diverse identity categories.
As Tambu learns how to be all her other constructed identities: black, African, Zimbabwean,
Rhodesian, colonised, self-colonised, missionary-educated or traditionally brought up on the
stories of the land, Ahmed too has to acquire what it means to be Muslim, Arab, Egyptian and
black or non-white. Rather than ‘represent’ this or that nation, their narratives of formation
locate them as individual heroines trying to grasp, come to terms with and then transcend the
limitations placed upon them by their time and space, and illustrate the meeting points or
cross-currents in their individual identity formation, their communities’ identity formation,
and both their individual and national formation within a larger world. Ahmed’s succinct and
lyrical: “we are always plural. Not either this or that, but this and that” (25) ably sums up this
journey of coming to terms with the plurality of identities that makes up the self, (even if, by
the nature of the protagonists’ multiculturalism, creative talent and migrations, their narrated
‘selves’ seem more plural than others). By transcending homogenous, univocal
representations, the protagonists can define individual awareness and global agency as a way
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of being in the world. A gender-sensitive world text in a postcolonial context presents
precisely that “emergent, prefigurative category that is concerned with a form of cultural
dissensus and alterity, where non-consensual terms of affiliation and articulation may be
established on the grounds of historical trauma” (Bhabha Location of Culture 17), but also
the acknowledgment, as Said put it in a wider context, that “narratives of emancipation and
enlightenment in their strongest form [are] also narratives of integration not separation, the
stories of people who had been excluded from the main group but who [are] now fighting for
a place in it” [italics in original] (Culture and Imperialism XXX). Feminism in its many
approaches and practices, from grassroots activism to the academic and creative practice
offers a politically-charged perspective that reacts to exclusion. From a gender-in-worldliterature perspective, being ‘plural’ may be a starting point for conceptualising ‘global’
gender concerns that take strength, in a comparative context, from both similarity and
difference, specificity and universality. It is at this point that Brandes’s telescope can expand
to its largest vision again.
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Chapter 3
Circumnavigating the Canon:
Amitav Ghosh’s Antique Land between ‘Elliptical Refraction’ and ‘Double Mirrors’
Each of these documents has a story of its own: of travel from Aden and Egypt, to Malabar and Sicily and then
back again to Cairo –medieval histories that somersault into a further chronicle of travel and dispersal in modern
times. Their history has the baffling elusiveness of lights seen in parallel mirrors: they are both the stuff of
history and history itself, as real as a battle or a temple; they are each a living history and a commentary on the
writing of history; a mocking aside on how histories are stolen, bought and traded in the marketplace. The story
of the slave of MS. H. 6 is one tiny spark within the bright lights of this looking-glass chamber, faint, elusive
and often jeering. [My italics]
Amitav Ghosh, “Slave of MS. H. 6” (167)
World literature is an elliptical refraction of national literatures ….[W]orks become world literature by being
received into the space of a foreign culture, a space defined in many ways by the host culture’s national tradition
and the present needs of its own writers. Even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation
between two different cultures. The receiving culture can use the foreign material in all sorts of ways: as a
positive model for the future development of its own tradition; as a negative case of a primitive, or decadent,
strand that must be avoided or rooted out at home; or, more neutrally, as an image of radical otherness against
which the home tradition can more clearly be defined. World literature is thus always as much about the host
culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture; hence it is a double refraction, one that can be
described through the figure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate
the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by
neither alone. [My italics]
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (282-83)
This chapter will examine how Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) sheds
light on and stands in dialogue with key travel writing in Arabic produced during the 10th-13th
centuries in the Afro-eurasian world by the region’s (s’) various inhabitants. Quoted in
Antique Land and in Ghosh’s essay “The Slave of MS. H.6” on the same subject in Subaltern
Studies, the Arabic travel texts are part of the material that Ghosh excavates, but their
circulation histories also provide a practical illustration of pre-modern cultural exchange in
light of Ghosh’s call for a kind of ‘world without borders’ and a resistant, also subaltern
historiography. Seen through the critical and organising lens of Amitav Ghosh’s Antique
Land, the Arabic texts shed light on what a World Literature in pre-national, pre-modern
times might mean, specifically by dwelling on pre-modern ‘global’ networks and forms of
cultural dominance and resistance. The travel texts show how travellers helped draw the
assimilative ecumenical concept of the ‘abode of Islam’ (dār al-islām ) for their multicultural and multi-lingual audiences, and also how the travellers complicated the concept of
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‘the abode of Islam’ by revealing the abundant beliefs, customs, and histories acknowledged,
subsumed or suppressed within the Islamic world. Drawing on some of the debates of World
Literature and Postcolonial theory, and in light of the general objectives of the study as a
whole, this chapter aims to challenge the way that supposedly unique (in this case religious)
customs and beliefs are understood as a pre-modern source for some pure and homogenous
‘Arabic-Islamic’ affiliation, propagated in both Eastern and Western academic writings, and a
vision which, because of its exclusionary and homogenising, not to mention limiting and
stereotypical, impulses, whether manifested in the political sphere or the cultural one, needs
to be challenged and subverted. Towards this end, rereading some of the works of the most
orthodox denizens of classic Arabic literature in the golden age of Islam, from our viewpoint
in the present, seems to be a good way to start. In order to ‘expand the Arabic canon’ in
search for silenced ‘Others’, this chapter will necessarily require laying some groundwork
discussion about Arabic literature, then looking closely at the texts, and after that discussing
some of the ways the travelogues circulated. In acknowledgement of the fact that no literature
exists in isolation, and because of the creative distinctiveness of Antique Land on this topic,
the discussion of Arabic literature will be prompted by Amitav Ghosh.
The idea of ‘elliptical refraction’ in this chapter is used as it is referred to by both
David Damrosch and Amitav Ghosh. The phrase, of course, is Damrosch’s, who uses it to
describe the movement of literary texts which circulate influentially beyond the readership of
the local or ‘home’ communities in which they were produced, as these Arabic travel texts
once did, gaining different interpretations or serving different reading purposes from one
culture to another, or standing like the figure of the “pushmi-pullyu” in the Dr. Dolittle series:
looking to past and present at the same time (Damrosch What is World Literature?).
Alternatively, Ghosh describes a similar process of “lights seen in parallel mirrors” (“Slave of
MS. H. 6” 167). In this movement literature serves to enlighten readers on the connections
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between people, places and times by creating an effect of lights being endlessly reflected in
double mirrors; and so the traveller’s movement between recent and ancient histories in
Antique Land constructs a tense, continuously-reflective space between East and West,
‘antique’ and ‘modern’ worlds.116
By delving into what the Arabic texts reconsider of the relations between individuals
and communities, this chapter argues that the travelogues circulated as non-religious
reading/recited material, posing a trans-local 'canon' of belles-lettres for a ‘sub-elite’ common
reader. This ‘canon’, seen in secular perspective, thereby emphasises one of the aspects
central to World Literature (whether in pre-modern, non-postcolonial contexts, or in postmodern postcolonial contexts): that extended communication routes and economic exchange
entail an expansion of cultural relations, which in turn requires a suitably widened critical
approach. Reappropriated through Ghosh’s modern work, the Arabic travel texts pose an
alternative vision to a monolithic and unchanging Islamic Empire, an epithet used
academically (and often politically) today to refer to a region that was actually far from being
homogenous. Like the other works by Ghali, Kundera, Dangarembga, and Ahmed previously
discussed in this study, Amitav Ghosh’s Antique Land and the Arabic texts it engages with
construct a resistant and diverse, political/community identity: in this case, an ‘everyday
nation’ engaged in cultural and economic transactions.
Transiting-Nations and Narration
In An Antique Land is an account of Amitav Ghosh’s field experience in Egypt
undertaken as part of his doctoral degree in anthropology. Written as a travelogue, Antique
Land is also punctuated with short history lessons and political polemic on issues as varied as
colonialism, religious tolerance, and migration of labour. As Ghosh narrates the events of his
sojourn he also reconstructs in alternate sections the stories of ‘parallel’ travellers from
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ancient times, piecing them together from the large store of Jewish mediaeval documents,
known as the ‘Geniza documents’, found in Cairo, but also from other sources such as early
Arabic travelogues. The main story recounted in tandem with Ghosh’s own experience
among the peasants of the Nile Delta in Egypt is that of a twelfth-century Jewish trader, Ben
Yiju, who lived between Aden, Mangalore, Tunis and Cairo, and often travelled with his
Indian slave Bomma, whose origins may have lain in south India. As if to put a final seal on
the image of travel routes that criss-cross many centuries and vast geographical terrain, the
title of Ghosh’s work is divided into two parts, conjoining both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’
traditions of scholarship on travel and history writing. The first part, ‘In an Antique Land,’
alluding to Shelley’s Ozymandias, and taken along with Ghosh’s strong critique of
imperialism in his book, is a clear reference to Western travel (conquest, science,
tourism) especially of the times of Romanticism, but also beyond (D’haen “Antique Land,
New Worlds?”). The sub-title, however: ‘history in the guise of a traveller’s tale’ also
acknowledges the ‘Eastern’ tradition of travel writing. Conjoined, the two parts of the title
indicate the cohesion and sometimes antagonistic interdependence of culture, history and
literary traditions.
Because it draws upon both historical documentation and field experience, Ghosh has
stressed that In an Antique Land was not written as a novel, even if it may be and, often has
been, read as one.117 A large number of the reviews show befuddlement at its ‘mix’ of genres
and disciplines: ethnography, travel writing, anthropology, etc. Even intuitive and positive
reviews such as Clifford Geertz’s, while appreciating the stories as such, miss or question the
link: the book has “a sense of incompletion about it; of something not said about then, and,
even more, about now” (41). The ‘foreignness’ of the form appears implicit too in its various
reviews, described alternatively as “a multi-cultural bazaar” (Geertz 40), “a passage to India”
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(Geertz 40; Adams 134), and even, on the less scholarly side, “a tangy literary masala”
(Black 5).
Yet travel writing, and in addition to everything else Antique Land may be it is also
very much that, has always tended to be a combination of (constantly redefined) sciences and
genres: of ethnography and anthropology (or natural science), representation (narration) and
presentation (documentary), history and geography, anecdote and reportage (or data
collection), field experience and research, hearsay and conjecture.118 As Hooper et al note:
One of the most persistent observations regarding travel writing is its absorption of
differing narrative styles and genres, the manner in which it effortlessly shape-shifts
and blends any number of imaginative encounters, and its potential for interaction
with a broad range of historical periods, disciplines and perspectives. In much the
same way that travel itself can be seen as a somewhat fluid experience, so too can
travel writing be regarded as a relatively open-ended and versatile form,
notwithstanding the closure that occurs in some of its more rigidly conventional
examples. (3)
The difficulty of categorising Antique Land does not stem from the ‘form’ alone, but
also from the position of its very aware narrator who purposefully and clearly critiques the
relation between power systems (specifically empire and modern nations) and knowledge on
one hand, and wryly but systematically debunks his own authority on another. Ghosh
employs the writing forms used by imperialist powers to circumscribe and subjugate other
peoples (often with their consent) and write the main narratives of history now referred to as
Orientalism, but ironically, Ghosh uses it for counter purposes, presenting a kind of ‘good’
Orientalism (which gives the subject agency and power to write history) to counter a ‘bad’
Orientalism (which robs the subject of the gaze from its agency).119
One of the many effects of the work of scholars in the last few decades has been to
foster a healthy scepticism towards representation of peoples and places, especially in travel
writing within frames of empire and rising nationalism (Said (1978); Hulme (1986); Clifford
(1988; 1997); Pratt (1992)). The range of Ghosh’s critique, like Said’s Orientalism, is not an
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all-out attack on ‘Europeans’ or the ‘West’, but a critique of the way knowledge is produced
and propagated by dominant (military and economic) bodies, held by these bodies as the only
valid form of knowledge, and then further institutionalised by the politically-dominated
themselves. Ghosh’s critique, like Clifford’s in Predicament of Culture, is as much a critique
of a method of representation as it is of the idea that any culture can be in its patterns of
‘dominance’ or ‘acquiescence’ either an untouched superior propagator or a passive
receptacle of influences. As such Ghosh’s critique covers not only Western high culture and
imperialism, epitomised in the story of the appropriation of the Geniza documents, but
extends to the locals complicit in the theft, the locals who have continued placing themselves
as subjects within a progressive march of history that begins with their primitive selves in an
‘antique land’, passes them by and ends at modern, first-world civilisation,120 and finally, in
the case of Egypt, to the actual alternatives these now ‘post-colonial’ locals have offered.
(What, after all, has Egypt done to preserve its remaining monuments, or, more importantly,
to safeguard its minorities?) Debunking the narrator’s own authority in Ghosh’s travelogue
marks a personal attempt to grapple with these issues as a cultural actor or producer himself
‘in the know’, and so the narrator implicitly: 1) acknowledges the difficulty of distancing
oneself from the major epistemological change engendered in entire communities and native
subjects who have grown up believing in certain structures of knowledge, 2) admits that the
veracity of any knowledge or perception is questionable and arguable, and 3) intentionally
distances himself from the unquestioning and confident centrist perspective of previous
narrators –Europeans, Arabs, Indians, or otherwise– who have had the power of the gaze.
Rising to Ghosh’s project makes it important to read his engagement with the body of
European travel writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Imperatively, however, and
challengingly, it requires departing from that corpus to highlight the submerged voices Ghosh
intends to give agency to. It requires first, departing from classic European travel literature in
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content, by visiting Eastern writing on Eastern history, specifically by reading Ghosh’s work
as an engagement with (or an ‘elliptical refraction’ or ‘double-mirroring’ of) the writings of
the peoples who have lived in and travelled between these regions many centuries previously.
Secondly, it requires a departure in time, by visiting a pre-modern period before the rise of
the nation-state or ‘modernity’ in order to rethink the beginnings of global, or more
accurately, unprecedentedly-widened networks. Yet, as posited in this study, if one of the
aims of seeking new forms of transnational relations is to resist cultural homogeneity, rising
to Ghosh’s project (focusing in this instance on the Middle East and India) requires not just
adding Eastern texts to the literary corpus but also delving deeper in these Eastern key texts
to uncover what voices they –as cosmopolitan and travel-wise as their authors may have
been– silenced in turn, such as the voices of women, slaves, non-Muslims, non-Arabs, and
the unlearned.121
Although the globalised world of modern nation-states is central to the examination of
the circulation of texts in World Literature theory, “globalization in the sense of relations
over long distances can also be seen as extending far back in human history, with
intercontinental trade, forced or voluntary population movements, and political colonialism as
conspicuous ingredients” (Goldmann et al 10). Indeed, “much of the ethnic and cultural
diversity which characterizes various territories in the present is the enduring result of longdistance migrations that occurred centuries ago” (Goldmann et al 10). In the absence of the
nation-state in the period discussed here, peoples and their texts can be seen to travel around
what Braudel (1979), Abu Lughod (1989) and Gunder Frank et al (1993) have referred to as
one or a series of pre-modern ‘world system(s)’122 –specifically what Abu Lughod has
expounded on as a series of connected urban systems of production, of varying sizes, from
Flanders to Canton. Dividing the semi-global Afro-eurasian system into a connected
“archipelago of towns” (348) Abu Lughod examines the remarkable degree of congruence
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between these cycles, arguing that the towns resembled “nodal points” in a larger system, and
were, in fact, the only comparable units in a world system that included everything from citystates to loose confederations and extensive empire-capitals (39).123 Abu Lughod draws
attention to various towns or town-clusters that pose major locales of communal affiliations
or collective imaginaries, although existing under the otherwise homogenising entities of the
Islamic or Byzantine or similar ‘empires’. The economic affluence of these centres which
made them major producers of (bookish) culture and scholarship also made them pre-modern
‘imagined communities’ and ‘ethnies’ (A D Smith 1971; 1999),124 some of which have
survived today in the ethos of capitals and urban centres in modern nation-states.125
The significance of Abu Lughod’s map of linked sub-systems is that it also renders
less significant the strict geographic and cultural barrier suggested between the ‘Islamic
empire’ and the ‘rest of the world’, while acknowledging at the same time a series of selfenclosed autonomous sub-systems designated by political and cultural frontiers. The Arabic
travel writings extrapolated by Ghosh appear to have travelled across the different linked subsystems along the nodal points of towns and via the trade routes, whether within the changing
borders of the ‘abode of Islam’, or outside of it. Since Abu Lughod’s analysis only refers to a
certain period (1250-1350), and since this chapter refers to a longer duration, references to
the Middle East or the ‘Islamic’ or the ‘Arabic-speaking world’ here refer to a region or subsystem whose borders changed with time, whose links to other sub-systems changed as well,
and within which its city-centres and their dynamics (trade, traffic, regional affluence, etc.)
changed too.126 The one constant assumed when referring to the ‘Middle East’ and the
‘Islamic world’ is to view this area as a potential designated unit in itself that is always linked
to other sub-systems.
Hence, this chapter will contextualise the function and readership of a number of
major texts that circulated well-enough to be considered an Arabic corpus of letters by the
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thirteenth century, discussing what a secular, pre-modern world literature in Arabic may
mean, and taking into consideration how this writing has been reread in contemporary times
by Ghosh. Along with the celebrated Geniza documents, Antique Land builds on the ‘core
canon’ of travel texts written in or translated into Arabic from the 10th-14th centuries.127 All of
the texts chosen in this chapter are autobiographical, widely-circulated travel writings
produced in or translated into Arabic from about 900-1300 by self-defined Arabs and nonArabs, all of whom quote from each other (and most of whom continue being quoted by
subsequent travellers, centuries afterwards). All the works, except one, are also alluded to in
Ghosh’s Antique Land and his essay “The Slave of MS. H. 6”. The works discussed here will
be: The Journey to Russia (Kitāb ilā malik al-saqāliba) by Ibn Fadlan (c. 922- life details
unknown);128 Volume 1 of Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (Murūj al-dhahab wa
ma‘ādin al-jawhar) by al-Mas‘udi (?- d.957);129 The Travels of Ibn Jubayr (Rihlat Ibn
Jubayr) by Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217);130 The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands or
The Book of Roger (Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi-ikhtirāq al-āfāq) by al-Sharif al-Idrissi (11001165);131 and Volume 1 of The Dictionary of Countries (Mu‘jam al buldan) by Yāqūt alHamawi (b. Anatolia 1179-d. Aleppo 1229). The Safarnameh or Travels132 of Naseri
Khusraw (b. Qibadyan, Iran ca.1004-1088), originally written in Persian but well-circulated
among Arabic-speakers might possibly be the earliest, or one of the earliest, literary
travelogues in the full modern sense, and is thus too important to be left out.
The size of the project makes it necessary not just to leave out more than is included
but to leave out entire cultural zones as well. Nevertheless, the drawbacks of (to use a loose
term very loosely) distant reading, also assumes the ‘view from the canon’, which is based on
the assumption that some key texts can pose a common, major body of transnational reading
material for writers who come from diverse cultures but are able to use the same language or
read the works in translation. By reading and responding to the same material, the writers,
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whether intentionally or inadvertently, position themselves in dialogue with each other. In an
attempt to start a discussion to a linked system of texts, there will be reference (usually
through endnotes) to ongoing discussions of overlapping ‘clusters’ of travel writers or travel
routes.
Although the later trajectories of these texts in modern times will not be discussed, it
is important to note that they continued ‘travelling’ on different routes among different
audiences to form ever-changing reading “maps”: “networks of partially overlapping ellipses
in space and in time, leading to changing constellations over time” (D’haen “Mapping World
Literature” 416). In Iran today, for example, Khusraw’s Safarnameh is often regarded as a
collection of popular classical travel tales, while in Arabic letters, Khusraw is included in
anthologies of travel writing or in literature courses as a ‘classical Arab traveller’. Khusraw,
who came from what was then Persia, who wrote in Persian and faced severe religious
discrimination for his ‘non desert-Arabian’ Ismaili Shi’ite beliefs in his time, would have
been perplexed. Ibn Fadlan’s text was until recently largely ignored in Arabic, but had held a
prominent place earlier among Russian historians and Orientalist scholars in the nineteenth
century (Kratchkovsky “Muqaddima” [Introduction]). His work is currently enjoying a new
popularity. Recently the work has inspired a rather bizarre Hollywood adaptation (The
Thirteenth Warrior), while an annotated translation of the work in English appeared in 2012.
Al-Idrissi once held an important place in traditional Latin cartography and geography, with
his map of the world being considered the first ‘modern’ map in European science in the
fifteenth century, but today, perhaps precisely because of the scientific observational tone he
adopts, is rarely read. A complete annotated translation into English of his work is yet to
emerge. The primary step, however, is to construct an idea of pre-modern Arabic travel
writing as ‘world literature’.
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What is Travel Literature in Arabic?
In an article on the definitions and terminology of travel literature Jan Borm
comments that from the number of labels applied to travel writing in recent years, one may
well wonder whether critics are discussing the same subject. Among the wide range of terms
in use are: ‘travel book’, ‘travel narrative’, ‘journeywork’, ‘travel memoir’, ‘travel story’,
‘travelogue’, or simply ‘travels’, as well as ‘travel writing’, ‘travel literature’ and ‘the travel
genre’. (13) The travel book may be “any narrative characterized by a non-fiction dominant
that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes
to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and
principal character are but one or identical” (17). Taking his cue from the modern French and
German traditions which distinguish between the genre of the travel book or travelogue, and
‘travel literature’ as an overall thematic category, Borm suggests that the travel book or
travelogue is a predominantly non-fictional genre while travel writing or travel literature is an
overall heading for texts whose main theme is travel (18-9). Ultimately, Borm stresses that
the form of travel writing one will practise depends on what kind of writer one is or wants to
be, but in essence, travel writing can be a useful heading under which to consider the multiple
crossings from one form of writing into another and from one genre into another, making the
most characteristic aspect of all travel writing, like travel itself, the idea of “shifting borders”
(26).
Despite the influence travel literature has had on major Western philosophers (from
John Locke to Adam Smith), writers (from Jonathan Swift to Bill Bryson) or politicians (as
propagandist literature and data generation for imperial expansion), Orientalism (1978) is
often seen as the first work of contemporary criticism to take travel writing as a major part of
its corpus, seeing it as a body of work which offers particular insight into the operation of
colonial discourses. Since then different fields and sub-fields have approached travel writing:
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gender has sought gender themes in women’s travel writings, for example, while travel
writing has also been looked at in the fields of translation studies, anthropology, geography
and history (Hulme et al 8-10).
In Arabic literature the interest in travel writing is of longer standing. In Arabic, that
‘trans-local’ corpus of letters despite itself, one form or another of ‘travel writing’ has been
revered and occasionally canonised (taught and studied) for over a millennium. In the face of
the substantial evidence on the subject –literary, historical, linguistic, cultural or material– it
seems a truism that there was a great deal of mobility of varying degrees of intensity between
Africa, Asia and Europe for at least half a millennium before 1500 (G. Hourani; Risso;
Chaudhuri),133 and which has continued with variations until the present day. Although
directions (to/from certain centres), means (sea or land), and certainly incentives varied, there
can be no doubt that an immense and at times overwhelming number of people travelled over
similarly overwhelming distances and in spite of immense odds.
Judging by the huge number of travel texts that circulated widely and that were
consistently produced even through the so-called ‘age of decadence/decline’ (traditionally
described as the ‘cultural isolation’ of Arabic letters under Ottoman occupation from about
1300-1800), it is for good reason that the ‘rihla’ lurks like an overreaching mythical presence
in Arabic letters. Both action and genre, the significance of the rihla in Arabic, meaning
‘voyage’ but also the ‘account of the voyage’ or ‘travelogue,’ ranges from a religious
obligation to an academic requirement, from form of narration to subject of narration, from
motif and metaphor to ecumenical view:
Because they [the travellers] traveled in order to know, some among them gave a
cognitive foundation to their experience of expatriation, while others gave it an ethical
content. All…followed the paths of knowledge as an asceticism that was both
physical and intellectual. By their incessant coming and going through the ‘empire of
Islam’ (mamlakat al-islām), a spatiotemporal entity that the geographers promoted to
the rank of a frame of intelligibility and meaning, they wove a vast web that became
part of classical Islamic culture. Thus, thanks to their efforts, the voyage, more than a
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means for acquiring knowledge, became the prime modality for creating it. (Touati
vii)
As the term in Arabic stands then, the rihla-voyage was, and to some degree remains, both
means and ends, both a proper subject for scholarly and sophisticated knowledge, and a
method or proof of authenticating knowledge and validating and qualifying the knowers. The
rihla-voyage was never just a way to know other people, or to contemplate oneself and one’s
community, but was integrally a way to achieve some degree of intellectual, ethical and
professional formation; a movement that could all too literally translate into upward mobility
in various spheres resulting from the education and experience that one might receive, the
trade one might garner and the people one might network with. As ‘a base for all genres and
an independent genre’, ‘both flint and spark’, as Mouadden puts it, travel accounts in Arabic
have necessarily been prolific, possibly the very reason why there remains a great confusion
in theoretical terms (26).134
Today, the “genre” concept of travel narratives in Arabic from the 9th-14th centuries is
often seen to exclude geographic-historical books (ranging from so-called annalistic histories
to works of astronomy and cartography) even if these were based, by the tradition of
scientific verifiability, on real travels, and despite their writers’ sometimes extensive obiter
dicta on their personal experiences and observations. Also excluded are al-masālik w-al
mamālik (itineraries and provinces) in spite of what they comprise of an urban and
ethnographic topography. Similarly excluded are imaginary tales which are considered
different genres (and some of which became very popular in Western translations). Travel
writing is seen to include in the first place diaries or journals, reports and travel accounts.
Whether or not the texts happened to have been initially ‘published’ for a ‘general’
readership, travel writing is that in which the voyage forms an organising aim of the
narrative, and that which focuses on conveying the personal experiences of the traveller,
whether self-composed or written by a biographer (Touati; Mouadden; Nassār; al-Muwāfi).
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Travel accounts that aim to be literary might be seen as those in which the voyage is
indispensable to the intellectual and aesthetic qualities of the text (Mouadden 34), which
convey the traveller’s impressions and perhaps something of the writer’s personality, or
which aim in the first place to entertain and attract readership (Nassār 131). Finally, by
almost complete agreement, travel literature is seen as a ‘shape-shifter’, a genre with
necessarily fluid borders.
It is no passing fancy then that motivated the large numbers of volumes on the Arabic
rihla and the highly-esteemed rahhāla (travellers) of the mediaeval and modern worlds.135
There is yet, however, to be an established or foundational corpus of scholarship presenting
an organised or agreed-upon critical approach to it. This is possibly under the influence of
modern Western aesthetic criteria of what literature is or should be,136 but undoubtedly it is
also because of the sheer bulk of the writings and their eclectic and generically-complex
nature that defies dichotomies of genre and disciplines, and also mingles at will prose and
poetry, the secular and the religious, and oral and written transmission. Thus, most in-depth
scholarship of various lengths has attempted to organise this endless range of material by
focusing on a single traveller or text (most famously, the Ibn Battuta-Ibn Fadlan-Ibn Jubayr
trinity generally categorised under ‘Sinbad-Other’), a single purpose of travel (such as
pilgrimage), a certain area (such as the Holy Land or Egypt), or on the writings of a certain
group (such as Christian or Jewish communities). The dilemma increases if any attempt is
made to take the ‘Islamic world’ in its subaltern entirety and delve into the many subsumed
languages within Arabic –precisely the kind of discussion this chapter would like to start.
Only recently have exciting attempts been made to cross such boundaries by compiling
collections of edited and translated material from several languages written by travellers
across Afroeurasia.137
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Meanwhile those interested in the Arabic rihla as a generic form have commonly
classified it either by the objective or destination of the voyage or by the writer’s incentive in
writing. The former classification fails to accommodate the usually mixed reasons for travel,
and thus becomes overwhelmed by too many ‘exceptions’ to the taxonomy (see, for example,
al-Fāsi (qtd. in Nassār 17-19); al-Muwāfi; Nassār; al-Sāwiri 97-100). It seems more useful to
contextualise the travel account by contextualising the writer, in some way as Boym states
that the kind of travel writing you write depends on the kind of writer you want to be (26).
The rihla-voyage in Arabic mediaeval learning was important because it was deemed a
necessary way for professionals and scholars to prove their worth, and so it was almost
essential for those interested in social mobility. Defining the travellers’ objectives to write,
however, makes it easier to contextualise the class or circle in which the traveller’s writings
were intended to circulate (and, subsequently, among which readers or by whose patronage
the writer expected to rise).This suggests the mode of writerly culture the text was intended to
fit, whether academic, popular, courtly and so on.
This latter approach appears in classificatory and cataloguing endeavours as early as
the thirteenth century, and has continued in fits and starts to the present day. In his massive
geographical dictionary Mu‘jam al-buldan [dictionary of places] the meticulous Yāqūt alHamawi (d.1228), for example, divides books concerned with travel according to writers’
objectives and/or potential readers, or more specifically, by what and whom the texts would
serve. He differentiates between texts that focus on ‘science’ (for geographers, astronomers,
medical men, etc.), administration (documentation of taxes due to the caliphate),
entertainment (epics, news, anecdotes, biographies and mirabilia), polite literature (works that
focus on beauty of expression intended for littèrateurs), or travels-general (for readers of the
general public or al-‘ammah, such as travel manuals for pilgrimages, histories of Mohammed
and his companions, etc.). Al-Hamawi goes on to sub-divide the geography books into two
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categories: those that described the ‘inhabited world’ in the tradition of Plato and Pythagoras
and their followers who wrote on similar and divergent routes; and those, usually linguists
and ‘littèrateurs’ who wrote on Arab places and bedouins (10-11).138 Closer in time, both
Nicola Ziyada (1956) and G. F. Hourani (1952)139 use the popular modern division of Arab
travel writers into two broad types: geographers and historians (whose works paid great detail
to distances and cartographic data, and pointedly expanded on previous research) and
tourists/travel writers (who focused on relating what they observed and supplementing it by
what they had read).
Two recent works of either classificatory approach stand out. Shawkat M. Toorawa’s
article “Travel in the Medieval Islamic World” provides a useful taxonomy of the most
common reasons behind the travel of groups and individuals (66-67). Commendable for its
brevity and precision, the list is divided into thirteen ‘motives’ for travel, covering the most
commonly cited, such as ‘religion’ or ‘learning’ and ‘slavery’, to some less alluded to, such
as patronage, exploration and commerce. Toorawa’s list also comprehensively sub-divides
each category. Religious travel, for example, (typically only considered as the annual hajj
pilgrimage to Mecca), is sub-divided more precisely into the hajj pilgrimage (which he
describes as annual, since it occurs at a specific season), but also the ‘umra (pilgrimage to
Mecca which may occur any time, and any number of times per person), as well as visits to
shrines, which could occur year-round, and more importantly, were neither restricted to place,
for there were shrines all around Afroeurasia, nor to Muslims.
Meanwhile Houari Touati’s excellent Islam and Travel both acknowledges the
important difference between the motives to go on a voyage and to write the voyage account,
as well as the fine lines between the various forms of written accounts. Positing that the rihlavoyage formed the epistemic foundation of mediaeval Islamic culture, Touati argues that the
rihla-voyage was a complex, necessary and authoritative methodology for science or
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knowledge-gain and transmission, since it combined the importance of travel with autopsia
(‘iyan) and audition (sama‘). Moving gradually through a huge body of Arabic letters, Touati
eruditely explores the discrete difference between various articulated (written/oral) forms of
the Arabic journey as each led to the other, and how some eventually emerged as comparative
methodologies of enquiry with distinctive ‘genres’, ‘fields’ or ‘schools’. Touati skilfully finds
a method to approach the travel accounts that is both particular to Arabic culture and its
tradition of knowledge acquisition at the time, but also prioritises world linkage, namely how
scholars writing in Arabic were often working within the Hellenistic methods they saw
themselves as both inheriting and bequeathing. In doing so Touati offers a much-needed
systematic link between the impetus to go on a voyage, to write the voyage, and to read it,
suggesting ways in which this entire process affected the final ‘forms’ of the voyage account.
Unsurprisingly, Touati ends by stressing the need for a comparative expansion of scholarship
on the linked travel literature in other languages to gain a fuller picture of the time.
Challenging Boundaries: Knowledge, History, the State
The problems inherent in systematically approaching travel literature arising from the
‘East’ embodies in interesting ways the problematic presented in Antique Land of cultures
and cultural knowledge posed between limiting national canons on the one hand and an
‘unboundaried’ world culture on the other. Antique Land’s central critical position, echoed
and expanded in many of Ghosh’s other works,140 problematises and critiques the nation-state
by questioning its categorisation and ossification of bodies of knowledge: in this case, history
and historiography. If a critical relation can be found between travelogues and the expansion
of ancient and modern empires, and the novel and nation-formation, Amitav Ghosh’s
“mediaeval travel in postcolonial times” (Mongia), both a travelogue and a novel, blurs and
therefore subverts norms. Looking to both the past and the present, Antique Land constructs
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the alternate and resistant ‘history’ of the diverse community intersections in the twelfth
century and after, thereby resisting the homogenising story of an unchanging Islamic ‘state’
or region. To question historical narratives and the way History is written, Ghosh: (1)
critiques written or official History as put forth by those in power (that is, by drawing
parallels between military might and knowledge organisation and diffusion), (2) gives voice
to the ‘small histories’ left out of or submerged under mainstream historical narratives, and
(3) questions the view of linear progress from antiquity to modernity that starts with the
Classics, skips over a few hundred years, relaunches with the Renaissance and proceeds
onwards to the end of history.
