The circles of oppression in Bahaʾ Taher's Wahat al-Ghurub (Sunset Oasis, 2007, hereafter Sunset) close in on the Siwa Oasis, a colonized periphery of the 19th-century Egyptian state, and finally on a woman: Maleeka.Footnote 1 As a child, she cross-dresses to wander in the forbidden zones of temple ruins. Her mother forces her to marry an elderly man, instrumentalizing her body to make peace between feuding community factions, but Maleeka runs away. She is soon widowed and becomes “the ghoul-woman,” a liminal figure between life and death who is ritually separated from her community and eventually killed.Footnote 2 As a character, Maleeka is unassimilable to the nation, marriage, and even language. She communicates primarily through replicas of statues abandoned in the ruins, inscribing the uncanny into a novel in which most speaking subjects are both oppressor and oppressed.
Because Sunset makes the silence of a marginalized woman the epicenter of colonial and gendered modes of oppression, it will be tempting to interpret Maleeka as a Siwan subaltern, a figure of textual resistance.Footnote 3 In what follows, however, I trace an alternative route toward Maleeka's meaning. I do so through a materialist and theoretical engagement with the institution that, in 2008, secured Sunset’s translation into numerous languages: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), commonly known as “the Arabic Booker.” This prize, which has attained unprecedented success since its founding in 2007, annually selects an Arabic novel for recognition, financial reward for its author, and translation. My reading of Taher's novel is not, however, a general paradigm for all IPAF novels (i.e., those recognized by this prize). Rather, I use Sunset and the IPAF as a lens to revisit the relation between the Arabic novel, material context, and critique.
Prizes are nodes that bring together diverse actors concerned with literature, including journalists, publishers, writers, and critics; they make overt the imbrication of literature in economies of exchange and reproduction; and they assert, by selecting and celebrating texts, commonalities between genres and texts. Cultural fields and audiences are identified and invoked, as consumers and critics participate in the consecration of the work that “best” represents a community or standard. Moreover, in the debates and scandals around prizes, perennial questions of literature's relation to society and politics are laid bare and reworked. Thus, prizes are often studied from materialist and sociological perspectives that tend to marginalize textual reading.Footnote 4 Key among these works is James English's Economy of Prestige, which argues that “institutionally, the [literary] prize functions as a claim to authority and an assertion of that authority—the authority, at bottom, to produce cultural value.”Footnote 5 Sarah Brouillette's works on the creative economy also offer compelling accounts of the material and political contexts that shape literature's production and circulation. These scholars draw on Pierre Bourdieu's legacy, notably his characterization of the literary field after the 19th century as a “dualist structure” between a “restricted field” of high art and intellectual production and “a mass entertainment audience.”Footnote 6
Despite this privileging of the material, though, few are willing to cede literature's capacity to offer creative or resistant readings of the world—nor should they be. Reading with the IPAF, I suggest, must address texts as representational objects and commodities. To this end, I trace the institutional contours of this prize before exploring its implications for reading practices we might bring to novels entering world literature. Currently at the center of debates in literary studies, world literature in this context denotes a corpus of original and translated texts from across the globe that circulates primarily, but not exclusively, in English and that is sustained by transnational institutions—most relevantly, here, publishing houses and the literary-critical output (again, primarily, but not exclusively, in English) of the contemporary academy.Footnote 7 Of particular concern to my argument is the malleability of theoretical paradigms—such as the subaltern—that have entered the canon of literary criticism vis-à-vis Arabic texts. In this, I respond to a call by Mohamed-Salah Omri for dialogue between theory and Arabic literary scholarship, which he characterizes as entangled in area studies. In a short but evocative essay, Omri suggests that scholars tend to apply theory to texts without allowing for the possibility that the latter might require us to reconceptualize the terms and uses of theory itself. By opening this one-way street to two-way traffic, Omri concludes, “Arabic literature has the potential to challenge literary theory to be genuinely global, flexible, and self-critical.”Footnote 8 Omri cites the IPAF as an opening for this traffic, arguing that despite the prize's “symbolic as well as financial capital,” which “directly affects the production and circulation of Arabic literature,” the IPAF has “not been discussed, let alone theorized.”Footnote 9
In addition to general cautions over the portability of theory, I will suggest that theorizations of IPAF novels must remain flexible because this prize produces a contingent intersection between national and world literary fields, asserting the ability to launch expressions of the Arabic novel into global circulation. On the one hand, IPAF novels may be read through their “original” national frames, a move that typically deploys expertise associated with area studies: the history of, for example, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Algerian nationalisms and their respective expressions in the Egyptian, Iraqi, and Algerian novel. Such readings foreground the specificity of national fields, including their institutions, textual norms and genres, and notions of literature's function. On the other hand, when an IPAF novel is translated into new semiotic codes and reading publics, it takes on new afterlives.Footnote 10 Whether we are concerned with a pun on a president's name that doesn't quite translate or a reference to national history that elicits no echo in an Anglophone reader, the meaning that an IPAF novel produces will become, simply, other. Scholars routinely perform a bridging work to address these afterlives in the classroom, teaching the skills to read a translated novel through national histories and iconographies while simultaneously deconstructing a specter that so often lurks in worldly readings of Arabic novels: Orientalism.Footnote 11
A stark either/or between national and world literary frames, however, cannot apprehend the ways in which a movement between them is institutionalized in bodies such as the IPAF, nor can it grapple with the implications for reading. My reading of the IPAF, while concerned with the worldly, does not dispense with national frames for Arabic novels, whose critical lives are often tied to national histories, nor does it treat them as a guarantor of “authentic” meaning against a disembodied world literature. To the contrary, it argues for a resituation of national frames, institutionally and hermeneutically, within the nodal relation the IPAF represents. The readings that follow interrogate tropes associated with the postcolonial novel (e.g., polyvocalism, hybridity, subalternity), which destabilize national monoliths, and their (non)intersection with national epistemologies in IPAF novels.Footnote 12 I argue that texts like Taher's, whose worldly legibility may hinge on references to such tropes, in fact foreclose the radical forms of critique that literary theory today associates with narratives of peripheral borderlands, silenced subalterns, and ineffably plural forms of identity. In this regard, my argument participates in critiques of world literature's tendency “to suggest a political mind without betraying a real one,” but roots its text-based claims in contemporary contexts for the production of Arabic literature and institutional settings for its reception.Footnote 13
Because IPAF novels are on the move, physically and interpretively, I use the paradigm of scale, developed in the context of Anglophone African literature, to shuttle between text and context, nation and world. Scale foregrounds the role of comparison as a textual strategy (e.g., a novel telescopes between nation and periphery) and as a critical-literary task—one that must be continually re-evaluated in tension with the novels under study. IPAF novels invite us to interrogate the uses of comparative method in relation to Arabic literature, a task this essay addresses by combining methods from postcolonial and world literary theory and from area studies, notably research on the Egyptian novel. A key premise is that methods associated with literary and disciplinary space (e.g., the Arabic or African novel) render aspects of texts legible and others opaque; without clutching at comprehensiveness, we may invigorate critique by attending to these fleeting illegibilities and, in turn, to our reproduction of method across disciplines.
