I’ve been struggling with this book for a while now. First of all— the title: A Map of Home, is so loaded. How does one begin to draw that map? As Jarrar so cleverly does, one draws it across nations and oceans, using families, stories and music.
I’ve been following Randa Jarrar for a long time now. I remember reading (and loving) her short stories on some Progressive Muslim website that I used to browse almost a decade ago (a quick internet search didn’t help in locating what that site actually is or whether it still exists).
The truth is, I enjoyed this novel very much— but I felt very pained throughout reading it- the familial abuse, the relocations; it was all very distressing to read, especially knowing that A Map of Home so closely mirrors Jarrar’s own life story. I wanted to find her and hug her, even though we’ve never met. While the book is funny and light, it is also heartbreaking. How much of this is fact and how much of it is fiction is not a question for me to answer, but somehow, my feelings changed just as I turned the last page. Suddenly, what mattered was that the family had stuck it out, and that they clearly love one another, in their own outlandish way.
In this story, Nidali, the protagonist takes us through her birth in Boston, her childhood in Kuwait, the Gulf War (of course) and then her teenage years in Egypt. Eventually, the family settles in Texas. Throughout this story her father is abusive, her mother is bitter and frustrated and it is a tragic story of two people who fell in love, got married and then realized that they are in fact completely unsuited to one another. Their dreams of bright futures disintegrate and they are left pointing the finger at one another. Her father’s anger at his fate as a Palestinian of course manifests itself in the home and her mother’s only solace is her Piano. The idealism of the parents is not passed on to the children; life wears them down and all they pass on to their kids is a fear of commitment and internal  turmoil and divisiveness. However, by the time the book is finished, somehow, it is Nidali’s big personality and big smile that will stay with you.
Jarrar is a natural storyteller and her map of home will tackle the insecurities of adolescence, the confusion of nationalism, and a longing to fit it all together while still having fun.

Life as a Lebneh Lover: The Identity Crisis of a Maybe-Lebanese. In an era when Hummus Queens reign supreme and falafel fever is all the rage (sorry, couldn’t resist!) finding a book about Lebneh Lovers piqued my interest enough to pick it up at that cute corner store full of wild purses and other outrageous things in Saifi while last in Beirut. I mean, Lebneh and Identity in one place? Who could say no to that! Reading a book that (wittily) waxes nostalgic both about being not-quite-Lebanese in Lebanon and not-quite-not-Lebanese outside Lebanon seemed to strike a chord with my wayfaring self. The book is actually based from Kathy Shalhoub’s blog from (what I assume are) her wayward twenties. While this is hardly a deep reflection on the existential crises that arise from spending too many years floating around, it is definitely a light read that will remind you that you are not alone when you’re feeling like you have no idea where you’re from, who you are, who your family is, and of course the meaning of it ALL (that does happen to everyone, doesn’t it?). She goes from Beirut to Stonybrook, NY to MIT to Cape Cod all the while wondering why she was living in the cold weather, what it was she way trying to prove and then refusing a Green Card- not as a matter of principal but simply because she didn’t see the point in America. She goes back to Beirut only to give up and end up in the South of France before miraculously meeting Mr. Right in the last place she expected— Lebanon, of course. They then set up shop in Dubai. This trajectory may seem like a roller-coaster to the uninitiated— but to the floaters among us, it is practically linear. While Kathy Shalhoub is most definitely Lebanese (as confused as she may feel about it) and all the references in the book are for the Lebanese— this Palestinian-American-Canadian-Lebanese-Gulfie production had no trouble relating. Reading this book while on a quick trip to Beirut and en route back to New York (while visiting friends in between) definitely felt appropriate and I recommend the giggly experience to any traveler that gets confused while going from “here” to “there” (wherever those are for you) and looking for some light reading to ease the in between.

Revolution. There is a word that comes up a lot these days. I think it’s important to remember that Arab revolutionaries have long preceded this current wave of Arab revolutions—- possibly why I’ve been on a kick to read as many of their stories from the sixties and seventies as I can get my hands on. It’s as though I need to find the connections between revolutionary Arabism and Arab revolutions.