Although the story of the dislocation of the Geniza documents (Antique Land 54-60;
80-105) read as a textbook example of Saidian Orientalism makes obvious Ghosh’s
condemnation of imperialist/empirical theft, it also censures the Egyptian government for
being an accessory to the theft,141 remaining, in the new political divisions of the Middle East
and North Africa, “content to excise…[the memory of its Jewish population] from Egypt’s
history” (“Slave of MS. H. 6” 116). As British scholars armed with “beribboned credentials”
(Antique Land 91-92) appropriated the Geniza documents and then ‘wrote’ a history of the
‘Orient’ that denied the very diversity and vitality which had enabled the letter-writers’
existence and the letters’ preservation in the first place, the colonialists were helped by
Egyptians, including the Jewish community of Egypt, who supported the British imperialist
mission’s efforts to displace the civilisational monuments of the colonised world. These were
followed by subsequent Egyptian governments’ efforts to rewrite a national History that
erased the heritage of its once-indigenous Jews. Nothing remains in Egypt of the Geniza: its
papers are dispersed, the storehouse torn down, and its worshippers silenced. Ghosh’s
marvellous prose supplements history from absence as well as from presence by explaining
what the lack of the Geniza in Egypt and its presence elsewhere signifies. It throws into relief
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the way texts of the mediaeval world, from which Ghosh took such inspiration, have
circulated and been re-interpreted today, and the way the history of the letters and the letterwriters has been constructed and reconstructed, sold and bought to sustain diverse personal
and collective agendas. To delve into the twelfth-century world of letters, Ghosh taps into the
vast trove of travel writing of the time. Being preserved by chance and against all odds, much
like the Geniza documents, but having been made public much earlier, such texts have lived
within scholarship until today on the borders of disciplines, and have travelled across
networks for centuries, sustaining in practice a cultural global mobility that Ghosh propounds
in theory. Such texts too, have been used, in the same way as the Geniza documents, to
construct and reconstruct the Histories of the nation-state.
It has often been held that many of the mediaeval travelling scholars within the region
used their accounts to delineate the borders of an ecumenical Islamic empire.142 The ‘view
from above’ of an ‘Islamic civilisation’ makes it much harder to define and prioritise the
everyday dealings or practices of daily life governed by the secular God known to his friends
and relations as Incentive, and under whose ruling there flourished networks of one or more
of the three Ts: travel, trade and telling-tales. Maintained by relatively open borders, open
markets, secured travel routes, a flourishing hospitality sector in major centres, various lingua
francas, a seemingly large availability of disposable income and an observable literacy rate,
the three Ts offered opportunities for unity that members of this vast region seemed more
than eager to seize. Such travel texts give a valuable image of an ‘everyday nation’: the way
that people have navigated around –if not intentionally resisted then wilfully derouted– a
universalising ‘state’ discourse, in this instance a politically-religious one, and in the interests
of a pragmatic and tolerant cohabitation with others. The letters that Amitav Ghosh describes
as ‘the stuff of history and history itself’, or what Ranajit Guha memorably calls the “small
voice of history” (Guha History), mock and refute the History and Civilisation curricula
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taught in schools around the world by presenting a lived history rather than a written one.
Under the grand narratives of the nation-state, or its pre-modern ‘equivalents’ of caliphate or
empire, the business of everyday living continues as usual. As an example of transnational
relations, this mode of imaginary community, the ‘everyday nation’, is not the exceptional
one, but the (arguably large) numbers of undocumented real people whose voices have not
‘sung the nation-state’.
Antique Land starts as the Crusades reach a historical crescendo in Palestine in 1148.
Yet the Crusades are only ‘background’. The mediaeval letters written by Jewish traders take
central place for it is the letters and their writers that point to a completely different narrative.
Ghosh writes: “Within this tornado of grand designs and historical destinies, [the]…
letter[s]…open a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues
uninterrupted” (15-16). A passage written by one of Ghosh’s ‘mediaeval brethren’, prototype
travel-writer Ibn Jubayr (d.1214), describing precisely this time of the Crusades offers a
vantage point for comparison. Ibn Jubayr marks the rich composites of daily life under the
canonical gaze of political hostilities in (what was then) Damascus, specifically near Mt.
Lebanon:
Of the most astonishing things we hear is that the flames of sectarian division rage
between the two groups, Christians and Muslims [in Damascus]; the two armies may
meet in battle, but their peoples travel among them unimpeded …we saw at this time
Saladin leaving with all the Muslim soldiers to lay siege to al-Karak fort. One of the
strongest of Christian forts, it obstructed the way to Hijaz and the pilgrimage route,
and is [also] a little less than one day’s journey from Jerusalem, the heart of Palestine,
so the Sultan approached it, closed in upon it and the siege continued for a long time.
And the caravans travel from Egypt to Damascus and from there to the lands
of the Franks uninterruptedly; and the Muslims travel from Damascus to Acre as well;
and the Christian merchants are not stopped or hindered on these routes either. The
Muslims pay the required taxes to the Christians in the latter’s provinces levied on
security of merchandise, and the Christians pay the same tax on their merchandise to
the Muslims in the latter’s provinces. And everything between them is in accord and
moderation. So the people of war are busy with their war, while people are concerned
with their well-being, and this world is left to whoever wins. [My translation] (260)143
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As each army was fighting the other infidels, business seems to have continued as usual in
the twelfth century over land and by sea (as it would remain, according to Braudel, along
with the manifest antagonism, in the Levantine-Mediterranean three centuries later). This is
not to draw a wonderful picture of people-power resisting state politics. Ibn Jubayr himself
seems to have had no observable reservations on enemies of the ruler/Islam being anything
else than his own; nor is it to argue that the ‘Islamic world’ was a haven of tolerance (either
between Muslims and non-Muslims or between Muslims and other Muslims) before ‘the
Europeans came’. This is to nuance and refine relations between politically-organised
‘peoples’ or ‘cultures’ often categorised as mutually antagonistic or acquiescent or otherwise
collectively homogenous by prioritising cultural relations and transactions between smaller
groups of people and between individuals, which is arguably one of the aims of World
Literature in its many approaches. By focusing on the small matters of the everyday –the
relations of family members, barter, conversations, etc.– Ghosh attempts to bypass borders of
‘imagined communities’ that may be inherently restrictive; writing about the everyday
becomes “one way of not writing about the nation (or other restrictively imagined
collectivities)” [italics and brackets in original] (“Correspondence” 147).
In an Antique Land starts then, with a challenge to History. Ghosh’s sub-title to
Antique Land, ‘history in the guise of a traveller’s-tale’, blurs and complicates the
demarcation between ‘History’ (the dominant official narrative) and the ‘tale’ (the
individual’s or even community’s unofficial narrative). The sub-title is more than a random
witticism or an allusion to Ghosh’s ‘mixture’ of field experience and historical excavation; it
also subtly and succinctly questions empirical modes of knowledge (how we know) and the
iron curtains distinguishing fields of knowledge (what we know).144 Embedded within the
sub-title is a critique of ‘historiography’ both as a process and a subject. Conceptualising the
process of history-writing can happen in many ways, one of the most favoured “in the
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rational, scientific discussions of academic social theory…[has meant taking for granted] the
universality of the analytical categories of the modern disciplines of the social sciences”
(Chatterjee The Nation and its Fragments 33). Ghosh’s sub-title, resonating in the Arabic
texts he quotes, challenges this ‘universality’, for, as Ghosh knew, the disciplines of
knowledge those travellers took for granted were quite different. There was often no large
discrepancy between ‘history’ and ‘traveller’s tale’ either as process or subject of study in the
mediaeval writings. History-writing in Arabic starting in the eighth and ninth centuries was
often, and was often academically required to be, an account of the historian’s own travel.145
If historical accounts can potentially be little more than collections of personal ‘tales’,
the question arises as to why History is not subsumed under fiction or literature. Yet for the
mediaeval Arabic writers, history was indeed something just like that, a kind of refined
reading material subsumed under ‘art’ or belles-lettres (adab). The empirical significance of
the rihla-voyage often automatically gave quality or status to its written accounts, raising it
from the realm of popular story tales, while its pragmatic relevance to people’s concerns gave
it a potentially wide readability. Inasmuch as there can be said to be a non-Quranic literary
canon for mediaeval Arabic belles-lettres, generally defined as a body of texts organised
around a transmitted understanding within learned groups that these texts constituted the
‘best’ of what was said and known within polite society, travel literature was from early on
and in its various guises enmeshed within this category.
Thus, in addition to method of knowledge, Ghosh’s reformulation of these Arabic
texts starts a series of questions about the institutionalisation of knowledge, specifically, the
boundaries of disciplines, and the nature of literature. The use of the term “literature” in
English for writing that is open to aesthetic evaluation is relatively recent, and the
development of a field of study devoted to it is yet more recent (with the study in the West of
non-Western literary traditions being even more so). In Arabic the term for “literature” is
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adab, often translated as belles-lettres, paideia or Bildung, all terms which convey the
concept’s inherent combination of aesthetic and didactic elements. As is the case with many
literary traditions, the origins of the Arabic term lie in the realms of correct or polite
behaviour, and as is the case within Western literary traditions, this early category included
‘non-literary’ genres like biography and history (see ‘adab’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica).
The significance of the contemporary argument of how to classify Antique Land (as well as,
in Arabic, how to classify the mediaeval Arabic travel writings) underlies the basic
disciplinary questions in most fields of knowledge today, and sheds light on ‘national’
disciplines and aesthetic standards as organised or institutionalised systems of knowledge:
created, imported, interactive and developing.
Beyond the aesthetic or disciplinary criteria that pose definitional problems for travelwriting either as a ‘genre’, or as a genre within a discipline, problems are multiplied ten-fold
when attempting, as happens in the historical-vortex of Antique Land, to lift these disciplines
(and genres) out of the national boundaries within which they have been delineated. The
phrase ‘Arabic travel literature’, considered in the narrative of Antique Land which focuses
on the connections between India and the Middle East and North Africa, points to the
problematic of considering Arabic as a lingua franca. The intrinsic problem of the word
‘Arab’ lies in the use of the same word to denote both ethnic affiliation and language, a link
not always obvious or self-explanatory for many Arabic-speakers themselves. The further
correlation of the seemingly indivisible terms Arab and Islamic then excludes a massive
number of peoples and languages, that is, Arabic-speakers who are not Muslim and Muslims
who are not Arabic-speakers, and so presents a methodology of exclusion and reappropriation that various modern nation-states in Africa and Asia have enthusiastically
adopted while writing exclusionist national ‘Histories’. It is precisely a refutation of the
assumption of an ancient monolithic, homogeneous and unchanging ‘Arabic-Islamic empire’
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lying as a precursor to a series of modern nation-states that any non-hegemonic approach to
travel writing in Arabic needs to consider.
Unity in Diversity: Subalterns and Others, Languages and Religions
The administrative (bureaucratic-official) use of Arabic among the different caliphatecentres from the eighth and ninth centuries onwards both threatened the status and effaced the
memory of many other languages spoken or written within the region, some of which the
small voices conjured up by Antique Land refer to. Some of those languages naturally died
(initially emerging au courant with the spread of the Muslim armies in the seventh century)
like the Judeo-Arabic used by Ben Yiju (Antique Land 100-4), and some have never been
properly used as a written language, such as spoken Arabic dialects. The differing
significations of ‘‘arabi’ (Arab/Arabic language], whether positive or negative, a source of
pride or shame, denoting political power or lack thereof, have raised issues of communal
identity at least as far back as the ninth century (as exemplified in the shu‘ubiyya debates).
The seemingly indivisible terms Arab and Islamic have made it even easier to efface the
memory/history of the thriving non-Arab, non-Muslim but Arabic-speaking and literatureproducing communities living within the huge expanse of a Muslim-majority region (see A.
Hourani Minorities in the Arab World). In much the same way as Gilroy declares in The
Black Atlantic that it is time for modernity to be narrated from the slaves’ point of view (55),
Arab-Islamic history needs to be narrated from the view of its non-Arabs and non-Muslims,
not just by adding a number of representative texts of various languages, religions, etc., in the
region, but by a close reading of the Others embedded in the Arabic texts themselves.
Refuting the ‘Arabic-Islamic’ umbrella as some ethno-monolithic referent, stressing
that the cultural traffic between centres and ports, kingdoms and caliphates was never oneway requires stressing today that Arabic language and literature has always been in constant
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flux with the different languages of the world, Eastern and Western. It requires, too,
reconstructing the lost connections between the religions, cultures and communities of the
region, sometimes in creative ways, precisely as Ghosh has done.
The division of the mediaeval world itself into ‘dār al-islām’ (the abode of Islam) and
‘dār al-harb’ (the abode of war) embodies the fate of any theoretical descriptive dichotomy
taken too literally, (and most obnoxiously in modern times within the discourses of political
Islam).146 From a literary perspective such dichotomies have always been simplistic, and
stand at variance with an understanding of Arabic literature at its most classic in the (9th-13th
century) ‘golden age’ of Islam, formed by, most famously, Persian, Byzantine, Turkish and
Hellenistic fusion:
The emergence of a distinct, urban adab, including literature and Arab-Muslim
paideia, reinforced the position of Arabic as a global language. In contrast to the body
of pre-Islamic poetry, this Arabic literature was never “genuinely” Arabian, but it
reflected the vivid urban intellectual milieus and was inspired by emerging Muslim
religious sciences…Arab philology… and by translations from Byzantine and Persian
traditions. (Al-Bagdadi “Registers of Arabic” 449)
Al-Bagdadi is by no means a lone voice in stressing that cultural fusion was the powerhorse
of Arabic cultural prosperity. The ‘Dean of Arabic letters’ Taha Hussein would go so far as to
claim in a well-known scandal in 1923 that the stories of the Quran themselves owed their
value to cultural assimilation and transfer. Although the same might be reasonably argued of
any body of literature –and Ghosh reacts similarly to the Sanskritic Hinduisation of high
culture in India147 –the impetus to insist on cultural connections and exchange as a yardstick
for national literature has yet to take hold. This is arguably, however, one of the many
crossovers between Postcolonial Literature and World literature. For the first, excavating the
ruptures rendered by colonialism insists on the acknowledgment of represented and
subjugated cultures on their own terms. For the second, expanding the list of classics and
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delving into the circulation networks of texts challenges an essentialist nationalist vision of
literary texts and cultures.
Just who were the many inhabitants of the ‘abode of Islam’, then? Ghosh focuses on
non-Arabs (Bomma) and non-Muslims (Ben Yiju). Bomma seems doubly silenced because
he is a slave, appearing on the stage of history at “a moment in time when the only people for
whom we can imagine properly human, individual existences are the literate and
consequential” (Antique Land 17). As Soueif rightly remarks, although of course there is a
danger of complacency in this line of thought, the institution and (changing) concept of
slavery under various Islamic rulers differs from the commonly-understood Western
conception, and accounts and biographies of slaves appear frequently in Arabic (“Intimately
Egyptian” 7). Arabic slave biographies and writings also reveal a large degree of social
mobility. Not insignificantly, and in different ruling dynasties, many slaves were subsumed
into the army under the system of paid ‘patronage’ or ‘foster parentage’ by the ruler, often
ending up ruling themselves, either by eventually becoming adopted or through militant
coups d’état.148 Slave-to-Sultan accounts too abound in Arabic.149 This appears to be the case
with the other slave mentioned in Ghosh’s account, the Greek Jawhar al-Rumi, who, leading
a hundred thousand men, founded what would become one of the strongest urban centres of
the 11th-13th centuries, Fatimid Cairo (Antique Land 36). Yet many more undocumented,
Bomma-like allusions, “faint, elusive and often jeering” (“Slave of MS. H.6” 167) as Ghosh
puts it, inhabit much mediaeval travel writing in Arabic, and all too faintly hint at its dense
unarticulated subaltern stratum. For example, an unnamed Indian male guide/servant of
Naseri Khusraw’s (d.1077) guides the traveller in the opening pages of the Safarnameh (49).
‘Three Muslim ladies’ in al-Idrissi’s Nuzhat al-musthāq, similarly unnamed, show generous
philanthropy in constructing three large wells of water (literally, the life source in the desert),
and enable the city of Tunis to flourish as a trading post and pilgrim stop (283-84). Such
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subaltern presences, as Said says (referring to the presence of imperial possessions in English
and French novels) are “usefully there…their existence always counts, though their names
and identities do not, they are profitable without being fully there….people on whom the
economy and polity…depended” [italics in original] (Culture and Imperialism 75).
In narrating the fortunes and travails of Ben Yiju, Ghosh explores the three Ts (travel,
trade and telling-tales) of daily interactions flourishing between an intricate network of
communities, families and individuals, with such groups creating linked overlapping
communities in larger dense networks, getting on with the daily matter of living, even during
times of extended warfare and religious persecution. Rather than smack too much of nostalgia
or denial, the picture the texts offer is more akin to pragmatic survival or, less urgently,
simple incentive, an impetus that classic Arabic writers (less so, modern ones), seemed to
express quite matter-of-factly.
This is the case for al-Idrissi, for example. At a time when a conglomeration of
European powers were regaining Jerusalem in the eastern provinces of the Islamic world,
when al-Idrissi’s home region Ifriqya (Tunisia) was so frequently attacked by Roger II from
1143 onwards that for several years not a single year went by without a Sicilian attack on the
North African coast (Ghosh “Slave of MS. H. 6” 211), al-Idrissi, a refugee in King Roger’s
court, manages to keep his head about him and uses the same adjectives to describe all kings.
Hence, “great” King Roger II “opens” (a polite word really meaning ‘conquered’, in Arabic
often exclusively used with Muslim armies) the cities of Ifriqya in the same manner as the
Muslim armies ‘opened’ the same cities before him, including the city of Sbeitla, after killing
its (likewise) “great” Roman king George. Noting the havoc caused by Roger’s armies which
had brought trade to a standstill, al-Idrissi notes that in previous times, ‘before the [still] great
King Roger, the cities of Tunisia used to be the ports of call for ships from Hijaz, carrying
travellers and valuable merchandise from the countries of East and West, from Andalusia and
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Byzantium and elsewhere’ (281-85). The attitude reveals not so much sycophantism (Khair et
al describe it as ‘ambivalence’) as much as scientific professionalism –and undoubtedly an
interest in survival. As Ghosh implies, it also reflects in double-mirrors the incentives for
travel and migration of labour from the third world today: “Why does anyone leave [to
work/live abroad]?” asks Shaykh Musa of Antique Land rhetorically when Ghosh wonders
how a common Egyptian acquaintance could stand the loneliness in modern war-torn Iraq,
“the opportunity comes, and it has to be taken” (152).
If the voices of Jewish communities seem muted in modern Arabic historiography,
those that fall outside of the ‘Abrahamic faiths’ (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) appear even
more so, for the three religions are acknowledged by canonical Islamic doctrine as
theoretically similar, and their adherents referred to as ‘the people of the Book’. Until today
these three religions remain the three ‘major’ ones in Egypt. As the Egyptian peasants,
bewildered at finding an Indian in their midst, obsessively ask Ghosh when he tells them he is
a Hindu: “What is this ‘Hinduki’ thing?...If it is not Christianity nor Judaism nor Islam what
can it be? Who are its prophets?” (47) Or as the sceptical Egyptian police officer muses at
Ghosh’s presence in the small village: “Neither Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Christian –there had
to be something afoot” (334-35). Yet the mediaeval travellers, with fewer centuries of living
in Muslim-majority contexts behind them, were perfectly (and sometimes imperfectly)
knowledgeable about the various religions outside of the holy tripartite. While the most
famous of such travellers is probably al-Biruni/Alberonius (973-1048) (whom al-Hamawi
quotes), three of the travellers discussed here also describe India and its beliefs in some
detail, having studied and journeyed to the region themselves: al-Idrissi, Khusraw, and alMas‘udi. As Ghosh travels from the Egyptian countryside to Mangalore, retracing Bomma’s
possible origins and religious beliefs and the trade routes around south and east India, he also
retraces the faded footprints of such mediaeval travellers.
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The way Muslim travellers regarded or conceived of non-Muslims in some of these
texts is a moot point –sometimes overstated, since the moral advantage or superiority seen in
being Muslim is the same inherent confidence assumed by any given pious member of any
religion, and sometimes generalised, since most Arabic travellers did not simply and solely
transcribe people into broad categories of ‘non-Muslim’ and ‘Muslim’. More tangibly, what
seems to have struck many of these worldly travellers beyond historical and ethnographic
details was what certain religious affiliations seemed to guarantee or lack of a politico-social
infrastructure: an administrative hierarchy and a canonical law (generated from scriptures and
prophets). It is thus no coincidence that the first questions which the Egyptian peasants ask
Ghosh about Hindus are “Do you have a holy book?” (170) and “Who are your prophets?”
(47; 170). As Shboul puts it on al-Mas‘udi, who like most scholars at some time or the other
in this versatile region was personally affected by the religious debates of his day:
In dealing with the religions of various peoples al-Mas‘udi seems to perceive a
distinction between two types of religion. The first type consists of organized religion
with a more or less clear concept of a deity, prophethood, sacred scriptures, a
priesthood, and organized places of regular worship. To this group belonged (in
addition to Islam), Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and to a lesser extent,
‘Sabianism’ and Manichaeism. The second type of religion is that which had no
articulated religious principles, and lacked hierarchy and canon law. Al-Mas‘udi
terms the peoples among whom such religion prevailed as jāhiliyya. His view of a
state of jāhiliyya is thus not confined to the religious life of the Arabs before Islam –
whose state of ‘ignorance’ and ‘darkness’ is a rule piously contrasted in Islamic
literature with the enlightened knowledge which Muhammad’s mission brought.
Indeed al-Mas‘udi uses the term jāhiliyya… as a description of primitive religions in
general. (286)
Shboul’s ‘primitive’ comes as near as possible to the ‘civilisational’ view the travellers’ gaze
often implied, not signalling biological or racial linear progress where all non-Muslims were
seen as inherently inferior or belated but by which some communities, unlike various
caliphates and centres of Islam, seemed unable, in the writers’ views, to consolidate power
around a court, judiciary, bureaucracy, literati and a professional class.
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Those religions that did seem to show some aspect of organisational abilities were
regarded in a very different light, and so for many Arabic writers the legendary ‘wisdom’ of
the ancient civilisations of India and China was not some intrinsic inscrutable ‘racial’ quality
but could be proved foremost by, for example, an efficient (if oligarchic) rule of law. See, for
example, al-Idrissi on the King of Kings in China (italics mine):
It is mentioned that in China there are three hundred towns, all prosperous, with a
number of kings but all of whom serve the Baghbugh who is called the king of
kings…and he is of good conduct, fair with his subjects, noble in spirit, capable in his
dominion, right in his views, resolute in his actions, chivalrous in his desires, gentle in
his ruling, generous in his giving, sharp in matters near and far, prescient of
consequences, and aware of his subjects’ concerns which reach him without delay or
intermediary. One indication of this is that in his palace he has arranged a council of
fair merit, solid construction and elegant prospect. In this council the King sits on a
chair of gold surrounded by his ministers…[W]hen a complainant approaches with his
letter of complaint, the king receives it directly, looks at it then pushes it to his
ministers and passes adequate judgment as suits his doctrine and the law without
delay, long-windedness or ministerial interventions and connections. In addition to
this he shows piety, enforces the law, is conservative and devout and charitable to the
weak. His religion is the worship of al-badud, of which, between it and the religions
of India, there is only slight deviation. The people of India and China do not deny the
existence of the Creator, and judge Him in his wisdom and eternal creation; they do
not believe in His prophets or Holy books, and in all cases never part from justice and
fairness. [My translation] (97-98)150
At times, too, being Muslim, however devout, was not enough to save you from the
disgrace of being unorganised. Ibn Jubayr, for example, makes fun of the members of the
buffoon-like, nomadic al-sarw Bedouins from Yemen who identified as Muslims but showed
no vestige of organised society, and whose ‘primitivist’ devotion to God was therefore as
comic as it was touching (110-13). At other times, even all-out chaotic communities of no
particular religion might act more virtuously than those so-called Muslims back home.
Khusraw implicitly criticises Muslim raiders’ acquisition of slaves in the deserts of Nubia,
south of Egypt. The tribes of al-bajja, Khusraw states, have no religion or creed; they are a
peaceful people who live by shepherding and ‘are not harmful, for they neither raid nor steal’,
‘yet the Muslims and others steal the children of these tribes and carry them off to sell in
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Islamic cities’ [my italics] (134). Note: steal, not a less negative word such as ‘appropriate’,
‘acquire’, or even ‘raid’.
At yet other times even those who lived in a state of utter chaos could provide a
‘lesson to those who would learn’. Ibn Fadlān gives a subtle moral in his report on the
“Ghuz” tribes of ‘Turks’ by the river Volga, a nomadic peoples who live ‘like stray donkeys,
showing no allegiance to either god or reason’ [my italics] (91), and who could agree on
nothing by consensus, since as soon as they reached an agreement, along would come their
lowest and vilest member and start the discussion all over again. Slovenly and filthy, they
never touched water if they could help it, and even their women went around completely
naked. Yet one day as Ibn Fadlan and companions visit a man and avert their faces in horror
from the glaring ‘pudenda and genitalia’ of his naked wife, the man laughs sarcastically and
tells them through their interpreter: ‘Although she reveals it in your presence and you see it,
she preserves it and it cannot be accessed, which is better for her than to cover it but make it
accessible’. ‘Indeed’, Ibn Fadlan adds, ‘they know no adultery’ (91-92). In short, in the
wondrous wide world the creations of God and men could always teach something to those
who gazed upon them, however disparate or even contradictory the viewer assumed these
creations were, and at more empathetic moments, they might offer a specific critique of one’s
own community and code of conduct –a counter-belief.
In a movement of double-mirrors Ghosh then moves from the co-existence of diverse
religious beliefs in pre-modern times to the relations between religious groups in the same
regions today. He juxtaposes political Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt with political Hindu
fundamentalism in India, critiquing both, and drawing out ironic instances where their
histories have overlapped and merged. Ghosh narrates how in India, the ‘spirit’ of an ancient
Muslim trader has been placed unknowingly within the Sanskritic Hindu pantheon of gods by
political Hindu groups with anti-Muslim agendas, even as such groups were severely
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condemning all ‘non-Hindu’ practices (264). Meanwhile in Egypt, the ancient Sidi AbuHasira shrine, that of a Sufi mystic once revered by Muslims and Jews alike, generates
confusing, contradictory and violent reactions. Although the Abu Hasira festival and shrine
visiting had long been a popular village fete which all the vicious condemnation by more
‘canonical’ religious authorities could not stop, the ‘straw’ that broke the camel’s back was
Israel’s bombing of Gaza in 2011. Large protests ensued against allowing the Abu Hasira
festival to continue and its international Jewish pilgrims to visit. In view of the breakdown of
law and order that had followed the ousting of President Mubarak a few months before, the
authorities seemed to find no way to be able to sustain the rigid security preparations needed
for the international visitors, and the shrine was closed to visitors until further notice.
If in modern Arabic culture traces of knowledge of the ‘Hinduki thing’ seem far and
in between, what seems even more remote in modern times (strangely enough for a region
which has been rather prolific religiously) is an understanding of the cultural ‘fusion’ that
often creates religious practice. Yet as Ghosh implies, this too, was not always the case. By
articulating some of what he calls “inarticulate counter beliefs”, as he travels among shared
histories and shared ancestors, Ghosh cleverly locates the diverse doctrinal ‘cultures’
(orthodox Muslim and Sanskritic Hindu) and their ‘counter-cultures’(Sufi, agnostic, Bhuta,
etc). He emphasises the blurred categories of doctrinal belief and practice within the one
culture itself (such as the magical formulae and treatises found among the orthodox Jews of
the Geniza (263)).151 Ghosh also emphasises the blurred boundaries between one culture and
its counter-culture in India and Egypt, depicting the interdependent relation between ‘high’
and ‘low’ religious cultures, one ostensibly propagating the (religious) canon, and the other
practising the marginal or popular. In India he shows the gap between the “Himalayan gaze
of canonical Hindu practice” and the practices it dismissed as “mere devil worship and
superstition” [my italics] (264). In Egypt he shows how local villagers regard the Abu Hasira
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festival as a simple village fete, and how prevalent religious authorities view it as the
dangerous “superstition” of the simple-minded (329-42). This too was a distance that many of
the early Arabic travellers discerned and mused over.
Al-Idrissi, for example, describes the Multan statue on the borders of Sind and Hind
(now in Pakistan) which is set in a market town whose majority of inhabitants are Muslims.
The statue is highly revered and frequently visited for blessing by the people of India (no
religion specified), whose charitable piety has managed to pay for its protection and upkeep.
No one actually worships the statue (al-Idrissi is very particular to note) except its immediate
community of guards and slaves who hurry to hide it whenever a hostile king sends forces to
destroy it. Finding nothing left, the forces always withdraw. Al-Idrissi narrates that the
statue’s guard-worshippers then spread the news that the statue’s presence has blessed their
town, and has ‘saved’ the flourishing market from imminent destruction, by which manner
the guard-worshippers manage to increase the statue’s power and draw even more (paying)
visitors (175-77). Al-Idrissi smoothly presents here the difference between finding comfort in
some venerated or holy site, and actually joining in the practices of its immediate
worshippers. He seamlessly moves from stressing that the inhabitants do not practise idolatry
(forbidden and despised in the canonical doctrines of any of his audiences, Western and
Eastern), to describing instead something more everyday and certainly familiar to audiences
on both sides of the Mediterranean: how a contested site can remain highly venerated and
sustained by groups with different belief-rituals. Without pausing to make judgements or
point out contradictions, al-Idrissi’s nonchalance does not just mark his attempted objectivity
(otherwise he need not have taken pains to eliminate the possibility of idolatry for his
readers) but something deeper: an understanding that cultural-religious practices are often
hybrid and interwoven, local and derivative.152
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Originally related to codified religious texts, the definition what should or should not
be canonised obviously became influenced by those who were in charge of pronouncing on
the topic: the learned who would then guide or instruct others on what to do or read (Schoeler
68-84; see also Al-Azmeh). Examining, questioning or expanding the canonical in literature
has often meant exploring the distance between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘local’ and ‘foreign’
cultures. In the Arabic-speaking world starting in the ninth century, the ‘learned’ were of two
broad classes: the men of religion (‘ulama) who specialised in religious knowledge and
undoubtedly had the upper hand in interpreting it, and the men of the chancery (kuttāb), ‘state
secretaries’ who were usually of non-Arabian descent. While the members of the first class
ostensibly devoted themselves to exegesis, private and commercial law and the like, the
second class’s literary output included translations and adaptations of books from Middle
Persian and gave Arabic literature its first prose masterpieces (Schoeler 56-63; see also
Ashtiany et al ). The production of these erudite writers would ultimately encourage
travelogues, aimed at other literary readers who might appreciate them, but also at a second
group of literates, those who were most interested in financial security and social mobility:
the ‘common reader’ or the ‘sub-elite’. From the subaltern and Other (linguistic and
religious) presences that these travel books refer to, their circulation among certain readers
also points to another resistant, alternate ‘community’ of the ‘everyday’: the emerging, premodern ‘middle’ class living in the urban centres of the caliphates.
Circulating Networks: Travellers’ Texts and the Traders’ Grapevine
Amitav Ghosh depicts the merchant Ben Yiju as an avid letter-writer, calligrapher,
scholar and poet (19; 158-9), who, it appears, took so much care in choosing his paper and
ink that his letters often list paper as part of his shipments, and that the quality of the letterpaper still shows today. The figure of Ben Yiju starts a series of questions on the wide range
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of educational opportunities and writerly needs available for professionals working in trade,
and constructs a very different, non-elite readership base from the commonly perceived
circles of the Islamic court and professional scholars (‘ulāma). At the end of the day there
may have been no ostensible reason why merchants or traders, generally being substantial
men of business,153 needed to learn how to read and write, particularly if they could buy
slaves or hire letter-writers in the market to do it for them, as was the case of one of the
writers discussed here, Yāqūt al-Hamawi.154 One way is to consider that men of letters might
already come from well-off backgrounds, and might think of investing in trade themselves
(such as Abraham Maimonides of Egypt, whom Ghosh alludes to).155 Other men of letters
would eventually become traders to further finance their travels and private book collections
either as a long-term career move (Touati 81-83; Hanna 2007 9) or on the road (Nassār 123;
El Moueddin 75). A wider understanding of literacy and writerly culture, however,
essentially needs to be considered.