THE PRIZE
Like any prize, the IPAF confers legitimacy on expressions of a genre: the Arabic novel, heuristically defined by its language of production. It was born in a 2005 conversation at the Frankfurt Book Fair between Ibrahim El Moallem, head of Egypt's Dar El Shorouk publishing house and then president of the Association of Arab Publishers, and British publisher George Weidenfeld, as described below by IPAF administrator Fleur Montanaro:
They discussed the regrettably low amount of high quality contemporary Arabic fiction being translated into leading Western languages. The suggestion was made that an international prize for Arabic literature, based on the highly successful Man Booker Prize, would be a good way to encourage recognition of high quality Arabic fiction and to ensure increased translation of such literature into world languages.Footnote 14
From these early stages, the IPAF was imagined to be “Arab owned but internationally facilitated.”Footnote 15 The Arab ownership lies in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the international facilitation stems from the Booker Prize Foundation, which commissioned the feasibility study for the prize and provides its informal title as well as ongoing mentoring. From 2007 to 2011, the Emirates Foundation, a venture philanthropy organization, funded the IPAF. In 2011, the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA Abu Dhabi) took over. This state institution supports a range of cultural and artistic initiatives, most famously the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island, a hub for “luxury-based experiences” in commerce, culture, and tourism.Footnote 16 With these financial backers, the IPAF injected significant capital into the regional prize circuit, offering US $10,000 to six short-listed writers and an additional US $50,000 to the winner.
The IPAF selection procedure is as follows: each year, publishers nominate up to three of their own novels to a panel of judges, chosen annually by the prize's Board of Trustees.Footnote 17 The judges select a long list and subsequently a short list.Footnote 18 Each list is announced to the media, building up to the announcement of the winning novel in a gala celebration on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. Prominent names have graced these panels—including Mohammed Berrada, Georges Tarabishi, and Fadhil al-Azzawi—and each year a non-Arab literary specialist is included “to ensure an international dimension.”Footnote 19
The IPAF has drawn on expertise that the Booker Foundation honed over decades in the United Kingdom. Its Man Booker Prize dates back to 1968 (when it was called the Booker Prize for Fiction) and is known colloquially as the Booker.Footnote 20 The role of the Booker in canonizing the Anglophone postcolonial novel will be discussed below. Logistically, the common features of the Booker and IPAF are the length of the short list (six titles); the initial role of publishers in selecting novels; the size and composition of the judges’ panel (five; a mix of academics, writers, and critics); the gala announcement of the winner; and the postponement of the winning announcement following the release of the short list. Richard Todd suggests that the rise in the Booker's fortunes in the early 1980s can be in part attributed to its decision to delay the announcement of the winning novel, creating “a potent brew of suspense and speculation” in the press.Footnote 21 If the prominence of IPAF short-listed novels—with dust jackets touting the distinction like a title—and the media buzz are any indication, the brew has been no less potent for Arabic fiction. Indeed, the IPAF seems to embrace the media hype that often makes scholars squint askance at prizes.
Prizes tend to be a neglected stepchild in scholarship because they evoke the spectatorship of popular culture and the materialism against which high literature and criticism define themselves. Scholars often dismiss prizes as an antithesis to literature's rarified realm, while the sociology of literature has long suggested that prizes produce this opposition between materialism and a “pure” realm of art. They permit writers, critics, and academics (who benefit from literature's restricted capital) to perform their investment in an art whose separation from the market must be constantly reproduced. This pure realm, English notes, “stands in relation to the economy of cultural prestige” much as gold stood in relation to “the cash economy in the days of the gold standard—the perfectly magical guarantor of an imperfectly magical system.”Footnote 22 The very possibility of “selling out” to the market presumes this binary. English thus concludes that “antiprize rhetoric” is, in fact, “part of the apparatus of prizes,” reproducing and recirculating the cultural value that is their very raison d’être.Footnote 23
Critiques of the IPAF have suggested that with a publisher's eye on driving up sales, it favors “sociocultural” novels characterized by easy reading and neglects experimental works that are less liable to gain wide readership.Footnote 24 Others speculate about hidden agendas; for example, the IPAF is rumored to favor male writers.Footnote 25 These critiques accept the prize's status as an arbiter of literary value and thus transform it into a site for valuable debates on Arabic literatures and diversity (or lack thereof) among leading authors in the field. Yet these approaches do little to theorize or critique the notion that the IPAF could constitute such a site. Developing the terms of such a critique requires a digression into the institutional formation of the IPAF as a producer of literary value and, subsequently, into its relation to its mentor: the Booker Prize.
DETERRITORIALIZATION
A striking aspect of the IPAF's impact has been a widespread acceptance of its authority to negotiate the Arabic novel's entrance into world literature. Critiques have focused on regional geographies of culture, notably the shift to the Gulf, with remarkably little to say about the international facilitation of the prize.Footnote 26 We can trace this legitimacy, following English, to the value the IPAF produces: a diligently publicized claim to transparency that is enmeshed in the move to global institutions and markets. The IPAF's founding narrative asserts a basic lack in regional prizes; in 2007 “it was recognised that many literary prizes in the Arab world were either local or not entirely independent and transparent in their processes.”Footnote 27 Intent on constructing itself as the first neutral prize for the Arabic novel, the IPAF has ensured a balance of age, gender, and nationality in committees of judges. In a further gesture toward integrity, judges’ names remain anonymous until the announcement of the short list, and individuals affiliated with publishers that nominate novels cannot serve as judges. The prize's departure from “the Arab world” is thus a deterritorialization: from local institutions to a world brand and from rumors of corruption to international transparency. And it has been successful: no writer, to this author's knowledge, has rejected an IPAF award.
The following reading traces the contours of one national field—Egypt—to elucidate the deterritorialized value the IPAF has put into successful circulation. My reading attends to the Egyptian field for reasons both intellectual and pragmatic. Cairo, a major literary-cultural center, has historically been seen as a broker of prestige in Arabic literature. This status is now in dispute due to the meteoric rise of the Gulf states—a shift of which the IPAF is symptomatic. Egypt has also been central in scholarship, yielding important sociological works on literature and culture. Finally, the Egyptian literary field constitutes the necessary background against which to read Taher's Sunset, below, with the IPAF.
In contrast to the IPAF's acceptance, the sine qua non of antiprize rhetoric is prize rejection. In 2003, Sonallah Ibrahim rejected the Cairo Prize for the Novel, awarded to him personally by Minister of Culture Faruq Husni. After offering “a virulent diatribe against the Egyptian regime,” Ibrahim announced “I publicly decline the Prize because it is awarded by a government that, in my opinion, lacks the credibility of bestowing it.”Footnote 28 Under Bourdieu's dualist structure, we would read Ibrahim as partaking in a “long tradition of sincere animosity between artists and bourgeois consecrations,” in which artists act as “freedom fighters on the old model of art versus money.”Footnote 29 When the field is understood in these terms, authors who have garnered prestige in the restricted field can “put their symbolic capital . . . to work politically by linking autonomy with truth.”Footnote 30 These are what Bourdieu terms old-style intellectuals.Footnote 31 However, Ibrahim's rejection points up the role of the state, not the market, and its legitimacy in determining hierarchies of art.
