Arab Short Stories

Guest speaker: Prof. Margaret Larkin, Near Eastern Studies, larkin@socrates.berkeley.edu

Reading for Working Group:

Emile Habibi. "At Last the Almond Blossomed" (trans. by Anthony Calderbank) in A Land of Stone and Thyme: An Anthology of Palestinian short Stories. Edited by Nur and Abdelwahab Elmessiri. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1996.

Ghassan Kanafani. "The Death of Bed Number 12" (trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies) in Modern Arabic Short Stories. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Suggested discussion questions: (from Michele Delattre)

For our Ovid meeting we read about a human society cut off from an idealized past (the "golden age") and struggling with capricious gods to control their fate through a series of shifting identities and transformations. In story of Bertrande and Pansette in The Return of Martin Guerre we reviewed a "micro-history" where one couple reconstructs the past in an attempt to repair the present. In the Palestinian stories for this session the characters' perception of time (past, present, future) plays a large role in their construction of identity. How are the characters uprooted from their past? How do they try to remedy this?

How much of their present identity is a product of how others see them? Consider these passages:

"Oh, Ahmed, how imprisoned we are in our bodies and minds! We are always endowing others with our own attributes, always looking at them through a narrow fissure of our own views and way of thinking, wanting them, as far was we can, to become "us". We want to squeeze them into our skins, to give them our eyes to see with, to clothe them in our past and our own way of facing up to life. We place them within a framework outlined by our present understanding of time and place." (Kanafani, p. 46)

From now on everything happened as though he were raised above the ground, as though his legs were dangling in mid-air: like a man on a gallows, he was moving in front of Time's screen, a screen as inert as a rock of basalt." ("The Death of Bed Number 12" p. 37)

"In a daze I went to the box and picked up the ear-ring. I don't know why it was that I looked at the nurse and said: " He bought this ear-ring for his sister Sabika - I happen to know that." (Kafani, 41)

"I realize now that I had never withdrawn into my shell, or curled up except when I cut my links with the past. What is this past? The past isn't a time. The past is you and so-and-so and so-and-so and all the friends. It's like we drew the picture of this past and each one of us coloured it with his own special colour until it emerged, an image of shining youth, to embrace everything in the whole world. I will never regain my links with this past until the parts of the picture are complete with all their colours."

How much of the characters' identities are predetermined? How successful is the attempt to become a "self-made man?"

To step back a bit to the larger idea of connecting literature and history, how much of history is story we tell about ourselves and how much the story we invent about the "other"?

Suggested readings from Prof. Margaret Larkin (print as pdf)

Elmessiri, Nur and Abdelwahab, eds. A Land of Stone and Thyme. London: Quartet Books, 1996.

Haqqi, Yahya. The Saint's Lamp and Other Stories. Leiden: Brill, 1973.

Habibi, Emile. The Secret Life of Saeed and Pessoptimist.

Ibrahim, Sonallah. The Commission.

-----The Smell of It.

Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Johnson-Davies, Denys, trans. The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction, 2006.

-----Arabic Short Stories. London: Quartet Books, 1983.

-----Modern Arabic Short Stories. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Kanafani, Ghassan. Trans., Mayy Jayyusi. All That's Left to You. Austin: University of Texas, 1990.

-----Men in the Sun. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press.

-----Palestine's Children. Returning to Haifa and Other Stories. Boulder, Co.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000.

Muwaylihi, Muhammad. A Period of Time. Trans., Roger Allen. Reading, England: Ithaca Press, 1992.

Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1985.

-----The Wedding of Zein. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1985.

Handouts from Deborah Petranek:

Allen, Roger, ed. In the Eye of the Beholder: Tales of Egyptians Life from the Writings of Yusuf Idris. Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978.

Darwish, Mahmud, Al-qasim, Samih, and Adonis, eds. Victims of A Map: A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry. London: Al Saqi Books: Distributed by Zed Press, 1984.

Shepard, Aaron. Folktales on Stage. Scripts for Reader's Theater.

Other Selected links and references:

Short biography for Emile Habibi from Arab World Books: http://www.arabworldbooks.com/authors/emile_habibi.htm

Short obituary for Emile Habibi on the PBS Global Connections timeline (1996).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/globalconnections/mideast/timeline/text/links/event_634.html

"Haifa: Wadi Al-Nisnass & Abbas Street " By Emile Habibi (Translated by Mona Anis and Hala Halim)
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/Haifa/Story187.html

"Emile Habibi, the Pessoptimist Who Went Global" by Omar Zane in the journal Al Jadid Vol. 2, No. 7 (May 1996)
http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/000/070/079/al-jadid/aljadid-emileh.html

A brief biography of Ghassan Kanafini from Encyclopedia Of The Palestinians edited by Philip Mattar
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Acre/Story168.html

Another biography of Ghassan Kanafini from a Finish "Books and Writers" site by Petri Liukkonen.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/kanaf.htm

"Jaffa: Land of Oranges" by Ghassan Kanafani (Translated by Mona Anis and Hala Halim)
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/Jaffa/Story153.html

ORIAS Working Groups are established to provide professional development support for K-14 teachers with shared interests in international studies. The working groups provide teachers with the opportunity to extend their content knowledge by participating in seminars with University scholars; meet with colleagues to share resources and experiences; and work independently or collaboratively on classroom materials with ORIAS staff.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS), the Bay Area Global Education Program (BAGEP) at the World Affairs Council of Northern California and the Robbins Collection at the School of Law, U. C. Berkeley.

For further information contact Michele Delattre at ORIAS: 510-643-0868 or orias@berkeley.edu