Among the elite scholars of the golden age were those firmly entrenched within an
aural-oral Islamic tradition of education who could ‘publish’ books in scholarly circles
without being able to write, and ‘blind’ scholars who could memorise and recite but not read
and write, but from whom students could learn by way of listening and memorising. Schoeler
argues, however, that the specificities of the transmission of Islamic scholarship even in the
first four centuries of Islam (ca. 600-1000) cannot be conceived of through the dichotomy
oral/written. Tracing the rise of literature in the Islamic world from the seventh century to the
eleventh, and from the aural to the read, Gregor Schoeler explores the tenuous relation
between oral and written in the way books were ‘published’ (that is, whether they were
collected orally and written down, ‘published’ ‘orally’ by teachers to students, or published
as a written book for readers); the audience for which they were intended (as lecture notes
meant as aides-memoires for students, books commissioned for the court or a certain circle,
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and books meant for public readership); and whether they were literature as such (literary or
artistic prose bearing the imprint of its authors’ personalities). Moving through various
disciplines, Schoeler traces the move from oral/aural publication of books and transmission
of knowledge to an established system of written/read education, and the parallel expansion
of the readership class, from the religious scholars to the Caliph and the court, the secretaries
of the state, the elite learned class, and the common reader. Schoeler concludes that the turn
to ‘read/written’ literacy had already taken hold by the ninth century, and would continue to
carry the day, even if the borders between oral/aural and written/read transmission and
publication remained fluid.
Now, the kind of ‘college of law’ (madrasa) which would come to dominate
specialised academic education from the eleventh century onwards in major Arabic centres
would gradually produce an ostensibly cohesive class of highly erudite scholars. Based as
these colleges were, however, on “a system of transmitting knowledge that was informal,
personal and oral, and in the absence of any formal institutional system of control, the 'ulama'
[specialised scholars] remained an inherently open and permeable body, and included not
only professional teachers, but a host of educated or semi-educated individuals active on the
margins of intellectual life” (Berkey 54; Mottahedeh 135-50). As Mottahedeh puts it on the
scholar class of the Buyid period in Iraq/Iran:
The ulema, therefore, are one of the most important and yet least restrictive categories
of self-definition in Islamic society…Its unrestrictive nature is shown by the number
of other categories with which it overlaps. Clerks are almost never soldiers, soldiers
almost never clerks. Tujjar [Merchants] are almost never soldiers, and only
occasionally become clerks. But soldiers, clerks, merchants, and members of almost
any category we know about became ulema. (142-43)
The public locales of the lessons also made them less of an exclusive event. ‘Lessons’ and
salons could be attended by a whole range of people, since they were held in mosques and
private homes, but also libraries, bookshops and public spaces such as markets (Toorawa Ibn
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Abi Tayfur 13; 55-58; 124). From Baghdad to Qayrawan and over different times, even
amateur-scholars could acquire an ‘education’ on the road, attending lectures as they
travelled.156
The ‘great gulf’ then, often assumed between the scholarly world of writing and oral
culture more properly included gradations such as those who were read to but were not able
to read, those who could read but could not or could barely write, and those who could do
only a little of both. Nelly Hanna also stresses a need to widen the understanding of
elementary literacy in the Islamic world, (focusing on the period from 1300-1800 but starting
her analysis a little earlier in time), where the students could be sent to the local mosque, the
local clerical ‘school’ (kuttab/maktab), or the home of a local sheikh to learn how to read and
recite the Holy book. A certain amount of teaching was also undertaken within the (usually
strongly-connected) Sufi brotherhoods and, for Jews and Christians respectively, within
synagogues, churches and professional scribal circles, and later on, Jewish or Coptic schools
(maktab).157 The results of such eclectic educational sources were necessarily variable, and
while some of these pupils ended up as scholars in colleges (whose training and system of
admission itself was not standardised), others probably finished with only a certain level of
literacy (Hanna “Literacy” 181-82). Thus, any basic schooling received by students could
result in various forms of literacy, which then develop according to the student’s life
experiences.158
Hanna argues that a more nuanced idea of ‘literacy’ could be served by taking into
consideration motivating factors such as religion, commercial conditions, and the legal
culture. The distance between the great unschooled and the specialised scholars appears to
have been peopled by groups who used different amounts of reading and writing (modulated
and organised around modes of orality and aurality) which would then be used in different
practical ways –such as, for example, to help run a business.159 If college graduates did not
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find suitable employment, they might turn to commerce (Hanna “Literacy” 182). Moreover,
the ‘sub-elite’, including middle-type bureaucrats, lower religious officials, and “the
tradesman or craftsman”, while perhaps unable to participate in the academic religious
circles, might carry out “certain transactions in writing” (Hanna In Praise of Books 182),
making use of the written word to “protect…business interests”.160
Examining the social structure of one of the most intellectually prosperous
communities in Arabic letters in the Buyid-Abbasid era (10th-11th centuries), Roy Mottahedeh
sheds light on the classification and network of social groups, and the different ties of social
bonds as they appeared in the texts of the time. Mottahedeh delves into pervasive class
categories such as ‘distinguished people’/‘the public’ (khawās/‘awām), ‘eminent
people’/‘commoners’ (a‘yan/‘awam), and others, pointing out how these divisions formed
clusters of overlapping networks rather than circumscribed social levels. Expounding on this
concept, Toorawa uses the term “sub-elite” to describe groups who were not members of the
ruling class, who did not have posts in government, and yet were not ‘commoners’. Such a
group was a strong participant in a common writerly culture. Adopting Toorawa’s term,
Schoeler holds that it is a group that might include but would not be limited to merchants,
lawyers, aspiring littérateurs, the wealthy, and foreign and visiting scholars, in short, the
literate, or would-be literate bourgeoisie and the intellectuals (Schoeler 104; Toorawa 2005
33). Toorawa adds to this the “emerging bourgeoisie” in the expanding literacy and literary
landscape that had started to appear noticeably from the ninth century such as “small business
folk and civil servants” (33) including ‘landlords and landowners, merchants and
entrepreneurs, judges and jurists, physicians, poets and littérateurs, teachers and autodidacts’
(Ibn Abi Tayfur 1-2), as well as those of literary-related professions that were not necessarily
affiliated to the court or the generosity of a patron, such as ‘teachers, tutors, copyists, authors,
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storytellers, booksellers, editors, publishers or any combination of these’ (Ibn Abi Tayfur
123).161
Through their intricate, overlapping and sometimes conflicting spheres of interests,
the location of these mediaeval traveller sub-elites to the ruler or Sultan (like the position of
civil society to the modern state today) might construct an image of a spatio-temporal and
largely homogenous ‘Islamic world’. On the other hand, it is also among this class of writers
and readers that resistance to a homogenised ‘abode of Islam’ could be found. Two
manifestations of this resistance come immediately to mind: the loyalties expressed by
travellers to their local communities which seemed to supersede trans-local Islamic
allegiances (Mouadden “Ambivalence”); and more interestingly, a shared secular world of a
common reader interested in the descriptive expositions, cultural transactions, and the rich,
usually subversive narratives of wonders and folktales all offered by travel literature.
Key travel texts (‘scientific’ or not) seem to have been popular judging by how
commonly quoted they are in subsequent texts, and were not necessarily authored by
specialised scholars and college graduates (although they may have been copied, edited and
expanded by them).162 Such texts were prose writings targeting the learned and the elite (for
patronage), but they are also written in an easy formal Arabic, suitable for oral repetition and
much easier to understand, and much less ornamental and high-blown than even the (oral)
poetry of the time. If the average reader/listener of the vastly popular oral epics (the maqamas
and siras) could understand and memorise them, they could certainly understand the travel
writings.163 This widens the readership potential considerably, and it also gives us a new
reason for writing: the trade grapevine, its direct ‘bourgeois’ readership, and its unarticulated
(even sub-bourgeois) ‘aural-ship’ retinue of slaves, agents, and small-time and would-be
investors, although the percentage of the latter group cannot be determined to any
specificity.164
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Often the travel texts themselves give indications of how people could access books
and how the books could serve as consumables, currency and commodity while travelling.
Ibn Jubayr, for example, writes that ‘the shaqādīf [camel seat] contraption allows you and a
companion to travel on a camel, and in which, safely ensconced from the heat, one could sit
restfully, and eat and drink, play chess, or read what one desired ‘of the Quran or a book’
[my italics] (42).165 If, as the travel writers often claim, they were writing for the edification,
instruction or guidance of other travellers, such texts or parts of them may have been read ‘on
the road’, particularly since some of these travel accounts offered valuable ‘travel guides’.
The accounts often included, after all, practical information on prices and transportation
routes, suggested itineraries to follow and souvenirs to buy, and some even contained
shamelessly blatant touristic propaganda (Nassār 17), with cities like Cairo, Damascus and
Jerusalem getting a fair share of good press over the centuries.
For those whose travelling fortunes were less well-planned and padded Naseri
Khusraw, wandering poet-philosopher and chancery clerk,166 explains in some detail how
such books could be used as currency when travels were hard.167 Reaching Falj, some 180
parsangs away from Mecca, he describes it as a strife-torn place in the middle of the desert,
consisting of ‘fourteen forts ruled by thieves, terrorists and ignorant people’, and inhabited by
people who, despite their obvious misery and poverty, chose to spend their days in continuing
warfare and bloodshed. Khusraw describes how he is stranded there for four months, since he
had absolutely nothing of worldly value on him except for “two baskets of books”, and these,
he exclaims, among a people who were “hungry, naked and ignorant, who kept their shields
and swords on even as they went to pray!” (156-57). If hardly a pleasant state for any
traveller, it seems doubly so for this particular Persian, who, having spent some nine months
among Arabians, and like many other urbanite travellers, did not particularly hold desert
dwellers in high regard (164). He manages, however, to decorate part of a local mosque with
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some calligraphy and some poetry in pretty colours of ‘scarlet and azure’ in exchange for 100
of their locally-grown (and valuable) dates, and on these he largely manages to get by until a
trading caravan finally arrives from Yemen. Negotiating a ride with the Arabian caravaneer
in promise for thirty dinars on reaching Basra, Khusraw sets his brother and all his worldly
possessions –his two baskets of books– on a camel, himself accompanying on foot (157).
Once he reaches Basra he sells his books easily enough, although for much less than the
thirty dinars he owes the caravaneer.168
Finally, there is the apocryphal story of a tenth-century Persian grand-vizier cited by
Edmund Burke III:
Abdul Kassem, so it is claimed, never traveled without his library of 117,000
volumes, borne by a caravan of four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical
order. This arrangement, maintained at some cost, permitted Abdul Kassem to
continue his researches even on the march, by sending runners among the camels to
select whatever volumes he might need. (181)
This is not to claim that most people living in the region over four centuries were scholarly,
although there is strong evidence that there existed a public bookish culture in Arabic’s
golden age for quite some time, but it is to suggest more precisely that books (and people
reading books) were a frequent sight on the travel roads, with books often being considered,
as Mr Wemmick of Great Expectations would say, “portable property”, for they were
relatively cheap, socially emblematic (Burke 178), and could serve as hard currency. 169 The
same caravans that brought the writers brought the pilgrims, merchants and wandering
professionals,170 and the books, the labour and the spices.
Moreover, the networks of traders, soldiers, slaves, and the erudite chancery clerks
and religious scholars, courtly nobles and sultans (who themselves ranged from the illiterate
to the erudite) were not singularly isolated by ‘class’. Travel texts hint at zones of contact
where the professional interests and literary influences of scribes, soldiers, chancery clerks,
passengers, pilgrims and traders may have mingled. On reaching the first major port on his
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travels, an irate Ibn Jubayr recounts what would prove to be one of the first of his many ireraising experiences with port clerks and inspectors. As soon as the ship lands in Alexandria,
inspectors arrive on behalf of the Sultan and note down the details of the Muslim passengers,
their merchandise and cash, and then tax them for the ‘zakat’ levy (whether or not the
passengers are able or legally required to pay it). Ibn Jubayr’s companion is then asked to
step down, and is taken around to ‘the Sultan, then the high judge, then the clerks of the
chancery, then some of the Sultan’s retinue’ to inform them about ‘any news from Morocco
and the merchandise of the ship’, all of the questioners asking for certain information and
diligently noting down the answers. Muslim passengers are then asked to unload their cargo
(with help from carriers for that purpose) and submit to further inspection which predictably
results in much crowding of people and theft of merchandise, causing Ibn Jubayr to angrily
and naively exclaim that if the noble Saladin knew about the chancery clerks’ malice and
corruption, he would have put a stop to it at once (13).
In addition to the many ears, eyes, tongues and pens at work in Ibn Jubayr’s populous
picture, copyists or scribes were needed who would copy out those books intended for
publication. While authors needed to ‘authorise’ copies, this was done in public sessions in
which the copyist read the copy aloud in the presence of the author who then certified it as
accurate. With this system, referred to as ‘check reading’, an author might produce a dozen or
more copies from a single reading, and within two generations of readings, more than one
hundred copies of a single book (Burke 179). It has often been remarked that the system of
check reading in combination with the use of paper increased the number of works in
circulation significantly as opposed to the practice of solitarily copying books on (more
expensive) parchment, but what has not often been remarked is that check reading also
increased the contact zones of the various people involved in the process, and therefore
introduces another group of ‘readers’ –copyists, booksellers, editors, slaves, autodidacts, etc.–
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who would have therefore ‘read’ the books or accessed some of their prime information,
without otherwise having been able to buy or borrow them.
The relation between travellers, paper production and trade seems integral to the
readers and writers, or systems of production and circulation of these travel texts. If writers
invested in trade, it may have helped that they were in prime positions to know of the latest
intelligence of the markets: either fresh from the ports and noted in the chancery, through
letters that might be dictated to them, or through scribes or agents who may be used as
business and language intermediaries. The travel texts which directly and indirectly circulated
this information offered a wealth of information on trade and mail routes –but also markets,
which the travellers described as secured or vulnerable, managed or corrupted by officers,
monopolised by certain groups, or famous for a certain commodity. The texts provided
information on the business environment, whether the market towns were well-watered,
bitter-watered or dry, and how the locals dealt with newcomers and strangers. Equally
importantly, the texts supplied ‘research’ on customers’ needs, describing people’s habits in
clothing and food, their interests in natural remedies or cosmetics, and the local commodities,
services and labour, whether scarce or abundant, rare or surplus. So even if the travellers
themselves were neither primarily traders, nor book producers, nor investors, nor wealthy
enough to buy books, there was still a prime incentive for them to note down such
information in their writings simply because the works may then attract a wider audience. In
many different ways then, travelogues and travel writing sat at intersections of market forces
–even in the case of travel primarily intended for pilgrimage. As Abderrahmane El Moueddin
describes the voyage of Muslim pilgrims from Morocco during the period 1300-1800:
The pilgrimage….was not only a religious enterprise, but, because of its length (15-18
months in normal travel, but quite possibly longer…), the pilgrims also observed and
experienced common practices....[I]n most…stages of the journey, Moroccan pilgrims
converted their merchandise or slaves into cash, and purchased the different
commodities that they needed for the journey, such as food and animals for
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transportation. For this reason, many rihla texts are in the form of market guides,
advising future pilgrims about the best way to carry on advantageous trade on the way
to the Hijaz …These guides, incidentally show how business and pilgrimage were so
intimately connected that it is hard to determine which one inspired the other. (75)
Since any travel took, even at the shortest distance, months, and more usually, a year or more,
and there would have been limited caravan space to pack food and supplies for a year on the
road, merchandise, which kept longer, could be taken along to be exchanged for currency or
by barter. What merchandise to pack? Depending on the destination, the information-packed
travel texts would suggest a reply.
It needs no strong stretch of the imagination to trace this travelling living textual
grapevine in myriad directions: in addition to the groups of copyists who produced the books,
those who read them might transfer the knowledge to private letters (written by individuals or
dictated to scribes) which would be received by individuals (reading themselves, or read by
personal clerks), news of which could then easily transfer to whole communities of traders
and merchants, who of course, as Ghosh shows, ran a tight network. By focusing on the
correspondence of the Jewish merchants, Ghosh touches upon one circle or sub-circle of what
may have been a major cycle-run of news: an active traders’ grapevine that spread “from
Spain to India” (Antique Land 155).171 At least two Egyptian sayings in use today long after
the ancient trade routes have withered or died remain suggestive of this relation between
travellers and the news they spread: ‘Arab travellers know the way to water’; and ‘If a
woman gives birth in Mecca, the pilgrims will bring the news’.172
There must also be a reason that travel writers often examined people and places in
much of the language of the marketplace; sometimes they were traders themselves, but as
often they may have been writing to an audience which, to various degrees, was vastly
interested in trade and used to its language.173 The real patrons of letters were after all, the
‘city-states’, or the variously flourishing nodal towns such as Rayy, Aleppo, Cairo, Tunis,
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Fez, Tripoli, and Cordoba. Every major centre of scholarship, whose inhabitants would range
from elite men of letters to people with some degree or skill of literacy, was affiliated to or
powered by a major market or markets –towns which were also major travelling stops on the
travel routes, and in which even pilgrims (who it is often assumed had a single overarching
destination) could stop to ‘visit libraries, buy books, attend classes or give lectures’ (El
Moueddin 75). As such, brisk trade always comes in for a good share of praise. Even Ibn
Jubayr, the otherwise most plaintive, priggish and disgruntled of travellers, who finds little
praiseworthy, waxes poetic when he reaches well-watered bustling market-towns whose
commerce has been secured by wise and just rulers (whose wisdom and justice in turn is
explained not a little by their ability to secure these markets), and consistently evokes God’s
wrath on raiders and greedy custom officials who disrupt the trade and travel routes.
Thus, while raiding was a familiar and generally accepted way of life in a time of long
and weary desert paths and dangerous seas, it was still as welcome to settlers as the plague,
(which travelled along similar routes), and severe condemnation creeps into the writing of
that most objective of geographers al-Idrissi as he describes a community of Christian Arabs
on the island of Qutruba in the Indian Ocean: ‘a traitorous people, the most malicious of sea
enemies one could meet who attack the ships coming and going between Bahrain and Basra
via Oman’. While their island is rich with pearl fisheries, the islanders’ constant theft of
goods and persecution of merchants has stopped any business from going their way (64-65).
In contrast, only a few days travel away lay the prosperous islands of “al-rānij”. Next to their
natural resources, the people of these islands drew merchants their way by their brisk and fair
trade and welcome treatment of strangers, to the extent that during the revolts of China,
Chinese merchants in the Indian Ocean derouted their ships through these islands (61-62).
Besides using the language of the trade routes, many travellers at times described
areas and people as if they were leafing through merchandise in the market. The central space
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accorded to barter and negotiation in the lives of these peoples is implicit in the nonchalant
way goods and barter always surface in the texts. Ibn Jubayr is careful to list not just the
kinds of goods sold and bought but often how much they cost, becoming so awed at one point
at the sight of the caravans heaped with pepper that he exclaims that one would have thought
that pepper was dirt-cheap (43; also quoted in Antique Land 175). Some of his analogies, like
those of other travellers, display an everyday familiarity with commodities and their origins;
he describes a black stone in al-Hussein mosque in Cairo, for example, as so dark that it
reflected one’s image as clearly as a “newly-cut Indian mirror” (20). Meanwhile Naseri
Khusraw in Hebron writes that the prayer mats near the shrine sent by the Sultan of Egypt
allegedly cost thirty gold Moroccan dinars, making him exclaim that ‘had the mats been Rumi
(Byzantine) carpets they should not have cost so much’, although truly he had never seen
their like anywhere in the world (85).
Ghosh’s assimilation or refraction of this writing trait so many centuries later in his
own text is made evident in the way he cites the cost of certain merchandise and Ben Yiju’s
shopping. In describing the network of Jewish traders from Sicily to Mangalore through
Ifriqya, Fustat, Syria and Aden, Ghosh highlights a vast, intricately-forged network of daily,
personal economic exchanges taking place across multiple borders and in spite of the terrible
natural and human-made odds. By highlighting Ben Yiju’s choice of abodes, as a savvy
trader himself, and the process of and reasons for his migration, Ghosh also suggests some of
the ways the ‘unity’ between the usually hostile and frequently warring centres within ‘the
abode of Islam’ and beyond it to ‘the abode of war’ could be maintained by individuals and
groups.
This mixture of high-brow and low-brow narrators and audiences and the mix
between the oral and written brings us back to Ghosh’s sub-title: “history in the guise of a
traveller’s tale”. Since the basic aesthetic criteria of classical belles-lettres in Arabic, and
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possibly the way to attract patronage and readers, was to present material that would
enlighten, instruct and entertain,174 most travel writers, whether reporting their own
observations, explaining a natural phenomenon, or repeating reports from hearsay would
present it in the form of an anecdote or ‘tale’. Used as proof or explanation, partly no doubt
served by the need to authenticate or authorise one’s text by noting what the eye saw and
what the ear heard (or autopsia and audition: Touati 9), anecdotes could range from those
explaining the natural origins of amber and how it was extracted to explaining the reason
behind a certain place’s name. Sometimes entire anecdotes, fantastic or mundane, would be
lifted (and less frequently cited) from previous scholars’ works, appearing through texts even
centuries apart like so many belated echoes in a cave. “The very same stories –of islands in
the Indian Ocean inhabited by naked or dog-faced or headless people– punctuated the
generally more credible geographies and travel accounts produced by Muslim geographers in
the ninth century and even later” (Abu Lughod 160).
The same catchy line of verse about kings and capital cities in al-Mas‘udi (125) for
example, appears verbatim centuries later (along with its accompanying prose commentary),
uncited, in al-Hamawi (48). ‘Anecdote’ could be presented in large chunks of direct speech,
such as in Ibn Fadlan’s text; more commonly, it was given as indirect speech in the formula ‘I
heard from so-and-so that...’, usually attributed to unspecified spokesmen such as ‘the
merchants’, ‘the pilgrims’, the ‘locals’, a ‘storyteller’, or a sage. All these conversations,
whether expressed in direct or indirect speech, meant to signal that the writer had
accomplished meticulous ‘field work’, and was intended to lend authority to the account. The
brief absolving phrase ‘God knows’, a tag all of these writers use to various degrees, often
indicates the writer’s polite disbelief, seemingly at a tug-of-war with his accepted
responsibility to tell the news as he saw or heard it. It seemed to express a feeling, as Ghosh
puts it elsewhere, that the “true corollary of a genuine sense of wonder is not fancifulness but,
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on the contrary, a certain meticulousness” (Foreword ix). Or, with the same ‘God knows’ tag,
the anecdote could indicate a healthy measure of self-doubt (and precaution, just in case the
writer is proved wrong by later publications): “a recognition”, Ghosh explains, “that what is
common sense for him need not be so for the rest of the world” (Foreword ix). Above all,
hearsay frequently showed a ready openness to widening the view of the world by travel, and
offered a vibrancy, depth and colour to the narratives which would have been greatly lost if
left out.175
Hence, Ghosh’s ‘traveller’s tale’ is narrated in an endless refraction of smaller
anecdotes recurring and being reconstructed in parallel mirrors across centuries and across
borders. Ghosh tells the stories, for example, of the Sidi Abu Kanaka shrine in Egypt (13840) and the Bhuta shrine in Mangalore (266), through which both respective governments
wanted to build a road, but which, when the day came for the tractors to work, the tractors
were rooted to the spot and could not move, thus forcing the governments to change their
plans. On hearing the Indian version in Mangalore, Ghosh is asked by his taxi driver if he had
heard any story like that before. Ghosh thinks briefly and replies, “Yes, I heard a very similar
story once. In Egypt” (266). The brief words speak volumes, for comparing travel texts from
the mediaeval world Ghosh has excavated brings up precisely that: echoes and echoes of
stories from diverse languages, oral and written traditions, across centuries. Ghosh himself
describes the moment of déjà-vu that comes to him in his work several times, for example, as
he delves into the mediaeval Judeo-Arabic texts and hears the contemporary rural dialect of
Shaykh Musa speaking to him across time (105). There is such dense intertextuality within
the Arabic texts that déjà-vu can occur again and again to such a degree that an attempt to
isolate say, Persian elements from Arabic as HAR Gibb writes176 or to trace who took what
from whom and why, can often be a pointless or impossible endeavour. Obviously the writers
depended on each others’ works, lifting and expanding at will in the best practices of free
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borrowing.177 Drawing on the intertextual skills of trade of the Eastern writers, the déjà-vu of
Ghosh’s stories emphasises cultural intersections, parallels and similarities.
One of the travel texts, for example, that sustains an engaging autobiographical and
anecdotal tone throughout is Khusraw’s Safarnameh. A much-quoted anecdote of Khusraw’s
tells of when he and his travel companion try to enter a public bath in Basra (164-65).
Arriving at a bathhouse after long and arduous travel, Khusraw and his partner look so
disreputable that the bathing attendant turns them away. After buying new clothes, changing,
and refreshing themselves, the travellers return to the bathing house. Recognising them, the
stupefied attendant lets them in and takes it upon himself to tell the rest of the clientele of his
previous behaviour, apologising to the newcomers profusely and causing much laughter in
the bathhouse. Compare this to one of Guha’s178 popular tales which still circulates at least in
Arabic today. After a long and arduous journey, Guha arrives at the house of a notable vizier
where he has been invited to dinner. So dishevelled from the trip does he look that the vizier
takes him for a vagrant and turns him away. After buying new clothes and cleaning up, Guha
returns to the house where the vizier meets him warmly and offers him the best of the dining
table. Only at this point does the tale diverge from Khusraw’s: Guha proceeds to ladle soup
into his pockets and stuff food in his turban, eventually explaining to the astounded host that
since his clothes were the real beneficiaries of the vizier’s largesse, he might as well feed
them.
Whatever else it did or was meant to do, prose travel writing trod past genres almost
by default, and provided reading material for a large number of people among the learned and
semi-learned classes, also morphing into and from popular oral tales. It is in this grey area
that a large corpus of travel writing seems to be placed, neither belonging to the highest rung
on the cultural ladder nor the lowest, neither being strictly restricted to professions nor to
educational background or training, and it is perhaps this ‘middling’ quality that has made it
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so hard to classify. Yet these same qualities make it today such fresh and profitable material
for analysis, and possibly supports travel writing’s relation to and continued popularity
alongside, and within, the novel. Travel writing’s diversity and divergences also resists the
supposed homogeneity of ‘the abode of Islam’, which in turn feeds essentialist and
exclusionist claims of predatory identities today. The value of this Arabic non-Islamic
belletrist prose as it circulated among readers lies not in its potentials for constructing an
image of a mono-vocal ethno-religious worldview, but, as world literature, in its potential to
construct a world of secular diversity.
Future Routes Back to the Present:
As the conditions of travel changed, so too did its literary manifestations. As Hulme et
al put it:
As travel itself has changed, physically and in terms of perception, so too has travel
writing altered, reflecting the shifting aesthetic and cultural fashions of the day as well
as the power inequalities that lie between East and West, the history of empire, and
the gendered aspects of home and abroad. (3-4)
For most Arabic scholars who have written on the topic, the rihla-voyage at its most literary
seems to be considered as one cohesive barely-changing link over centuries, even as its prose
forms change drastically from the diverse mediaeval travel accounts to the modern Arabic
novel; and so scholarship that deals with travel accounts often finds little reason to draw the
epochal line that Hulme et al, for example, draw at 1500. While the first texts associated with
the novel were associated with tales of ship-wreck and wanderers, the first texts associated
with the Arabic novel follow the same pattern. Most famously, Abu-l Alaa al-Ma‘arri’s (b.
Syria 973-d. Syria 1058) The Epistle of Forgiveness (Eng. trans. 2013) narrates an imaginary
or rather mystical voyage to heaven and hell in the form of an epistle, and Ibn Tufayl’s (b.
Andalusia 1105-d. Marrakech 1185) The Self-Taught Philosopher (Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan)179 has
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been seen as an inspiration for, among others, Robinson Crusoe, and a prime example of how
the Hellenistic-Orient was ‘refracted’ in the Renaissance and through the Enlightenment (see
Attar; Barud; Brotton).
By considering the specific significance of the rihla-voyage in Arabic, various
scholars have suggested the literary rihla account can be divided into phases, along with the
changing physical and perceptive terms of travel, as Hulme suggests, but according to more
specific directions, paralleling the change of centres and peripheries, and the view of the
Other, from explorative/wondrous to emulative/awed. Nassār’s Adab al-rihla [Travel
Literature], for example, refers to a visible ‘change of destination’ for travellers in the ‘late
period’ (starting the sixteenth century) to Istanbul, and which, in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries changed again, this time to Europe and then the US (126). The so-called period of
decline (1300-1800), rather than a five-century lull between the classical golden age and the
East-West encounter, appears to be a period rich in travel literature, and as such, central to
the rise of the Arabic novel, for it then sustains the continuity over a longer duration between
pre-modern empire and the rihla-voyage on one hand, and nation-formation and the modern
novel on another.
In the late nineteenth century the rise of the Arabic novel is located in the spread of
modernity, with Napoleon’s 1798 campaign launching a new era of East-West relations, so
much is known –but the Arabic novel is also strongly related to prose travel accounts. In the
spirit of building a modern Egyptian state (and gain some sort of autonomy from the Ottoman
Empire) in the 1820s, and in order to create a strong professional class, Mohammed Ali of
Egypt would sponsor the first ‘student missions’ to Europe. They would start what would
prove to be the modern reformulations of the ‘journey to seek knowledge’ (rihlat talab al‘ilm) which had been so entrenched in the centres of the Arabic golden age, this time
exemplified by Rifa‘ah al-Tahtāwi’s student-travel account to Paris (An Imam in Paris 1834).
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Like its pre-modern precedents had done with various town-centres, recounting travel
officially sows the first seeds of both the modern Egyptian state, and the modern Arabic
novel, and so once again the rihla-voyage would often prove ‘both flint and spark’.
Chouaib Halifi (2006) argues that the travel account can be considered an everchanging and dynamic textual and discursive practice of self-identity, whose writers, textual
forms and audiences have necessarily reflected this flux (48). Halifi considers that its written
forms in Arabic can be separated into at least two ‘ages’, the first ranging from about the
ninth to a little before the seventeenth century, and which despite its variety, posited such
familiar textual ‘types’ as the pilgrimage, visitational, ambassadorial, cultural and touristic
travel account. In the second phase, from the late eighteenth until the first half of the
twentieth century, “travel and travel accounts emerged showing contrasting factors [to
previous texts] and travel particularities obsessed with the attempt to understand an ‘Other’
and assimilate this Other’s mechanisms of progress. This preoccupation indicated changes in
the perception of both Self and Other, which would pave the way, along with other
expressive forms, principally the maqama, to the rise of the [Arabic] novel” (Halifi 49).180
A contemporary of Rifa‘ah al-Tahtāwi’s, but originally from Lebanon/Syria, the life
of Ahmed Faris al-Shidyāq (ca.1804 Lebanon-1887 Istanbul) fictionalised in his picaresque/
maqama-like autobiography gives a prime example of the God of Incentive at work through
travel, trade and telling tales181 and provides grist to the mill of Halifi’s thesis. Since fools
can learn too, and offer an often subversive moral to their readers, it is a picaresque hero that
marks one of the most serious, and until recently, seriously neglected, comic novels in
Arabic, al-Shidyāq’s al-Sāq ‘ala al-Sāq (Leg Over Leg 1855). An Abbasid man in modern
times, al-Shidyāq’s erudition and long travelling produced a comic tour de force that was part
autobiography, part picaresque novel and part satire.182 Savvier and worldlier than alTahtāwi, al-Shidyāq gives a more insightful gaze onto the ‘world scene’, from the
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‘crumbling’ centres of Damascus and Cairo to the ‘threatened’ one of Istanbul, from the
glittering capitals (and packed libraries) of London and Paris to the provincial clerics and
parishes of the mountains of Lebanon. Combined with the more famous account of alTahtāwi’s An Imam in Paris, the two works signal both an end and a beginning: the end of
the picaresque ideal of societal assimilation through education by follies and foibles, and the
beginning of the new ideas of Bildung or education within the nation-state. The link between
the classical forms of travel accounts in Arabic, the rhyming ornate picaresque novel and
satirical poetry and prose, as well as key European philosophies and the new form of the
‘novel’ makes it as possible to speak in Arabic of a ‘long Arabic tenth century (AD)’ as it is
to speak of a long European nineteenth. Together both can be, and are, placed in respective
‘national’ traditions, or, in the terms of World Literature, within a single global dialogue of
‘elliptical refraction’.