This dispensation adheres to arguments by Richard Jacquemond and Jessica Winegar, who have revealed complex relations of patronage and contestation that took shape between the Egyptian state and writers and artists, respectively, in the second half of the 20th century.Footnote 32 Both underscore the vital role of the state after 1952 in shaping these fields and the centrality of the nation, as a conceptual and affective frame, in intellectuals’ evaluation of art and literature's value. Indeed, as Winegar argues, in the culture wars of 1990s Egypt, “the state was continually held accountable against an ideal of it as the primary creator, nurturer, and protector of the nation.”Footnote 33 Both Winegar and Jacquemond argue that this formation of Egypt's cultural fields explains what may otherwise sound anachronistic: intellectuals’ valorization of political commitment as a measure of literature's meaning.Footnote 34 Moreover, it requires moving beyond a strict understanding of the market/art binary as it has been studied in Anglophone settings to interrogate the relation between authorship and the literary field.Footnote 35 As Jacquemond puts it, “the written word” has become “the most important expression of [Egypt's] national imaginary,” while the writer is seen as uniquely equipped to “give a true and authoritative version of history.”Footnote 36 The implications of this formation for reading are explored in the discussion of Sunset below. Outside the text, however, Jacquemond situates authors between the position of writer and scribe, with the latter corresponding to a mouthpiece for state ideology. The state, acting as patron, is not separate from a writer's material success; thus, the autonomy of the writer is produced first in opposition to the scribe and her state. Indeed, Jacquemond suggests that after 1958, literary prizes in Egypt became symptomatic of “the overextended character of state control” in determining literary value; this perception became particularly pertinent in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the Mubarak regime reasserted the role of the state in the literary-cultural sphere.Footnote 37
The IPAF's insistence on neutrality can thus be understood as a move away from the entanglement of literary capital with state interests—including in the Gulf, where a parallel vision of authorial autonomy versus a state/market hybrid dominates. Scholars have interpreted Arab writers’ acceptance of non-IPAF Gulf prizes as an “exchange of symbolic [and] material capital,” and scandals surrounding these prizes have similarly revolved around the imbrication of literature in wealthy states’ control over culture and, more particularly, censorship.Footnote 38 A cautionary tale in this vein is the withdrawal of the Sultan Bin Al Owais Cultural Award for Poetry from Saadi Youssef in 2004 following his criticisms of Shaykh Zayid bin Al Nahyan, the late ruler of the UAE.Footnote 39
Still, if national prizes are viewed with skepticism, the IPAF's success cannot be attributed to the mere fact of partnering with a foreign institution. The IPAF invites comparison to the American University in Cairo's Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, established in 1996, which leveraged the global legitimacy of the Nobel Laureate to consecrate the best Arabic novel from anywhere in the world.Footnote 40 In 1996, Ibrahim declined the inaugural award, an act described by Samia Mehrez, former chair of the award:
The first award was intended for [Ibrahim], one of the alley's [i.e., nation's] most prominent and “trustworthy” [authors], in recognition of his highly acclaimed novel Dhat (Zaat). But Ibrahim . . . who, as a staunch leftist and nationalist, has always had a problematic relationship with AUC as an American institution in Egypt, discreetly declined the award.Footnote 41
Certainly, Ibrahim's discretion suggests that rejecting the AUC award courts more risk than rejecting a state prize. But Mehrez's interpretation tells a similar story, in which Ibrahim pits his symbolic capital—his political stance and moral authority as an autonomous writer—against the merging entity of the Mubarak state and US political-cultural influence, embodied in AUC. This reading is made explicit in arguments against the prize, which condemn AUC's “political agenda and its well-known intelligence role in Egypt,” and argue that “AUC was actually ‘using the name of Naguib Mahfouz’ in order to ‘seduce’ [writers] through the promise of translation that combined both symbolic and material gain.”Footnote 42 In this latter claim, the market indirectly enters the fray: the autonomy of Mahfouz as a national writer is pitted against the global (i.e., Anglophone) market for fiction, rendered a further symptom of US hegemony.
A crucial dimension of the IPAF as a node out of the region and into world literature is the novelty presented by the “global” Booker Foundation. The prize's partnership with this foundation marks a separation from states and a rapprochement with a prestigious literary brand perceived as external to regional tangles of political-economic influence and culture.Footnote 43 Thus, the IPAF's production of cultural value relies on distancing prize giving—as a brand and a process—from fields in which prizes materialize the overlap of state patronage and literary capital.Footnote 44 In this perception, however, the IPAF's placement in another genealogy of capital and prize giving is occluded.
In Anglophone literature, the Booker is known for canonizing the postcolonial novel, with awards made to figures such as J.M. Coetzee (1983, 1999), Arundhati Roy (1997), and Salman Rushdie (1981). Few dispute Rushdie's representative status in this canon since he won the superlative Booker of Bookers in 1993 for Midnight's Children. Yet the Booker has been lambasted for its implication in colonial economies and the construction of postcolonial exoticism. In 1972, English writer John Berger accepted the Booker while announcing, in a notorious display of old-style intellectualism, he would donate half his prize money (then £5,000) to the British Black Panther Party. He pointed out that the Booker McConnell company, which established the Booker Prize for Fiction, earned its wealth as a sugar plantation company in British Guyana.Footnote 45 Thus, critics have noted that the Booker's “frequent recognition of postcolonial authors carries the dubious tincture of the company's history.”Footnote 46 More recently, Graham Huggan's critique of the postcolonial exotic has skewered the Booker for its celebration of literature that commodifies and domesticates the postcolonial Other.Footnote 47 Huggan argues that postcolonial fiction, an established niche in the publishing world and a staple of undergraduate literature courses, satisfies a touristic impulse among privileged readers to consume exotic fiction from the Global South.
Does this genealogy imply that the IPAF is postcolonial? A certain rewriting of the IPAF's structure might cast it as such: a British literary institution with ties to colonial economies provides the expertise, and a Gulf emirate, until 1971 a Trucial State of Great Britain's informal empire, provides the funding. The raw materials of Arabic novels are brought to global markets via translation into English; an English institution, worse yet, is said to guard against corrupt rulers in the region.Footnote 48 Yet while such readings of the IPAF merit attention, the content and implication of “the postcolonial” must be worked through with care. The applicability of postcolonial theory to diverse expressions of the Arabic novel, states and societies in the region, and the role of intellectual production has been in question for some time.Footnote 49 Although the IPAF is funded by TCA Abu Dhabi, the Arabic novel's imbrication in an economy branded by tourism cannot be adequately comprehended or critiqued by fast analogies to touristic reading practices. Moreover, in textual criticism, pace Brouillette's critique of Huggan, we might be cautious that the work of debunking the postcolonial exotic does not presume insight into an “authentic,” local or national textual realm.Footnote 50 Rather than apply ready notions of postcolonial critique to the IPAF, let us revisit the emergence of the Anglophone postcolonial novel within global markets.
