Cities without Palms (Modern Arabic Novels (Hardcover))

On their approach the desert takes on strangely fertile dimensions, with every turn suddenly revealing vast expanses of herbs and plants not usu- ally associated with arid environments. Every animal that they see assumes supernatural characteristics: As the father kneels to touch it, he tells his son to put his hand in his, and together, trembling, they dig it up. Belief varies according to the capacity and nature of the believer.

Security only arrives after the earthly span has been traversed, and the nightmare negotiated to return to the kingdom of forgetting. At the end of the tale, Al-Koni ofers neither judgement nor evaluation: Derrida proposes the distinction between particular duty and universal ethics as a paradigm for reading the Abraham story in both Genesis and Kierkegaard. Abraham is commanded by God — the source of the universal law that makes ethics — to break that law and kill his son. In the process Derrida foregrounds the moment of undecidability inherent in this decision, and the way in which the fulilment of any one obligation to one entity necessarily entails the sacriice of the obligation to all others.

Far from being utterly indifer- ent to his son, the father cares about him deeply: As fathers go, therefore, he lives up to his obligations; indeed, he is more than dutiful. And yet his sense of obligation brings him into open conlict with every ethical code and custom that holds sway in the human, social world.

As Derrida reminds us, it is only by tackling the animal head on that we understand just what it is that deines the human. It is not a question of losing the distinction between human and animal, but rather one of displacing the former with respect to the latter. He ends up lost in the desert. As he nears death, he sees the male gazelle approach with a threatening gleam in his eye. Ukhayyad accepts this bargain, and leaves with his camel only to ind that he has a disgraceful reputation throughout the desert as the man who sold his family for a camel. Once he lets go of everything, including the gold dust al-tibr that he pours in the stream where he kills Dudu, he returns to heaven, but only after paying a heavy price.

Gold Dust thus narrates the failure of the individual, who attaches himself to the things of this world to the point of losing himself, and the fact that this is a necessary failure once the irst step attachment has occurred. Cain to the end of his rampage in the Fezzan. Asouf is named after the desert wilderness essuf. In other words, the novel centres on the Sui as a personage of the liminal space between habitation and wilderness. From the outset, Al-Koni makes it clear that we are in this hybrid space: Now, awal means, as Ibrahim Al-Koni kindly points out to the reader, speech, chat- ter, language.

And it is literary creation — that voyage without hope of return to the world of the invisible, of the jinn, of the spirits that inspire, and the intrepid return to the world of the ins despite it all — that is deined in this novel as the highest form of valour: Like Al-Ghitany, Al-Koni aims at mastering death through writing, albeit in a more aggressive, less conciliatory mode.

As Blanchot reminds us, writing is only possible once the writer has established a relationship of sovereign domination with respect to death. Over the course of the narrative the protagonist consistently inds himself in situations that exemplify the solitude of the other-worldly individual, the writer and the Sui. Later in his life — whether he is in the oasis, travel- ling through the desert with companions who eventually try to betray him, at school or in the Russian academy where he sharpens his skills — both the human and spiritual realms disavow any relationship with him: You are alone in your world.

Because the artist can see what others do not, he is condemned to live on his own. And because the desert only communicates with those who see it with the inner eye, the eye of insight, he is condemned to simultaneously see and remain on the margins of society: How can he relate to them what they cannot see as long as they will only acknowledge what they do see?

Indeed, the word daylam could, conceivably, refer to a multitude of human beings or an army. Feeling trapped by the former, and weighed down by the sense of guilt that he has betrayed the source of his prophecy heaven, the stars and the desert , he decides to commit suicide. Is this what the tribal magicians call freedom? Is this what the lovers of solitude describe as calm? Or is it that puzzle that the masters of mystery describe as a second birth? Everything seems closer, more intimate, an integral part of who and what he is: Only now does he see that these objects in which he only used to see bodies, names and things are neither bodies nor names nor things, but something else whose name he does not know.

Something closer than friend or inti- mate or companion. Something else that he now sees with the eye of insight after his eyesight kept it hidden all these years. Something else not separated by distance, not obscured by darkness, something that has no existence outside himself. And the water racing into the hollow of the river did not spring from the depths of the earth, but from his own heart.

