Arabic literature wins the prize - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly

Al-Ahram Weekly

13-03-2025

Founded in 2006, the annual Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation recognises translations of works of Arabic literature published in English in the previous year. It casts its net wide, with publishers free to enter their books for consideration, and it is unusual in recognising translation, a rare and welcome fillip for Arabic literary translators.
This year's Prize, awarded to translator Katherine Halls for her rendering of a memoir by Egyptian author Ahmed Naji at a ceremony in London in February, headed a distinguished shortlist that included five prose works and one cartoon book, all of them published by small and independent publishers in the US or the UK.
The novels included Before the Queen Falls Asleep by Huzama Habayeb, translated by Kay Heikkinen, Edo's Souls by Stella Gaitano, translated by Sawad Hussain, Lost in Mecca by Bothayna al-Essa, translated by Nada Faris, Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji, translated by Katherine Halls, and Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated by Robin Moger. Yoghurt and Jam (or How My Mother Became Lebanese) by Lena Merhej, translated by Nadiyah Abdulatif and Anam Zafar, is a cartoon book or graphic memoir.
Among the authors there was a strong Egyptian showing, including both Naji and Iman Mersal, while Huzama Habayeb is a Palestinian living in Kuwait, and Stella Gaitano is from South Sudan. Bothayna al-Essa is Kuwaiti, and Lena Merhej is Lebanese. While there were thus no works from the Maghreb on the shortlist for the Prize this year, Kuwait comes through strongly as an incubator of literary talent.
There was also a markedly feminine character to the shortlist this year, with all the writers and translators, bar one in each category, being women. This shows the major contributions that women are now making to literary writing in Arabic, perhaps still a mostly masculine pursuit as recently as 30 or 40 years ago. Many of the works on the shortlist, perhaps most obviously Traces of Enayat by Mersal and Yoghurt and Jam by Merhej, also explicitly thematise women's experience, most notably mothering.
Yoghurt and Jam (or How My Mother Became Lebanese) was something of an outlier on the shortlist of books this year, though it is also one of the most charming. Merhej is a Lebanese graphic artist and cartoonist, and her book, consisting of cartoon-strip sections or chapters about her mother's life in the Lebanese capital Beirut, was first published in the Lebanese magazine Samandal before being issued in book form in 2023. It won an award for Best Graphic Novel in Arabic at the Algiers Festival de la Bande Dessinée, and it has been published in English translation by the Balestier Press in London.
Merhej's mother was originally German and moved to Lebanon in the 1960s where she married and brought up a family. She worked in various jobs, including as a nurse, teacher, and doctor, and she lived in Beirut throughout the Lebanese Civil War. Her experiences, perhaps together with her natural resilience, meant that she eventually 'became Lebanese,' as her daughter's affectionate memoir puts it, with admiration often mixed with wonder at quite how her mother managed it.
'I observed my 'foreign' mother as she raised five kids in Lebanon in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War,' Merhej's says in the afterword to the English translation. 'I also observed my mother, the doctor, special educator, and professor, face challenges and danger and still grow dreams and realise projects' in what was at first a very unfamiliar environment.
Anyone looking for an introduction to Arab comics in English might well do worse than start with Merhej's work, clear and uncluttered as far as the drawing goes and with an intriguing narrative line as her mother navigates her way through the obstacles on her way to becoming Lebanese while stubbornly retaining certain tell-tale habits betraying her foreign origins. These include her habit of eating yoghurt with jam, instead of with cucumbers or other savoury ingredients as in her adopted country of Lebanon.
More important than her mother's stubbornly German culinary habits, however, was her determination not only to make the best of her Lebanese location even during the hard years of the Civil War, but also to thrive within it.
'I had understood that for her, living in Lebanon was never a single decision but lots of little, everyday ones that helped her find her place,' her daughter writes in her memoir. They included her mother's commitment to her job, working in Beirut hospitals throughout the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the time she spent with her immediate and extended family, organising visits to Harissa, Saida, Beiteddine and other places throughout the country with friends and the children of friends filling the backseat of her car.
Memories of mothering: Two of the novels on this year's shortlist continue the focus on women's experience, notably mothering, one of them from Kuwait and the other from South Sudan.
The Palestinian-Kuwaiti writer Huzama Habayeb will be well-known to followers of the Banipal Prize and of contemporary Arabic literature in translation more generally since an earlier novel, Velvet, also translated by US translator Kay Heikkinen, won the 2020 Prize. The Arabic text also won the AUC's Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2017.
Before the Queen Falls Asleep, shortlisted for the 2024 Prize and published in Arabic under the same title in 2011, is told throughout in the first person and consists of a mother's late-night messages to her daughter as the latter starts out in life. While the book thus describes a mother-daughter relationship, linking it to Merhej's memoir of her mother's life in wartime Lebanon, the narrative direction is reversed, this being a mother's memories offered to a daughter rather than, as in Merhej's book, a daughter's memories and mature reflections presented on her mother's life.
However, whatever way the narrative direction is imagined as going, the main interest of such a procedure is substantially the same, with communication across the gap of generations being an opportunity to meditate on the changing ways society looks at women and the new opportunities, and familiar choices, open to women from the older and younger generations.
Life has been hard for the mother's generation, or at least restricted by worries about money and background political concerns. At first she was not wanted by her family, and she still bears the masculine name of Jihad after an absent son. But over time she becomes more and more important to it, finally forcing a confession from her father that 'Jihad, my child, you are the man of the house' after good grades at school open the way to university and the prospect of a well-paid career.