Recent scholarship concurs that since the 1980s the market for literature has globalized through the consolidation of publishing houses. Brouillette highlights the creation and increasing diversification of niche markets that resulted from this consolidation, wherein a group of major firms (e.g., Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins) and their imprints dominate. She argues that one outcome of this shift has been the new viability of a market for “serious” literary fiction.Footnote 51 It is within this niche market, made up of aesthetically educated readers, that we find the submarket for postcolonial literature in English. Translated IPAF novels now circulate within this global economy.Footnote 52 Thus, the transnational alliance between TCA Abu Dhabi and the Booker Prize Foundation must be understood as one expression of a publishing industry that perpetuates imperial translational practices and market inequalities, but that has also produced and marketed the canon of novels that critique the representational legacies of colonialism and anticolonial nationalisms. As IPAF novels circulate into this global canon, the prize's material genealogy must nuance assumptions that they, particularly in their postcolonial attributes, constitute unmediated resistance to a hegemonic world market; the implications of this point for reading will be returned to in the discussion of scale below.
In many ways, none of this is news to the studies of the Egyptian field discussed above, which chart how actors navigate state neoliberalism and the hegemony of “Western” standards in cultural production. In Arabic literary studies, scholars have attended to the impact of “Western” markets and institutions in Egypt that began in the 19th-century nahḍa.Footnote 53 Their scholarship permits readings of the IPAF's impact on domestic and regional publishing networks; on the changing calculations of publishers; and on the styles and forms of the Arabic novel confronting the pressures of hegemony. However, they remain rooted in a national, or area studies, perspective that considers the impact of world markets on the local, and thus do little to engage texts as they depart from the nation, institutionally and imaginatively, through the nodal formation represented by the IPAF.
Today's “economy of cultural prestige,” English writes, “is a global one, in which the many local cultural markets and local scales of value are bound into ever tighter relations of interdependence.”Footnote 54 For English, globalization has diminished the nation-state as the frame for the production of cultural value. The “tendency of prizes . . . to facilitate exchange of symbolic capital between the indigenous and the metropolitan marketplaces—often by circumventing strictly national institutions—has become much more pronounced.”Footnote 55 English shows how this economy of prestige forges direct connections between world literature and local, or subnational, zones and the writers who can be identified with them—“indeed whose place within world literature [is] a function of their particular relationship to those local roots.”Footnote 56 The nation thus cedes institutional place to a shuttling between local sites and the global. As English notes, the nationalization of culture industries that accompanied decolonization and the concomitant valorization of nationalism have faded since the 1970s; while the nation remains an index of value, it is not necessary for an artist (“the local hero”) to valorize the nation to be consumed and understood in world markets.Footnote 57 Indeed, literary invocations of nationalism today appear anachronistic, out of step with a globalized, hybrid, and mobile world.
It is in light of this that the link between literature and tourism in the IPAF becomes legible. TCA Abu Dhabi celebrates a marriage of development, culture, and preservation, calling for the global promotion of “the heritage, culture and traditions of Abu Dhabi” and its recognition as “a world-class, sustainable destination which makes a unique contribution to the global cultural landscape.”Footnote 58 For English, the deterritorialization of prestige has led to “place-promotion,” in which cultural institutions are linked to cities rather than nation-states, such that “the very name of the host city becomes resonant of symbolic fortune.”Footnote 59 Thus, the outcome of the IPAF's regional deterritorialization translates successfully into a global trend toward place-promotion. The prize's mix of marketing and culture, moreover, capitalizes on literature and its creators as paradigmatic models for neoliberal development.Footnote 60 Indeed, as Brouillette notes in the context of the United Kingdom, “creative-industries policies have been rapidly embraced as an inexpensive way to brand one's city or region or nation as friendly to private enterprise and to investment and development.”Footnote 61
SCALE
Against this backdrop, reading novels with the IPAF opens a host of questions for reading, translation, and critique. The fraught relations between literature's material life and its interpretation are far from settled, and the IPAF invites only one iteration of a lengthy debate.Footnote 62 The following discussion of Sunset brings into play a national reading, in which female figures stand in for a national imaginary, and demonstrates that through its invocation of forms and codes associated with the postcolonial—polyvocalism, cross-colonial networks, and epistemic instability—the novel destabilizes and critiques the Egyptian national narrative. As noted above, Taher's Sunset departs from Cairo to a subnational colony in late 19th-century Egypt. While this geography is isomorphic to English's account of globalization, it is not an analogy for market structure. Rather, it initiates a comparative reading of empire, conjuring a pluralistic rewriting of the national novel's iconography from a state periphery. To engage this textual move, I draw on Nirvana Tanoukhi's “scale-sensitive” reading that, perhaps counterintuitively, cautions against the dominance of spatial metaphors in criticism.Footnote 63 Tanoukhi argues against reading postcolonial literature as a peripheral zone (e.g., “Africa-of-the-Novel”) that “writes back” to another, separate space: the “world” of markets and erstwhile metropoles. Here we note an echo of Bourdieu's dualist structure, but the object of concern is critical method, which spatializes African (or Arabic) literature and thus renders it resistant to world markets that embody neocolonial power.Footnote 64 As noted above, the postcolonial novel emerged precisely within global markets. My interpretation of Tanoukhi's paradigm thus advocates attention to the making of scale through the act of comparison—within texts and in the methods we bring to them.Footnote 65
Sunset’s cross-colonial geography, rendered from a subnational periphery, invites a reading wherein Maleeka is a subaltern figure in whom the critic finds resistance to the imperialism the novel takes pains to dramatize. Against this reading, my interest is not in rooting Taher's text “back” into a national frame, but in arguing that global scale does not in fact release us from the epistemology and ethics (what Partha Chatterjee dubbed the thematic) of nationalism in the novel.Footnote 66 By drawing apart the novel's thematic from its postcolonial tropes, I demonstrate the perdurance of a conservative, rationalist worldview that is manifest in the novel's self-positioning as a weigh station for meaning. As will become evident, what troubles me in the maintenance of an either/or (nation/world) is the fact that neither renders visible the elision of meaning that occurs as the novel passes into Anglophone reading publics, an elision that finds its analogy in the untranslatability between Taher's positioning in the Egyptian literary field (an enlightened voice of the nation) and a global one (a local hero drawing attention to the plight of women in a Muslim society). The instrumental silencing of women will persist in this elision, wherein the possibilities for literature to limn subaltern critique or radical politics are foreclosed.