We inally understand the meaning of the title: For Al-Koni, the writer becomes who and what he is by braving death. In the space of writing where death has been overcome there are no ends; merely a timeless literary survival that ensures proliic literary creation. What do we mean when we invite a creative artist to make us listen to his psalms? It is, in other words, a sanctuary for prayer.

Not prayer of the prescribed sort, but the far nobler prayer that we call artistic creation.

Expression is a letter, and the letter is a body, and the body the talis- man that kills. Al-Koni ends the chapter with a reference to Heidegger, for whom the work of art is precisely the locus of the revelation of the truth. For Al-Koni, writing cannot happen without a direct confrontation with death; indeed, without a foretaste of death, going so far as to call biological birth false and the second birth, the one that comes after the brush with death real, insofar as it leads to the birth of the soul. It is especially signiicant that what Dostoyevsky acquires at the moment of death is not mere creativity; it is prophecy.

For Al-Koni, unlike Al-Ghitany and Mahfouz , the writer, the novel- ist, as an individual, has no place in the world. He studied in Algeria and Tunisia, maintaining a strong commitment to Arabic literature and culture throughout his life in opposition to the practice of writing in French, which was widespread in the Maghreb even after independence from France. His iction features bold relec- tions on Algerian history and the failures of post-independence Algeria and the Arab world, frequently turning to satire and allegory to communicate a sense of profound dismay with the betrayal of the revolutionary socialist ideals of the FLN.

In his history of the Algerian Civil War, Luis Martinez points out that war is the scene not only of violent conlict but also of the reinterpreta- tion of national memory.

روايات عربيه

On both sides, there is a serious claim being made on the minds and memories of the Algerian people, in whose name the war is being fought. Far from being something that is made by human beings, this history is something that happens to them: I did not add an ending, but rather I suggested several. I contented myself with an epilogue: All along the course of the novel the novelist asks — via his protagonist — what Marx and Lenin would have made of late twentieth-century Algeria. In his introduction to the novel Ouettar makes clear that the events of the novel precede those of With that he gave the zero a value that rivalled the value of the one.

Indeed he went beyond that: Even though we think that it is illuminated by several forms of knowledge, it is dark, mysterious and frightening. All questions are in it simultaneously, forming a permanent storm that grows darker the harder we try to look at it [. You will not ind a single door to open without seeing entire mazes and basements opening up before you [. God is the Light of the heavens and the earth. His Light is like a niche containing a lantern, the lantern in a glass, the glass like a star glittering, set aglow by the oil of a blessed olive tree, neither Eastern nor Western, its oil almost aglow even if untouched by ire.

God draws comparisons for humanity and is all-knowing. Sui exegetes underline the trope of illumination as a representation of the heart and mind of the believer. Our beloved country that is neither Eastern nor Western, geographically or culturally. It is impossible for any other creature to be Algerian; the descendant of all the devils and all the angels and all the jinn. Donatus the rebel and Augustine the conservative. Her recognition of the poet as a waliyy stands for Algeria naming him as one of her patron saints.

Her description recurs several times in the second half of the novel like an incantatory sequence pronounced by a voice trying to remember, or by a worshipper engaging in dhikr: Only your eyes are disclosed.

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It therefore makes sense that religion, as a driving force, will at some point dominate the social praxis of the society that they inhabit. Perhaps the most telling moment comes when one of his assassins calls for his death on the following grounds: May Ibn Rushd die. May [the scien- tist] Ibn Al-Haytham [—] die.

You interpret things in a manner unlike that of our pious ancestors. So remind, if reminding will help. Prosperous are those who purify themselves, remember the name of their Lord, and pray. As an act of remembrance, dikr recalls the memory of the divine presence recol- lection of God , and re-enacts the awareness of the divine immanence commemoration of God within man. But time seems to have stopped: His prayer is symptomatic: Needless to say, the choice of these two verses is not haphazard.