Writing about the Orientalist explorers of the eighteenth century in Egypt, Ghosh
refers to a “new breed of traveller” (80). The new Arabic-speaking ‘breed of travellers’ of the
eighteenth century would be those who would write their voyages into Anglo-European
historical chronology, leaving their ‘antique lands’ for superior civilisations. In the fastchanging political scene of the twentieth century, these would be replaced by even ‘newer’
travellers whose journeys would eventually become referred to as ‘the voyage in’, perhaps
exemplified by Tayyib Salih’s justly famous Season of Migration to the North (1966). As
indicated by the allusion in the title to the bi-annual mediaeval trips to Yemen and Hijaz
known as the ‘winter’ and ‘summer’ journeys, this ‘newer’ breed of traveller would have
assimilated something more complex than the ‘old’ European version of modernity:
resistance and diaspora. Meanwhile, as Ghosh’s account makes clear, the migrant workers of
today –labourers, clerks, shopkeepers, drivers, imams– continue the great subaltern mobility
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and the unwritten travels of the previous centuries: slaves, illiterate traders, soldiers, and the
rest.
That a writer of Arabic, a language “itself an intersection and integration of so many
cultures” (Ghazoul “Comparative Literature” 115), should be essentially comparative in
practice is exemplified by the travelogue in Arabic heritage. The integration and mingling of
cultures that travel/travel literature may effect and that can be almost set as a tradition within
Arabic letters appears too in Al-Bagdadi’s categorisation of the ‘globality’ of Arabic
language and letters since its emergence into three phases: “oikumenical globalisation”
(ranging from late antiquity to the end of the Abbasid period:), “expansive globalisation” (of
the Imperialist age or late eighteenth to the twentieth century), and “dispersal globalisation”
(at present). The first refers to the expansion of Arabic from a tribal language into a wideranging lingua franca that was then vitalised in its reformulation through the many languages
and cultures of the peoples who used it. The second phase is where the advent of modernity
entailed the definitive polarisation of East/West and the rise of ‘national’ literatures in
Arabic. Finally, the third phase, enmeshed in ‘postmodern cosmopolitanism’, is marked by
the change of the pattern of ‘travelling to’ such centres as Paris and London and settling in or
‘writing from’ these centres (Al Bagdadi “Registers of Arabic”). Al-Bagdadi’s categories
implicitly take into account the travel imperatives and tendencies of Arabic’s many writers,
and what this mobility and border-crossing in turn reflect of a ‘world history’, that is, people
who have a “shared history” although perhaps not the “same history” (Epple).
By questioning the incentives of groups –political, scholarly or both– to ignore,
dismiss or silence the diverse voices embedded in history, and by highlighting instead ‘the
“small voice of history”, Ghosh stresses that no culture is homogenous; that no ‘national’
culture exists in an isolated, hermetically-sealed space, and that multiple (often unarticulated)
encounters refurbish and regenerate local and national cultures. By stretching the boundaries
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of the national –historical, literary, and epistemological– Ghosh also opens a window onto
the huge scope of highly-circulated works beyond the canonical (which then, in comparison,
appears a ‘marginal’ bulk of what we read, what we know, and what we teach other people to
read and know). To call attention to forgotten or dismissed shared history/ies of travel,
exchange and open borders is to ideally posit the opportunity for counter-cultures to flourish.
If questioning all kinds of national boundaries gives impetus for a consistent, endless
questioning of norms, a pulsing curiosity about people and peoples, an openness to cultural
assimilation, the sense, in Ghosh’s words, of “wonder”, and “an acknowledgment of the
limits of [our] knowingness”, then perhaps his ‘history in the guise of a traveller’s tale’ has
done exactly what it set out to do: remind us “of the spirit in which we undertake our most
instructive and pleasurable of journeys” (Foreword xii).
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Conclusion
World Literature: Negotiation and Equilibrium
.ً‫ ولكنها وطنية إنسانية معا ً وهي في أكثر األحيان فرديةً أيضا‬،‫فليست الثقافة وطنيةً خالصة وال إنسانية خالصة‬
)394( ‫ مستقبل الثقافة في مصر‬،‫طه حسين‬
Culture is neither exclusively national nor exclusively universal, but it is national universal at the same time, and
most often individual as well.
Taha Hussein, Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fi misr [The Future of Culture in Egypt] (394)
Even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures.
David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (282)
On several occasions in In An Antique Land Amitav Ghosh writes of bringing gifts on
his way back from India to Egypt, and from Cairo to Nashawy. In the latter instance Ghosh
brings Shaykh Musa an ornately-decorated Quran, a memento from Ghosh’s visit to the
capital intended for someone who has lived all his life in the provinces. The present is doubly
touching as an encoded gesture of tolerance, since it comes from an Indian Hindu with the
background of Muslim-Hindu antagonism behind him, and one who has just spent an
inordinate amount of time in his sojourn in Egypt resisting amicably-intended but stifling
attempts at peer-conversion. The gift is also intended to express gratitude to the sheikh for
having been a gracious host and given Ghosh insight into life in Egypt; it is in some sense
then, also a payment of a debt of knowledge.
In the Arabic travellers’ texts discussed in Chapter 3 the writers often mention buying
gifts to take back home with them or to give to friends, such as pilgrim souvenirs from
Mecca: an action of acquiring a tangible memory (or proof of experience) familiar to any
tourist until today. Ibn Jubayr dubiously claims to give some of his Meccan souvenirs later to
a stranger in Spain, a man who is ‘pretending’ to be a Christian in fear of the new
suspiciously-benevolent Christian King. The gifts then acquire a new significance as markers
of a kind of fraternity, a show of solidarity and support.
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In Beer in the Snooker Club Ram speaks of refusing to ‘go empty-handed’ when
invited to lunch at the Dungates. Edna tries to talk him out of it. She tells him he is not in
Egypt anymore after all, and there is no need to be so ‘oriental’. Ram, for all his familiarity
with British culture, feels confused that he could be anything else. Ram has been invited to
dinner by the family of his old headmaster; in Egyptian (and Arab) tradition, he ought not to
visit someone empty-handed, and the present is a sign of good manners, but it is also a sign of
gratitude for the Dungates’ hospitality, and, politically interpreted, for their English
hospitality in hosting Egyptians in Britain. Ram becomes an ‘oriental’ representative despite
himself, a debt inherited from his culture, but by giving the flowers voluntarily and happily,
Ram is also offering a gift of his own volition.
In Nervous Conditions, when the more affluent Babamukuru visits the reserve, he
brings presents to his family. The gesture lies in the spirit of Christian benevolence and
charity for the less able, but is also a development out of the traditional African extended
family which entails that Babamukuru, as a more prosperous member of the family, ‘owes’
something to the less fortunate, usually numerous, family members. Babamukuru’s
benevolence is a moral debt or obligation that is resonant of his acculturation in two cultures,
and his family receive the gifts too, with the understanding that their impetuses, and
economic means, come from inside and outside Africa.
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Tomas likens the fortuitous chance encounter
with Tereza to Pharaoh’s daughter finding baby Moses in the Nile. Tereza, symbol of the
European civilisational Testament, is then obviously a bestowal or a gift. It is, however, also
a debt, a responsibility which Tomas must take up and pass on, or else it becomes, as the title
of a subsequent book by Kundera puts it, a ‘testament betrayed’.
How can these ‘gifts’ and ‘borrowings’ be interpreted in a critical idiom? Literary
‘gifts’ taken by one author from another or adopted by one culture from another as part of the
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process of cultural encounter offer readers and critics chances to read into these encounters a
‘locus of negotiation’. “Even a single work of world literature”, Damrosch writes, “is the
locus of a negotiation between two different cultures” (What is World Literature? 282) One
of the key reformers of the modern Arabic Renaissance, Taha Hussein (1889-1973), calls this
negotiation of gifts and debts, influences or traces: achieving ‘equilibrium’.
This study has argued that one of the objectives of expanding the list of world’s
classics and masterpieces should be to read the engagement with the ‘Other’, whether
embedded within the text, language or local culture or evident in market transactions,
circulation routes and reader reception. The study has posited that even though there is
ground for Postcolonial theory and World Literature theory to diverge, both, under or
alongside the umbrella term of Comparative Literature, have aimed for a “global
comparativism” (Mufti): that is, a wider and more representative discussion of the literatures
and languages of the world in order to bring about or at least consider stronger bonds between
cultures. Towards these ends, the constant vigilance to the minor or less-apparent Other in
texts and cultures, and a critical position on the power structures that support literary and
cultural systems have been part and parcel of the adoption of a wider, transnational view to
letters. The consideration of the Other underlies the idea of contrapuntal reading, call-andresponse cultural patterns, and the elliptical refraction of texts circulating between national
cultures.
By comparing and contextualising a number of texts on or from different parts of the
world, focusing on how individual protagonists resist the national imaginary often promoted
by dominant political discourse, the study has compared different visions of the
‘transnational’ or the ‘nation-in-the-world’. All of these ‘international’ visions, which have
been referred to as ‘supra-’, ‘cross-’, ‘global’ or ‘everyday’ nations, and despite their
respective differences, rest on the reluctance of individual protagonists to be transcribed
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under a certain dominant and popular identitarian umbrella. Instead, these protagonists see
themselves as belonging simultaneously, both intentionally and inadvertently, to local
communities and to trans-local communities, particularly since their formative conditions are
made up of local and trans-local forces.
Hence, resisting Nasser’s politics and concurrent (anti-Nasserite) political discourses
in Egypt in the 1950s, Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club constructs a ‘cross-nation’: a
private, intimate vision of different Egyptian communities more ‘real’ and sustainable than
Nasser’s state. Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being counters the totalitarian
state of Communist Party rule in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic during the 1960s-70s
by depicting a powerful European ‘supra-nation’ as the political and historical imaginary
suitable to guide the Czech people into peace and prosperity. He dismisses a self-sustainable
independent Czech nationalism as destined to die by its small size and location between
larger, often hostile powers.
In the same time, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage: A Women’s Journey from Cairo
to America and Tstitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions reject the political affinities
propagated during the struggles against the British in 1950s-60s Egypt and 1970s-80s
Zimbabwe, respectively. The novels posit a wider transnational imaginary as a proper
platform for political empathy. Drawing on the ‘global nation’ embodied by core feminist
values, the protagonists strive for a worldly national consciousness based on global solidarity
and equality of women.
Finally, Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land resists the sectarian violence (and
national strife) in modern India and Egypt. The travel narrative counters the prevalent discord
between Hindus and Muslims in India, and between Jews and Muslims in Egypt and the
Levant by constructing the parallel relations between India and the Middle/Near East in the
twelfth century. Ghosh excavates the historical documents of mediaeval Jewish communities
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found in the Geniza storehouse in Cairo, and builds on the canon of early travel writing in
Arabic to construct an ‘everyday nation’, the lives of traders and slaves, pilgrims and
warriors, and others who go unrepresented in the main narratives of history, and whose
interactions continue uninterrupted despite the political violence of empires and states, rulers
and parties. By positing an ‘everyday’ ‘nation’ Antique Land questions official history and
state discourse, revealing the large numbers of un-narrated people who travelled across
borders. It erases the constructed separating lines between disciplines by showing how
History is also written in the personal diaries and letters of travellers. It blurs the lines
between religions that push people to sectarian violence by showing how religions have
shared beliefs and rituals, and questions the idea of a mono-directional (from West to East)
linearly-developing modernity that posits entire regions and communities of the world as
unchanging, caught in a warp of time, or ‘antique’.
All these ‘transnational’ visions stress the importance of affiliation as an intentional
action to be undertaken by parties who may have exchanged gifts or are, consciously or
unconsciously, in each other’s debt. To acknowledge that culture exchange is always
happening, that texts are always somehow travelling, is to acknowledge that contrapuntal
reading is an implicit negotiation of a gift or debt, both an examination of the cultural ‘ties
that bind’ of predecessors, as well as an examination of the historical and political contexts
by which these ties –giving and taking, offering and imposing, acquiescing and resisting–
take place.
Challenging Homogeneity, Again
As mentioned in the Introduction, many of the moves to revisit the ‘Other’ horizons
of Comparative Literature’s founders by theorists of World Literature have found it useful to
recognise that the global aspirations of Comparative Literature’s key figures and their
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motivations to aspire to new international boundaries stemmed from the writers’ own
positions as ‘Others’ or their knowledge of ‘Other’ cultures, including Goethe, Auerbach,
Wellek, Posnett and Etiemble. Highlighting the Other as an active participant in world
culture-making also makes it imperative to shed light on different concepts of World
Literature theory appearing outside core countries, and to use them in discussing texts that
belong by now to a ‘universal’ readership. Like the scholars located in Europe and the US, it
is important to take notice of what might have motivated critics in ‘other’ respective times
and spaces to consider a comparative or ‘international’ approach to literature.
In order to return to the problem of homogeneity, seemingly following from using one
critical language to reading texts, and in deference to what I see as the mutual objectives of
World Literature and Postcolonial theory to decentre and to give agency to the previously
‘represented’, this chapter aims to conclude by looking forward. It aims to rise to the
challenge of emphasising the work of Easterners as cultural theorists and moderators of
cultural exchange by seeing how such theories may shed light on the analysis of non-Eastern
texts. The chapter then will discuss the theory of World Literature propagated by the ‘Dean of
Arabic Letters’, Taha Hussein (1889-1973), focusing on one article he published in English
but also alluding to his output in Arabic and French, in order to examine what his work and
life reflect on the five novels under discussion, and to sum up at the same time certain
premises of World Literature as it has been discussed and understood in this study. Born to a
poor Egyptian family and going blind at two, by the time Taha Hussein turned sixty he had
become an erudite scholar of Arabic and French of world renown: Egyptian Minister of
Education, founder of various institutes and Chairs for Oriental studies in France, Greece and
Spain, and holder of two doctoral degrees and several honorary ones from around the world,
including Oxford, Athens, Rome and Montpellier. Caught in the deprivations of the disabled
and poor in Egypt, trained at the hands of key Oriental scholars and the French and Arab
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intellectuals of his time, and rising to privileged heights in his lifetime, Hussein knew more
than most that finding a cultural equilibrium between national, often antagonistic, traditions
was a supreme act of comparison, compromise and negotiation. Negotiation and equilibrium
were, in other words, both an acknowledgment of a cultural gift, the power to bestow and the
grace to receive (and then return), and a cultural debt, 183 that is, the power to lend and the
sense of accountability needed to acknowledge receipt.
‘Arabic Literature Becomes a World Literature’
In an English article published in 1955, and using the same self-assured tone he was
famous for back home, Taha Hussein described for an American magazine (Books Abroad,
now World Literature) how a generation of Egyptian intellectuals and writers had managed to
‘turn’ Arabic into a world literature. “The Modern Renaissance of Arabic Literature” reviews
the thirty years from 1919 to 1950, illustrating how the “generation of 1900” had to work
within strong political constraints to liberate Arabic literature from the chains of highlyformulaic prosody and turn it into a true ‘world literature’ of equal value to and in dialogue
with other literatures of the world. As an exposé of what is now known as the modern Arabic
nahda or Renaissance the article did a good if perhaps selective job, but it illuminated more
strongly Hussein’s personal vision of the world cultural conversation underlying literary
culture.
According to Taha Hussein the renaissance of Arabic letters at the beginning of the
century was for better or for worse an intrinsic part of the political ferment of the time,
particularly since many statesmen were also men of letters. From very early on intellectual
debate was both triggered by and served to rouse political issues in Egypt, which would then
spread to Arab countries and modify accordingly.184 The battle between partisans of the
sonorous classical school of Arabic literature, for example, and experimental modern Arabic
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literature would overlap with parliamentarian conflicts between conservatives and liberals or
the religious establishment and secular thinkers.
As matters came to a head in one coup d’état after the other between Egyptian
nationalists, the last descendents of the Ottoman monarchy still ruling Egypt and the British
colonial establishment, Arabic literature underwent a thorough transformation that included
the renewal of idioms and language, the appearance of new genres such as verse drama,
theatre, novels and short stories, a huge expansion of publishing and translation from and into
Arabic, and the emergence of a reformist critical opus questioning the ‘sacred’ dogmas of the
Arabic tradition and calling for modernisation and innovation. The struggle against foreign
occupation also gave rise to a huge related literary output: intellectuals issued articles, essays,
books and poems, while those using popular dialect brought forth songs, poems and
pamphlets.
Meanwhile educational reform enabled more Egyptian youth to receive solid training
and come into contact with the wider world. Cairo University (founded 1908) enabled the
systematic grounding in ancient languages –Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and
modern ones –English, French, German and Italian. It attracted European professors from
diverse countries –France, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia,
Spain and the Netherlands. It received students from around the world, from Morocco to
China, and sent Egyptian teachers to teach in and found educational institutions in Arab
countries. The government also sent Egyptian students on missions to Europe and America,
and solid cultural relations were established between countries.
It was in this Renaissance, Taha Hussein argues, that Arabic literature was made once
again into a ‘world literature’ after centuries of cultural isolation: “Thus, this generation,
whose history I am trying to sketch broadly, will not only have given back to Arabic
literature the splendor that belonged to it when it was at its epopee [sic], but will have begun
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to make it a world literature” [my italics] (14). What does it mean to be a world literature, or
as Hussein puts it elsewhere in Arabic, one of “al-adāb al-kubrā” (Great literatures),185 althaqāfa al-‘ālamia (world culture)186 or al-thaqāfāt al-kubrā al-‘ālamia (great world
cultures)?187 Hussein offers a seven-step formula for world literature which makes it a
creative and educational process and a literary criterion.
Expanding the National Canon
To be classified as world literature texts must undergo a process of translation,
circulation and re-creation. In Taha Hussein’s description of how the short story, “novelette”
(novella) and novel genres appeared and developed in Arabic, one can discern a pattern for
the creation of world literature which would go as follows: (1) translation from a foreign
language, (2) circulation, (3) imitation, (4) assimilation, (5) innovation, (6) canonisation, and
(7) transmission/translation from the language in question into another language. Hussein
describes the process over a couple of pages in his article (brackets mine):
The [Egyptian] writers…have thus to their credit the introduction of an
entirely new genre in classical Arabic literature:…the short story, the novelette, and
the novel….First, translations of Western stories were made [translation]; they were
soon liked [circulation] and attempts were made to do the same in Arabic [imitation].
It was Hessein Heikal who first published…a novel….A special place [also] belongs
to Mahmud Teymour; he began by writing novelettes and short stories in which it was
easy to trace the influence of certain French masters, notably Guy de Maupassant
[assimilation]; little by little his personality evolved and took shape about 1935-1940;
then the novels of Teymour became the most authentic expression of Egyptian life in
its commonplace aspects [innovation]….Since the end of the Second World War the
novel has become the most important literary product of Egypt as well as of all the
other Arabic countries [canonisation]. (13)
….
We have it [Arabic literature] translated or in process of being translated into
several Western languages and, naturally, several Eastern ones, [translation] and this
new phenomenon must be emphasized: Everywhere that Arabic is taught in European
and American universities it is the texts of contemporary Arabic writers, especially
Egyptian, which are being explained, commented on, and taken as models of style
[transmission]. (14)
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Over and above, here and elsewhere, this kind of cultural exchange is what Taha Hussein
refers to as the process that makes world literature. World literature is in this instance a single
global site of cultural exchange and production, and from there, a criterion for critical
appraisal: both a gift, to be received gratefully, and a debt, to be returned. Even when he does
not use the term ‘World Literature’ it can be assumed by reading Taha Hussein’s polemics
that the aim of modernisation, innovation, acculturation (and those three words or ideologies
permeate his life’s work) was to make Arabic literature a modern science of enquiry that
would be able to move by the efforts of its nationally and intellectually liberated people into
the sphere of world art.
Using this concept of literature as a criterion, Hussein judges the two ‘renaissances’ of
Arabic literature. He compares the process of assimilation of Arabic, Greek, Persian and
Indian cultures during the first four centuries of Islam to the assimilation of the modern
European and Arabic-speaking cultures in the twentieth century, and concludes that the
second period bore far greater fruit. In only thirty years, he writes, the Arabic-speaking
peoples did more than their ancestors did in centuries: they created a fraternity in resistance, a
combined struggle for political and intellectual freedom against religious dogma and foreign
occupation, and still managed to pay homage to the extraordinary diversity of cultures
between them. “Thanks to their persevering effort the Arabic language today draws on all the
sources of civilization, Western or Eastern, ancient or modern” (“Modern Renaissance” 16).
Published after some forty years of working towards academic reform, Hussein writes
the English article as a proud patron of Arabic letters. With the native subjects of his writings
whom he knew needed to work constantly in a politically-turbulent world to be able to
establish and (this time around) sustain a literary academy, his opinions were much less
complacent. The need to modernise, educate, update, translate, etc., and the fear of cultural
containment (and consequently literary decline) seemed constant. So in the prodigious works
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that reflect a lifetime spent attempting to remove the cobwebs from the musty cerebral
condition that was the study of Arabic literature, Hussein repeats this seven-step method
almost like a mantra, consistently and unwaveringly stressing that literature cannot aspire to
be great (world/modern) in isolation, without dialogue with other cultures –and the nationstate could be framework and mediator.188
Thus the insistence in almost all his critical writings on the diversity that lay behind
the first and second Arabic renaissances and the cultural historicity forming Egyptian culture.
During the 8th-13th centuries the Arab-Muslim189 invasions spread Islam over a huge area and
merged myriad indigenous peoples, cultures and languages, creating new levels of linguistic
and textual hybridity. Hussein argued that the respective singularities and inter-dialogues of
such indigenous cultures (merging through more or less the same seven steps) made possible
the ‘golden age’ of classical Arabic literature in a way that did not and could not have
happened at a time of cultural isolation. 190 In the modern Arabic Renaissance, classical
Arabic heritage (with its initial diversity of sources) mixed with modern Arab and Western
languages and cultures to prompt a new renaissance as prosperous as the old.191
As a natural corollary to his theory Hussein argued that the surest way to bring a
literature down to a degenerative limited, localised level would be to separate its peoples
from the outside world and to cut off dialogue: cultural isolation posing a natural anathema to
world literature. Drawing on Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s argument (whom Hussein had
heard lecturing in Cairo), Hussein likened the process of cultural isolation and subsequent
literary deterioration forced on Arabic letters by Ottoman and Central Asian invasions to the
European ‘dark’ ages which had been brought on by the Mediterranean impasse between
antagonistic Muslim and Christian empires (Future of Culture 8-9).192
Hussein’s call for the absolute need for ‘foreign’ knowledge was where his detractors
accused him of beating the Western drum a little too strongly. The insistence that Arabic
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literature at the height of the Islamic Caliphates and even, horror of horrors, the sacred text
itself had needed to be Hellenized and ‘foreignized’ in order to be ‘great’ was too much for
the conservatives. Moreover, the too-fine line that Hussein drew between ‘homogenization’,
‘imperialism’ or ‘universalism’ on the one hand and ‘dialogue’ on the other made the idea of
‘merging’ slightly suspect for those whose literatures have had a history of being swallowed,
silenced, dismissed or, at best, ignored, rather than gracefully merging –one of the fears
expressed today towards World Literature in its recent re-emergence.
Yet while Hussein a-politically glosses over the means by which such ‘merging’
happens, the sword or the cultural centre, he stresses that an interactive compendium of
cultural influences is necessary for literature to flourish. Inasmuch as he found positive such
events as Napoleon’s expedition to/invasion of Egypt and admitted that ‘foreign’ (colonial
and missionary) schools gave the best sort of education,193 Hussein also refused outright the
idea that Arabic culture or the Meccan-Arabic language was ‘foreign’ to Egyptian culture,
and often spoke lovingly of the distinctive nostalgia of the desert that lay at the essence of
Arabic literature (ironically of a broad region whose ancient civilisations have settled for
millennia near the lush valleys of Iraq, the Nile Delta and around the ports of the
Mediterranean). If he wrote gratefully and welcomingly of the spread of the superior science
of European letters through European colonisation, not, one would imagine, the most
soothing argument to hear for peoples caught in the struggle for independence from those
same European colonisers, Hussein also glorified the cultural debt bequeathed from the
military invasions of the Islamic empire. At his most outrageous public hour, if he declared
that certain religious narratives were invented for practical political concerns,194 he did
remove the statement from the subsequent edition of the book, and steered clear away from
such sensitive issues for the rest of his career. Finally, if, influenced no doubt by the primary
two cultures of his own learning, Hussein had echoed one time too many the classicist
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European and particularly French tradition in his own critical appraisal, he consistently
insisted on the urgent need for literature and littérateurs to absorb a multiplicity of cultures, a
position which also clinched the ‘international’ incentives of ‘resistance in interaction’
(Boehmer Empire) between Egypt and the rest of the colonised world:
A country which wanted to be really free must not give her spirit solely to one rather
than to another of the numerous foreign literatures. Quite to the contrary, this country
ought to welcome all forms of civilization and culture, lend itself to absorbing all
literatures and all ideas, wherever they may come from. (“Modern Renaissance”
10)195
According to World Literature theorists then, including Hussein, to respond to
expanding networks, World Literature requires appropriately expanding the foundational
texts of all national canons. This is partly manifested in the importance given to acculturation
and formation beyond the national paradigm in the five modern works chosen in this study.
The search for new experiences and fresh material for self-acculturation (literary and
otherwise) in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Beer in the Snooker Club, Nervous
Conditions, A Border Passage, and In An Antique Land pre-empts the individual
protagonists’ journeys, and is the underlying cause for the action. The development of the
protagonists’ formation is part and parcel of the protagonists’ actions of defining the nationstate, assessing and critiquing the performance of national leaders and locating the
protagonists’ own positions as fictional citizens or members within the imaginary collective.
The five works are also directly preoccupied with literary cultivation and canons. The
protagonists’ experiences stem directly from their ability to read the world they live in from a
comparative and therefore intelligent perspective. Tomas, Ram, Leila, Tambu, and Ghosh the
narrator are all at least bicultural and are familiar with several literary traditions, and so even
when they ‘narrate’ the cultures of Zimbabwe, India or Czech Republic, they use a
multicultural, inherently comparative understanding of these cultures.
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All characters too, resort to analogies from the literary corpus as a shared referent for
which to render experience. In the article which gets Tomas into political trouble and
overturns his life, he asks whether the Czech Communists who had welcomed Russian
influence in 1948 should hold themselves accountable, like Oedipus, for 1968. The life
Tomas chooses to live is compared to a romance, giving him the role of either a Don Juan or
a Tristan. For Tomas’s experience to become understandable, it draws upon a world of shared
referents which, wherever they originated, circulated widely enough to make them
‘household names’, transcending national borders. The first step to a more worldly
experience then is to widen these referents, to push back the parameters of the ‘national
canon’.
Translating the National Canon
To bring forth cultural eclecticism and make diverse reading material available for his
audiences, Taha Hussein started and edited a monthly periodical entitled al-Kātib al-misri
(The Egyptian Writer) which would run for thirty years. Like many magazines at the time,
The Egyptian Writer was issued in Cairo (and was available in large Arabic cities) to present
a highly eclectic selection of literature and literary criticism from around the world translated
into Arabic. Such magazines often attracted world famous contributors and enjoyed wide
circulation among Arab intellectuals, many of whom, as mentioned before, were also
statesmen, reformers and prominent social leaders. The preface to the first issue (1945)
asserts that the aim of the magazine was a critical enquiry into everything literary with the
aim of covering Eastern and Western literatures, old and new.196 The ‘Programme’ stresses
the importance of cultural eclecticism:
This magazine will present to Easterners their cultural output in a way that is strictly
regulated by an unbiased criticism of Art and Truth. It will also present to them
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quality selections of the literary movements in Europe and America. It will not limit
its attention to one [national] literature rather than the other, and it will not give
preference to one culture rather than the other, but it will throw its doors wide open to
all literary and cultural trends, wherever they come from, whichever peoples produces
them, and in whatever language they are written. This is because science, art and
literature are subjects that should be loved for themselves, and should be received as
they appear, so the heart and mind can absorb what they want to absorb or renounce
what they want to renounce, but may benefit from them in all cases.
Neither will this magazine give priority to one peoples over another, or one group of
Arab writers over another…desiring to raise literature above such disputes that are
provoked by people’s immediate practical concerns. [My translation] (‘Programme’
3)197
To produce world literature, then, the first steps were obvious: scholars or
intellectuals had to throw the doors of literary acumen wide open, allowing the translation
and circulation of as many literatures as possible. These diverse literatures must then be
properly read, and if liked, cultivated and emulated, but in a way that makes one’s production
not mere mimicry, but an innovative addition to the world literary heritage, and thus, worthy
itself of being translated and sent out into the world for the cycle of World Literature to begin
afresh.
Translation is a key to world circulation in many ways. Obviously it makes texts
accessible to more readers and has always formed a large part of scholarly endeavour around
the world. It has traditionally held a prestigious and important place in Egyptian history,
prominently associated with the French campaign as well as Mohammed Ali’s modern state,
but also playing a vivid role in scholarship in pre-modern times with the Alexandria library.
In Arabic letters, political-educational establishments like the House of Wisdom in Baghdad,
and the strong translation or Arabization practices (of Greek and Latin, Chinese and Persian
writings) they encouraged, tend to be emblematic of literary prosperity. In twentieth-century
North Africa and the Levant, magazines like Taha Hussein’s Egyptian Writer were important
ways by which translated excerpts and serialised whole texts could penetrate the Arab
markets, and indeed, most leading Renaissance figures were translators as well. Hussein
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himself published a number of translations with the idea that there were certain “world
masterpieces with which Arabic must be enriched, even if the public is not prepared to
receive them” (Cachia 182).
Accordingly, World Literature requires increased translation of works. The desire to
translate certain texts indicated for Hussein the literary merit of the text in question and
offered increased cultural value through wider readership, but it also presented a miniscule,
text-level demonstration of his vision of world literature in practice. In an article on Khalil
Mutran, for example, Hussein commends Mutran on having translated Shakespeare, Corneille
and Racine as a practised poet, thereby managing to transcend the restrictions of authenticity
(which sacrifices the poetic quality of the text) by poetic imagination. Hussein asserted that a
play by Shakespeare which had been translated into Arabic by Mutran was in some sense a
collaborative production. He held that Mutran had enriched Arabic literature with such
translations not only by making the texts accessible to Arab readers, but also by paying
homage to the overall poetic experience of the texts and their specificities, and therefore by
making evident the inter-linguistic dialogue at play in any literary expression (“Khalil Mutran
2”).198 The importance Hussein gave to translation and circulation has significantly rung true
in his own autobiography, Days, which, translated into several languages and widely
circulated, has often been claimed as “one of the [Arabic] books most likely to survive as part
of the literature of the world” (A. Hourani History of the Arab Peoples 341).199
There are two sides to translation considered here: translation as a market
phenomenon, and translation as a creative and professional practice. Previously in each
chapter, some discussion has been made to the translation and circulation of the five works
discussed in the study. Yet there is another type of ‘translation’ at work in the texts, particular
to multilingual writers, as they take great pains to ‘self-translate’ local experiences and
phrases into the worlds of their creation, not, as some detractors of what is dismissively
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referred to as the ‘global novel’ argue, to ‘exoticise’ their works for the ‘global’ market, but
to ‘go glocal’, that is, to bring the world (of the authors) into the text, undoubtedly for a
global outreach, but also because despite themselves, multicultural authors are products of the
polemics and cultures of several ‘canons’.
For all Milan Kundera’s portents for the doomed destinies of ‘small nations’ he makes
a great point of giving lengthy digressions into the semantics of Czech words, or telling
Czech jokes, thereby consecrating that which is most distinctive, and perhaps most sellable
and likeable, about The Unbearable Lightness of Being: the simultaneous universality of its
critique of totalitarianism, and the specificity of its ‘Czech’ experience. In the same way
Tambu ‘translates’ something of Bantu culture, from the way traditional sadza is prepared to
the respectful method of greeting people. Leila too recounts feeling confused at the constant
nagging to eat that passes for hospitality in Arabic-speaking cultures in the same time as she
self-consciously ‘translates’ or compares the use of the first chapter of the Quran to that of
the Lord’s Prayer. Not perhaps knowing that the ‘global novel’ would be later considered
‘faddish’, Ram too, translates Egyptian jokes and proverbs and a line from one of the songs
of Um Kalthoum, perhaps the most well-known Arabic singer of all time. Meanwhile
Ghosh’s dialogues are all hybrid transcripts of English and Egyptian, with entire translations
of mediaeval documents in Judeo-Arabic thrown in. World Literature then allows for
translating the ‘national’ canon, both on the level of the text, by bringing the world to the
reader, as well as outside the text, in the space of the market, by sending the text to the reader
in the world.
