After the Arab Spring: 5 Writers to Watch

posted on: May 30, 2016

By ALEXANDRA ALTER
THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the chaotic aftermath of the Arab Spring, writers from the Middle East and North Africa have channeled their frustrations into novels that explore the political and social fallout that followed the revolutions.

Here are five rising literary stars from the region.

Yasmine el-Rashidi

In her debut novel, “Chronicle of a Last Summer,” Ms. Rashidi, an Egyptian journalist, explores the country’s political turmoil through the lens of a girl’s coming-of-age in Cairo.

The novel unfolds over three summers: 1984, when Hosni Mubarak comes to power and her father mysteriously disappears; 1998, when she becomes a filmmaker in college and starts to bristle against political oppression; and 2014, when she is finally reunited with her father in the chaotic aftermath of the revolution. The novel, which Ms. Rashidi wrote in English, will be published next month by Tim Duggan Books.

“The questions I had as an Egyptian, I felt they could only really be explored in that gray area where fact ends and fiction and multiple truths and speculation begins,” Ms. Rashidi said in an interview. “I was interested in the failings of memory, and the soft censorship of society and culture, and the erasure of political history.”

Ahmed Saadawi

In his dark fantasy novel “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” the Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi takes the premise of Mary Shelley’s horror story and turns it into a haunting allegory for sectarian violence. A Baghdad street peddler named Hadi collects body parts from the carnage of bombings and sectarian attacks, and combines them to create a monster. The composite corpse comes to life and takes revenge on the people responsible for the deaths, slaying Shiites and Sunnis, criminals and government forces alike.

In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Saadawi said he was trying to
capture the moral ambiguities of war, and how “with this war and violence, no one is innocent.”

An English translation of the novel is scheduled to be published by Penguin Books next spring.

Shukri al-Mabkhout

Mr. Mabkhout’s debut novel, “The Italian,” unfolds in Tunisia during the
tumultuous late 1980s and early 1990s, and examines the political clashes between leftists and Islamists and the forces that brought the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali to power.

Although it takes place in the past, Mr. Mabkhout, a Tunisian academic, has said the story was inspired by the 2010 uprising.

“This is a novel of defiance,” he said in a news conference after he won the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Saleem Haddad

Mr. Haddad’s debut novel, “Guapa,” published this spring by Other Press, takes place in an unnamed Middle Eastern country after a popular uprising fails to bring political freedom and stability. The narrative unfolds over a single day as Rasa, a young gay Arab man, searches for his best friend, an activist who has been arrested by the police.
Mr. Haddad, a humanitarian aid worker who grew up in Kuwait, Jordan and Cyprus, and now splits his time between London and the Middle East, wrote the novel in English and is currently looking for an Arabic-language publisher.

Mr. Haddad got the idea during a visit to Morocco after the Arab Spring. He wanted to write about the sexual awakening of a young gay man against the backdrop of the political revolution, which brought the promise of greater personal and social freedom.

“When I was writing the book, there was a feeling that anything was possible, for a very brief moment,” he said.

Khaled Khalifa

Mr. Khalifa’s novel “No Knives in the Kitchen of This City,” which will be published in English this fall, is set in Aleppo during the 1960s and 2000s, and follows one family that struggles under the brutality of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Mr. Khalifa’s previous novel, “In Praise of Hatred,” was banned in Syria, likely for its frank depiction of government crackdowns on Sunni Muslims in the 1980s. In a 2013 speech, Mr. Khalifa, an award-winning Syrian writer, said that fiction “can’t stop a war or turn down a killing machine, but it can be a triumph of the oppressed.”