Precisely because the waliyy cannot come to terms with his past, it comes to him in dreams and visions. And precisely because it comes to him in dreams and visions, it remains dis- tant, unavailable, unknowable, misunderstood but simultaneously, and most troublingly, always there, ready to reappear. For him, the earliest breach in the narrative comes with the wars of apostasy al-ridda that followed the death of the Prophet. For Ouettar, therefore, the Arab world is still ighting the wars of apostasy, on a catastrophically larger scale and with no end in sight.

Both the waliyy and the poet stand in for the novelist Tahar Ouettar. It is as though Tahar Ouettar were proclaiming his idelity to the Algerian republic precisely through all these moments of failed mourning with the waliyy at their centre. When he interviews them about what happened, the answer shocks him: She insinuates herself into his plan to save the world, seducing him with stories about how they will proceed to populate the world with their children. She is, actually, the seductive avatar of peace, come back to the world to warn its residents of the horror of war and bloodshed.

I warn you, master, against spilling my blood. What is stored in your head will be erased and will not be restored to you for centuries. It will only return to you drop by drop and bit by bit. You will wander in the desert here for centuries without inding your way, and once you do you will start all over again. You will be chased by the curse of beheadings, strangling children, the elderly and the disabled, and burning people alive. You will die a thousand and one deaths, your blood will irrigate every land in which the call to prayer is heard, and every time you return you will be chased by the curse of looking for me without knowing what you seek.

All that matters for the waliyy is that there is a war, into which he plunges headstrong without hesitation: He turned in his irst books [i. Both Mahfouz and Ouettar synthesise Islamic and global culture, which is why they prove to be so threatening: In an instant I saw myself in him. I saw Egypt and the Arabs and the Muslims in him.

I saw myself torn between myself and another self. I tried to get rid of the other, but I failed. Let me die, then. Let me be slaughtered. Furthermore, in so doing and through his literary activity, Mahfouz keeps adding syntheses to this rich cultural ferment that he then transmits to readers such as the igure of the waliyy-assassin. Nuwayra; he is the Islamists ighting in nearly every faction of the Afghanistan war in the s, as well as Kosovo and Chechnya; he is there during every chapter of the history of the Muslim world.

Far from being exceptional or unusual or perverse igures, Ouettar seems to be saying, they are all normal; they are all part and parcel of an Arabo-Muslim world that has repeatedly rejected unity and reconciliation. For Ouettar, the Arabs, the Muslims, are doomed to wander the desert in a state of astonished amnesia; a people who, having destroyed their history, have deprived them- selves of a future. Writing the nightmare of history is impossible due to the repeated ejection of the writer — the saint, the waliyy — from that history.

In his preface Ouettar states that the igure of the waliyy, as seen through the protagonists of the novels discussed above, all represent the Muslim unconscious, thereby extending the pattern of universal identiication found in the irst two parts of the trilogy: He gives the reader a sarcastic reading of an Arab world plunged into the dark ages, quite literally by the appearance of a black mass in the sky cover- ing the entire region except Jerusalem. Bahaa Taher, Solidarity and Idealism n Egyptian man in love with a European woman goes to a desert temple.

A Once there, he attempts suicide. His commitment to his political and aesthetic values quickly led to both an active career in the cultural sphere and increasing pressure from the Egyptian authorities. From to he took a position with the United Nations in Geneva. His lucid prose frequently presents apparently simple plots and language to unmask the morally and politically troubling aspects of the everyday.

In both texts, the other-worldly space serves as a refuge for the protagonists, removing them from a world in which their values cannot operate. Although the narrator is sceptical of these claims, his relationship with a young woman named Anne Marie bears them out: Martine is a gentle, other-worldly creature. Her visit to Egypt is a revelation: She cannot wait to return to Egypt permanently so that she can be baptised in the Nile and the temple with her beloved, thereby inding the completion she desires.

His research into ophthalmology moves in a more mystical direction, investigating ante-natal timeless visual memories. He is joined by his Irish wife, Catherine. Catherine describes the Pharaonic temple accurately as a miniature representation of the Egyptian Kingdom that also operates as a gateway to the divine, open- ing up a location for the manifestation of a God who would then inhabit the temple and protect the kingdom and its inhabitants.