* * *
Mahmoud Azmi was district commissioner of the Siwa Oasis, on the Egyptian–Libyan border, at the end of the 19th century. His Irish wife Catherine accompanies him, attracted to inscriptions on ruins she believes to hold the tomb of Alexander the Great. Mahmoud is sent into quasi-exile there, banished from Cairo in belated punishment for his involvement in the ʿUrabi Revolt.Footnote 67 He is haunted by the failure of this revolt, which he attributes to the elite who betrayed ʿUrabi when Britain defeated his forces and occupied Egypt:
I beheld with my own eyes the stab in the back [al-wals] that broke Urabi, and then I beheld the greater betrayal [al-wals al-akbar] that followed . . . in the square that had witnessed the glory and the joy, with Urabi on his horse waving his sword and berating the Khedive . . . And in the very same place, just one year later, I saw . . . the great men . . . who had delivered fiery speeches against the British in the days of the revolution . . . alighting from their carriages to join the Khedive on his dais, from which he reviewed the army of occupation . . . [that] with the help of the traitors, had annihilated our army at Tell el Kebir.Footnote 68
In its focus on national revolt, this novel pays homage to the nahḍa novel in Egypt, shaped in the first half of the 20th century by figures such as Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim, and Naguib Mahfouz. As Samah Selim has argued, the rise of the novel “was linked to the emergence of liberal nationalist ideologies” and a need for “a new and properly national literature” to explore the experiences of the Egyptian middle-class subject.Footnote 69 In texts such as Hakim's Return of the Spirit (1927), the march to individual and collective liberation culminates in 1919—a year enshrined in literary-critical memory as the birth of national consciousness.Footnote 70 The geography of these novels imagined “a national reality” in “the quotidian landscape of the city” but also in the country, where land and fellah (peasant) embodied “the millennial spirit” of national unity.Footnote 71 More precisely, the tensions between these spaces encapsulated “the conflict between the social and cultural values of a modernizing city and its other—a vast rural zone.”Footnote 72 In shuttling between these spaces and producing their opposition, the novel spatialized an imaginary of Egyptian modernity—one that preoccupied novelists, notably Taher, into the postcolonial period.Footnote 73
Like its predecessors, Sunset dwells on the national consciousness evinced in 1882, but never attains the narrative climax of the 1919 revolution. Instead, without hope, Mahmoud looks back to 1882 as a time when “there was meaning, but [now] that's over and done with.”Footnote 74 This betrayed national telos is spatially expressed in a departure from Cairo: not to the rural heartland of the nation, but to Siwa, where Arabic is not spoken and Egypt's sovereignty rejected. With this relativization of national geography, a horizontal network of imperial oppression becomes visible. In Cairo, Mahmoud can position Egypt vis-à-vis British imperial power with certainty, as in the following passage with Mr. Harvey, British advisor to the minister of internal affairs:
Observe, [Mahmoud], our colonies in Africa and Asia, where chaos reigns because labor there—” I interrupted him once again with a laugh and said “My dear Mr. Harvey, we don't have colonies in Africa, or Asia.” I managed, however, to prevent myself from saying, “We're the colonized!”Footnote 75
But as Mahmoud crosses the desert, he becomes a representative of Siwa’s metropole: Cairo. Egypt is imposing colonial rule on the “ceaselessly rebelling” Siwans, and Mahmoud is the state's tax-collector.Footnote 76 The Siwans and their struggle for independence are described by Ibraheem, an Egyptian who serves as a guide for (and foil to) Mahmoud:
Say what you like about them, they're the bravest people I've ever seen. When I came with the army twenty years ago, we bombarded the town with artillery and the only weapons they had were small rifles . . . [But] they didn't surrender until their ammunition ran out. They have their feuds, but they always form one front against outsiders.Footnote 77
The British bombardment of Alexandria in the late 19th century is echoed in this recollection of siege—a window onto another history, in which Egypt becomes the aggressor against a small, out-armed community.
Taher's novel can thus be read as a literary instantiation of a historical argument made by Eve Troutt Powell: that colonization was central to the imaginary of Egyptian nationalism, despite the fact that it was anti-imperialist in relation to Britain. Powell reads this paradox via representations of the Sudan in the late 19th century, in which Egyptian nationalists expressed “the perspective of the colonized colonizer.”Footnote 78 In their “Janus-like view of the world,” the reclamation of the Egyptian nation from British imperialism accompanied the reclamation of a “past greatness and regional power” through the colonization of the Sudan.Footnote 79 In Sunset, Mahmoud, the anti-imperial nationalist, occupies this Janus-like perspective in his loathing for the Siwans and identification with a superior, imperial power. In one scene, he refuses to exchange his helmet (a gift from the British) for the Siwan turban, despite the extreme heat, because it would be undignified to behave “like them.”Footnote 80 As he internalizes the practices of colonization, he swears to “imprison, and possibly flog, [the Siwans] to collect the taxes” and contemplates turning “Easterners against the Westerners”—just as Mr. Harvey advised him.Footnote 81
Although Taher's narrative lays Mahmoud's colonial outlook at Britain's feet rather than rendering it an integral part of Egyptian nationalism, it is clear that the departure to Siwa opens a paradox in Mahmoud's worldview and limns a critique of nationalism. Siwa was, like the Sudan, conquered by Muhammad ʿAli (in 1820 and 1821, respectively), and like the Sudan, it functions in the novel as an outpost—a site of exile—that is nevertheless imagined as internal to Egypt.Footnote 82 Thus, through comparative scale, Sunset rewrites the codes of the national novel: rather than depart to the countryside, we travel to a colonized periphery; rather than reach the nationalist apex in 1919, we linger in the unresolved promise of 1882. And as the nation fractures into simultaneous colonizer and colonized, the novel does not track progress to liberation, but maps rhizomatic networks of oppression that are rendered visible through women.