Achieving Equilibrium in Space and Time
After translation and circulation in Taha Hussein’s theory comes assimilation or
familiarisation, that is, educated or trained reading, and then (re)creation. Valuable literary
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creation necessitated striking a balance between imitation and innovation.200 Hussein held
that artists must be aware of the work of both the ancients and moderns but should imitate or
prioritise neither in their own production, allowing the work to develop its own distinctive
personality. If, even by the very first step of translation, the efforts of the translatorintermediary shows through, then by the end product the author’s whole literary tradition and
his own individual contribution must appear. In this manner an Egyptian man of world letters
(and there should be no other kind) should write with what T. S. Eliot once called
"contemporaneity", the spatio-temporal dimensions which Hussein defined as: Egypt’s
ancient Hellenized-Pharaonic heritage, her classical regional Arab-Islamic heritage, and
modern and contemporary culture of Eastern and Western nations.
Rather predictably, perhaps, given such weighty inheritance, Hussein’s most repeated,
acerbic censure would be that a certain writer lacked knowledge of the world, ancient and
modern, or aped one or either ‘tradition’ too slavishly, thereby failing to achieve this world
literary fine-tuning (see “Kayfa yatajaddad al-shi‘r al-‘arabi” [How Arabic Literature is
Renewed]). At the final balance the repeated injunction was to consider literature as a global
site of cultural capital exchange between ancients and moderns, east and west, north and
south. In other words, World Literature is an act of ‘contrapuntal reading’, ‘elliptical
refraction’, ‘call and response’, or ‘double-mirroring’ of cultures across space and time.
This is precisely what this study has sought to show in the five works. In their
resistance of predatory nationalist identities, the protagonists of the five works all refute a
simple and formulaic representation by the loud political powers of the day. All protagonists
insist on subverting and reformulating the political status quo by revisiting ‘national’ heritage
and history, realigning the nation with larger, sometimes alternative, histories, and seeking
alternative political definitions. As such, all the protagonists look to their historical past for
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rootedness, locate their national present vis-à-vis the situation of other peoples in the world,
and offer alternative political and creative futures.
World Literature and the State: Diversity as a Basis for Dominance
Most synopses of Taha Hussein’s hefty and infamous educational treatise Mustaqbal
a-thaqāfa fi misr (1938) or The Future of Culture in Egypt (1954)201 describe it as an attempt
to disclaim all of Egypt’s ‘regional’ allegiances except the Mediterranean one. In fact what
the introduction (and only the introduction) actually does is locate Egyptian culture outside
the ‘frail spiritual Oriental East’ and within ‘rational materialistic’ Europe, at the crossroads
of the Mediterranean. The argument has a strong rhetorical purpose. Written shortly after
Egypt had concluded a treaty of friendship with Great Britain and had been admitted to the
League of Nations, the book carries strong nationalist overtones, and exposes an agenda for
school education devoted to national Bildung.
Reacting to the urgent nation-building problems of illiteracy and lack of educational
infrastructure in Egypt, Hussein’s introduction intended to spur Egyptians to action by using
concurrent Orientalist power discourses. He argues that Europeans teach in their schools that
Hellenized Egypt was part of the Western world and then in their imperialist foreign policy
decide it is part of the East. He argued that Egyptian culture, in itself always distinctively
Egyptian, had been influenced far more greatly by European cultures than it had ever had by
the Far East. He refuted that there was any such thing as a ‘spiritual irrational Near East’, and
argued that the only Near East he knew of was the rational one that had enriched Hellenistic
and then European cultures; the place where three religions –Christianity, Judaism and
Islam– had first appeared before travelling to Europe. Why, he asked, consider those religions
‘spiritual’ in the East and ‘materialist’ in the West? Islam had ‘Easternised’ Egypt inasmuch
as Christianity, another religion from the East and of the same theological premises had
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‘Easternised’ Europe. He ends by stating that the only difference between the way Europeans
and Egyptians did things was time, and if there was any point for the Egyptians in gaining
independence and writing a constitution, it would be to work towards instituting a powerful,
progressive democratic and secular state. Forming less than ten percent of the book, the
introduction seems to have been intended as a rousing prompt to push Hussein’s own agenda
of revamping the entire nation-wide educational system; and he would often employ similar
rhetoric elsewhere for any call for action. The point of this cultural relocation was less
historical veracity and more nationalist resistance: a denial of the essential difference between
native and coloniser.
Moving slowly through primary, secondary (middle to college) and university levels,
Hussein’s organicist theory of education aimed to eventually produce, for those who finished
the three stages, a cosmopolitan world scholar, meaning both a professional of world
standard, and an individual aware of world cultural matters. Hussein advocated that the
primary stage should give primacy to Arabic language, Egyptian geography and history so as
not to destabilise students’ ‘national affiliations’. Through the secondary stage, however,
focus should be widened onto the world, and students should be taught modern and ancient
foreign languages. In order to avoid focusing on the two most prevalent British and French
cultures, students should be allowed to choose which modern European languages they
wanted to learn. Those who wanted to go on to university and become specialists would also
need to choose an ancient language related to their subject of study.
One can see a linear progression here (the book was called the ‘future’ of culture for a
reason). If there was going to be an Arabic literature, then formal or written Arabic needed to
be kept a ‘living’ language to ensure some continuity of ancient and modern, that is, to
guarantee that a rich source of (fundamentally diverse) traditions would be available for
contemporary Egyptians to draw from. If schools would produce readers, scholars and writers
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who would eventually feed the academy’s pipeline, then the schools would have to teach and
make accessible classical Arabic. If the literary academy would engage with world literature
then schools would also need to teach foreign languages. If Egyptian literature would achieve
high circulation then a whole support system had to be set up that included increasing
translation to and from Arabic, financially encouraging writers and artists, guaranteeing
freedom of expression and creating markets and cultural spheres of influence in Arab and
non-Arab countries. Hussein’s description of the cultural transactions and assimilation that
took place in the classical Arab age could have been stated by many an Orientalist scholar,
not least by those who taught Hussein in Cairo University or Paris, but the educational
agenda Hussein presented took the theory a few steps further in the agency it imparted to
Arabic-speaking peoples to produce their own work on their ‘Orient’, the possibilities it
generated for creating public individuals aware of and engaged with the world, and the
scholarly impetus to move from a comparative literary practice of adab, or polite letters, to a
comparative literary discipline. Ultimately, World Literature questions national homogeneity
and exclusion but works within the framework of the nation-state.
Political power discourses in Hussein’s time could often be broadly placed in
sweeping categories such as ‘nationalist’ Egyptian, ‘coloniser’ British and Turkish,
‘educationally and diplomatically’ French, miscellaneous ‘Orientalist’ (German, Italian and
Belgian) or ‘alternative’ (Soviet and, later, American); and this reflects naturally in Hussein’s
primary intellectual preoccupations, yet by drawing on the material available to him in Arabic
and French, he could speak of contemporary events in Japan, quote a Hungarian author or
condemn the caste-system in India and racism in the US. In his autobiography Days, the only
non-Arab writer he alludes to besides his teachers in Cairo and Paris is not, as would be
expected, any of the foremost French intellectuals that Hussein associated with as friends and
mentors, but the “great Indian poet, Tagore” whom he meets at an evening of poetry in Cairo
217
(Days 384). Invited to speak on the place of Arabic literature among world literatures at the
American University in Cairo in 1932, Hussein began by saying that he would not speak of
Indian or Chinese literatures only because ‘he knew little about them’ (“al-Adab al-‘arabi wa
makānatihi” [The Position of Arabic Literature] 526). In short, and this cannot be stressed
enough, for Taha Hussein literature simply meant “taking something from everything”202 like
he believed the best of Arabic literature to have done, from the “policies of the Persians” to
the “wisdom of India” (Fi-l adab al-jāhili [On Pre-Islamic Literature] 21). It is testimony to
his true world vision that despite the dominant East-West binaries creating Egypt’s political
scene he still desired to widen the East-West encounter to a global perspective. From its
specific location, World Literature seeks to bypass essentialist ethno-cultural entities.
From another angle, this tension in choosing between ‘modern’ and ‘antique’, to ‘take
what is suitable and reject what is unsuitable’ from a certain culture, to be a ‘bridge’ or
‘crossroads between East and West’, embedded in the quandary of the need to emulate a
foreign culture to achieve ‘progress,’ has been from early on a common, if sometimes
suppressed, epistemological concern or disjuncture within communities that have suffered
from colonialism. The fine epistemological line that any of those interested in cultural
interconnections find themselves treading between ‘our’ knowledge and ‘their’ knowledge
becomes a tightrope when these cultural intersections have been paralleled with military
might and economic power, making ambivalent the difference between ‘compare’ on one
hand, and ‘weigh and balance’ on the other, and throwing into stark relief the need to
somehow validate the less powerful culture in order to effect a just comparison or
assimilation. The idea of ‘balance’, whether it entailed political resistance or submission, or,
more commonly, the attempt to find a third way using a little of both, has thus been central to
the modern conception of world cultural intersections or dialogue in Arabic letters (and other
Postcolonial as well as minor-culture contexts). Yet in arguing that the urge to find a
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‘balance’ or ‘third way’ had always existed, Hussein made it an aesthetic norm, a cultivable
national tradition –not only resistance, but independence, and not only independence, but
individuality: the way of the world.203
This then, the idea that resistance and assimilation have always existed as part of the
nation-state, is the nucleus from which Postcolonial theory and World Literature theory can
be said to start. Perhaps one of the main reasons that Postcolonial theory as it rose was easily
affiliated to Comparative Literature was that the writers and intellectuals of, or writing on, the
postcolonial world either cannot afford to ‘ignore’ or have no inclination of ignoring the
‘Western’ tradition.
It is no coincidence that earlier, during liberation struggles, nationalist ‘reformers’
around the third world, even those who wrote in languages already with an established
history of scholarship, debated how to practise ‘world’ literature, if not by that name. Many
of such ‘reformers’ may not have been necessarily or solely inspired by Goethe, but like
Goethe found themselves because of their particular places and times facing a wider reality of
national formation, such as Tagore (1861-1941) in Bengal (see Tiwari) and José Lezama
Lima (1910-1976) in Cuba (see Lupi). Caught in the balance between colonial resistance and
international affiliation, such figures provided a global imaginary which asserted their own
culture’s intricate relation with the culture ‘of the West’ (their right, to misquote Said, to
appreciate Beethoven even if they were not German), but also their right to be heard even if
they were not from a dominant culture or tradition of letters. Practising ‘world literature’ by
reading and writing across borders and in translation, and debating world literary encounters
was often part of modern nation-making under networks of empire. World cultural exchange,
not without irony, frequently became a form of national struggle against cultural
provincialism, political insularity, and both imperialist and self-enforced Orientalization.
Precisely because of the national struggle for liberation, many reformers, comparatists or
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visionaries in postcolonial contexts had, in other words, all the reasons ‘in the world’ to
engage with the Other.
Hence, while the five works examined in this study can be claimed for ‘postcolonial’
literature, they can also be claimed for World Literature. A comparative approach to local and
trans-local cultures is inherent to the narratives, and stands as an expected result of the
authors’ multiculturalism, but also stands as testimony to the authors’ intentional ‘balancing’
of various cultural, written and oral traditions: the Czech and a wider European culture in
Kundera’s novel; Egyptian and Western European culture in Ghali’s novel; Egyptian,
European and Islamic culture in Ahmed’s memoir; Zimbabwean, African and British culture
in Dangarembga’s novel, and Indian, Arabic, Hindu, Muslim and Jewish culture in Ghosh’s
travelogue. In the intentional juxtaposition of different cultures, of those of the ‘Self’ and the
‘Other’, there is a strong effort to retain the structure of a sovereign nation-state but still
claim a worldly, international attachment and solidarity.
If used to read texts contrapuntally, Postcolonial and World Literature theories reveal
discrepant experiences of different cultures but not essentialist, oppositional and unresolved
discrepancies. The protagonists’ journeys to ‘Other’ shores –whether to those of other
cultures, or by different means such as exile or migration, or in the imagination, through
books and art –only serve to reaffirm something particular about the protagonists’ own image
and sense of accountability, societal assimilation and general well-being. Tambu and Leila’s
local oral histories resemble the lessons learnt about in the great works of literature. The
mediaeval writings in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic serve to affirm the possibilities, however
exceptional, of tolerance and reciprocal respect between modern antagonistic communities in
India and the Middle East. Ram’s disappointment in love and life is offered new possibilities
in his alliance with Didi. Tomas and Tereza’s political aspirations and actions in occupied
Prague can find a spiritual and physical rootedness in an Edenic countryside.
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Reading Contrapuntally, Globally
This chapter began by suggesting that world literary dialogue could be expressed as a
negotiation of cultural ‘gifts’ and ‘debts’. One can see, for example, in Taha Hussein’s
writings, how intricately the ‘renaissance’ in which Hussein played a key role was linked to
its political context, and how the political situation may have created an impetus for
engagement in his writing that would not have otherwise existed (particularly in light of
Hussein’s own suspicion of committed literature as modus operandi). If Goethe had written
of world literature at a time when “there was, even within the domain of permissible public
discourse, no German nation” (Pizer, Origins and Relevance 7), Hussein wrote at the peak of
Egyptian nation-formation, and his pedagogical initiatives and literary criticism, from his
Arabic language project to the occasional book review, were embroiled, frequently to their
detriment, in the immediate nationalist issues of the time.204 Faced with the awkward
problematic of creating a discourse which simultaneously resisted imperialism, constructed a
modern national voice and envisioned a world cultural dialogue, Hussein had to recognise
that some ‘world’ cultures were more equal than others, and so as part of the movement
towards independence, his single world literary plane emphasised negotiation, balance, and
reciprocity.
While it was imperative for Easterners to look to the West for acculturation, according
to Hussein, it was as imperative for the West to look to the East: by both acknowledging the
‘debt’ of classical times taken from the East, and by returning the ‘gift’ of Eastern cultural
interest in the West in modern times. In global times, World Literature intentionally promotes
the movement of texts in multiple and reciprocal directions.
To affirm the importance of reciprocity, Hussein rejected the idea that cultural
dialogue was a one-way endeavour to be undertaken solely by Arabic letters for its own
betterment. Rather chidingly, Hussein expresses hope in “Modern Renaissance” that Arabic
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texts in translation would gain more currency, and that “this regrettable lacuna of the West
will soon be overcome, to repay us a little for the warm interest we have always borne it”
(254).
It is, however, in a French article, appropriately on Goethe, that Hussein uses a
musical analogy faintly reminiscent of Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ reading and Paul
Gilroy’s cultural antiphony to express his much-used standard of ‘equilibrium’. Goethe,
argues Hussein, was ‘undoubtedly’ the first European who sincerely attempted with his
Divan ‘a solid familiarity’ of East and West on a basis of equality. Refuting critics’ reductive
tendency to measure the Divan’s ‘authenticity’ in line with the Persian tradition, Hussein
argued that Goethe had aspired to be Persian or Arab with his Divan as much as he had
aspired to be Greek with his classicist writings. Hussein stressed instead that the value of
Goethe’s creation lay in how he had utilised a particular Eastern way of expression and had
simultaneously drawn on his own German and European learning to articulate his individual
genius, thereby succeeding in ‘removing distances and discrepancies and realising the
integral unity in human thought’. In the respect and a-politicised interest its author
bequeathed to the cultures of the Orient, the Divan symbolised more than an individual
achievement in the history of a great man and marked a milestone ‘in the history of European
literature’ (“Goethe et l’Orient” 185-95; “Guta wa-l sharq” 35-37). By looking to past and
present, East and West, Goethe in his lifetime had achieved the ‘equilibrium’ of a ‘fine piece
of music’:
Ibn Sina [Avicenna] disait: «Je préfère une vie large et courte à une vie longue et
étroite.» Il eut ce qu’il voulait; sa vie fut aussi large, aussi variée que possible, mais
il mourut avant d’atteindre la soixantaine; ce qui, à son idée, ne représentait pas un
très grand âge. La vie de Goethe fut à la fois large et longue; c’est qu’il avait la
qualité essentielle qui manquait au grand philosophe musulman: l’équilibre, et cela
rendit sa vie aussi harmonieuse qu’un beau morceau de musique”. (“Goethe et
l’Orient” 183; “Guta wa-l sharq” 35)
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Since World Literature is created by achieving equilibrium, according to Hussein, it is a
literature that is in constant motion, progressing in a ‘natural’ chronological or linear progress
forward by acculturating its intellectuals or developing the nation in the Enlightenment
tradition, but also creating a cultural expansion ‘breadth-wise’, constantly receiving and
transmitting, being written, being read and being commented on wherever it travels around
the world. World Literature is then a constant act of negotiation.
Thus, Hussein often celebrated the outward conveyances of modernity, perceiving
them as a global salvation for literature by quite literally bringing the peoples of the world
closer. Like the constant advances in technology today, modernity had brought, according to
Hussein, speed and transparency to the world. It allowed peoples around the earth to
exchange news and culture much faster, and increased the performance of printing machines
so people’s immediate responses to events could be issued much more quickly and could be
circulated more widely. Although, as he argues in Qādat al-fikr [The Leaders of Intellectual
Thought], such advancement could have hegemonized local cultures and created a culturallyautocratic world empire ruled as if by Alexander or Caesar, what the printing press and
improved means of communication had actually done was shorten temporal-spatial distances,
allowing literature to proliferate and compete in diverse places all at the same time. “[Linear]
Progress there still is, of course, but no longer does one genius, or one line of endeavor, or
even one nation stand above all others” (Cachia 79).
In a ‘modern’ world, Hussein hoped that free democratic nations could produce
cultural dialogue equally, on a single platform. Wishful thinking, crackpot optimism, a stab in
the dark, part of the brief, secular liberal Egyptian honeymoon at the beginning of the century
–whatever this opinion reflected, it is the same spirit with which Hussein welcomed the idea
of a UNESCO office in the Middle East in 1948 with a suitably glocal metaphor of his own,
also intended to depict a state of balance: “Here, then, is the salute of the West offered to the
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Orient, sincere and disinterested; a salute worthy of being joyfully received and truly
appreciated…more especially as the Arab World is influenced by the civility of the Koran
which says: ‘If you are saluted, answer the salute by a better one or return it similarly’”
(“Taha Hussein” 7). In addition to being a matter of critical standard, then, a global
comparative also appeared to be a matter of good manners or etiquette, or even social
responsibility, of knowing how to give and receive cultural gifts and return debts,205 so as the
text might truly be, in Damrosch’s words, “a locus of a negotiation between two different
cultures” (What is World Literature? 282).
Whether World Literature is a process of translation, circulation and re-creation; an
agora for dialogic national productions; a form of resistance to a politically-biased world
market; or an individual’s way of Being in the world, in many ways Taha Hussein left behind
a theory in practice and future questions to ponder. Yet Hussein’s own reception with local
audiences after his death has been less than embraced. Rather than offer a vision of a
crossroads between cultures, Hussein is seen to pose as a bridge for the dominant culture to
walk over. Rather than a monument to national education, his Future of Culture has been
critiqued for affiliating Egypt ‘too eagerly’ with (implicitly, indebting it too greatly to)
Europe. Figures like Taha Hussein retain their places as fore-figures of the modern Arabic
renaissance while remaining part of the class of intellectual black-skin-white-masks: shining
the torches on the path to ‘modernisation’ as they shade over the harsher aspects of
imperialist domination. At a time when predatory nationalist identities, such as religious
fundamentalism and other ethnic-nationalisms, find global succour, Taha Hussein’s call for
dialogue and exchange, for intellectual (and political) secularism seems like a very lonely
voice. This is precisely why this is a good moment to re-read him, to question his limitations
and to re-formulate his vision for the present. All this, knowing that “conversation doesn’t
have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps
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people get used to one another” (Appiah Cosmopolitanism 85). By critically and constantly
questioning one’s centre, one’s locus of affiliation, and by resisting ‘predatory identities’ that
depend on exclusion and extermination, through an intentional and systematic widening out
of perspective to the world, World Literature will be of this world (critical), about this world
(global) and for this world (secular).
It is mainly in this spirit of ‘equilibrium’ between different parts of the world,
between ancient and modern, and between individual and collective, that the ‘gifts’ given by
Ghosh to Shaykh Musa, Ram to the Dungates, and Babamukuru to his family, or the
influence of Oedipus and Beethoven, Nietzsche and the Old Testament on Tomas, or the
educational scholarships and the world of reading offered to Tambu and Leila, can be
figuratively read. To achieve literary ‘equilibrium’, World Literature requires expanding the
idea of the national canon as some limited and unchanging list of ethnically-categorised
works intended for the moral education of a select number of people. It requires translating
the national canon, both on the level of the text by ‘going glocal’ and outside the text by
translating and circulating it in a world market. It necessitates achieving equilibrium in space
and time by looking to diverse cultural spheres of influence, attaining a balance between what
one has been and what one wants to be; and resisting cultural domination (from within or
outside a local culture). If the dialogue between cultures means negotiating gifts and debts to
others, then reading contrapuntally globally requires, above all, retaining an acknowledgment
of the Other, an indebtedness to the Other and a mutual interdependence with the Other, such
as has been creatively manifested in the five works discussed in this study.
Notes
1
Although a full Bakhtinian reading will not be attempted in this study, particularly because of Bakhtin’s
enmeshment in the linguistic-oriented readings of the 1970s-80s, (an approach not adopted in the study),
Bakhtin’s idea of the novel as a polyphonic genre accommodating often conflicting discourses usefully
complements the Postcolonial/World Literature reading used here. Bakhtin’s concept of language and culture as
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a two-sided or dialogic act posits that language is already imprinted with the effects of previous users, and our
use of it is directed towards receiving a future answer. The novel form in its inherent polyphony and
heteroglossia has a carnivalesque function of subversion and resistance of authoritarian ideologies. The
preoccupation with individual formation in the novels discussed here, and their perceptible autobiographical
inspirations also makes Bakhtinian analysis pertinent because of the connections Bakhtin posits between the
novelist, the narrator, and the protagonists, the first located at a “novelistic centre”, while all three exist in
dialogic relation to each other. A consideration of some of Bakhtin’s work would also support the multi-vocal
musical analogies offered by Said and Gilroy. The implicit variety of voices in Said’s poetic-political metaphor
of ‘contrapuntal reading’, for example, even Said’s recurrent use of the word ‘polyphonic’, has been picked up
by Homi Bhabha: “[In addition to the] sheer plurality and virtuosity of voices, polyphony provides us with a
figurative vision of the possibilities of fairness and freedom in the midst of complex transitional
structures…There is something resembling a democratic practice that runs through the fugal form and
establishes the convention that several voices must, at different times, claim the character of a main part; that the
contrapuntal process should express the feelings and aspirations of several peoples; and that the combination of
subjects and structures ensures that each voice is answerable to the other” (“Adagio” 16). Meanwhile, Gilroy
makes it clear, as I explain here, that the sheer variety of ‘calls’ and ‘responses’ from different sources, in
different times and places, makes it impossible to specify the initial call or its definitive answer.
2
As mentioned by Salah D Hassan, “hypercanonization describes the consensus in academic judgment that
locates a text at the apex of its field” (Hassan 298). Taking up the word from Jonathan Arac, Hassan uses it to
express his concern of what citing certain works in Postcolonial studies may suggest of “some kind of
compensation for past exclusion [that]…in fact overburdens a text with a singular representative function”
(Hassan 298). See Salah D Hassan, “Canons After ‘Postcolonial Studies’”.
3
In its implicit material linkage, this seems to be much the same relation as (the image, resources and peoples
of) the ‘Orient’ had stood to the image of the Occident in Said’s Orientalism. The relation also resembles the
way Raymond Williams approached the English ‘country’ and English ‘city’ in his now classic The Country and
the City. See statements, for example, such as the following: “There is then no simple contrast between wicked
town and innocent country, for what happens in the town is generated by the needs of the dominant rural
class….For indeed, if you stop to listen to it, the bright conversation of the town never really strays far from its
quite inward concern with property and income” (53). Or “It was no moral case of ‘God made the country and
man made the town’. The English country, year by year, had been made and remade by men, and the English
town was at once its image and its agent (honest or dishonest, as advantage served). If what was seen in the
town could not be approved, because it made evident and repellent the decisive relations in which men actually
lived, the remedy was never a visitor’s morality of plain living and high thinking, or a babble of green fields. It
was a change of social relationships and of essential morality. And it was precisely at this point that the ‘town
and country’ fiction served: to promote superficial comparisons and to prevent real ones” (54). In many ways,
however, the idea of contrapuntal reading in Culture and Imperialism as a ‘follow up’ to Orientalism (and for
that matter to The Country and the City) passes over, although of course does not ignore, its predecessors’
materialist metaphors.
4
See, for example, on India: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its
Fragments and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
5
Damrosch also refers, for example, to concepts of World Literature in Brazil (What Is World Literature? 27).
6
For a succinct overview of colonial and postcolonial approaches across fields such as anthropology and literary
studies, see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, esp. ch. 2, pp. 33-55.
7
Counter-arguments inspired by music include Françoise Lionnet’s “Counterpoint and Double Critique”.
Lionnet picks up on the musical motif of Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal reading’ and compares it with Abdelkebir
Khatibi’s concept of ‘double critique’. Lionnet argues that Said ignores the contributions from the post-1960s
Francophone world or the possibilities of Francophonie and therefore submits to the British and French colonial
divisions of the cultures of North Africa.
8
In response to Lionnet’s suggestion of a ‘transcolonial’ solidarity and affiliation to counter hegemonic (firstworld) perspectives, see Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic on what he perceives as the shortcomings of concepts like
black nationalism, creolisation and hybridisation which either dwindle into or are pre-conceived as sets of purist
binaries.
9
See Puchner “Teaching Worldly Literature” on teaching texts as World Literature when they were not
considered literature in the modern sense.
10
For a longer examination of colony-colony relations and similar networks of resistance, see Elleke Boehmer’s
Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial.
11
See also ‘clusters’ of responses to and debates on critical approaches to World Literature: Prendergast to
Casanova on The World Republic of Letters in “Negotiating World Literature”; Prendergast to Moretti on
Graphs, Maps, Trees in “Evolution and Literary History”, and the latter’s reply: “The End of the Beginning”.
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See also Spivak’s critique of anthologies of World Literature in Death of a Discipline, responded to by
Damrosch in “World Literature/Comparative Literature” and Puchner in “Teaching World Literature”. Finally,
see Moretti’s response to various critiques of his “Conjectures on World Literature” in his follow-up essay
“More Conjectures”.
12
See also Said’s “Yeats and Decolonization” which divides resistance into two ‘phases’: the first, the period of
nationalist anti-imperialism in which the objective was to gain independence, the other, the liberationist antiimperialist resistance that followed World War II. It is with the second that the idea of ‘liberation’ is conceived
of for itself.
13
See, for example, Rob Nixon’s comparison of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and South Africa, and a
discussion of the violence entailed by a popular acceptance of ‘ethnic nationalism’ or of the definition of
ethnicity as a founding characteristic of the state. Rob Nixon, “Of Balkans and Bantustans: Ethnic Cleansing
and the Crisis in National Legitimation”.
14
See the organisation of Simonsen et al’s, World Literature, World Culture which seems to tap into the
polemics (and tensions) of World Literature as mode of criticism, pedagogy, market network, and a list of
cultural representatives, particularly apparent in the editors’ choice to organise the various essays into sections
entitled ‘histories’, ‘translations’, ‘migrations’ and ‘institutions’.
15
Damrosch suggests that one strategy by which writers rework local material with a global audience in mind is
by going ‘glocal’. “Glocalism takes two primary forms: writers can treat local matters for a global audience –
working outward from their particular location– or they can emphasize a movement from the outside world in,
presenting their locality as a microcosm of global exchange” (How to Read World Literature 109).
16
The hornet’s-nest debate on the precise nature of the relations between the Bildungsroman, Bildung, the
nation-state and the novel is further complicated because it takes on different local concerns and is approached
through different interdisciplinary perspectives around the world. There is no intention of unravelling the layers
of precisely this centuries-old debate, if indeed it is possible to do so. For some of the latest discussions on the
matter that tap into the way these relations (between Bildungsroman, Bildung, the nation-state and the novel)
have changed in different times and places, see Thomas Pfau’s “Of Ends and Endings: Teleological and
Variational Models of Romantic Narrative” on what different kinds of narrative closure in European
Bildungsromane may imply of the changing understanding of Bildung in various political circumstances. For a
discussion of how tenuous the relations between the Bildungsroman, Bildung, the nation-state and the novel
may actually be, as well as an overview of some of the literature of the past decades on the topic, see Pieter
Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef’s “Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century”. For a succinct
overview of what the concept of Bildung may mean, see Josef Bleicher’s “Bildung”. For a rare article in English
that gives some insight as to how Bildung, with all its accumulated meanings of the past, may be used today
outside Literary Studies, specifically in educational theory, see Klaus Prange’s “Bildung: A Paradigm
Regained”.
17
The idea is that because the Czech nation is a “small” one it is fated or doomed to struggle continuously to
defend its existence from the threat of large nations. See Kundera’s now famous speech at the equally famous
Fourth Congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union. See a reiteration of this argument in Testaments Betrayed,
“The Unloved Child of the Family”, pp. 190-95. The plight of being a small nation surrounded by hostile ones
has been a recurrent theme in Czech national discourse, not least during the precarious international situation of
the 1960s-70s. See, for example, Vladimir V Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring; Derek Sayer,
The Coasts of Bohemia; David W Paul, Czechoslovakia.
18
I use the word here in what may be an old-fashioned general sense of multicultural co-existence and a
privileged, perhaps distanced, intellectualism, which is how Ram might have used it. The notion has come in for
renewed interest in the past few decades. See, for example, Pheng Cheah’s “Cosmopolitanism” which traces the
changing concept of cosmopolitanism from the eighteenth century to the globalised present, from an intellectual
ethos to an institutionally-embedded political consciousness. Cheah argues that cosmopolitanism without a mass
base remains a concept by and for a select elite. He compares the common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
idea of a cosmopolitan person as someone who belongs to the elite citizenry of the world to its more recent
referent to someone who, supported by a popular and political infrastructure, is a citizen of an international
community. For a discussion that relates Bildung, cosmopolitanism and the nation-state, see Pheng Cheah’s
Spectral Nationality which reformulates the classic ideals of free Bildung (in a liberal state) to an imagined one
in postcolonial states. See also Bruce Robbins’s work on cosmopolitanism which uses the concept to refer to a
political awareness and engagement, particularly through the international community. See Bruce Robbins and
Pheng Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics; also Bruce Robbins, Perpetual War. In a similar vein, Kwame Anthony
Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism focuses on the way cosmopolitanism if considered an ethical choice can achieve
more efficient dialogue in a globalised world. For a study that combines some of these discussions of
cosmopolitanism with a focus on Ghali’s work, see Deborah Starr’s unpublished thesis on images of the Jewish
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community in Levantine literature, “Ambivalent Levantines/Levantine Ambivalences”, and her published article
“Drinking, Gambling, and Making Merry: Waguih Ghali’s Search for Cosmopolitan Agency”.
19
There is a playful linguistic connection too between ‘Bohemian’ and ‘Egyptian’, both having been used in
English to describe ‘gypsies’: dark and exotic people with no country. See Amitav Ghosh’s Antique Land (3034) discussed in Chapter 3. See also Derek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia (5-8) who points out how the words
‘Bohemian’, ‘Egyptian’ and ‘gypsy’ could be used interchangeably by various people from Shakespeare to
Neville Chamberlain.
20
See, for example, Robert Young’s Postcolonialism for the connections between what he calls the
‘tricontinental’ decolonisation movements around the world; see also Elleke Boehmer’s Empire, the National,
and the Postcolonial for interactive (anti-imperial and anti-colonial) connections in the British empire, that is,
margin-margin interactions rather than colonial-periphery interactions, and specifically from 1890-1920. For a
shorter discussion see Laura Doyle’s “Inter-imperiality” which argues that what she calls the ‘inter-imperial’
relations between colonial and postcolonial cultures should include an understanding of globalisation as
happening over a longer duration, and of colonisation as happening over a longer period of time and a larger
geographical expanse.
21
The protests for national liberation in the colonies of course themselves had often appropriated and reworked
previous protest moments in Europe, the French Revolution and its writings always being the most notable, but
also the peasant revolts and workers’ strikes in Russia and China. For suggestions, however, of the more subtle
and often surprising relations between resistance movements in places seemingly unconnected, see Amitav
Ghosh’s essay “Mutinies” on the Indian and Irish soldiers working for the British Empire and sent to suppress
resistance movements around the world, but who would, at the end of their service, also become some of
empire’s staunchest critics. See also Kundera’s note on a conversation he had with Carlos Fuentes, and in which
the former discovers that Czech soldiers were sent to fight in Mexico, and so had left a fond memory for Czechs
among locals at the time (“Czech Destiny” 3). On such troops in ‘unexpected’ places, it is worth mentioning that
as is well known, Nasser sent Egyptian soldiers to fight in national struggles around the Arabic-speaking world
but what is less known is that he also sent a contingent as far as Mexico.
22
Thus the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 could directly affect the economic situation in Czechoslovakia, a
situation which in turn directly aggravated general dissatisfaction with the Communist Party. See Kieran
Williams, The Prague Spring and its Aftermath.