A sudden visit from Maleka, a young Siwan woman with an active intellect, leaves Catherine wonder- ing whether she loves her or Mahmoud. When Fiona dies, Mahmoud destroys the temple with dynamite, deliberately seeking death in its destruction. If, as Taher argues in an interview, he writes narratives where human solidarity trumps individual salvation, that solidarity must all too often cross boundaries that go well beyond the physical and the temporal. Between them, history runs through and inlects the investigations of the creative, spiritual self under political, economic and psychological siege in the Arab world: Far from being an ahis- torical, apolitical or politically disengaged undertaking, therefore, the turn to Suism in contemporary Arabic iction faces the intractable forces of history head on, though it does so without turning the novel into a political agenda.

It remains to be seen what the cultural outcome of these events will be. It would be even more interesting to speculate about the impact of these events on the incidence of Suism in literary production. As long as there are writers and artists, the self-relexive mode of writing will persist, and as long as self-relection informs literary production, Suism will continue to afect and inform that output. Derek Attridge, he Singularity of Literature, Attridge glosses this phenomenon with an appropriately illuminating anec- dote: Attridge takes his distance from the idea of the absolute, wholly transcendent Other, but this is a key part of the semantic ield attached to the term as it operates in my study.

Attridge, Singularity, 27, n. Or, as Derrida puts it: Herr mache mir Raum in meiner engen Brust. Chittick, Sui Path, n. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading, It is brought into existence by the other, invented by the other. Frank Kermode, he Sense of an Ending, Muhammad Siddiq has recently emphasised the fraught relationship between realist Arabic iction and the idea of individuality in Arab Culture and the Novel, — Siddiq also has much of interest to say about the refrac- tion of religious identity in the Egyptian novel —53 , but his focus is not necessarily on Suism alone.

In my view it is no accident that this statement is made by one of the most important scholars of Suism of the past century. Derrida on the relationship between writing and survival in Parages, —2; a question to which I will return below. Since my focus in this study is on the aesthetics rather than the politics of Suism, and because my position is that Suism is used as a tool for working out aesthetic rather than political problems in the Arabic novel without, how- ever, maintaining that either Suism or the novel are apolitical , I will not deal with the opposition to Suism in the social and political sphere.

Despite state and institu- tional opposition to Suism, there have been multiple attempts at a modus vivendi and reconciliation between Suism and its opponents. Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique I, 42—4. Freilich bleibt dann eben keine Frage mehr; und eben dies ist die Antwort. Wittgenstein, Notebooks —, 51—51e.

Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Attridge, Reading and Responsibility, 19— Neither focuses on the novel, however. El-Enany, Arab Representations, In the context of the authors that we are studying, including Haqqi, the term is used to designate a Sui master. While she builds a strong case, my reading of the story deviates signiicantly from her conclusions.

Islam on the Street, — On this aspect of Sui life, and with speciic reference to the musical culture of Suism in Egypt, see Earle H. Waugh, he Munshidin of Egypt, 6— Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: In a later interview Mahfouz lists Hafez whose verse plays a key role in he Haraish and Tagore as two of his favourite poets. Another example of the bond between this peculiar language literature and desire comes in the fourth tale of this collection: Chittick, Sui Path, 89—90, —8. Aii, Mystical Philosophy, 29— Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur, n.

Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints, 90—8. Equally worthy of note is the use of the vocabulary of hospitality in creating the image of all creation welcoming and receiving the arriving reality. He believes her to be an angel incarnate, and refuses to speak to her due to the immense gap separating the human from the divine. Another important point of contact between the Echoes and he Haraish is the idea of the sacred as something that ills space and darkness, as witness the following aphorism: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction, ix. Haifa Saud Alfaisal ofers much that is useful by way of situating the Suism in Bandarshah in a historical context in Religious Discourse in Postcolonial Studies, — Both of these sources will only be cited in the case of a direct quotation or necessary recollection.