While Fawaz Turki was never implicated in violence or imprisoned, his politics are decidedly radical- revolutionary, if you will. His memoir, much like other revolutionary memoirs, inevitably makes the reader feel heavyhearted at the lack of change, the seemingly insurmountable barriers, the old-guard regimes of the Arab world…the fact that people are still fighting the same fight, thirty, forty years later- and sometimes, the reality is even harsher now than it was then. Turki’s book, however, manages to blend exile, longing, bitterness, loss, and revolution in such a frank and unabashed way that his prose is almost poetic in its deep emotion and honesty, if not in its style.

This sense of stagnation is inter-weaved with the battle of Karameh, the horrors of Tal el Zaatar, and the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, tragedies he dutifully narrates as from the outside. His personal guilt and his bitterness at the world for allowing another exile, another bombardment, another failure, another abortion, surges through the pages and then plummets through the reader. This, while Homs is burning. This, when Gaza is Gaza. While this is inevitably a depressing read, I dare say it is not a distressing one. Turki is unwavering, as are people on the streets of Arab cities today.

De Niro’s Game

Rawi Hage

The first chapter in Hage’s literary debut introduces war-torn Beirut very aptly. Its ups, downs and history. The lost, floating feeling of being in a war zone. Hage’s style suits his surroundings: blunt, quick sentences, no particular sense of order – this is Lebanese flavoured chaos. It means that the neighbour deciding to “reserve” his parking spot on the street is OK. It means shooting up a neighbour’s car is also OK. It feels like Bassam, the narrator, is trapped - robotically going through the motions of his day-to-day, in a city that is only safe once everyone has gone to sleep.

Some of Hage’s sentences resonate long after you have read them - “Beirut was the calmest city ever in a war” - a commentary on the length of the war? Or perhaps it is on the Lebanese state-of-mind? “The Romans also turned to dust” - an anticipation of the demise of Beirut? Or is Beirut already dead? Today, this might seem quaint. A tourist can party in the Beirut of 2012 without thinking about the war that lasted a lifetime, but Hage insists that back in a war-town Beirut, dogs are better and more faithful than people.

It’s no surprise when Bassam starts reading The Stranger. Hage has not quite recreated Camus’s bleak aesthetic with De Niro’s Game, but there are echoes of Camus throughout, especially when Bassam is unable to conjure up any emotion at his mother’s funeral. The lifelessness of the prose while Bassam is in Lebanon is proper and fitting to the tale that Hage is trying to tell.

Having made his escape from Lebanon and now in a peaceful Paris, he is asked to explain his life back in Beirut. It’s in this part of the novel that Bassam’s humanity finally appears - here, he is a complete person, albeit one who lies about himself and his past, trying to make it disappear, but also trying to gain clarity through distance. There is of course, a twist, one that is almost too typical of conspiracy theories - but I definitely didn’t see it coming…and in the end, DeNiro loses at his own game.

Simply put, this is Arab-inclusive contemporary American history. Malek embarks on a project that tries to capture the diversity of the Arab-American experience, universalising it and mainstreaming it for the average American reader. The subtitle, “Arab Roots, American Stories” is very resonant throughout this collection of stories and throughout her writing, as Malek skillfully delivers these personal accounts of seminal moments in contemporary American history.

It is such that we are taken to Civil Rights Marches, the Oklahoma City bombings, and (of course) to Dearborn. By weaving Arab stories into American history, Malek makes a (strong) case for how and why Arab Americans cannot and should not be excluded from official American history books. While in and of itself a commendable undertaking, many more such projects will have to start and end before serious change begins to take place and Arabs are (less) absent, or worse, from the mainstream American psyche. 

It makes sense, doesn’t it, that the story of a young girl would be intertwined with the history of her land? Okay, maybe not always, but in this particular case, it makes for a stunning novel and commentary on the history of that land. Djebar makes point and counter point, inviting her reader to question the Truth time and time again. She manoeuvres almost one hundred years of Algerian history with a narrative full of astute observations, cultural commentary and questions of gender and identity. Her own ambivalence about language, about her Western-educated self, and her role as an Algerian woman navigating through both privilege and restriction is delightful for any self-aware reader. This is a novel, a memoir, a commentary on colonialism, theft, and a historical text. It is Djebar’s simple expression of paradox as norm that makes it brilliant. 