Women, as Powell and Beth Baron have shown, were central to the iconography of the time period the novel depicts, when visual representations of Egypt crystallized around female figures.Footnote 83 Moreover, “‘the national feminine’” remained “absolutely central in twentieth-century Egyptian fiction . . . in this trope, (rural) woman is constructed as a metaphor of the nation.”Footnote 84 In keeping with this tradition, Sunset paints in idealized strokes two marginalized women—Maleeka and Mahmoud's slave, Dusky Niʿma—whom we may read as national feminine figures that permit a critique of complicity in oppression. It is Niʿma who first invites such a reading because she is associated with the euphoria of 1882 and her raced, gendered body is rendered a sensual embodiment of Egypt and the Nile: “Dusky Niʿma got her name from the color of her smooth, clear, golden-brown skin, which was like the color of the Nile in flood” and which emitted the “scent of Egyptian jasmine” from its pores.Footnote 85 During the uprising, Mahmoud returns to her each evening, where she feeds him, reflects his emotions, and makes love to him. In a classic trope of the woman as a keeper of collective memory, she is a storyteller, likened to Scheherazade, who recounts romances of “good kings and bad kings.”Footnote 86 Her discontent is only apparent when she flees to an unknown fate, and we are led to understand that it is because Mahmoud failed to marry her, unwilling to break racial codes that made dark-skinned women central to the Ottoman-Egyptian household, but not its marriage structures.Footnote 87 “The respectable officer marry a slave of unknown parentage? What a scandal!”Footnote 88 The irony is that Mahmoud's family setting soon transforms from a harem household to a bankrupted ghost of elite life, ruined by debt.Footnote 89
In keeping with the novel's distancing from the nation, Niʿma fades into the past while Maleeka, in the novel's present, is disentangled from political frames. As noted, she is painstakingly depicted as unassimilable to Siwa (where her difference is read as devilish), Egypt, gender, marriage, and language. She is linked instead to the land: Siwa's ancient ruins and nature. It is Sheikh Yahya, her uncle, who describes her beauty and precocious intelligence, which she channels into an ability to craft clay images of beetles and birds (like those “on the walls of the ruins”) and to grow plants.Footnote 90 Because of her attachment to the ruins, a nationalist account of Maleeka might map her onto a Pharaonic past. Indeed, Catherine describes the temples as “a symbol of the whole country, its roof decorated with stars like the sky and its floor the Egyptian earth.”Footnote 91 Yet Maleeka's relation to the ruins remains as illegible to her interpreter, Yahya, as it does to all other narrators: we don't know why she makes the statues. If the novel is a critical rescaling of the nationalist text, then this proximity without meaning recasts the signification of the female body, dramatizing the collective symbolism attached to Maleeka's body (as a pawn in Siwan disputes, as the ghoul-woman) while preserving her impenetrable difference. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than in a climactic scene when Maleeka breaks her isolation as the ghoul-woman (ensuring her own death) by bursting into Catherine's room with two statues for reasons that remain unknown. Mahmoud narrates what transpires, and we remain observers of an embrace between the women that is at once erotic, maternal, and violent. After Maleeka's death, Catherine revisits the scene, struggling to interpret it: “was it she who had seduced me? I who had seduced her? And was there in fact any seduction . . . what had she wanted, in fact?”Footnote 92
There is ample evidence, then, to read Sunset as a postcolonial rewriting of the national novel. The departure to Siwa and resulting scale write ambivalence into the national telos, while the novel's structure nods to the polyvocalism of the postcolonial Arabic novel. Its chapters switch between characters’ voices, and Taher uses this technique to perform misunderstanding, particularly between Mahmoud and Catherine, and to suggest a certain unknowability in others (though his preference for declarative speech tends to defuse this motif).Footnote 93 Echoing the loss of national telos, Mahmoud announces the destabilization of meaning. “History” is a “bastard” (laqīṭ), and identity is lost: “I wish I knew what I wanted! I wish I knew who I was!”Footnote 94 Catherine similarly worries the borders between truth and history, as she questions the hermeneutics of deciphering temple inscriptions. Such indictments of representation recall the famously (some would say notoriously) ludic metafiction of the postcolonial Anglophone novel: “an awareness of mediation” and the construction of history.Footnote 95
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It is, of course, not necessary to grasp the representational history of Egyptian nationalism to derive meaning from Sunset in translation. In keeping with English's argument, the nation has faded: with or without “local” codes, the novel's critique of power's many guises is overtly conveyed. Thus far then, an area studies approach seems nothing more than a helpful bolster to a postcolonial reading. As the novel departs from a national to a transcolonial scale, Sunset’s translatability may only seem more assured. However, it is by keeping the novel's national frame in view that the following analysis grounds a critique of this IPAF novel.
Sunset introduces its transcolonial scale through Catherine: a colonized Irish subject carrying a British passport in occupied Egypt.Footnote 96 We then find Niʿma's double in Catherine's sister Fiona, a quasi-mystical Irish woman who, like Niʿma, provides an idealized reflection of anti-imperial sentiment and is linked to storytelling. Mahmoud overtly compares them, noting that while Fiona speaks calmly, Niʿma “lived her stories,” embodying each of the characters in turn.Footnote 97 If narrative style differs, the stories themselves incarnate a transnational romance, in which characters move seamlessly across anticolonial Irish and African imaginaries: “Here suddenly was Niʿma's beautiful prince in the middle of Fiona's story!”Footnote 98 The act of comparing the nation—of rescaling—becomes central to the narrative precisely through narrative, indexed to women as the keepers of memories that concern, above all, the lives of repressive rulers.
The relevance of this theme and the implications of Sunset’s cross-colonial networks become apparent in an incident that departs from the novel's realist register. Catherine is hunting for inscriptions in the ruins when a rock falls and almost hits a sleeping boy. Ibraheem rushes to save the child, but Mahmoud hangs back to save himself. His cowardice triggers a revelation: “In a few seconds, the false image of the past that I'd drawn for myself fell away . . . I boast to myself of a heroic past and deliberately forget [my] moment of ignominy.”Footnote 99 Mahmoud acknowledges that he betrayed ʿUrabi, denouncing him to save himself. Between the rock's fall and Mahmoud's revelation is a monologue by Alexander the Great, who obligingly introduces himself as a ghost of empire, detailing his imperial conquests and recalling his vision of a new historical era: “a new world” in which there would be one race, one language, and “no ill will or wars.”Footnote 100 The Egyptian seat of empire was to be Alexandria, but in an ancient mirroring of journeys from imperial capitals, Sunset suggests the sepulcher of Alexander was moved by devotees to “the Oasis of Amun”—Siwa.Footnote 101 And, speaking from the periphery, Alexander too is inclined to look back on his life and on empire with a critical eye. He recalls a young rebel, who demands to die if he cannot be free, and his decision to execute the boy: “I was a tyrant, no matter what justifications I might find for my tyranny.”Footnote 102
What do a rock and a ghost of empire have to do with scale? In Taher's text, they underpin a transcolonial hermeneutics that overspills the Janus-faced vision of 19th-century Egypt and open out onto an eddy of historical repetition. Alexander concludes: “I thought long but could not discern the starting point in the chain of tyranny, fear and betrayal. Which gave birth to which? And was I truly the one who fashioned it, or one of its victims?”Footnote 103 The novel's synchronic networks (Egypt, Britain, Ireland, Siwa) shift to a diachronic account of empire, introducing a chronotope that overlays 19th-century empire onto the ancient Mediterranean and splinters empire into the globality to which Alexander aspired. Mahmoud explains the lesson:
We didn't come to [the Siwans] as brothers, but as conquerors. We didn't treat them [as] fellow citizens but [as] a colonized people who had to pay their taxes to the conquerors, like it or not. Why then should we get angry at what the British were doing to us, or why should Catherine get angry at what they were doing in Ireland? We practice the law of might here just as the British practice it there.Footnote 104
In a sudden twist, we find that the act of comparing empires does not introduce radical, transcolonial solidarity, but obviates the ethical-political project of critiquing violence and structural oppression. Mahmoud cuts short his reflections: “There's no point thinking about it. The wheel [al-ʿajala] has started turning and nothing can stop it.”Footnote 105 Transcolonial scale here collapses difference into fatalistic tropes of repetition: wheels, chains, grindstones, and crushing rocks that fall from tombs. Mahmoud declares the futility of thought just before he is about to shoot the subaltern woman whose silence opened this text: Maleeka, caught at the center of “the grindstones [al-ruḥī] of war, feuding, and conflict that crush all men.”Footnote 106
The problematic implications of such a reading are many. Alexander the Great's conquests are purportedly the same as Britain's bombardment of Alexandria and colonization of Ireland, which are the same as the gendered rites that eventually kill Maleeka. It is her uncle, Sheikh Yahya, who glosses the meaning of her death: “Who will confess that he buried the knife in her heart? All of them, all of you, took part. Even the ancestors who invented the story of the ghoul-woman.”Footnote 107 The assignation of collective blame for Maleeka's death—of tradition, the state, the British—renders all and thus none accountable. The novel ends with Mahmoud blowing up the ruins, an antiquity the British used to show that “[Egyptians] had once been giants and now were dwarves.”Footnote 108 He is struck by a stone and dies. The stones, we learn in an author's note, were used to build steps to the police station and to strengthen the commissioner's home; a discursive tool for one empire becomes the material foundation of another's disciplinary sites. The wheel turns; the text is earnest, yet ambivalent.