23
Thus, for example, the spread of Indian film in Egypt during the late 1950s and early 60s of non-alignment
(See Ghosh “Confessions of a Xenophile”), or the increase in Poland of translations of Arabic novels into Polish
at the same time (See Lasota-Barańska “Arabic Literature, Polish Readers”).
24
Besides the more well-known examples of the Universities of Chicago and Columbia, see, for example, “1968
Revisited”, a recently hosted webpage archiving some of the New York University student protests of 1965-71.
25
See Betty S. Anderson’s “The Student Movement in 1968” for a brief comparison of the student movement in
Cairo and Beirut in 1968 and the January 25th protests in Cairo in 2011.
26
In their introduction to Dangerous Liaisons, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat allude to the influence of Marxist
politics, thought and practice on the rise and spread of third-world nationalism (Mufti and Shohat 5-6). For a
longer analysis, see Robert Young’s Postcolonialism.
27
In the first half of the twentieth century, for example, the same issue of an Arabic periodical or magazine
could debate the problems of British or French occupation in the same pages as it discussed local irrigation
problems, Tagore’s universal culture and Gandhi’s politics in India (the former would eventually visit Egypt in
1926, the latter in 1931). Interestingly such issues could all be discussed under the same banner of
emancipation. World War I, for example, figured as a bone of contention for writers on issues of ‘occupationgeneral’, whether it was perceived as a European civil war or as a war on the Ottoman Caliphate (itself a longresented presence in Egypt), or whether it was considered a war that was fought on non-European land by nonEuropean soldiers, or simply for what the War entailed of demands for supplies and soldiers, and economic
change. Framed in Egypt by two national milestone events –the Urabi Revolt (1879-82) and the 1919 Egyptian
Revolution– World War I also helped complicate local debates. Egyptian politics could then be contested using
the same discourses of World War I, with local groups adopting pro-axis or pro-allied positions based on their
priori allegiances to, or hostility towards, the British, French or Ottoman powers. In the Middle/Near East the
conflicts of World War I would continue for a much longer time, leaving indelible ideological imprints, such as
the memory of promises for national liberation that were then reneged on after the War (A. Hourani 1991; G.
Antonius), and political divisions, some of which have not been resolved until today. What would also remain
until at least World War II, woven and rewoven through these newspapers, were signs of the “interactions in
resistance” (Boehmer 2005; Young 2001) that would by mid-century become clinched. Even until the late 1930s
Arabic newspapers could dissect the corpse of the Great War in the same pages as they analysed situations in
India, Ireland and Africa, the African American Civil Rights movement, and the socialist victories in Eastern
228
Europe and Russia. Armistice did not signal the end of a time of atrocity, but for many, it triggered a new
solidarity, a new ‘internationalism’.
28
Ken Seigneurie touches upon these intersections in his article on the Arab Revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and
Syria, focusing specifically on the cultural discourses of human rights, progressive commitment and “elegiac
humanism”. See Ken Seigneurie, “Discourses of the 2011 Arab Revolutions”.
29
Very recently the connection seems to have resurfaced as indicated by the theme of the University of
Edinburgh conference entitled ‘Comparing revolt and transition from Europe 1989 to the Arab World 2014’ (8-9
Jan. 2014).
30
Although the details are far from known, Ghali got into political trouble in Egypt for alleged communist
activities, a common accusation under the Nasserite regime. Ghali’s Egyptian passport was also revoked when
he was abroad. He lived as a political exile from about 1956 until his death in 1969.
31
See Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage which will be discussed in the next chapter. Ahmed asserts that the
Jews did not, as is sometimes made out, live as some ghettoized persecuted minority in early twentieth century
Egypt, and indeed, there were state-endorsed and active Zionist associations in Egypt from about the 1920s,
(which is not obviously to deny that the Jewish community was persecuted). On the Jewish community in Cairo
and Alexandria see, for example, Hassoun; and Ilbert. See also an example of the French-language newspaper
Israël. Published in Cairo with a peak circulation of 2,000 to the effect of informing readers of, and at times
inflaming them towards, international Zionist affairs, Israël was run by Dr. Albert Mosseri, a prominent
Egyptian Jew, from 1922-39. Some of the issues have been digitised and are available online.
32
This is evident in much of the works written by the Egyptian Jewish community which has begun to form a
small corpus of its own, such as Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt; and Lucette Lagnado’s The Man in the White
Sharkskin Suit. See also Mongrels or Marvels (eds. Deborah A. Starr and Sasson Somekh) which publishes
some of the work of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, a Jewish Alexandrian who eventually settled in Israel. Despite
the differences in the backgrounds of the Jewish families and the travelling papers or foreign nationalities they
may have happened to have, in these writings, the Jewish speakers insist that they had no primary inclinations to
leave Egypt even after the state of Israel had been established; their exile was forced, their departure was drawn
out, and the whole process whereby they suddenly found themselves in a situation held on a par with the
refugees from European shores came as a shock. See Deborah A. Starr’s unpublished dissertation for an
exposition of the literature produced by and about the Jewish Egyptian community.
33
Such organisations could be both non-religious, such as pro-axis supporter groups during World War II, and
religious, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.
34
Will Hanley has rightly criticised the common use of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Middle Eastern studies
which fails to engage with the latest developments of the critical term in Euro-American fields and therefore
suffers from being formulaic, elitist and charged with a kind of grieving nostalgia. He advocates a deeper
examination of historical documentation and an engagement with the new international understandings of
cosmopolitanism that excludes (the implication is bypasses) meanings of ‘ethnic co-habitation’ and the like. See
Will Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies”. While I strongly agree with Hanley on his
critique of what often appears to be a rather fetishist nostalgic idea of cosmopolitanism rather than a strict and
much-needed historical excavation of the records of communal pluralism, I take his outright dismissal of the
usefulness of analysing this understanding of cosmopolitanism to account. I think it would be productive to
examine critically the parameters of what may be a common Middle Eastern understanding of cosmopolitanism
as it stands –neither only by perceiving it as some hard-to-dislodge remnant of ‘European elitism’ as Hanley
seems to do, nor as a would-be aspirant to a current Anglo-American universal, but for its own objectives in its
local political-cultural contexts. It would be significant in this manner to examine why writings on
cosmopolitanism in the Middle East at present seem to be so nostalgic, how modern political/social/cultural
traumas, such as decolonisation and in many cases a complete restructuring of a political-economic way of life
in the nations of the Middle East may have influenced or engendered such nostalgia in common discourse
(comparable, for example, to writings on post-World War II and post-Soviet Europe), the status and function of
nostalgia itself as an emotion or trope which is perceived less negatively in Arabic culture, and above all, what
this nostalgia may suggest of a shared scepticism towards political futures in the various communities in the
region. While Hanley calls for a reinvestigation of historical documentation and factual evidence of the ‘lost
cosmopolitanism’ of the Middle East, which, indeed, is vital and of priority if the discussion of Middle Eastern
cosmopolitanism is to be more productive than it has been so far, a different investigation of the polemics of
cosmopolitanism as it stands may prove productive in the same manner as Shahid Amin puts it on the changing
images of majority and minority Hindu/Muslim ethnicities in India: “Rather than simply confront pasts,
ingenious or disingenuous with definitive historical records, history writing, I argue, must have a place for the
ways pasts are remembered and retailed, and for the relationship of such pasts to the sense of belonging. As a
practicing historian, one must then pose afresh the relationship between memory and history, the oral and the
written, the transmitted and the inscribed, stereotypicality and lived history. A ‘true history of communalism’, to
229
use a slightly tendentious phrase, would be one that sets out to unravel not just what happened …[in India’s
diverse communities] but also how these communities remember, understand, explain and recount pasts and
presents to themselves” (2). See Shahid Amin, “Representing the Musalman”.
35
David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (Eng. trans. 2010) touches upon an implicit generational difference
in understanding the situation in Palestine/Israel: specifically, the differences between first and secondgeneration Israeli settlers’ attitudes to the ‘other’ inhabitants of the land, the general weariness of territorial
conflict, and the stress on the losses suffered and inherited by all the population. Grossman’s novel too uses the
romance and particularly family trope for national affiliation, and starts with the 1973 Egyptian-Israeli (Yom
Kippur) war as an Israeli national crisis/trauma.
36
Ghali’s biographer Diana Athill has announced that she has lost the diaries. Recently, however, photocopies
of them turned up in the hands of another scholar, who had them digitised and made available on the Cornell
University website. See Ghali, Diaries. A print version of them is forthcoming. See Hawas, ed. The Diaries of
Waguih Ghali.
37
A tendency Jane Kramer remarks on even as she uses it herself in a 1984 interview with Kundera: “[Kundera]
is 54 now, tall, lean as a cowboy, with pale eyes and straw hair faded into gray. On the streets of Montparnasse
he even looks a little like an old cowboy, in the pair of jeans and the black shirt, buttoned to the neck, that have
become a well-known Kundera costume. He is something of a celebrity here…His new novel, ‘The Unbearable
Lightness of Being,’ is on the best-seller lists. Libération calls him ‘cruel,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘virile,’ as if he were next
winter’s collection from Claude Montana or Thierry Mugler” (n.pag). See Jane Kramer, “When There is no
Word for ‘Home’”.
38
The novel is also (less commonly) approached through the philosophies/philosophers it highlights. See, for
example, Erik Parens, “Kundera, Nietzsche, and Politics”; Michael W. Payne, “The Unbearable Lightness of
Being”; or, with an emphasis on theology, Stephen Schloesser, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.
39
See Robert Thomas, “Milan Kundera and the Struggle of the Individual” for a very brief summary of the
importance of individual political choice in four of Milan Kundera’s novels.
40
Partha Chatterjee points out that in the heyday of the struggle for independence in third world countries, the
‘women’s question’ becomes urgent. Once direct foreign rule ends, the issue fades in the background of public
debate in the now-independent states, and simply fails to arouse the same degree of public passion that it had a
few decades before (Chatterjee The Nation and its Fragments 116).
41
See, for example, Doris Summers on the romance narrative in foundational nation-building novels in Latin
America; or Alison Sainsbury on the British romances or domestic fictions in India during the 1880s-1930s. The
love experience is almost a cliché for the East-West encounter in the modern Arabic novel.
42
On Kundera’s pan-European vision and what it excludes, see a short discussion in Charles Moleworth,
“Kundera and The Book”.
43
This is beyond obviously the theological differences on this matter and the fact that entire regional cultures
continue to reinstate mutual antagonism built up over centuries precisely around what these differences are, or
rather should be. I refer here to the same narratives/stories in the three Holy books.
44
Compare Vaclav Havel’s position on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan which he presents in the
“Anatomy of Reticence” (1985) while drawing on a similar ‘small nations-large nations’ argument. While
Kundera uses a small nation-large nation discourse to outline the precariousness of small nations’ existence
within the European bloc, and so creates a vision of ‘Central Europe’, Havel links the specific historical
experience of Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan in 1980 to the Soviet tanks rolling into Prague in 1968:
“Havel draws on national and regional history, but he emphasises the common experiences of small, vulnerable
nations around the world rather than laying claim to a unique destiny (whether Czech or Central European)”
[Brackets in original] (Sabatos 1837).
45
For a concise survey of key critical texts and figures that espoused the evolutionary vision of
European/Western literature whether as epochal historical process of works or individual process of artistic
creation absorbing and extending cultural history, see Wellek’s Concepts of Criticism. Wellek discusses the
different concepts of literature as ‘growth’, from Aristotle’s Poetics (in his analogy between the history of
tragedy and the life-cycle of a living organism), taken up in Renaissance and neoclassical criticism, through
Herder and Schlegel’s organicism, through Moulton and Eliot, and so on until 1960. See René Wellek, Concepts
of Criticism, esp. 37-53.
46
In much the same way as Edward Said suggests ‘contrapuntal reading’ as a critical approach to the
interweaving of world literatures and literary cultures, Kundera, an avid musician, uses the same image to speak
of the literatures of the small European nations which form ‘another Europe’ and “whose evolution runs in
counterpoint with that of the large nations” (Testaments Betrayed 190).
47
Kundera’s world scope seems to change in his most recent critical work. In The Curtain (French edition 2005;
English edition 2006), which contains a chapter devoted to ‘Die Weltliteratur’, Kundera stresses his admiration
for the ‘contributions’ of magical realism, and acknowledges the importance of adopting a comparative
230
approach to the novel as a genre that includes important writers such as Carpentier. Although there appears a
notable widening to non-Europe, Kundera’s view remains firmly ensconced in the march of what he regards as
strictly European literary culture, emanating from a European centre, originating in European (Judeo-Christian)
civilisation. “Broch inaugurated a new path for the novel form. Is it the same path for Carpentier’s work? It
certainly is. No great novelists can exit from the history of the novel. But behind the sameness in form hide
different purposes. In juxtaposing diverse historical eras, Carpentier is not looking to solve the mystery of a
Great Death Throe: he is not a European; on his clock (the clock of the Antilles and of all Latin America) the
hands are still far from midnight” (The Curtain 161). The Antilles and Latin America are still the ‘inheritors’ of
a European past whose European peoples have betrayed their own testaments. The presence of non-European
cultures can only be acknowledged after European civilisation ‘dies’; it is a vision for a potential World
Literature of the future, but one that remains firmly rooted in its ‘mono’-cultural past. On this particular point,
then, I disagree with Michelle B. Slater’s reading (who also uses the term ‘supranational’ but differently from
the way I use it here) of Milan Kundera’s widening ‘global’ vision of literature. See Michelle B. Slater,
“Shifting Literary Tectonic Plates”. Kundera’s concept of ‘world’ literature is worldly as long as the world is
actually Europe and an occasional cluster of distant lands. On this, see Alison Rice who likens Kundera’s vision
to Pascale Casanova’s in a wider discussion of various immigrant Francophone writers. See Alison Rice,
“Francophone Postcolonialism From Eastern Europe”.
48
A conference on World Literature organised at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in February 2012, for
example, took as its theme “New Worlds, New Critiques’. One of the topics suggested was the ‘globalized
Bildungsroman’ as a form that started in Europe and moved to Africa, Asia and the Americas.
49
To expound on the two perspectives of the national-imaginary, it may be fruitful to compare Suhayl Idris’s
The Latin Quarter (al-Hayy al-latīnī 1954) with these two works. The Latin Quarter tells a story common to
Arabic novels during the1950s-70s: an Arab student (in this case Lebanese) travels to Europe (in this novel,
France) to pursue postgraduate studies. He has one or more love experiences with European women, some more
educational than others, returns to his native country’s embrace and ends up marrying a ‘suitable’ girl from his
home country. The Latin Quarter’s strident call for Arab countries to stand united against European colonialism
is presented against the bloody background of Algerian independence and is worked in the mode of ‘committed
literature’ popular among Arab novelists at the time. Idris’s supra-national vision of ‘Arab identity’ with the
binary Western/Arab is comparable to Kundera’s pan-Europeanism and stands in contrast to Ghali’s crossnation.
50
It is significant to note that the German concept of Bildung is similar to some extent in Arabic as a concept of
organicist individual formation that is tied up to the individual’s experience in the wider world, but also one
which is embedded within the (national) education system. The origin of the study of literature in Arabic, for
example, is rooted in a kind of polite behaviour and conduct, ‘adab’, which is often translated as belles-lettres,
paideia and Bildung. The Arabic title for the Ministry of Education in Egypt today which regulates formal
schooling from the primary stage until university is called wizārat al-tarbia wa-l ta‘līm, loosely translated as
‘The Ministry of Upbringing and Education’, marking the link between acculturation, self-development and
national education.
51
Perhaps the quintessential example of the use of this common allegory in Arabic literature in the midtwentieth century is Yahya Haqqi’s novella “The Saint’s Lamp” (1944).
52
Speaking specifically of the loss of the father figure in Beer in the Snooker Club, Hamouda states that “loss of
guidance and authority becomes metaphoric of the absence of a nation...[which is] unable to meet the demands
of its citizens” (Hamouda 11). See, in a comparable perspective, Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men (2006),
also a formation narrative that uses the romance/family trope, this time located in Gaddafi’s Libya in the 1970s.
A little boy tells of growing up as his father forms part of a resistance group towards Gaddafi’s regime and gets
captured and tortured. In the same way that Kundera repeatedly asserted that Tereza is the real protagonist of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being but Tomas dominates the action, Matar’s title implies that this is the country
‘of men’, but it is the mother’s childhood, her attempt to survive an arranged marriage and save her family of
men in a dictatorial regime who is the real heroine of the novel.
53
See Frantz Fanon, “On Violence”, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 1-52; and “The Man of Color and the White
Woman”, Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 63-82.
54
Sex scenes are also part of the ever-present philosophical and aesthetic dimension in Kundera’s novels. See
Igor Webb, “Milan Kundera and the Limits of Scepticism”.
55
It is important here to note that ‘colour’ politics in Northern Africa are different from those in sub-Saharan
Africa, but see Fanon “The Man of Color and the White Woman” in Black Skin White Masks, pp. 63-82.
56
Considering that the novel was written at the peak of Nasser’s anti-American rhetoric this shows great
foresighted resentment on Ghali’s part. Over the next fifty years during the Sadat and Mubarak eras, American
presence in Egypt would increase tenfold, quite often in the shape of civil workers like Jack.
231
This is not meant as a narratological reading, and the designated narrators: ‘first-person’, ‘omniscient’ and
‘author’ are not meant to directly engage with terms such as ‘I-narrator’, ‘third-person omniscient narrator’,
‘implied author’ (Wayne Booth 1961), author/subject (Gérard Genette 1989;1993) or ‘focalizer’(Mieke Bal
1989), etc. The narratorial voices I refer to are defined or self-introduced in Kundera’s novel, which, as I
indicated at the beginning of this chapter, is divided into sections, with each section narrated by a clearly
designated speaker. The analysis of issues of author, reader and their respective authorities, while certainly
pertinent to discussing Kundera’s work in general, is not intended here. For a short piece that does address these
issues, see David Lodge’s essay “Milan Kundera”. Lodge gives a reading of Kundera’s The Joke (1967; auth.
Eng. tr. 1983) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978; Eng. tr. 1980) that touches upon the problems of
the reception of Kundera’s work which either holds him accountable for the political opinions expressed in his
novels, or ignores the political content completely. Drawing on his own experience as writer and academic,
Lodge alludes to Kundera’s double engagement with the practice of writing and with modern critical theory.
This double engagement seems to result in a potentially discordant combination in Kundera’s novels of a
preoccupation with highly artificial or conscious narrative techniques and linguistic play on one hand,
(ostensibly a privilege of ‘Western’/Western European writing) and, on another hand, the inescapable societal
and political preoccupations (or national allegories) of non-Western writing (in this case, Central or Eastern
European). Although Lodge only alludes to these problems, sometimes implicitly, his brief reading does a good
job of highlighting the textual strategies of Kundera’s writing while still acknowledging its political
significance, market circulation and reception.
58
One view of Czech political history interprets it as happening in a series of ‘eternal returns’, with a series of
conquerors, often with Czech consent, re-writing historical archives to suit the political purposes of the day, so
even as successive governments declare ‘progression’, their actions parallel previous governments, all the while
recreating new ideas of ‘Czech nationalism’ that seem to push it further away from Europe’s mainstream
narratives. See Derek Sayer’s The Coasts of Bohemia, esp. chapters 6-7, pp. 221-321, pointedly-titled “Eternal
Returns” and “Future Perfect”, respectively. While Kundera depicts this vision of Czech history in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being by drawing on what he describes as Nietzsche’s philosophy of ‘eternal return’,
he seems to have an otherwise linear view of novelistic (and Western European) history, in contrast with which
the Czech nation’s elliptical pattern of historical destiny seems distinctive and even aberrant.
59
In an interview Kundera refers to the return to Prague specifically in The Unbearable Lightness of Being as a
reflection of the “glorification of roots”, the “adoration” of “the house, of the household, of das Heim”, or the
“idea that life beyond one’s roots is not life anymore” which appears as a “national enigma” in Czech literature
and all over Central Europe including Austria, Hungary and Germany (Kramer n.pag). Meanwhile, Ghali
specifically chooses to construct Cairo, the capital, in his literary work with some loving nostalgia, although he
was actually Alexandrian.
60
Compare this presentation with that of the Cairo presented in other writings such as Edward Said’s “Cairo
Recalled”, “Egyptian Rites”, and his memoir Out of Place. See also Leila Ahmed’s memoir in the next chapter.
Such memoirs have increased in the past few decades, as migration from Egypt has increased (noticeably from
1970s onwards) and the market for ‘world writing in English’ has expanded.
61
The choice of the Vltava is intentional. It is not only the longest river in the Czech Republic, but it is also a
national symbol, being a backdrop for Prague and featuring in much of the national music composed in the
country in the nineteenth century.
62
The movement to document folk tales and ballads of course often paralleled the rise of nationalism in many
areas of Europe.
63
Elsewhere Ghali, a strident socialist, would himself use the same romanticised epic. See his article written a
few months before his suicide in 1968 for the first issue of Shimon Tzabar’s Israel Imperial News.
64
According to Williams: “By 1967, around 60 per cent of the working population was aged between fifteen
and thirty-seven, had been shaped almost exclusively by wartime and the communist era, and had at most only a
fuzzy memory of the pre-war republic. The intelligentsia that was starting to challenge the existing order was,
by and large, a new one, consisting largely of people of working-class origin who had moved up in the world
thanks to class war, education, and the patronage of party god-fathers. Many of the writers, scholars, and
journalists who in the mid-1960s began aggressively denouncing the crimes of political terror and the
constraints of censorship had, fifteen years earlier, written odes to Stalin, hounded thousands of ‘bourgeois’
professors and students out of universities, and dutifully tamed the media” (5).
65
“This was the time when plays were staged and books by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka,
Eugene Ionesco and others were read, and when new interest was shown in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and
Husserl” (Kusin 53-54). Kusin discusses how such philosophical debates were the site for engaged political
dialogue and calls for political reform in intellectual circles. See Vladimir V Kusin, The Intellectual Origins of
the Prague Spring, esp. ch. 4, “Philosophy of Man”, pp. 36-52. Kieran Williams mentions the liberalisation
philosophies concurrent in the sixties during which Czech thinkers drew on the work of Eastern European
57
232
revisionists such as Georg Lukacs and Leszek Kolakowski to challenge the functional determinism of Marxism
which portrayed human beings as victims of history to enhance man’s projective consciousness. “Through
praxis, especially art and philosophy, people were to transcend the false reality of the surface world and probe
the reality beneath, which, upon discovery, they would try to change, thereby overcoming alienation, a concept
derived as much from the rediscovered Franz Kafka as from Marx” (Williams 9). Although such a discussion
lies outside the scope of the present work, Kundera’s novel shows a direct debt to these diverse writers and
philosophers.
66
As Kundera himself puts it: “I have always, deeply, violently, detested those [critics] who look for a position
(political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to
understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality” [italics in original] (Testaments Betrayed 89). See also in the
same book Kundera’s critique of any literature that aims to be political in the first place (155-57).
67
For Kundera’s idea of the main dilemma of the novel form, that is, its relation to history, its objective in
asking the question ‘what is an individual?’, etc., see parts 1 and 2 of Testaments Betrayed, pp. 2-51.
68
As a Palestinian speaking of his first visit to his homeland after years of exile Barghouti’s statement takes on
added significance and refers to the impossibility, for a Palestinian, that anything might be a-political.
69
See how the role of writer/political activist as both aesthetically and politically-engaged through distance
appears in a recent example of second-generational postcolonial/resistance writing ‘in globalised times’, Junot
Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Telling the growing pains of a second-generation
immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Oscar in the United States, Diaz’s novel excavates the traumatic era of
Trujillo in footnotes to engage with the dilemma of the poverty of immigration and the inherited historical
postcolonial background. The formal ‘distance’ of the footnote as supposedly supplementary material located
beyond the main narrative is belied by the rather nosy and belligerent narrator who addresses the reader directly
in macho Spanglish, frequently commenting on Oscar’s story (if his family and postcolonial background were
not bad enough, Oscar also has to deal with the tragedy of being an unattractive Dominican man). A case can be
made for the work to be a reformulation of the Bildungsroman, at least of a kind, even as it contextually
dialogues with a different body of postcolonial literature focused on the Trujillo era such as Mario Vargas
Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000) (referred to in one of Diaz’s footnotes).
70
See Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”, Open Letters, 125-214.
71
Groppi’s was a famous bar/salon de thé in Cairo, (although its first branches were in Alexandria). Originally
opened in 1925 by the Swiss Giacomo Groppi in a building designed by the Italian architect Guissepe Mazza
and featuring a non-stop concert and a pricey high tea, it enjoyed a good thirty years of fame until
nationalisation, when it lost its original owners, clientele and glory. Located in downtown Cairo, the building
still stands today, decrepit and downtrodden, open to the occasional misguided visitor, and a monument to
Nasser’s rent-control policies.
72
See a similar analogy used in a foreword to an English translation of Etiemble’s The Crisis of Comparative
Literature: “Comparative literature serves criticism by functioning both as a telescope and as a microscope.
Used as a telescope, it widens the range of relevance and enlarges the frame of reference in which the individual
work is placed….Used as a microscope, it narrows and sharpens the frame of reference and thus differentiates
the individual, unique qualities of particular works of literature from others in their own genre, form, style, and
period” (Weisinger and Joyaux XIX). For a similar connecting movement, see Claudio Guillén’s discussion of
the ‘local and universal’ where he posits but without going into strong detail how the comparatist needs to be
aware of the tensions between local and universal, particular and general, national and international. See
Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, esp. pp. 5-12. See also David Damrosch’s “Frames
for World Literature” who also applies the analogy to the texts’ mode of circulation: “[W]orld literature operates
in a multi-dimensional space, in relationship to four frames of reference: the global, the regional, the national,
and the individual. These frames of reference, moreover, continually shift over time, and so the temporal
dimension serves as a fifth frame within which world literature is continually formed and reformed” (496).
73
Boehmer’s article is expanded in ch. 2 of her book Stories of Women. The chapter adds to the article a
consideration of the dissemination of the ‘postcolonial’ novel in particular. The chapter complicates the
seemingly analogous definitions or approaches of ‘postcolonial’, ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ (existing implicitly
via cultural networks all leading to the metropolis) by suggesting that such terms are often used within the
borders of ‘national’ paradigms, and, so ‘postcolonial writing’, rather than bypass the nation in order to
transcend it, valorises the local and the national as a space from which to navigate or engage with the
transnational. See Elleke Boehmer, “Beside the West: Postcolonial Women Writers in a Transnational Frame”,
Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, pp. 187-206.
74
Focusing on women in the third world, Chandra Mohanty uses the idea of the imagined community
(specifically identifying with a socialist perspective) to suggest that one way of discussing a ‘feminism without
borders’ is to pose an ‘imagined community’ of third-world women, linked via potential alliances and
collaborations across divisive boundaries in oppositional struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism,
233
imperialism and monopoly capital. Mohanty goes on to argue that rather than biological or cultural bases for
alliance (race, class, etc.), using political frameworks and links (that is, the way we think about race, class and
gender) gives stronger ground for solidarity because then potentially all women of all colours can align
themselves with and participate within these imagined communities. Her approach to third-world women and
the politics of feminism is to conceive of imagined communities of women “with divergent histories and social
locations, woven together by the political threads of opposition to forms of domination that are not only
pervasive but also systemic” (47). See Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders. For an earlier use of
the term by the same author, see Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle”.
75
Damrosch suggests that one strategy by which writers rework local material with a global audience in mind is
by going ‘glocal’. “Glocalism takes two primary forms: writers can treat local matters for a global audience –
working outward from their particular location– or they can emphasize a movement from the outside world in,
presenting their locality as a microcosm of global exchange” (How to Read World Literature 109).
76
As the epigraph from Glissant suggests, history can be read on the underside of landscape. For an example of
the relation between landscape and the construction of history, see an excerpt from one of Glissant’s essays
which poetically links the landscape of Martinique and the historical formation of the community: the dense
green mountains of the north are where Indian slaves and labourers found refuge during times of strikes or
revolts; the prickly flat cane fields of the centre are dotted with ruins of factories above ground and slave prisons
underground; and the south beaches mark the plains where so many resistance fighters died ‘extending their
arms in salute over the seas to Louverture’ (Glissant 10-11).
77
Françoise Lionnet’s Postcolonial Representations offers a ‘feminist comparative’ approach that attempts to
find a space for dialogue between what could become dichotomous categories, epistemologies or groups of
women which undermine the promise of women’s solidarity and feminist critical theory. Lionnet argues that
métissage, a dynamic process of multidirectional cultural patterns of influence, is ‘universal’ even if, in each
specific context, power relations produce widely diverse configurations, hierarchies, dissymmetries, and
contradictions. Examining postcolonial women’s writing from different parts of the world including Botswana,
Franco-Algeria, Jamaica, and the US, Lionnet highlights the interconnectedness of literary traditions, and
discusses the approaches and insights of women writers and their perceptions into the complex formation of
identities and the flux of cultures. In an earlier book Lionnet uses métissage to examine a series of women’s
autobiographical writing in juxtaposition with St. Augustine and Nietzsche. She defines métissage in this work,
however, in particularly structuralist terms. See Françoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices.
78
Although there is no room to delve into it with any kind of depth in this study, the interdisciplinary and
increasingly popular approaches to reading offered by ecocriticism, and particularly the relations that
ecocriticism draws between nature and culture and its concern with the natural world in general, would have
further developed the analysis of these two works. Both Ahmed and Dangarembga’s works allude in passing to
key developmental projects that have garnered major ecological debate within Egypt and Zimbabwe for
decades: the High Dam in the former, the urban planning and development of the reserves and colonial
settlements in the latter, and various concerns of agricultural development in both. The importance given in
Dangarembga’s and Ahmed’s texts to sustaining and preserving the nature that is part of one’s birthright,
conditioning, and source of sustenance, and the implicit call for an ethical, intellectual involvement and ‘green’
activism runs in parallel with ecocriticism’s primary tenets. Since my study as a whole draws more on
Postcolonial, gender and World Literature theory, however, ecocriticism has been left for another day.
79
For an analysis of geographical space as an indicator of larger, socio-economic flows whether on global scales
of multinational capital or in national-particular issues of class, gender and regional development, see some of
Doreen Massey’s now classic work in Space, Place, and Gender. See esp. chapters 8-9, pp. 185-211, for an
examination of how space and place and our perceptions of them are gendered. For the intertwining of gender
and nation, see, for example, Elleke Boehmer’s Stories of Women and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather. For
a discussion of gendered images of landscape in literature, see, for example, Annette Kolodny’s The Land
Before Her on the American Frontier in narratives, letters and diaries. For a short and informative summary of
approaches to how the national landscape is ‘gendered’ in political debates during times of nation-building, see
Shachar Pinsker’s “Imagining the Beloved”. Focusing on the gender dimensions of the Zionist state reflected in
several modern Hebrew texts, Pinsker points to the work of various scholars on the imaging of the nation as
wife, mother and lover, and the description of territory, land and language as a woman to be cherished, protected
or fertilised. In her introduction to critical writing on the matter she mentions among others Benedict Anderson,
Anne Kolodny, Margaret Homans, George Mosse, Nira Yuval-Davis and Flora Anthias.
80
On the primacy of geographical landscape and territory also see Said’s “Nationalism, Colonialism, and
Literature” where he mentions the topographical or agricultural change wrought by colonial settlers in South
America, Australia and India (76-79).
81
See on this topic Christopher Okonkwo’s “Space Matters” for a thematic analysis of the use of geographical
and bodily space in Dangarembga’s work.
234
82
Jalal al-Din Mohamed Al-Rumi (1207-73) was a theologian, jurist and teacher. Rumi was born in the TurkoMuslim part of what was then Persia, now Afghanistan and Tajikistan. As a child he moved with his family
across Baghdad, Hijaz, Mecca, Damascus and around Turkey. The family settled in Karaman (Turkey) for some
time before finally relocating to Konya, where Rumi lived most of his life and where his shrine today has
become a place of pilgrimage. Originally written in Persian but widely translated and greatly circulated, Rumi’s
work had a strong influence on Iranian, Turkish and Central Asian Muslim cultures and those of the Indian
subcontinent. Where Sufism travelled across the huge geographical expanse of Islamic culture from Iran to
Ethiopia and from Yemen to Morocco, Rumi’s influence travelled with it, and, with spiritualism’s mobility,
transferred beyond its initial geographical borders.
83
Sufi and unhu humanism are also comparable as ways of achieving societal well-being through the individual
acquiring good conduct, character and acculturation. They have both been considered subversive countercultures to political discourses: in mainstream Islamic narratives in the former case, and within decolonisation
movements in Zimbabwe and in South Africa in the case of the latter.
