A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature by David Tresilian Page B

contaminated by foreign influences. ‘Our cultural heritage is crammed with nonsense,’ he wrote, ‘so much so that when contemplating those hundreds of thousands of books in theNational Library I curse the day we learnt to write Arabic.’ Perhaps Lytton Strachey felt something similar when contemplating what he felt were the cartloads of stuff produced by the British nineteenth-century writers he satirized in
Eminent Victorians
. Perhaps one can see in Idris a figure like Ismail in Hakki’s fable
The Lamp of Umm Hashim
, desiring to liberate himself from the past, even at the risk of smashing it entirely, yet at the same time seeing in that past reflections of the deepest parts of his personality.
    Idris wrote of the ‘huge, strange gulf that separates our written language from the simple and fluent idiom in which we speak’, meaning that ‘literature’, elevated conceptions of which Idris disliked, almost inevitably sounded artificial for reasons explored earlier in this book. This gulf was social as much as intellectual, separating the educated classes from the masses, and Idris dramatizes such issues in his stories, not only in pieces like ‘The Dregs of the City’, where the realities of the class structure are exposed, but also in those stories where ‘preachers, authorities and reform-minded intellectuals … deliver
ex cathedra
speeches to admiring or stunned peasants … their grandiloquence [being] only partly understood, if at all.’ He had a ‘deep-seated dislike of the established literary and linguistic authorities’, notably the ‘bunch of eccentrics’ making up bodies like the Arabic Language Academy, who sometimes spoke in literature’s name. 16
    Idris’s writings, in their frustrations as well as in their impatience for change, are typical of a strand of Arabic literature in the 1950s and 1960s that insisted on literature having a clear social message and its authors a clear ‘commitment’ to change. In this respect, Arabic literature was within the international mainstream (this was the decade of the ‘Angry Young Men’ in Britain), and ‘committed’ writers like Idris had little time for their elder peers, for whom ‘literature is an end in itself’. 17 A typical novel of the period is Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s
Egyptian Earth
, well translated by DesmondStewart, which focuses on the lives of Egypt’s peasant farmers, the
fellaheen
, and protests against their ill-treatment. 18 The poetry of the period displays similar qualities, as explained below.
    Outside Egypt, prose writers such as the Sudanese Tayib Salih and the Saudi national Abdelrahman Munif are among the most important writers of the post-war period. Salih came to prominence in the 1960s, and Munif’s writing career began in the 1970s, only ending with his death in 2004. Salih’s best-known novel, at the time of writing the only work by a modern Arab author to appear in the ‘Penguin Classics’ series of world literary works, is
Season of Migration to the North
, already referred to above. Other works include a collection of short stories set in Wad Hamid, the same village in the Sudan that features in
Season of Migration
, brought together in English in a volume entitled
The Wedding of Zein
. There is also
Bandarshah
, a later, longer work that represents a development from the world presented in
Season of Migration
and that is Salih’s most recent published work. 19
    Born in 1929 in northern Sudan, Salih’s professional career led him to posts in various international organizations in Europe and elsewhere, as well as to a great deal of journalism. In his literary writing, he has focused on the relationship between a poor and swiftly developing post-colonial society, in this case the Sudan, and the European society that contains both the former colonial power and represents the promise, or threat, of change. This theme of the meeting of cultures, dramatized through the experiences of either an Egyptian man