As Massignon puts it: Hassan, Tayeb Salih, Salih, CW, , Although it frightens Hasab ar-Rasoul at irst, the appearance of the demonic stranger thus returns him to himself. See my reading of he Wedding of Zein below. Hassan, Tayeb Salih, — As Hassan points out, the Arabic subtitle of Dau al-Beit makes this clear: Holt, he Mahdist State in the Sudan, 17— Sanderson, England, Europe and the Upper Nile, —, As in the lightning and the voice that beckon him towards his irst vision of Bandarshah.

For my present purposes I will focus only on the questions of witnessing and eternity, and will only cite Omri in case of a direct quotation. Omri, Nationalism, n. I am convinced that he is lying. As the story is nar- rated in Q7: Moses fell down, unconscious. To You I turn in repentance! I am the irst to believe! A clear, thorough account of this aspect of the Moses story is found in Sands, Sui Commentaries, 79— En Islam iranien, 2: See Corbin, En Islam iranien, 2: Corbin, Corps spirituel, In this framework the conclusion of the story would plead against the validity of the mundus imaginalis in favour of the world of the here and now.

Corbin, En Islam iranien, 2: Derrida and Autobiography, i. Chittick, Sui Path, 4; Self-Disclosure, xxiv—xxv, 96—8. According to Barthes, this has always been the task of literature: Derrida, Donner le temps, 59— Derrida, Donner le temps, 22—9. Parages where the case is made for surviving as a basis for writing: Derrida, Chaque fois, Mark Currie, About Time, Typically, Chodkiewicz ofers the clearest synthesis of the concept in Seal, 54—5, — Chittick, Sui Path, 18—19, , Corbin, Corps spirituel, — Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique I, Il fait aller plus loin, ailleurs.

La signiication du mot exil est multiple. Edward Said, Relections on Exile, —2. Al-Simadi, Gamal Al-Ghitany, —3. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, — Peter Hallward, Out of this World, 4, 30— Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, 47—9. Smith, Derrida and Autobiography, 37—8. One key consequence is the absolute uniqueness of the spiritual trajectory travelled by every mystic. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 30—3.

Novel of Worldliness, 4. Casajus, Gens de parole, Chittick, Self-Disclosure, 29—38, Chittick, Sui Path, , —4. Leonard Lewisohn translates the verse from which this is taken as follows: I am deeply indebted to Dr Lewisohn for his assistance with this reference.

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Aii, Mystical Philosophy, —3. It is no accident that we ind in this passage the same pharaonic idea of death as the start of life. Derrida outlines the distressing nature of the dilemma as follows: Tout autre est tout autre. Caputo, he Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, Attridge, Reading and Responsibility, Stefan Weidner, Erlesener Orient, Al-Koni, Un oeil qui jamais ne se ferme, Al-Koni, Un oeil, Deleuze and Guattari, Mille plateaux, —4: Among the more striking examples that Derrida mentions is the snake in the Garden of Eden.

In both instances the identiication between the snake and the human operates as an act of seduction. Dans nos cultures, il accepte le sacriice et mange de la chair. Furthermore it is not only the divine spirit that can inhabit the animals of the desert: Al-Koni makes clear that he is bending the meaning of the term slightly: Once again, there is an important parallel between Al-Koni and Blanchot, who describes the necessary encounter with death in the following terms: After the successful negotiation of the encounter with death, writing goes on endlessly, or as Levinas puts it in his witty gloss of this aspect of Blanchot: Sur Maurice Blanchot, 16, emphasis in the original.

Heidegger, Basic Writings, ; GA, 5: Poetry, Language, hought, —9; GA, On the Way to Langage, — On the Way, 25—6; GA, 9: Heidegger, Poetry, Language, hought, ; GA, It is especially worthy of note that Al-Koni turns to this most linguistically self- relexive and discursive of the Four Gospels, the one that starts all Being with the logos. See the biographical readings in Edward F. I have opted for the former translation and spelling as they seem to be in line with the strong autobiographical strain running through the three novels under consideration: James McDougall traces the lines of force of this process in admirable detail in his History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria.