Sunset is not alone among Arabic novels—including IPAF novels—in telescoping out to imagine transnational networks, whether of colonialism, immigration, or terrorism. Scholars often read such moves, particularly in relation to colonial networks, as resistant acts of solidarity and the restitution of “different forms of memory and . . . alternative modes of feeling and apprehending the social world.”Footnote 109 A crucial premise is that reading across peripheries (e.g., from Siwa to Ireland) breaks down the binary reasoning of colonialism, which posited a rational and universal Europe against the nonreason of the colonized. To be clear, I do not disagree that transnational perspectives may elicit radical critique. Yet as I have shown, the introduction of comparative scale beyond the nation does not in itself guarantee emancipatory modes of thought and can, rather, be put to conservative ends. In Sunset, the rescaling of the nation destabilizes knowledge of the Other, identity, and power relations; but it does so to make a more forceful case for the rule of enlightened reason, embodied in none other than Aristotle.
As discussed, the revelation of global empire occurs in Alexander the Great's monologue. In it, he mourns his failure to heed Aristotle's teachings “on the happiness that comes with wisdom and rationality” and the importance of moderation in governance: “everything I had done in life flew in the face of what he had taught me. He had dreamt of a middling country, neither too large nor too small . . . I, though, had built an empire as big as the world.”Footnote 110 Alexander's imperial excesses should have been checked by “the arbiter of . . . the rational mind.”Footnote 111 The ghost thus voices the notion that reason is the necessary counterweight to political ambition and the violence it breeds, resumed in the text as the grindstones of empire. Their present-day shadows are Mr. Harvey (British imperialism), Mahmoud (Egyptian imperialism), and Sheikh Sabir, the Siwan leader who manipulates the people with prophecies. It is no coincidence that Sheikh Yahya condemns Sabir's manipulations of the “superstitions” that he dubs the curse of the Siwa and withdraws from politics to the eminently rational pursuit of cultivating medicinal plants.Footnote 112
Read in a national frame, the valorization of reason in Sunset recalls the moral authority of the written word in Egypt's literary field and of the author as a conscience of the nation. The silent Maleeka, by this account, enters a tradition of indigenous subjects who are instrumentalized in collective iconographies but excluded from politics because they are external to the march of rational history. The subaltern woman is thus instrumentalized as “a signifier for the establishment of a good society,” wherein law and reason conquer superstition.Footnote 113 In choosing how to read Maleeka and thus Sunset, we appear to face an either/or: postcolonial critique of the nation or paternalistic enlightenment. However, it is the risk of elision between them that concerns us here: we must linger in the tension between frames.
Chatterjee influentially distinguished between the thematic of nationalism, “the epistemological [and] ethical system which provides a framework of elements and rules for establishing relations between elements,” and its problematic, which denotes “concrete statements about possibilities” in the political realm.Footnote 114 The thematic of nationalism in the colonial world corresponded to the universal knowledge of post-Enlightenment Europe, creating contradictions in the very structures of anticolonial nationalist thought.Footnote 115 More than revealing contradictions though, Chatterjee attends to the dialectic between thematic and problematic, its impact on the political realm, and, of interest here, the “closure” the thematic may impose on a search for new possibilities in thought.Footnote 116Sunset’s transcolonial history, wracked by the struggle between reason and the “grindstones” of superstition and violence, perpetuates the epistemological-ethical vision associated with the national novel while introducing transcolonial geographies and subaltern tropes.Footnote 117 The violence enacted on silenced women's bodies limns a plea for reason's universality, and the text's polyvocalism acquires a new significance: the novel weighs the narratives of diverse characters to position itself as a courthouse for meaning, the textual double of the rational mind that should have reined in Alexander's excess.Footnote 118 Though these aesthetic features correspond by analogy to nationalism's problematic, we should be cautious not to flatten literary language into the latter, which is defined by its modal qualities.Footnote 119 Rather, Chatterjee's distinction can be used in a literary context to underscore the foreclosure of critique—theoretically and politically—at the precise instance when an Arabic novel, harnessing the terms and geographies of postcolonial literature, enters world literature.
As Aamir Mufti has argued, world literature operates as “a concept of exchange” that “recodes an opaque and unequal process of appropriation as a transparent one of supposedly free and equal interchange.”Footnote 120 While Mufti, among others, has turned to historical perspectives and the critique of Orientalism to counter this notion, my reading of contemporary literature has focused on valences and practices of postcolonial theory, which may unwittingly act as a translational medium to set texts like Taher's into interpretive motion and perpetuate the illusion of open, homogenous exchange. Arabic literary studies, by attending to representational pasts and institutional settings occluded in world literature, is positioned to engage, contrapuntally, differing concepts of literature's function and imbrication in contestations over power—both between world and Egyptian literary fields and traversing these internally stratified zones. For example, Taher evinces a well-known rationalist stance in public life. Beginning in the 1990s, Egypt's “literary establishment broadcast . . . the official ideology, consisting in the main of praise for the intellectuals and values of the nahḍa [renaissance], summed up as patriotism and tolerance, faith and rationalism, and liberty and reform.”Footnote 121 Taher argued in 1993 that Egypt required a return to the nahḍa and the role of the intellectual exemplified by Hussein and al-Hakim; if Egypt, he writes, is to advance along “the path [of enlightenment] begun by [society's] best intellectuals since the beginning of the nahḍa . . . then intellectuals must become the true leaders of thought.”Footnote 122 Although literary scholars may balk at what appears to be biography, Taher's paternalistic public stance illuminates the contested practices that structure the Egyptian literary field, conditioned by, and in dialogue with, state ideology.Footnote 123 To read the critique of power in Sunset without easy recourse to Maleeka's resistance is to grapple with the epistemic and political weight of such calls for secular rationalism against “superstition” in Egypt since the 1990s—particularly after 2011—and thereby to texture the smooth surface of world literary interpretation.