'Living in an oil-producing country like Kuwait did not make us Kuwaitis, as was said, accusingly or enviously, by the many relatives we left behind us in the [Palestinian refugee] camps,' Jihad tells her daughter. 'Our life in Kuwait was an extension of our life as it might have been in the camp, still marked by diaspora, with a few improvements.' It is this cramped existence that Jihad imagines her daughter finally being able to leave behind.
One way into Edo's Souls by the South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano is to look at it as similarly concerned with the experience of motherhood and its strong emotional and other bonds.
Lucy Eghino, the main character, born in a village in South Sudan, early on devotes herself to having children, apparently a powerful identity component and route towards social recognition in this part of South Sudan. However, even as she grows into adulthood and settles into the habit of generations, life in the village is changing as a result of developments elsewhere. Young men begin disappearing, drafted into the army or the militias fighting the country's then civil war. Lucy and her family are forced to flee, at first to the South Sudanese capital Juba and then northwards to Khartoum.
Born in Khartoum herself to an originally South Sudanese family and moving to South Sudan following the country's partition in 2011, Stella Gaitano has chosen to write about the South in Arabic. Sawad Hussain's English translation, not always an easy read, manages to evoke something of the local atmosphere by preserving idioms presumably current in villages in South Sudan. Patches of earth around village huts 'protrude like fat men's bellies.' 'Handsome stalks are thick with grain.' People are 'smacked with despair,' and 'bodily matter is knitted with threads of blood.'
The society described in Edo's Souls is likely to be an unfamiliar one to English-speaking readers, further defamiliarised by Hussain's intriguing translation. This is a writer-translator pairing to watch.
Egyptian rivals: Perhaps the best-known book on this year's shortlist was Egyptian writer Iman Mersel's Traces of Enayat, published in English by the UK publisher And Other Stories in a translation by Robin Moger.
Mersel's book, a reconstruction of the life of Enayat al-Zayyat, an Egyptian writer of the 1960s who only published one novel before her early death, won the UAE Sheikh Zayed Book Award when it appeared in Arabic in 2021, and a French translation, Sur les traces d'Enayat Zayyat by veteran translator Richard Jacquemond, appeared from the well-known publisher Actes Sud in the same year.
Mersel mixes what she has been able to find out about al-Zayyat with her own reflections on her research, such that her book is as much about her, a younger Egyptian woman writer, as it is about her older peer. Some readers may well be reminded of the methods used by the German writer W.G. Sebald at the beginning of the millennium when writing about memories, real and imagined, of the Second World War.
Speaking to the Al-Ahram Weekly in Paris when the French translation appeared, Mersel said that the idea behind the book came to her when she was browsing among the secondhand bookstores in Ezbekiyya in Cairo and found a copy of al-Zayyat's only novel. She had never heard of the author, she said, who had apparently been airbrushed out of literary history. She then began a quest to find out more about al-Zayyat that led her to interview surviving friends and relatives as well as build up a picture of the cultural environment of the 1960s and what that had meant for women.
'I have known many talented women writers who have vanished,' Mersal told the Weekly. 'I have always been fascinated by the kind of talent that cannot survive in our environment,' particularly, as in the case of al-Zayyat, talents, not all of them women, who cannot recognise themselves in the dominant narratives of their time.
'There was a dominant formula [in the 1960s], which said that a woman's path to emancipation coincided with national emancipation and the struggle against colonialism and that her identification with these things lent meaning to her personal aspirations and was a way of validating the way she presented herself in her life-writing,' Mersal commented. Al-Zayyat had had other interests and was seeking other ways of self-validation, and she had not been able to write in the approved manner.
Finally, there is Ahmed Naji's novel Rotten Evidence, a memoir of a period spent in prison, the English translation of which won the 2024 Banipal Prize.
Whereas some of the other translators on this year's shortlist decided to stay quite close to the Arabic original when producing their English versions, marked in the case of Heikkinen and Faris who have produced English texts that often read like translations, Katherine Halls, the translator of Naji's memoir, has been able to find an idiomatic English voice for Rotten Evidence such that one rarely if ever feels that it is a translation.
Perhaps this is what attracted the jury of this year's Prize, though one wonders whether they also took into account the fact that Naji's book was probably a lot easier to translate than the other ones, with the exception of Merhej's cartoon book about her mother, and it also makes fewer demands on the reader. Stella Gaitano's Edo's Souls asks readers to imagine village life in rural South Sudan, for example, and Sawad Hussain's interesting translation probably rightly rejects the kind of choices that would minimise the mental distance involved. There is more material on these and other matters on the Banipal Prize's Website.
Ahmed Naji's voice comes through loud and clear in Halls's English version of his memoir, such that were one to meet him in person there would doubtless be some surprise to find him speaking Arabic, so much himself does he sound in English. His book is largely about reading and writing – the books he reads, often by chance since it depends on what he can find in the prison library, and the parts of them that he writes out for further consideration.
He remembers the books that were in the library of the Taha Hussein School for Boys in his native Mansoura, comparing them to those available in his new environment. Many of the titles are the same, though reading them again, this time as a man rather than a schoolboy, he finds they say different things.
One of the most precious is a battered copy of Taha Hussein's book 'With Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri in his Prison,' which Taha Hussein wrote during a summer holiday in France in the 1930s. The mediaeval poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri (973 – 1057 CE) was blind, like Taha Hussein himself, and despite the many centuries that distanced him from al-Ma'arri, Taha Hussein always felt a close connection to him.
Reading Taha Hussein's book on al-Ma'arri in different circumstances many years after the date of its original publication, Ahmed Naji also discovers many examples of fellow feeling.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 March, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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