84
Black studies theory has drawn on the history of the Nile Valley civilisations and ancient Egypt in particular
as proof of a pre-slavery ‘classical heritage’. See, for example, Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. Also referred to in
Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (59-60; 187-91; 208-11). This vision famously appears in all its global connectedness in
Langston Hughes’ poem “The Negro Dreams of Rivers”. Although the Nile connects North Africa with subSaharan Africa, the contemporary African cultures through which it flows mostly do not stress this link.
85
It has also, for example, been considered as an early image of the cross, or the Coptic cross.
86
As discussed in the previous chapter Milan Kundera starts off The Unbearable Lightness of Being by referring
to one of those stories of the Nile: the Old Testament story of baby Moses.
87
On the idea of the ‘road’ as a connector (or more specifically, being ‘on the road’, that is, ‘on the move’) in
African literatures and how ‘roads’ may show the conjunction of African literature with and into World
Literature, see Nirvana Tanoukhi’s “African Literature and World Literature”. Of the works referred to here,
Tanoukhi includes in her discussion Dangarembga, Achebe and Salih.
88
For what the peasants working the land might say of Nasser, see Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land
discussed in the following chapter.
89
These include: “the outright alienation of African land, the heavy subsidization of European farming
endeavours, the provision of extension services exclusively to European farmers, and the legislation of
marketing arrangements that favoured European over African producers” (Schmidt 3). For an overview of the
economy and change in infrastructure where Schmidt’s account stops, specifically from UDI to independence
(1965-80) see Stoneman and Davies, “The Economy: An Overview”.
90
For Turner’s theories on ‘liminality’ and ‘structure’ see The Forest of Symbols and The Ritual Process. For
Edward Said’s brief use of Victor Turner’s terms (in relation to Kipling’s Kim), see Culture and Imperialism,
p.170.
91
The image of cultivated gardens, private and public, physical or figurative, and the territorial politicised act of
owning or working fertile land is stressed and expanded in The Book of Not.
92
A large number of Arabic feminist writers, for example, have appropriated the figure of Scheherazade as a
symbol of the power of women’s oral knowledge in their titles or fiction, from Fatima Mernissi to Nawal Al
Saadawi. One of the books, for example, published by The Women and Memory Forum NGO in Cairo within a
project to rewrite local tales from a gender-sensitive point of view is significantly entitled ‘What Scheherazade
didn’t say’ (See Kamal).
93
Examples are legion. An earlier ‘generation’ of women autobiographies either self-narrated or edited and
published posthumously include those by leading figures of the Arabic feminist movement in the early twentieth
century: Egyptian Nabawia Musa’s tarīkhi bi-qalami [My History], Lebanese Anbara Salam Al-Khalidi’s jawla
fi-l dhikrayāt bayna lubnān wa filastīn [A Journey in Memory Between Lebanon and Palestine], and TurcoEgyptian Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years. There has also been a noticeable move to republish, translate and
suitably index similar works in the past few decades. See, for example, Radwa Ashour, Ferial J. Ghazoul and
Hasna Reda-Mekdashi’s bibliographic Arab Women Writers.
94
Ahmed’s also comes from a now large and growing body of nostalgia-infused memoirs of Cairo and
Alexandria. See, for example, on Alexandria: Harry Tzalas’s collection of short stories Farewell to Alexandria
and autobiographical Seven Days at the Cecil; Robert Solé’s novel The Alexandria Semaphore; Jacqueline
Cooper’s anecdotal short stories Cocktails and Camels. For Cairo, see Pierre and Anna Cachia’s autobiography
Landlocked Lives; Colette Rossant’s memoir/recipe book Apricots on the Nile and Samia Serageldin’s memoir
The Cairo House.
95
As Selma Leydesdorff remarks in her introduction to Gender and Memory: “In the 1980s, much of the
groundbreaking work in oral history was done in migrant communities where the particulars of women’s roles
were studied….These women remember their cultures of origin in different ways….[T]he borders between
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autobiography and work on memory are often fluid –a factor that… continue[s] to influence the field of oral
history” (x).
96
It is significant that feminist criticism in the 1970s would be partly responsible in changing the literary
discussion of autobiography as a genre, which was until the early 1980s almost exclusively discussed as the life
stories of great men. It was leading feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter and Juliet Mitchell who
examined the lives of major women novelists to discuss how they resisted patriarchal constraints with their
fiction. See Chamberlain and Thompson, esp. pp. 4-5. Writing on (black) narratives in the Black Atlantic Gilroy
refers to the role of black women’s autobiography in resisting the idea that the intellectual power of the
abolitionist movement was exclusively generated by white commentators. Narratives written by black men and
women on their own experiences “express in the most powerful way a tradition of writing in which
autobiography becomes an act or process of simultaneous self-creation and self-emancipation….[A] new
discursive economy emerges with the refusal to subordinate the particularity of the slave experience to the
totalising power of universal reason held exclusively by white hands, pens, or publishing houses. Authority and
autonomy emerge directly from the deliberately personal tone of this history….[T]hese narratives …[show] that
in the hands of slaves the particular can wear the mantle of truth and reason as readily as the universal” (69).
97
For a discussion of the intersections of religion and ethnicity (or ‘tribalism’) in Africa’s modern states, and the
role of Islam, Christianity and indigenous African religions as fragmentary or unifying, subnational or
transnational, see Ali Mazrui’s interesting article “Transnational Ethnicity and Subnational Religion in Africa”.
98
See E. Kim Stone on the bedroom as a location for the formation of single women’s performative space in
Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. For the idea of gender as performative, see Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
(although the concept will not be used in this discussion). For a related discussion to both World Literature and
women’s living spaces see an essay by Deborah Weagel which briefly sheds light on the life and achievements
of Juana Inés de la Cruz in seventeenth-century Spain through appropriating a ‘room of her own’. Deborah
Weagel, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Seventeenth-Century New Spain and Finding a Room of One’s Own”.
99
Elleke Boehmer discusses how Tambu and Nyasha’s ‘special female relationship’ may exemplify a kind of
subtle encoding of queer relationships in literature. See “Tropes of Yearning and Dissent: The Troping of Desire
in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga”. From a Bildungsroman point of view, this is also very similar to the
‘best friend’ relationship among men: random examples include Pip and Herbert in Great Expectations and Ram
and Font in Beer in the Snooker Club, besides of course the friendships that in fact are gay such as those in
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990).
100
Schmidt alludes to the form of kutya within Shona society as the “utmost form of respect” or literally “fear”:
“Just as it was the duty of children to respect and obey their fathers, and junior men their elders, it was the duty
of wives to respect and obey their husbands” (19). Although the precise word kutya is not used in Nervous
Conditions, the idea of Nyasha’s ‘respect’ or lack thereof seems similar.
101
Thus, for example the ‘solution’ of a Christian marriage ceremony forced by Babamukuru on his brother
Jeremiah in order to legalise and validate the latter’s relationship to the mother of his children (but also to
prevent Jeremiah taking a second wife and bringing the social, although not at the time illegal, shame of
polygamy to Babamukuru’s immediate family). Feeling that such a ceremony somehow invalidated her own
existence and made a mockery of her life, Tambu refuses to attend as an adult bridesmaid in her parents’
‘wedding’. Babamukuru may have good intentions but to the other people concerned they seem out of place. As
a representative of ‘progressive Africans’, Babamukuru, like others of his time, “laboured to create a
‘progressive’ African family and one of the ways they did so was to reshape [the contractual forms of] gender
relations” (Ranger Are We Not Also Men? 33).
102
It would later be this affluent class of the black population arising from an urban labour and entrepreneurial
force and missionary intervention that, as in the case of many other colonies, would form a significant part of
the opposition to white rule. For an analysis of the economic distribution and social mobility in Zimbabwe (after
UDI from the 1960s to the 1980s), see Coenraad Brand, “The Anatomy of an Unequal Society”.
103
Fanon’s famous argument about the emasculation of the black man by colonisation was taken up by antiracist movements around the world. According to Anthias and Yuval-Davis: “Activists in the Black Power
movement in the US in the 1960s, and which in its turn, has affected the British Black (and many other) radical
movements, were very affected by Fanon’s work and saw their task as reclaiming their manhood (in terms of the
‘humanhood’ of Blacks as well as with a touch of machismo)” (140).
104
Grewal and Kaplan argue that transnational feminist practices require comparative work that seeks to
“articulate the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal
nationalisms, ‘authentic’ forms of traditions, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on
multiple levels” (17). See their introduction to Scattered Hegemonies, pp. 1-33.
105
See Nadia Gindi’s “Ducit amor patriae: Which Country?”
106
On the European domestic patterns of womanhood that were incorporated within the colonial state through
missionary education, see Schmidt, esp. ch. 5, pp. 122-54. Of course, as Michael West puts it: “The cult of
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domesticity was not…simply a missionary or government imposition on Africans. Both female and male
members of the emerging middle class voluntarily subscribed to it” (qtd. in Ranger 59). In his biography of a
black Methodist South Rhodesian couple, Ranger presents a counter-opinion to Schmidt’s argument. “Schmidt
quotes –and certainly accurately– many examples of early missionary abuse of African women as backward and
superstitious and as a dead-weight on the progress of Christian men. She does not bring out, however, that the
Methodist Church, in common with all others, came to be increasingly a church of women. Women were the
faithful members, men the backsliders” (Ranger 40). During the Depression of the 1930s, the great period of
Shona independency, it was everywhere the women’s movements which held the day for mission Christianity.
The women’s movements, too, were the most successful in converting chiefs and spirit mediums (Ranger 42).
See Ranger, esp. ch. 2, “Making Class, Redefining Gender”, pp. 32-62.
107
According to Pheng Cheah: “Since one cannot see the universe, or world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan
optic is not one of perceptual experience but of the imagination. World literature is…a type of world-making
activity that enables us to imagine a world” (“What is a World?” 26). Or elsewhere: “Literature creates the
world and cosmopolitan bonds not only because it enables us to imagine a world through its powers of
figuration, but also, more importantly, because it arouses in us pleasure and a desire to share this pleasure
through universal communication. Literature enhances our sense of (being a part of) humanity, indeed even
brings humanity into being because it leads to sociability” (“What is a World?” 27).
108
See on a related matter, Elleke Boehmer’s ‘worlding’ of patriotic verse in the British Empire. The ‘jingo
poem’, she argues, “was, before the 1950s pop-song, probably one of the most culturally migrated or ‘worlded’
of literary genres” (22). See Elleke Boehmer, “The Worlding of the Jingo Poem”.
109
Of course Leila has her own ‘wind in the willows’ motif running through the book. The book’s opening lines
go: “There was, to begin with, always the sound –sometimes no more than a mere breath– of the wind in the
trees, each variety of tree having its own music, its own way of conversing” (3). The image recurs frequently: “I
remember it as a time, that era of my childhood, when existence itself seemed to have its own music –a lilt and
music that made up the ordinary fabric of living. There was the breath of the wind always, and the perpetual
murmur of trees” (47). Ahmed, however, directly links the music in the trees to the sound of the street reed
player in Cairo.
110
Phenomenally successful, like most of Dahl’s books, Matilda would travel around the world, in English and
in translation. It remains one the best-selling children’s books world-wide today.
111
These are the same ‘familiar red roofs’ of England that Ram dreams of visiting, mentioned in Chapter 1.
112
This ‘dichotomised’ bicultural position might perhaps depict the typical, or stereotypical, postcolonial
‘condition’, but more accurately I think exemplifies a state of ‘worldliness’, of being, in Ahmed’s words,
‘plural’, and subsequently, caught between dichotomous political discourses of resistance and assimilation. As
Rey Chow writes, referring to her work on femininity in modern Chinese literature: “Although the point that we
must not be trapped within dichotomies is a familiar one, many of us, especially those who experience racial,
class, or gendered dichotomies from the unprivileged side, are still within the power of dichotomization as an
epistemological weapon. The above kind of interrogation [Why are you using Western/Western feminist theory
on China?] slaps me in the face with the force of a nativist moralism, precisely through a hierarchical dichotomy
between West and East that enables my interrogators to disapprove of my ‘complicity’ with the West. Such
disapproval arises, of course, from a general context in which the criticism of the West has become mandatory.
However, where does this general critical imperative leave those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is,
precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already ‘Westernized’? For someone with my
educational background, which is British colonial and American, the moralistic charge of my being ‘too
Westernized’ is devastating; it signals an attempt on the part of those who are specialists in ‘my’ culture to
demolish the only premises on which I can speak” (“Violence in the Other Country” 90-91). She continues:
“This…brings to the fore the cultural predicament that faces all of those who have to negotiate their way into
dominant channels of representation….‘[T]radition’ is huge and crippling; as it weighs us down it also gives
shape to our movements and gestures….On the other hand, the Chinese [and non-Chinese] intellectual knows
that she must fight her way into the world precisely because she is already, in one way or another,
‘Westernized’” (91) [italics in original].
113
See also Yuval-Davis’s concept of ‘transversalism’ which she suggests as a way between universalism and
relativism in feminist global culture. Transversalism, which she adopts from an Italian group working
particularly with Palestinian and Israeli women, uses as keywords ‘rooting’ and ‘shifting’. The idea is that each
participant in the dialogue brings with her the rooting in her own membership and identity, but at the same time
tries to shift in order to put herself in a situation of exchange with women who have different membership and
identity. They call this form of dialogue ‘transversalism’ –to differentiate it from ‘universalism’ which, by
assuming a homogenous point of departure, ends up being exclusive instead of inclusive, and ‘relativism’ which
assumes that, because of the differential points of departure, no common understanding and genuine dialogue
are possible at all (Gender & Nation 129-30). See also Leydesdorff et al’s notes on the need to recognise
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“plurality as a basic feature of the human condition” in context of feminism since feminism has ceased to be
“simply a social and political movement of middle-class women” (5-7).
114
Renya Ramirez, for example, has stressed the importance of linking race, tribal nation and gender as nonhierarchal and linked categories of analysis to adequately explain and cover the oppression of “American
Indian” women, and to ward off the threat of ‘nationalist’ struggle overwhelming the feminist one. See also
Nagel who gives the example of the women military fighters during Algeria’s fight for independence, who, after
independence in 1969 were expected to return to the kitchen, or the case (at the time of Nagel’s article) in
Palestine, where some activists subsumed women’s rights under the priority of fighting for statehood. Yet
women’s movements too, change their organisational methods according to context. On an anecdotal angle, a
meeting was held in Cairo in 2012 by the Coalition of Egyptian Feminist Organizations (collaborating after the
January 2011 Revolution) with the aim of producing a draft constitutional document concerning the protection
of women’s rights, and which was to be delivered in tandem with the demands of other civil rights’
organisations at the time. One of the few men attendees, a lawyer for a civil rights organisation suggested (yet
again) ‘linking’ the constitutional amendments related to women to a ‘wider’ and more general cause. This was,
he argued, a practical suggestion, so that the demands could have more of a chance of being considered by the
(interim, as it turned out), government. The suggestion was met with an almost collective blank refusal. “We
tried that many times before and then we become marginalised”, one of the women attendees answered. “This
time our cause shall not be subsumed or swallowed.” For more on this project, see “The Women and
Constitution Working Groups Document” on The Women and Memory Forum website.
115
See Hosn Aboud’s article published in both Arabic and English giving a short bibliography of key studies of
Islamic feminism in the past few decades.
116
In an interview Ghosh corrects his interviewer who suggests the two stories (historical and Ghosh’s
experience) follow each other by saying: “Actually the narratives don’t follow on each other: they are joined
together in a helical pattern” (Stankiewicz 536). Picking up on this movement Ato Quayson writes that Antique
Land “calls for an evaluation of history as a process of mirroring in which the past is often reiterated but with an
easy-to-miss difference” [my italics] (11).
117
See Claire Chamber’s interview with Ghosh. “You know, it’s a strange thing about In an Antique Land, that
so many people think it’s a novel. Homi Bhabha teaches it and he told me at great length just the other day why,
philosophically, it’s a novel. But I know that it’s not a novel. I didn’t make up single word of it” (Chambers 28).
Or in another interview, Ghosh takes care to stress: “When people describe Antique Land as a novel, or as
‘fiction’, I think they are actually referring to the book’s structure rather than its content. But this is misleading
in my view because the book is…strictly nonfictional” (Stankiewicz 536).
118
Something that Clifford enthusiastically seizes upon in his commentary in the London Review of Books
where he describes Antique Land as “part travel memoir, part archival detective story, and part experiment in
multi-locale ethnography” (26).
119
As such, two reviewers could find the same book praiseworthy or lacking for precisely the same quality. One
reviewer writes: “Ghosh’s excellent account of the Geniza’s discovery is marred by persistent intrusions of a
sweeping anti-imperialist sentiment –reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism” [My italics] (Elukin 138).
Standing on exactly the opposite plane, Egyptian-British writer Ahdaf Soueif applauded the book’s ‘worthy
motivation’, ‘fairness of attitude’ and ‘generosity of spirit’ in recounting the theft of the Geniza documents, but
refuted that it could be ‘representational’ of Egypt (“Intimately Egyptian” 15).
120
This linear projection criticised by Postcolonial studies has not of course been limited to the ‘Orient’ of
Africa, Asia and America but also to the ‘Orient’ of Europe, vividly apparent, for example, in the ‘deep freeze’
theory which was a popular explanation for the nationalist movements after the disintegration of the Soviet
Union. It was commonly thought that the Cold War had kept national or ethnic conflicts “frozen” but then “a
thaw” had appeared and so old conflicts re-surfaced. This was referred to as “the return of history” (Goldmann
et al 14). See also in the same volume Jerzy Tomaszewski, “From Internationalism to Nationalism? Poland
1944-96”.
121
Perhaps this is why some of Ghosh’s most intuitive readers and working collaborators have been those using
Postcolonial and Subaltern approaches. For brief discussions of or allusions to Ghosh’s works from these
perspectives, see, for example, Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakravarty, Correspondence; Elleke Boehmer,
“Global and Textual Webs”; and Elleke Boehmer and Anshuman A Mondal, “Networks and Traces”. For longer
discussions see Tabish Khair ed., Amitav Ghosh; and Tabish Khair et al, eds., Other Routes.
122
Braudel differentiates between a ‘world-economy’ (or ‘world-theatre’) and ‘world economy’, where the
former concerns a fragment of the world, but is “an economically autonomous section of the planet able to
provide for most of its own needs, a section to which its internal links and exchanges give a certain organic
unity” (Civilization and Capitalism 3:22). Although much of Braudel’s magnanimous work has been on the
post-1500 Mediterranean world, Braudel often states that there were always world-economies, just as there have
been societies, civilisations, states and even empires, from ancient Phoenicia until the present. For the argument
238
of whether or not the hyphen is required, see The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, eds.
Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, especially the contributions by Immanuel Wallerstein, “World System
Versus World-Systems”, pp. 292-96, and Janet Abu Lughod, “Discontinuities and Persistence”, pp. 278-91.
123
See also an article which refers briefly to ‘new approaches’ to the markets of the 13th-15th centuries,
specifically in Granada, Italy and parts of the Northern African coast, and which examines these routes as being
connected by ‘complementary commercial zones’, often sustained by the efforts of groups of local traders,
rather than solely different regional economies controlled by the external agency of a metropolis. See Ádela
Fábregas García, “Other Markets”.
124
Such communal affinities can be seen in books of genealogies of the 10 th-13th centuries in Arabic which often
affiliated people and families to cities and towns, like Baghdad or Damascus or Khwarizm, despite the existence
of larger political entities like Iraq and India. Some of the more famous include ‘al-Hamadhani’ of maqama
fame (i.e, from Hamadhan), ‘al-Khawārizmi’ (anglicised as Algoritmi, from Khawarizm), and one of the writers
discussed in this chapter, Yaqūt al-Hamawi al-Baghdādi (from Baghdad). Similar surnames remain today,
although of course the genealogy is untraceable, and their owners may carry very different nationalities. Such
names and the origins and travel routes they hint at are referred to directly by Ghosh when he writes in Antique
Land of meeting people whose names “spoke of links with distant parts of the Arab world –cities in the Levant,
the Sudan and the Maghreb….a legacy of transience [which] had not ended with their ancestors either” (173).
125
Thus, critics could discuss the tragic burning of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and by the US and UK in
2003, elliptically, according to the critics’ respective approaches precisely because Baghdad had been
constructed and reconstructed politically and culturally for centuries as a town-metropolis (whether flourishing
or inglorious). Edward Said, for example, often condemned the common description of Baghdad as a place of
insignificance during the war on Iraq and the destruction of the city by American and British armies in 2003,
stressing that it had been the city in the twentieth century from where some of the finest modernist Arabic poets
had emerged. He compares the destruction of Baghdad in 2003 to its destruction in 1215 by the Mongols, the
latter event signalling the official end of the Abbasid age, and one which, because of its atrocity, had been
tersely referred to in Arabic as simply ‘the burning of Baghdad’. (After the American-British invasion a date is
now supplied to this phrase). From another perspective, Vilashini Cooppan explains one objective of teaching
World Literature by giving an example of two disparate historical narratives of Baghdad, that of Haroun Al
Rashid’s in 1001 Nights and that flashing fire and smoke on CNN in modern Iraq: “One culture’s Baghdad is
not another’s. The observation of this fact stages both an ethical obligation…and a historical obligation” (39).
Meanwhile Bruce Robbins criticises Wai Chee Dimock’s perspective of ‘deep time’ (Through Other
Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time [2006]) which juxtaposes both incidents without due
explanation of historical context. See Robbins, “Uses of the World Literature”. See also Djelal Kadir’s
comparative discussion of the two (and interim and related) invasions in “The Siege of Baghdad”, Memos from
the Besieged City, pp. 41-63.
126
See Ira M Lapidus’s Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages which delves into the socio-political allegiances
in cities such as Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo from 1250-1517, but with reference to other cities like
Alexandria, Beirut and Tripoli. Lapidus asserts the importance of seeing the cities as a series of social structures,
allegiances, and networks that changed continuously based on the changing patterns of class and family
structures, economic sophistication, technological competence, and forms of business enterprise.
127
In Antique Land Ghosh mentions, for example: al-Idrissi (b. Ceuta 1100-d. Sicily 1165), Ibn Jubayr (b.
Valencia 1145-d. Cairo 1217), Ibn Battuta (b. Tangier 1304-d. Morocco 1377), and Abd al-Razzaq alSamarqandi (b. Herat, Iran 1413-d. Herat? 1482). In his essay on Bomma in Subaltern Studies, Ghosh also cites
Ibn Khoradadhbeh (b. Tabristan, Iran 820-d. Baghdad? 893), Ibn Hauqal (b. Nisibis, now Turkey-d. Baghdad ca.
977), al-Mas‘udi (b. Baghdad?- d. Cairo 957), and al-Sirafi’s akhbār al-Sīn w-al Hind (9th -10th c).
128
Ger. trans.: St. Petersburg 1823; Russ. trans.: Moscow 1939; Eng. trans.: London 1949.
129
Fr. trans: Paris 1861; Eng. trans.: London 1831.
130
Partial Fr. trans: Sicily 1846; Fr. trans: Leiden 1852 and Paris 1949; Italian trans: Rome 1906; Eng. trans.:
London 1952.
131
Ar. ed: Rome 1592; Latin trans.: Paris 1619; Fr. trans.: Paris 1837-39 and Paris 1940.
132
Fr. trans.: Paris 1881; Ar. trans.: Cairo 1943 ; Eng. trans. 2001.
133
On the archaeological front, see a recent article reporting on a shipwreck of Indian or Arab origin filled with
Chinese ware off the coast of Indonesia. See Michael Flecker, “A Ninth-Century AD Arab or Indian Shipwreck
in Indonesia”.
134
In the interests of a wider project it would be significant to compare the rihla-voyage (as an epistemological
or formative concept) in writings which were not written in Arabic within the same or overlapping sub-systems,
particularly during the spread of Arabic as a lingua franca. Obvious parallels would be Turkish, Persian and
Hebrew as the most prolific, but it would be equally enlightening to examine the convergence between Arabic
239
and various Indian vernaculars appearing in flourishing cities or entrepôts in the linked system. See on this last,
for example, Muzzaffar Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan”.
135
The word ‘traveller’ in Arabic (rahhāl or rahhāla) is both in the ‘exaggerated’ case to signify worthiness or
value and the case denoting a profession (al-Muwāfi 24).
136
Nassār argues that the rise in the literary standing of travel literature can be seen in the increase in the
number of major writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who tried their hands at travel
writing, a genre which had been until then usually practised by minor writers. Nassār justifies this to the rise of
literary prestige of prose (that is, the European-models of the short story and the novel) which automatically
gave travel accounts more literary value (126).
137
For recent anthologies of Arabic travel texts across Afroeurasia from the ninth until the late nineteenth
century, see, for example, Nabil Matar’s In the Lands of the Christians and “Two Journeys”; and Nassār’s Adab
al-rihla [Travel Literature] for an appendix list of less-known travel texts starting the ninth century, with
particular attention given to the shady period of 1600-1800. For anthologies of travel accounts originally written
in different languages across the region, see Constable; Khair et al; Alam et al; and Wasti.
138
Al-Hamawi refers here to the early move, popular with linguists, ‘philologists’ and religious men of letters
but also poets and prose writers who travelled to the desert to collect the sayings and biography of Mohammed
and the ‘pure’ Arabian/Arabic language from the Bedouins of Arabia and the steppes of Syria and Iraq, dialects
deemed all the more ‘authentic’ for their distance from urban centres. The search for ‘purity’ and ‘correctness’
would gradually become outdated and strongly debated –giving rise to a wider scope of what adab (belleslettres) as artistic writing and proper behaviour might mean.
139
See also Kratchkovksy’s voluminous and now classic Tarīkh al-adab al-jughrāphi al-‘arabi [history of the
literature of Arabic geography] (1957; Ar. trans. 1965), the ponderous title of which reveals something of the
categorical blurriness of the travel texts.
140
Although the argument can be made for many of his works, see Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1987) in
particular, now a classic of partition literature in India, and also, pertinent to this context, a Bildungsroman.
141
By all accounts a kind of corrupt archaeology that has continued to the present: see Meskell’s article on
archaeological practices in Egypt.
142
On a short discussion of how the rihla-voyage, by bringing individuals and groups towards one or another
centre of Islamic teaching, united the wider community of the faithful (umma) while also developing a specific
sense of local consciousness, see El Moudden’s “The Ambivalence of rihla”.
143
‫ وربّما يلتقي الجمعان ويقع المصاف بينهم ورفاق‬،‫ومن أعجب ما يحدَّث به أن نيران الفتنة تشتعل بين الفئتين مسلمين ونصارى‬
‫خروج صالح الدين بجميع عسكر المسلمين لمنازلة‬...‫شاهدنا في هذا الوقت‬. ‫المسلمين والنصارى تختلف بينهم دون اعتراض عليهم‬
‫ بينه وبين القدس‬،‫ وهو المعترض في طريق الحجاز والمانع لسبيل المسلمين على البر‬،‫ وهو من أعظم حصون النصارى‬،‫حصن الك ََرك‬
.‫فنازله هذا السلطان وضيّق عليه وطال حصاره‬...‫ وهو سراراة أرض فلسطين‬،ً‫أشف قليال‬
‫مسيرة يوم أو‬
ّ
‫ وتجّار التصارى‬.‫ع َّكة كذلك‬
َ ‫ واختالف المسلمين من دمشق إلى‬.‫واختالف القوافل من مصر إلى دمشق على بالد اإلفرنج غير منقطع‬
‫ وتجّار النصارى‬.‫ وهي من األ َمنَة على غاية‬،‫ وللنصارى على المسلمين ضريبة يؤدّونها في بالدهم‬.‫أيضا ً ال يمنَع أحد منهم وال يعت ََرض‬
‫ والناس في‬،‫ وأهل الحرب مشتغلون بحربهم‬.‫ واالتفاق بينهم واالعتدال في جميع األحوال‬،‫أيضا ً يؤدّون في بالد المسلمين على سِلّعهم‬
.)260 ‫ والدنيا لمن غلب (رحلة ابن جبير‬،‫عافية‬
144
As this seems to be an intellectual preoccupation in many of Ghosh’s works, he is directly questioned about
it in an interview.
CC: [I]n the title of The Shadow Lines, you give us this great term, borrowed from Conrad, which is used to
question the artificial boundaries that divide disciplines from each other, or nations from each other. Is this
something you think about a lot?
AG: I do think about it a lot. But there again it’s partly just a result of being an Indian from the particular
intellectual moment I found myself in. Because disciplinary boundaries never had for us the kind of
absoluteness they have in the West. So I think you’ll see it’s not just me; many Indians who’ve done really
interesting work over the last 15 or 20 years have similarly combined completely different things. Like
Subaltern Studies, which is partly anthropology, partly history, and out of that you get something really rich and
interesting. I mean I don’t always understand what Gayatri or Homi Bhabha are saying [laughs], but you get the
sense that they’re coming out of that same tradition. A lot of these people are people of my generation: we
belong to a moment when those disciplinary boundaries weren’t really set. We were just trying to talk about the
world as we saw it. Some people did this through history, some through criticism, and for me it was through the
novel, because for me there’s nothing so interesting as the novel. In my view the novel is the most interesting
form because nowhere else, not in history, not in anthropology, are people at the centre, individual people”
(Chambers 34).
145
This has in modern times brought up disciplinary questions when trying to differentiate between, for
example, mediaeval works of geography, history and travel literature. The first two were differentiated by name
but used the same empirical methods and aesthetic criteria and so often overlapped, while ‘literature’ in its
240
modern sense is a relatively recent construction. Most writers acknowledge a ‘generic difference’ but offer only
tentative and impressionistic ways of distinguishing these texts, such as al-Muwāfi who suggests a tripartite
division into al-jughrafia al-wasfiyya (descriptive geography), al-adab al-jughrāfi (literary geography) and
adab al-rihla (travel literature); or Nassār who refers to texts that indulge too often in flights of fantasy as being
closer to the qissa (story) and those that adopt a ‘dry scientific’ tone as being geography or urban topography
(39). Scholarship from the Maghreb often suggests a formalist way out: Moudden, for example, differentiates
between the literature of travel (as a body of texts) and the literariness of texts (through narratology). On the
difference between History and adab, see Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period,
particularly on how the fields of history and literature first arose and then diverged during the early centuries of
Islam.
146
See Fredrik Barth on political pan-Islamism as a national and transnational movement in relation to early and
mid-twentieth century Arab national movements. Fredrik Barth, “Are Islamists Nationalists or
Internationalists?”
147
See, for example, Amitav Ghosh, “The Man Behind the Mosque”. For a further look at the Sanskritic
Hinduisation of modern Indian nationalism see Partha Chaterjee, “Claims of the Past”.
148
On slave and free boys brought up under patronage of rulers as ‘foster children’ in western and southern Iraq
in the tenth and eleventh centuries, see Mottahedeh, pp. 82-93.
149
The Baybars narrative, for example, telling a common slave-to-sultan storyline has been popular in diverse
forms for centuries. It is innovatively interweaved in Rabih Alameddine’s novel The Hakawati (2008).
150
‫وهو‬...‫وفيما يذكر أن في الصين ثالث مائة مدينة كلها عامرة وفيها عدة ملوك لكنهم تحت طاعة البغبوغ والبغبوغ يقال له ملك الملوك‬
‫ملك حسن السيرة عادل في رعيته رفيع في همته قادر في سلطانه مصيب في آرائه حازم في اجتهاده شهم في إرادته لطيف في حكمته‬
‫حليم في حكمه وهاب في عطائه ناظر في األمور القريبة والبعيدة بصير بالعواقب تصل أمور عبيده المستضعفين إليه من غير منع وال‬
‫] من ذلك أنه له في قصره مجلسا ً قد اتقن بنيانه وأحكم سمكه وأبدعت محاسنه له فيه كرسي ذهب يجلس فيه ووزراؤه‬.[‫توسط‬
‫فيمد الملك يده إلى المظلوم ويأخذ بالكتاب منه‬...‫حتى يقف بين يدي الملك‬...‫فيصعد المظلوم‬...‫فإذا جاء المظلوم بكتاب مظلمته‬...‫حوله‬
‫وينظر فيه ثم يدفعه إلى وزرائه ويحكم له بما يجب الحكم به بما يقتضيه مذهبه وشرعه من غير تسويف وال تطويل وال وساطة وزير‬
‫] ودينه عبادة البدود وبين مذهبه‬.[‫وال حاجب ومع ذلك فإنه مجتهد في دينه مقيم لشريعته ديان محافظ كثير الصدقة على الضعفاء‬
‫] وأهل الهند والصين كلهم ال ينكرون الخالق ويثبتونه بحكمته وصنعته األزلية وال يقولون بالرسل وال‬.[‫ومذهب الهندية انحراف يسير‬
.)97-98 ‫بالكتب وفي كل حال ال يفارقون العدل واإلنصاف (نزهة المشتاق‬
151
This was neither unique to the mediaeval Jews (see Jonathan P. Berkey on the ‘magic’ fountain in the
Fatimid madrasa in Cairo), nor to mediaeval peoples, for similar practices remain in the present.