Fetish Systems

Raafat Majzoub

It was the writer Italo Calvino that suggested a writing that—rather than pointing at or recreating an object or character—envelops, surrounds like a fine mist. This suggests their existence rather than attempts to simply recreate them, allowing the reader a measure of engagement and creation with the text. The writing in Fetish Systems, a new written work by multi-talented Lebanese author Raafat Majzoub, warrants this comparison. His bio alone which adorns this slim volume is merely suggestive: “he is trained as an architect, yet refuses the title – he is currently working on several construction projects, a few books, something that might be a painting, a table and would like this bio to end with an et cetera.”

“To live in Beirut, is to know that one must accept circumstance. We have become numb—all of us—numb—in a state of trance, where ‘elastic’ would describe our functional execution of our everyday…”

The work begins with curious jump-starts into a loosely shaped narrative that can be described as extremely subjective. There is no clear and formal introduction of characters or plot, but rather the text quickly makes it clear to the reader that this is more akin to the highly personal literary experiments of the past century than anything else. The language resembles somewhat the erotic poetic sketches of Georges Bataille, although more cohesive, more drawn out, but similar enough in near-destructive exploratory eroticism to draw the comparison. The fragmented flow of the narrative often times resembles poetry, with alliterative flurries of words provide rough outlines of occurrences that bring to mind a defective photography which only hints at shapes, colours and movement, with the Majzoub’s Beirut always vaguely in the background.

“It has become instinct to absorb, shock, absorb, trauma, react, trauma, shock, absorb shock. It is something, a trait that we contain—for so—we all are nothing…We claim that we have lost our identity, we claim the right to construct a holistic monotone remedy to unite us—to homogenize us.”

This work is certainly not for the casual reader; there is no quick drawing-up and resolution of characters and plot. Rather, this work has something intensely therapeutic, describing personal relationships with mysterious “others” and places in intimate detail in a way that is, once again, acutely subjective. One gets the impression that even the most innocent of exchanges between the narrator and a lover will show up on the page as darkly dissatisfied, anxious graspings for understanding and rejection of understanding, spiralling outward and inward simultaneously. Majzoub’s language, word choice, and cadence is curiously playful, vacillating within single sentences between the vulgar and the academic, sometimes with seeming deliberate focus on the rhythm and the sound of the passage rather than the written meaning, making it somehow visceral and physical and something that attempts to refuses rational deliberation.

“We are only afraid of our naked bodies in the mirror. We define our curves from our audience’s point of view, from their eyes, from between their eyelashes—so we struggle to title us, to make it easier for them to comprehend, easier for us to make them believe—for our actions and words—not the same.”

The success of Majzoub’s experiment is difficult to gauge. Yet as a text, the sustained formal and subjective effort makes this author one to keep an eye on in the coming years.

Review by Karim Sultan originally published in Kalimat, Issue 04, Winter 2012

Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih

Saleh’s poetic prose work is considered a modernist masterpiece—the English version is respected by both readers and critics alike as a magnificent work of translation. Considered an essential part of the “post-colonial” canon, this is a classic work of an Arab writer looking/writing back at his experience in the West which resonates with many Arabs (and other colonised peoples). The tension between the unnamed narrator, returning to his village Sudan from university in England, and Mustafa Sa’eed, a mysterious older man who also returned from the West years before, displays in full artistry the changing relationships of Arabs and Westerners, and the incredible, inherited weight these relationships have until the present day.

The Butterfly’s Burden (Arabic Edition)

Mahmoud Darwish

A collection of books drawn from the poet’s “late period,” the poetry of The Butterfly’s Burden is work representative of far quieter and more subtle Darwish than those who are only accustomed to his famous “national” works. Poems from The Stranger’s Bed for example, sees the poet illuminating a dialogue between the masculine and feminine “I.” The imagery is fleeting and the rhythms crystalline—exile is not the forceful by-product of war, but a now-fluid state in which the exiled is at once all the conquered people throughout history. Affectionate reflections on cities like Damascus or the stark, staccato verses on the siege that followed the Second Intifada are not the stylised photography of other poets, but the voice of a narrator whose human language (poetry itself) exists in every era. The ordinary repertoire of human life (words, women and men, laundry, war, sex) is translated instantly into the symbolic order that allows this universal communication across history and place. Fady Joudah’s excellent translation in the bilingual edition maintains the dry musicality of Darwish’s tone (his voice, so embedded, so audible in his instantly recognisable use of the Arabic language) comes through in the English for what might be the first time.