The literary-critical task I am advocating does not comprise a one-way translational act of explaining national histories and political struggles into the universal lexicon of theory. Rather, by rendering visible Sunset’s belonging in other representational and institutional fields, Arabic literary studies may challenge world literature to give an account of its own textual and institutional practices and, perhaps more polemically, its failure to account in analytically interesting ways for the tensions described here. For, once we acknowledge that Sunset, despite gestures to power and pluralism, in fact opens no position from which to critique political or epistemic violence, the path of reading remains open. The representation of Maleeka's silence can be read as a mark of resistance, but it must be done in overt tension with the text itself. Not coincidentally, Spivak's argument on the subaltern—beyond the sign of suppressed speech under which it now circulates—will offer a crucial resource because it is concerned with the positioning of the intellectual, her representation of subaltern women, and the material conditions for the latter's erasure from history. Reading with the IPAF might thus be likened to a dual movement of first reading along a novel's grain—tracing the critical and epistemological lines sketched through its scale—and then permitting the text, in all its contradictions, to generate friction in theoretical practice via methodological reflection and material contextualization.Footnote 124
LABOR, HYBRIDITY, MIGRATION
The above argument and reading process are staked on the conviction that novels can and should be read for their creative, resistant capacities. This task cannot, however, rely on a fast equation of IPAF novels with opposition to nation-states or world markets. As we have seen, a “resistant” text may be imbued with a rationalist thematic and reflect its author's elite positioning and normative politics. Moreover, as described above, the IPAF is institutionally entwined with the market emergence of the postcolonial novel. A brief concluding example takes up this point, demonstrating the flexibility of scale as we move away from the gendered figure of the subaltern to other contemporary tropes of the postcolonial: labor, hybridity, and migration.
Kuwaiti author Saud Alsanousi's The Bamboo Stalk (hereafter Bamboo) is narrated by José/Isa, the son of a Kuwaiti national (Rashid) and a domestic worker from Manila (Josephine).Footnote 125 The novel compares Kuwait and the Philippines: as he grows up, José/Isa contrasts urban spaces and social and religious practices between these nations with anthropological curiosity. This scale underpins the novel's major theme of hybridity: with two names, José/Isa belongs in both places and in neither. More accurately, however, it probes his marginalization in Kuwait: José/Isa is a Kuwaiti citizen but is not accepted because he is seen to belong to the Gulf's “laboring underclass.”Footnote 126 The novel's scale thus connects its protagonist's hybridity to critiques of inequality in global capitalism, embodied in the Gulf and its migrant laborers. In this vein, José/Isa's yearning for Kuwait and his subsequent disappointment may be read as the “cruel optimism” of neoliberalism, wherein the individual fantasizes about an unattainable “good life” and undercuts his own flourishing.Footnote 127 Indeed, José/Isa eventually returns to Manila, choosing interpersonal acceptance over wealth.
A closer reading of scale will suggest that Bamboo mobilizes colonialism for reasons similar to Sunset’s: to limn a critique of power, now inflected through wealth and social acceptance, via the marginalized. As the novel shifts to a metafictive register, we learn that José/Isa has written his text as a continuation of Rashid's novel, left unfinished when he disappeared in the war with Iraq. This act of literary inheritance is compared to the work of José Rizal, the nationalist, anticolonial leader of the Philippines whose name the narrator carries and whose words punctuate the text in epigraphs.Footnote 128 In this analogy, José/Isa's writing signifies paternal inheritance of national identity (heightened in the symbolism of his father's military service) and the Philippines’s struggle for independence from Spain. This leap in scale is underdeveloped; indeed, the grafting of Filipino nationalism onto Kuwait is formally expressed in Bamboo’s use of the epigraph.
Because the ties between colonialism, nationalism, and the novel in Kuwait are distinct from those in the Egyptian case, the heuristic of anticolonial nationalism described above is not germane to Bamboo.Footnote 129 A detailed discussion of the novel and its institutional context in the Kuwaiti national field lies beyond the scope of this article, but it can be said that comparative scale in Bamboo acts to denounce the exclusion of children who are born of transnational economies from the societies these economies structure. These are José/Isa and his half-sister, Merla, child of a Filipina forced into sex work and a European tourist; the text conjures her paternal genes as imperialism haunting the Philippines and her body in the contemporary tourist economy.Footnote 130 But if this dispensation echoes the conflation of nation and female body and appeals to critical theorizations of neoliberalism, we should proceed with caution. For, the stakes of this comparison are not global flows of labor, but Kuwaiti citizenship and its exclusions. The polemic at the novel's heart concerns Kuwait's stateless Bedoon population, represented by Ghassan, a former soldier who loves Kuwait but is the “bad gene” (al-jīna al-khabītha [sic]) in the national body.Footnote 131 Indeed, Bamboo’s preoccupation with inheritance and DNA bespeaks its normative vision of the nation as a kinship union. Why, then, invoke transnational scale? Because José/Isa is an isomorphic double who mirrors the Bedoon; an insider/outsider, his anthropological perspective defamiliarizes the troubled norms of Kuwaiti society, permitting Alsanousi to indulge in narrative exposition on class hierarchies and gossip (a driving force in the plot) and in dialogue that explicitly compares José/Isa's outsider status to that of the Bedoon.Footnote 132Bamboo’s self-positioning is, in other words, not that of a courthouse, but that of a mirror reflecting, and pleading for, the nation via a hybrid Other.
Thus, although this IPAF novel draws us closer to the Gulf and themes of globalization, the meaning we draw from its critique of labor flows and their social consequences must not presume Bamboo’s unmediated resistance to world markets or even its primary concern with globalization. Its comparative scale, rather, throws into relief discourses of xenophobia and the exclusion of perceived outsiders that can be traced to the development of the Kuwaiti state.Footnote 133 A plea for an inclusive social contract does not, in itself, prevent a critique of neoliberalism; indeed, Bamboo debunks fantasies of the good life in Kuwait, depicting a breakdown in trust and civic sentiment as the cause of social fragmentation. Yet Bamboo forecloses its own critical horizon because it produces an elitist and Orientalist essentialization of the Southeast Asian Other from within comparative scale. José/Isa romanticizes the material deprivation of the Philippines in contrast to Kuwaiti wealth, expounding on the simplicity of a social world where poverty ensures the predominance of material pleasure (i.e., food) and the absence of complex class prejudices that split Kuwait.Footnote 134
CONCLUSION
Scale-based reading is above all concerned with the extent to which novels, and the theoretical practice that engages them, can sketch new aesthetic horizons and renew the traction of critique, both political and theoretical. In the work required to perform this task—between local and world literary methods, at the institutional intersection represented by the IPAF—Arabic literary studies may well open the traffic of theory to a two-way street. Significant work remains, not least in exploring the internal stratification of national and regional (i.e., North African and Middle Eastern) fields and networks for the Arabic novel, both prior to, and in relation with, the world literary setting that has constituted the focus of the above argument. A more directly political impetus for such research, I should note in closing, is the need for scholars working in Arabic literature to confront critically the current tendency to market and consume Arabic novels as privileged expressions of the popular uprisings that have been silenced by state authoritarianism and civil war since 2011.