152
An interesting digression here would be to compare the description of the Multan statue and its town in other
chroniclers whether Arabic or otherwise. If the statue was visited for blessings by Muslim traders of the market
town, then it might suggest one way into the idea so difficult to popularise in either orthodox Islamic history or
the national history of India, that “the Indian nation as a whole might have a claim on the historical legacy of
Islam” (Chatterjee “Claims on the Past” 46). Chatterjee adds that “the curious fact is, of course, that this
historicist conception of Hindu nationalism has had little problem in claiming for itself the modern heritage of
Europe” (46). This is precisely the case in Arabic national history where ideas of ‘European modernity’ is often
said to have affected modern Arabic-Islamic reformers but very little is said about the integral ties between India
and the Middle East. If the relations between the two regions in classical times must have left traces, in modern
times, even thirty years before non-alignment, the mutual resistance against British occupation would give
Egypt and India tangible ties of affinity. There seemed nothing strange that Gandhi would visit Saad Zaghloul,
the leader of the Egyptian resistance movement, on the former’s visit to Egypt in the 1930s, or that a story
would circulate in Egyptian circles in the 1920s to the effect that the British had exiled Saad Zaghloul to
Seychelles rather than to Ceylon for fear of the latter’s proximity to India.
153
“The term [merchant] was generally not used for the keeper of a small shop or a peddler, for a tājir was a
substantial man of business who could be assumed to have considerable assets” (Mottahedeh 117).
154
Originally of ‘Rumi’ (Central Asian/Byzantine) origin, al-Hamawi was bought as a slave by an illiterate
merchant who needed a business agent. The merchant sent Yāqūt to learn how to read and write, and
commissioned him to perform his business duties, sending him on long journeys. With his elementary education
and long travel experience, and being an autodidact of considerable skill, Yāqūt gradually became known as a
scholar. He temporarily left his master’s service to work in the book-seller’s market, but finding it much less
profitable or satisfactory, he soon returned to his master and the commerce-travel life. After his master died,
Yāqūt, using some of the property his master had willed him, started investing on his own behalf, and became a
renowned merchant-scholar himself. See introduction to Mu‘jam al buldān [dictionary of places] (7-15).
155
The Geniza documents show that many trading ships and vessels were owned by people related to or
employed by government (which contained most of the lettered elite): the sultan, members of the royal
household, local rulers and princes, military commanders, viziers and judges in addition to the well-to-do
(Khalilieh 218).
241
For example, “wealthy young men often gave a greater dignity to their ‘grand tour’ of the Islamic world, or
their pilgrimage to Mecca, by studying hadīth on the way” (Mottahedeh 141). A certain type of travelogue
specifically listed all the lectures attended by travellers on their route. While not of this type, Ibn Jubayr and
Khusraw list at length the lectures they attend as they travel.
157
Scholarly contexts that were non-religious include Coptic scribes working for Mamluk beys in the eighteenth
century and then later under Mohammed Ali (Hanna In Praise of Books 13; 53-54; 107-08).
158
See on this topic also Bloom’s Paper Before Print on the 8th-13th centuries; and Hanna’s In Praise of Books
on 16th-18th century Cairo.
159
In addition to contracts, deeds, endowments, etc., Hanna cites the voluminous letters written in sub-standard
language by people who had not been college-educated but who could still write.
160
Hanna emphasises the commonly held view that trade centres are more likely to have a higher literacy rate
than other communities and adds that at times of intensive trade the rate of literacy would increase (“Literacy”
183), giving examples from Timbuktoo (eighteenth century) and Cairo (in the twelfth and eighteenth centuries).
161
See Shawkat M. Toorawa’s Ibn Abi Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture for an illuminating look at reading
and writing culture, particularly booksellers and book production, in ninth-century Baghdad. Meanwhile the
image of a busy booksellers’ network sustained by schools of calligraphy, coffee houses, storytelling and gossip
inspires Rafik Schami’s The Calligrapher’s Secret, (originally written in German), a novel set in 1950s
Damascus.
162
This can be seen in the travel texts where writers, whether they hailed from Tangiers or Khurasan,
intentionally and repeatedly cited the same ‘authorities’ for centuries. Ibn Jubayr, for example, whose travelogue
is often regarded as a prototype for the pilgrimage account quotes predecessors al-Mas‘udi (d.957) and al-Tabari
(d.923), both founding figures of literary geography and history, and both of whom produced their written works
based on their travels as proof of scholarship and worldliness. While writing, Ibn Jubayr (who would himself
become a ‘founding figure’ of travel literature) engages with a territory, route or itinerary that had been
previously mapped for him by predecessors and contemporaries.
163
El Moudden notes that for centuries when Moroccan pilgrims returned from Hijaz they traditionally found a
willing and ready audience among the literate and among the illiterate, many of whom “listened to [the
travellers’] long and frequently repeated oral reports” (76).
164
It is hard to find out with any degree of precision how much of the population in a certain area and time were
‘invested’ in trade, or how much of a start-up was needed, although merchants from the tenth century onwards
seem to have been regarded as prosperous. At later times smaller ventures seem to have been common in
various areas including Aleppo, Damascus, Cairo and Venice, an argument reiterated by court evidence in
Ottoman times. By the seventeenth century in Cairo court records show that investments could be modest or
very modest, even representing the entire savings of a minor tradesman and artisan (Hanna In Praise of Books
38).
156
165
‫الهاجرة ويقعد مستريحا ً في وطائه‬
‫الراكب فيها مع عديله في ك ِّن من لَ ْفح‬
ّ ‫ فيكون‬...‫ وهي أشبه المحامل‬،‫[فوق اإلبل] الشقاديف‬...‫وأحسن ما يستعمل‬
ِ
،‫ ممن يستجيز اللعب بالشطرنج‬،‫ ومن شاء‬.‫ومت َكئا ً ويتناول مع عديله ما يحتاج إليه من زاد وسواه ويطالع متى شاء المطالعة في مصحف أو كتاب‬
.)42( ‫عديله‬
‫أن ي‬
َ ‫العب‬
َ
166
Even though Khusraw becomes a religious scholar of some repute during his lifetime, neither scholars nor
chancery clerks were necessarily well-off. Khusraw mentions also in the Safarnameh that he walked for long
distances –the cheapest form of travel– and quite often seems to find himself out of funds.
167
Since travel might take a long time and was often expensive, for it might involve paying for food, clothing,
lodging, paper, transport by sea and a mount on land in addition to any incidental expenses, even those who
could afford it might have to wait until their money reached them on their travels. Touati tells the variously
recorded story of al-Tabari, the great historian and man of letters, who, having started his travels at a very young
age, was supported by his parents from whom he would often receive funds forwarded to him at the major stops
of his journey. When the money did not reach him in time, al-Tabari had to sell some of the sleeves of his tunic
(80). One of those sleeves of course, usually the right one, was often fashioned larger than the other to hold the
books that men of letters might carry with them (81). Whatever the initial reason for travel, any traveller might
turn to trade to fund his travel expenses en route (Nassār 11). Naseri Khusraw often finds himself in such a
situation, and once tells of bearing a letter of credit from someone he had just met in Aswan, Egypt to be
furnished with funds from the man’s agent in Jeddah, a debt I assume Khusraw would be expected to repay in
the future via similar channels (Safarnameh 135-36). Lunde et al write of Abu Hāmid al-Gharnāti, another great
traveller-scholar, who on his travels in Saqsīn (on the Volga) may “like other Muslim travellers” have combined
his role as “Muslim consultant” with trade, “for which [the slaves and furs of] Saqsīn and Bulghār offered
limitless opportunities” (xxviii).
168
Since Khusraw mentions that he manages to buy two full smart suits or tunics for thirty dinars in Basra
within the same few days then books seem to have been relatively cheaper than other commodities.
242
Books are listed in a Jewish bride’s dowry in Fatimid Cairo in 1218. Worth a whopping 250 dinars Goitein
surmises that she may have acquired them from her father, who was therefore too rich to be a scholar, but may
have been a physician or a scholarly physician. See S D Goitein, “Three Trousseaux of Jewish Brides from the
Fatimid Period”.
170
Such as the Baghdadi tailor whom Ibn Fadlan meets working in the court of the Bulgur king.
171
On the news run in tenth-century Baghdad: “[T]he largest and richest city west of China, rivalled in wealth
and size only by Cordoba…was a clearing house for geographic, commercial and political information. News
brought by merchants of the opening up of far northern lands to commercial exploitation, along with
information about other distant trading partners such as India, China and the Indonesian archipelago, filtered
into the works of the geographers, historians and scholars working in Baghdad and regional cultural centres”
(Lunde et al xiv).
172
See Ahmed Taymur for the original Arabic:
.)73( ‫ اللي تولد في مكة تجيب أخبارها الحجاج‬،(359) ‫العرب الرحالة تعرف طريق المية‬
173
The analogy between travel, trade and writing, especially in religious, scientific and judicial scholarship was
regularly used according to Touata: If travel and its hardship was important as a means of giving value to one’s
writings the voyage also served in some sense as currency, a “means of exchange”; and indeed the figure of
speech appears to have been common in mediaeval “literate discourse”, where “Muslim scholars often compare
‘knowledge’ with merchandise (bidā‘a), its acquisition to a commercial exchange (tijāra), and its domain to a
market (sūq)” (79-80).
174
It was “a lesson for those who would learn” (‫)عبرة ألولى األبصار‬. This poetic formula was often supported by
the religious exhortation that the way to understand something about God’s creation is by observation.
175
As a natural storyteller who is fascinated with faraway lands, the weaver Zaghloul in Antique Land
exemplifies this ‘wonder’ at the wide world; and it is to Zaghloul that Ghosh offers an imaginative rendering of
how to get from Egypt to India on a donkey, which would actually make a good travel story (172-73).
176
Qtd. in Toorawa, Ibn Abi Tayfur, p.79
177
Toorawa remarks in Ibn Abi Tayfur that the tendency of writers to ‘lift’ passages and sections from other
books without proper attribution could be seen as an accepted form of ‘raiding’, with such passages accepted as
spoils. See also Hussein Nassār who mentions that while there were some travel books (such as those discussed
here) which were considered prototypes or more popular ‘source-books’ than others, Arabic writers freely
helped themselves from books on geography, history, and even popular tales (76-78). On the “intertextuality” of
oral and written sources in manuscript culture, see also Walter J Ong: “Intertextuality refers to a literary and
psychological commonplace: a text cannot be created simply out of lived experience....Manuscript culture had
taken intertextuality for granted. Still tied to the commonplace tradition of the old oral world, it deliberately
created texts out of other texts, borrowing, adapting, sharing the common, originally oral, formulas and themes,
even though it worked them up into fresh literary forms impossible without writing” (133).
178
Prime trickster figure in Asian and Arabic popular tales: referred to among others as Guha, Juha, Hodja and
Nasruddin. It is hard to find a standard ‘compilation’ of his tales, or trace in which locale one tale began or
ended.
179
Latin trans. 1671 Philosophus Autodidactus; Eng. trans. The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in
the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan: 1686, rpt. 1708; Dutch trans. 1672, rpt. 1701.
180
Needless to say any view of some 1500 years of literary production around a single axis particularly with a
semi-global language like Arabic will sound airy. Yet the rihla-voyage can be considered a specific method of
knowledge acquisition (as well as motif, genre, etc.) and Arabic has, relatively, changed only little over
centuries of use. Whatever the reason, the understanding of a continuing ‘concept’ of the rihla-voyage seems
axiomatic in frequent writings on the subject. In addition to Nassār and Halifi above, El Moudden speaks of the
rihla-voyage first serving a sense of community and unity for travellers from the Maghreb during the early
centuries of Islam. Regardless of objective, the travelogues then generally flourished across North Africa from
1300-1800, and in Morocco in particular “from the sixteenth century onwards” (69). Husni Mahmūd Hussein
describes travel literature as drawing different literary maps, tracing travellers’ footsteps from about the tenth
century to the twentieth. Also Fathi A El-Shihibi’s published dissertation approaches the ‘evolution’ of the
travel genre as a centuries-long, linked expression of identity in Arabic literature.
181
See Geoffrey Roper’s biography of al-Shidyaq’s travels and scholarship.
182
On the use of the maqama tradition in al-Sāq ’ala al-sāq [Leg Over Leg], see Katia Zakharia, “Ahmad Faris
al-Shidyaq, auteur de ‘Maqamat’”. For an examination of the interplay of different ‘genres’ in the work, see
Mattityahu Peled, “Al-Saq ’ala al-saq: A Generic Definition”. For an examination of the location of Christian
reform within discourses of the modern Arabic Renaissance but which reflects on the genre of al-Sāq, see Nadia
Al-Bagdadi, “The Cultural Function of Fiction”.
183
The entry on ‘gift’ in the Oxford English Dictionary includes: 1.The action of giving or an instance of the
same; a bestowal. 2. The giving of gift: gratuitously, for nothing. 3. The power or right of giving. 4. Law: The
169
243
transference of property in a thing by one person to another, voluntarily and without any valuable consideration.
5. The thing given: a. Something, the possession of which is transferred to another without expectation or
receipt of an equivalent; a donation, present. b. Something of value proceeding from a specified source, quasipersonified as a giver. 6. Something given with a corrupting intention; a bribe. The entry on ‘debt’ in the Oxford
English Dictionary includes: 1. That which is owed or due; anything (as money, goods, or service) which one
person is under obligation to pay or render to another. 2a. A sum of money or a material thing. b. A thing
immaterial. c. That which one is bound or ought to do; (one's) duty. 3. Being ‘in debt’: a. Being under obligation
to pay or render something, owing something. b. Being under obligation to do something, duty, in duty bound,
as is due or right.
184
To avoid discussing who did what first and where, suffice it to say that Hussein underplays here the early
initiatives of the Syro-Lebanese, who in addition to literature were also largely responsible for the first
oppositional journalism in the region.
185
See “al-Adab al-‘arabi bayna amsihi wa-ghadāh” [Arabic Literature Between Past and Future], pp. 393, 410,
414 (twice). Also “al-Adab al-‘arabi wa makānatihi bayna al-adāb al-kubrā al-‘ālamia” [The Position of
Arabic Literature among Great World Literatures].
186
Mustaqbal al-thaqāfa fi misr [Future of Culture] (372)
187
Hussein does not seem to refer overtly to concurrent discussions on ‘comparative literature’ as a distinctive
discipline or to generic definitions of ‘literature’, although the topic was well discussed in the Arabic corpus and
a deeper contextualisation of Hussein’s work would definitely reap. Some of the best-known comparatists had
also visited or worked in Egypt in the early twentieth century. In 1943, for example, Taha Hussein worked with
René Etiemble to found the French Department at the University of Alexandria. See Douglas Johnson, “René
Etiemble: Leading the Fight Against the Threat of Franglais”. For the spread and institution of Comparative
Literature and its key theoretical texts in Arabic, see Ferial Ghazoul’s “Comparative Literature in the Arab
World”. For a discussion of critical debates on Arabic literary history vis-à-vis world culture see Nadia AlBagdadi’s “Registers of Arabic Literary History” and its significant bibliography; while Michael Allan’s “How
Adab Became Literary” compares the perspectives of Jurji Zaydan, H A R Gibb and Edward Said.
188
“Every Literature worthy of the name takes, gives and receives wealth from every direction. The important
thing is for the literature to retain its own character and cultivate its elements” (“al-Adab al-‘arabi bayna amsihi
wa ghadāh” [Arabic Literature Between Past and Future] 414).
‫ "األدب العربي‬."‫ والمهم أن يحتفظ األدب بشخصيته ويحرص على مقوماته‬.‫"فكل أدب خليق بهذا االسم يأخذ ويعطي ويتلقى الثروة من كل وجه‬
.)414( "‫بين أمسه وغداه‬
189
Who, incidentally, were neither all Arabs nor all Muslims.
190
Hussein ascribes the transfer of cultures across the Islamic world to the movement of soldiers, slaves, dancers
and court entertainers, the institution of local Arab rulers, Arab settlers in foreign lands, , the movement of Arab
and non-Arab traders and skilled workers, the travel of religious scholars, as well as the training of non-Arab
administrative clerks in the service of the Arab rulers.
191
In much the same way Jan Pieterse has pointed out that all the “celebrated stations” of European progress,
whether of Greece, Rome, Christianity, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment were moments of “cultural
mixing” (qtd. in Stam 191).
192
Much like Pirenne’s argument itself, this ‘traditional’ view of the so-called ‘period of decadence/decline’ has
been questioned. See, to name one example, Roger Allen’s Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period. It
might also support Hussein’s general argument to note that while the production of literature in Arabic may
have ebbed or the cultural scene in Egypt regressed, Arabic literature, like others, never existed in isolation.
193
Hussein mentions French (religious and secular), Italian, Greek, British, American and German schooling
(The Future of Culture in Egypt 23).
194
See Fi-l shi’r al-jāhili [On Pre-Islamic Poetry], esp. ch. 4, pp. 36-42.
195
The beginning of this quote is significant. Hussein has been discussing here the conflict in Egypt between
supporters (local and foreign) of English and French letters which had made them the two dominant cultures and
languages cultivated by Egyptians. Then, according to Hussein, Egyptians started going to Germany and Italy,
and the translations into Arabic of “Goethe and Dante…Tolstoy and Dostoevsky” prompts the realisation quoted
above. It is notable that Hussein quotes (now nationally-symbolic) authors whose works either clearly engage
with the ‘Islamic Orient’ or with the ‘European’ Orient (Russia), thereby pushing, or so it would seem, an
adequate response in Arabic letters, and demonstrating in general a continuous process of cultural give-and-take.
196
The articles in the first issue alone cover topics in Egypt, Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the Near East,
Asia general, and Japan, as well as general topics.
197
‫ وبأن تعرض عليهم خالصات حسنة للحركات‬.‫وستعني هذه المجلة بأن تعرض على الشرقيين آثارهم عرضا ً قوامه النقد الخالص للفن والحق‬
‫ ولكنها ستفتح األبواب على مصاريعها‬،‫ ولن تؤثر باهتمامها ثقافة دون ثقافة‬،‫ لن تقصر عنايتها على أدب دون أدب‬.‫األدبية في أوروبا وأمريكا‬
244
‫ وتتلقاها‬،‫ ذلك ألن العلم والفن واألدب أمور تحب لنفسها‬.‫للتيارات األ دبية والثقافية من أي وجه تأتي وعن أي شعب تصدر وفي أي لغة تكون‬
.‫ وتنبذ منها ما تنبذ وتنتفع بها على كل حال‬،‫ فتستسيغ منها ما تسيغ‬،‫العقول والقلوب كما هي‬
‫تريد أن ترفع األدب عن‬... ‫ وهي‬،‫ كذلك لن تؤثر بعناتها فريقا ً من أدباء العرب دون فريق‬،‫كما أن هذه المجلة لن تؤثر بعنايتها شعبا ً دون شعب فهي‬
.)3 "‫هذه الخصومات التي تثيرها منافع الحياة العاملة العاجلة بين الناس ("برنامج‬
198
Ferial Ghazoul’s “The Arabization of Othello” continues this conversation. Starting from Khalil Mutran’s
version of the play, Ghazoul examines the interpretation and translation of Othello in the Arab world, cleverly
tracing the reactions of key Arab translators to the work, not just to its universal appeal but as a ‘reappropriation’ of a story with an “indigenous” hero, the ‘moor’ or ‘Arab’ Othello.
199
A noteworthy example is Gunvor Medjdell’s examination of the “paratextual features” (book format,
prefaces, language) of the translations of Taha Hussein’s Days into English (1932), French (1947), Swedish
(1956), Norwegian (1973) and English again (1981), and what the translations imply of the political-cultural
contexts in which Hussein’s book was read.
200
Writing in 1956 Pierre Cachia uses the world ‘renovation’ to translate Hussein’s term ‘tajdīd’, rather than
‘innovation’ which he says means ‘jadīd’ (Taha Hussein 88). I see no key difference between Cachia’s two
Arabic words although he might possibly be picking up from Hussein’s frequent use in French of the verb
‘rénover’. Thirty years later, in his introduction to an English translation of Hussein’s Days, Cachia describes
Hussein’s theory of literature as “Arab modernism [’s]…most appealing formulation; not Innovation but
Renovation, the revitalisation of a great cultural heritage by bringing the best odes of Western thinking to bear
upon it, and this in emulation of his forefathers who, in the heyday of Islam, had drawn freely on the resources
of Greek civilisation” (5). This, however, implies that the disparate peoples brought under Islamic rule
considered themselves ‘Arabs’ already united and assimilated under one tight centrally-administrated Arab
empire, and were writing ‘Arabic literature’ through a conscious process of ‘borrowing’ from a distinct ‘foreign’
system. I do not think Hussein saw the Islamic ‘empire’ as producing one large national corpus, but perceived
the golden age of classical literature as a series of assimilative procedures in which individual authors, forced to
work with the same language in order to gain readership and patronage, seized the opportunity of society’s
contemporary diversity and their own non-Arab backgrounds to meet the challenges posed by the new Arabic
language, (particularly as Hussein emphasised non-Arabs being the first to produce Arabic language grammars
and lexicons). I am also not quite satisfied with the choice of the word ‘renovation’ since it limits Hussein’s
vision of reform to the idea of a decrepit Arabic letters needing to be ‘fixed’ and ‘mended’ with the ramps and
support systems of Western thought, even of course if that is sometimes exactly the meaning Hussein intended,
such as when he speaks of the reformation of education systems at Azhar University. In other contexts,
however, the meaning is lacking. Indeed, the word ‘revitalise’ (which Cachia uses in the same sentence), or
‘innovate’ seem eminently more suitable. The choice of ‘renovation’ also undermines the strong role of the
literary creator as an individual –which was high on Hussein’s critical priorities– and who was expected to bring
something of his/her own personality to both translation and text. It neglects to consider that Hussein supported
importing what he saw as totally ‘new’ genres to a local literary system, such as modern theatre and epigrams,
and that all original literature, not just that written in Arabic, required cultural transfer, such as in Goethe’s
innovative Divan, with the prime condition being that such ‘free borrowing’ would be acclimatised to the
sensibilities of its native receivers. Finally, I assume in my use of the word ‘innovate’ the premise that Hussein’s
entire vision of literature depended on, that ‘nothing comes from nothing’; and any innovation must be a change,
sometimes more conscious than otherwise, from a previous condition. Therefore I alternate between ‘innovate’
and ‘renovate’ according to context.
201
The epigraph to this article is my own translation. Citation refers to the Arabic edition. For other quotes I
have stuck to the 1954 English version of Future of Culture.
202
"‫) "األدب هو األحذ من كل شىء بطرف‬Fi-l adab al jāhili [On Pre-Islamic Literature] 21).
203
As conceived by Hussein and various contemporaries this suggests an interesting understanding of what
‘cosmopolitanism’ may mean in Arabic literature (in addition to current definition(s)), and its development
through the subsequent political tides of internationalism in the region.
204
Cachia has marked more intuitively than most the contradictions between what he calls Hussein’s generalist
“arm-chair views” and his specific “reactions to contemporaries and to contemporary situations” (85), giving
examples such as: Hussein’s optimistic belief in determinism and inevitable progress of nations and the
pessimism evident in his prolonged introspection (84-85); the historical bias with which Hussein analysed major
cultural influences on Egyptian literature; his authoritarian, politically-influenced actions as Minister of
Education as opposed to his early calls for the liberation of the university and free speech (126-27); and his
subjective analyses of texts as opposed to the clinical detachment he called for in studying Arabic letters (Taha
Husayn 137-42).
205
For another piece in English see Hussein’s article in the UNESCO courier, for example, written in 1948 on
the occasion of UNESCO’s Third General Conference in Beirut (to discuss, among other things, opening a
cultural office in the Middle East). Hussein shows he has both feet firmly planted in the discourse of modern
245
Arab nationalism by referring to the “Arab world” and the “Arab nations”, and the ‘failure’ of the League of
Nations, but still has eyes firmly trained on a global vision, writing that the Beirut festival will offer “a cultural
and human assembly” which is “not composed of those who represent a particular country or different countries
united by common interests and common aims, but is composed of men who represent the cultural circles of all
the nations of the world” (3). He expressed hope that UNESCO efforts (as he understood them) would succeed
where other similar cultural congresses had failed, because UNESCO did not aim to unite everyone under one
nation or create a playground for competing national spokesmen but rather to “unite all humanity” (3). By
bridging professionals and laymen, scientists and artists, by bringing together people from all geographical
locations and transcending political borders, UNESCO’s endeavour “aids world civilization and progress, giving
[people] a scope, depth and universality which they have never known before” (7).
246
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‫حليفي‪ ،‬شعيب‪" .‬الرحالت العربية‪ :‬النص وخطاب الهوية"‪ .‬ألف ‪ )2006( 26‬ص ص ‪.63-47‬‬
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‫خسرو علوي‪ ،‬ناصر‪ .‬السفرنامة‪ .‬ترجمة يحيى الخشاب‪ .‬القاهرة‪ :‬الهيئة المصرية العامة للكتاب‪.1943 ،‬‬
‫زيادة‪ ،‬نيقوال‪ .‬الرحالة العرب‪ .‬القاهرة‪ :‬دار الهالل‪.1956 ،‬‬
‫الساوري‪ ،‬بو شعيب‪ .‬الرحلة والنسق‪ :‬دراسة في إنتاج النص الرحلي‪ .‬رحلة ابن فضالن نموذجا‪ .‬الدار البيضاء‪ :‬دار‬
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‫كراتشكوفسكي‪ ،‬أ يو‪ .‬تاريخ األدب الجغرافي العربي‪ .‬ترجمة صالح الدين عثمان هاشم‪ .‬بيروت‪ :‬دار الغرب اإلسالمي‪،‬‬
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‫محمودي‪ ،‬عبد الرشيد الصادق‪ .‬مقدمة‪ .‬من الشاطيء اآلخر‪ :‬كتابات طه حسين الفرنسية‪ .‬ترجمة وتحرير عبد الرشيد‬
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‫المسعودي‪ .‬مروج الذهب ومعادن الجوهر‪ .‬ج‪ .1‬صيدا‪ :‬المكتبة العصرية‪.2005 ،‬‬
‫‪280‬‬
‫ دار نشر الجامعات‬:‫ القاهرة‬.)‫ الرحلة في األدب العربي (حتى نهاية القرن الرابع الهجري‬.‫ ناصر عبد الرازق‬،‫الموافي‬
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.1991 ،‫لونجمان‬-‫ الشركة العربية للنشر‬:‫ القاهرة‬.‫ أدب الرحلة‬.‫ حسين‬،‫نصار‬
Nederlandse Samenvatting
Gebruik makend van de inzichten van Edward Said en Paul Gilroy betoog ik in deze studie
dat “contrapuntal reading” (Said 1994), en de opvatting dat literaire culturen gevormd
worden door een transnationaal process van 'call-and-response' (Gilroy 1994), nodig zijn voor
een benadering van de ‘wereldliteratuur’ of ‘World Literature’ (Damrosch 2003). Met een
focus op de relatie tussen postkoloniale theorie and theorie inzake wereldliteratuur, gaat deze
studie na hoe vijf teksten die de afgelopen vijftig jaar een grote internationale verspreiding
hebben gekend ‘in de wereld’ staan: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), Milan
Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous
Conditions (1988), Leila Ahmeds A Border Passage (1999), and Amitav Ghosh’ In an
Antique Land (1992). De studie zal bekijken hoe de hoofdpersonages in deze werken
proberen eenzijdige nationalistische paradigmas of “predatory identities” (Appadurai 1995) te
overstijgen, met name in periodes van politiek conflict, door het construeren van
transnationale verbeeldingswerelden die steunen op samenhorigheid qua gender,
internationalisme of een gedeeld verleden. Zulke alternatieve or meer-omvattende
maatschappelijke en politieke banden worden in deze studie onderscheiden in ‘cross-nations’,
‘supra-nations’, ‘global nations’ en ‘everyday’ nations.
Hoofdstuk 1 vergelijkt hoe Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) en
Waguih Ghali in Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) aansluiting zoeken bij een internationale
gemeenschap. In het werk van Kundera neemt die de vorm aan van een ‘supra-nation.’ Bij
Ghali is er eerder sprake van een ‘cross-nation.’ Het hoofdstuk gaat na hoe de hoofdfiguren
reageren op specifieke politieke standpunten van regeringen en politieke partijen, waarbij in
beide romans de liefdesverhoudingen als metaforen fungeren voor individuele,
maatschappelijke en nationale assimilatie.. Tegen de achtergrond van respectievelijk de
Praagse Lente en de Suez-crisis schilderen The Unbearable Lightness of Being en Beer in the
Snooker Club deze liefdesverhoudingen als middel om weerstand te bieden aan een populaire
nationalistische rethoriek. Aandacht wordt besteed aan mogelijke overeenkomsten tussen
Tsjechoslowakije en Egypte in de periode 1950s-60s, de vloed aan protestbewegingen in
diezelfde periode zowel in Europa zelf als daarbuiten, en aan het idee van een wereldwijde
solidariteit zoals dat toendertijd opgeld maakte in de internationale politieke allianties, en
zoals het de nieuwe transnationale ‘imaginaries voedde, vaak in verzet tegen de lokale
politieke status quo.
Hoofdstuk 2 kijkt hoe in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and Leila Ahmeds
A Border Passage: A Woman’s Journey from Cairo to America (1999) de schildering van het
landschap wordt gebruikt om een dialoog, ‘subnational and transnational’, ‘universal and
specific’ (Pizer 2006), op te zetten in verband met de culturele assimilatie en conditionering
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die de vrouwelijke hoofdpersonen ondergaan. Met aandacht voor hoe ras, gender, natie en
religie op elkaar inwerken vergelijkt dit hoofdstuk hoe de hoofdpersonen locale
problematieken aanpakken door een beroep te doen op een op ethische leest geschoeide
‘global nation of gender.’ Gebruik makend van Georg Brandes’ metafoor van een
vergelijkende literatuur-‘teleskoop’ (Larsen 2012) die naar believen maximaal of minimaal
kan worden ingesteld focust dit hoofdstuk in steeds kleinere concentrische cirkels, van de
wereld tot het individu, om te kijken hoe de hoofdpersonen ‘go glocal’, en hoe ze
landschappen beschrijven en zich toeëigenen om te schetsen hoe hun identiteiten worden
gevormd en om weerstand te bieden in de politieke situaties waarin ze terecht komen. Mijn
betoog behelst dus achtereenvolgens natuurlijke landschappen die worden geklasseerd als
natuurlijke bronnen van grondstoffen, vervolgens (nationale) territoria, en dan privé
siertuinen, het huis, en tenslotte de slaapkamer.
Hoofdstuk 3 onderzoekt hoe cultuur ontstaat door het oversteken van grenzen, geographisch
en in de tijd. Het betoogt dat Amitav Ghosh in In an Antique Land (1992) een benadering
aanreikt om de belangrijkste reisauteurs in het Arabisch uit de tiende tot de veertiende eeuw
te bestuderen. Meerdere eeuwen bestrijkend en heen en weer gaand tussen heden en verleden,
en de oproep van Gosh om een eengemaakte wereldcultuur en een “subalterne”
geschiedschrijving van verzet indachtig, beschrijft dit hoofdstuk hoe reisbeschrijvingen
circuleerden via de handelssystemen die de bloeiende steden van de betrokken regio (Abu
Lughod 1989) verbonden, om tenslotte een ‘canon’ te gaan uitmaken van populaire gelezen
en voorgelezen belles-lettres voor een ‘sub-elite’ van algemene lezers (Mottahedeh 1980;
Toorawa 2004; Schoeler 2009). In het hoofdstuk wordt nagegaan hoe reizigers en de teksten
die ze produceerden het idee van een ‘homogene’, monolithische dār al-Islām (het huis van
Islam) nuanceren, en tegelijkertijd wordt er een aanzet gegeven tot een alternatieve, seculaire
literaire geschiedenis van de hedendaagse Arabisch-Islamitische literatuur. Deze ‘imagined
community’ van transnationale, ‘intermediate’ relaties die de politieke grenzen (van de natiestaat in het heden en van de pre-moderne stadscentra in het verleden) overschrijdt wordt
aangeduid als de ‘everyday nation’.
In de Conclusie wordt het onderwerp van de bijdrage van “Oosterlingen” aan de
theorievorming inzake culturele kruisbestuivingen benaderd via het werk van Taha Hussein
over wereldliteratuur als een vorm van culturele uitwisseling en productie. In dit hoofdstuk
worden Husseins ideeën over wereldliteratuur vergeleken met de kritische debatten en
doeleinden van ‘World Literature theory’ zoals dat wordt opgevat in deze studie, en wordt
getoond hoe Husseins werk licht zou kunnen werpen op de vijf moderne werken behandeld in
de voorafgaande analytische hoofdstukken.
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