He proposes a lucid alternative reading to the idea of a monolithic, nightmarish Algerian past. Brothers in Faith, Enemies in Arms. Martinez, Guerre civile, 30—6, —70, —, —92, — Indeed, LaCapra makes a strong case for literature in claiming that it enables a better working through of trauma than a historical reconstruction thereof. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5. Anawati and Gardet, Mystique musulmane, Mystique musulmane, —16, — Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, Incorporation, for them, consists precisely in the production of anti-metaphors: De quoi demain, —8.

Addas, Quest, —13; Chodkiewicz, —9. Quoted in El-Enany, Arab Representations, In Contemporary Arab Writers: Biographies and Autobiographies, edited by Robert Bennett Campbell, 2: Edited and translated by Ali Hassan Abdel-Kader. Gibb Memorial Series, N. Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. Quest for the Red Sulphur: Translated by Peter Kingsley. Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge University Press, Religious Discourse in Postcolonial Studies: London and New York: Anawati, Georges Chehata, and Louis Gardet.

Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event. University of Chicago Press, Literature as Diference from the Renaissance to Joyce. Edinburgh University Press, In he Legacy of Medieval Persian Suism. Iblis in Sui Psychology. Journal of Arabic Literature 1, no. Edited by Eric Marty. Sententiousness and the Novel: Presses Universitaires de France, Al-Tabyin 27 February Bern, Berlin, Paris and New York: Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, Brault, Pascale-Anne, and Michael Naas. Compter avec les morts. In Jacques Derrida, Chaque fois unique, la in du monde, 15— Development of Religion and hought in Ancient Egypt.

Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 6, no. Princeton University Press, Social Text 8 Winter —4: Politics Out of History. Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Fordham University Press, Indiana University Press, Entre nation et jihad. Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 3— Trauma, Narrative and History. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. La Fable mystique I. Seal of the Saints: Translated by Liadain Sherrard. In Suism and heology, edited by Ayman Shihadeh, — Nomadisme, cosmos et politique chez les Touaregs.

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Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Chaque fois unique, la in du monde. Manuscrits, recherche, invention 17 In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, — New York and London: Marges — de la philosophie. Translated by Cecile Lindsay et al. Columbia University Press, Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle.

Cities Without Palms by Tarek Eltayeb

Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In Points de suspensions: Entretiens, edited by Elisabeth Weber, — Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Roudinesco. Arab Representations of the Occident: East—West Encounters in Arabic Fiction. Ministry of Culture, Kingdom of Jordan, Encyclopaedia of Islam hree. Le Livre des illuminations. Translated by Khaled Osman. Translated by Humphrey Davis.

American University in Cairo Press, Translated as he Mahfouz Dialogs by Humphrey Davies.

Cities Without Palms

Cairo and New York: Entretiens avec Gamal Ghitany. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Journal of Arabic Literature 10 Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 57, no. Translated by Henry Wilberforce Clarke. Derrida and the Time of Life. Stanford University Press, Edited and translated by Louis Massignon. Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. Ideology and the Craft of Fiction. Syracuse University Press, Calling Animals by Name. From Being and Time to he Task of hinking Edited by David Farrell Krell.

Revised and Expanded Edition. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter Hertz. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Nairobi, Oxford and New York: Middle East Journal 40, no. Edited and translated by Reynold A. Edited and translated by Denis Gril. Edited by Osman Yahya. Edited by Luc Barbulesco and Philippe Cardinal. Edited by Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke.

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Leiden, Boston and Cologne: Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of Califoria Press, Studia Islamica 10 In Islamic Mysticism Contested: Nachgelassene Schriften une Fragmente II. Edited by Jost Schillemeit. General Egyptian Book Organization, Translated by Paul heroux with an introduction by Samia Mehrez.

Temple University Press, Studies in the heory of Fiction. Journal of Arabic Literature 26, no. A Desert Novel by William M. Un oeil qui jamais ne se ferme: Translated as Gold Dust by Elliot Colla. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Translated by Anna Bostock. Dweller in Truth by Tagried Abu-Hassabo. Translated as Palace Walk by William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Translated as he Haraish by Catherine Cobham. Translated as Mirrors by Roger Allen. Edited by Taouiq Baccar. Edited by Christian Jambet. Essai sur les origines du lexique technique de la mystique musulmane.

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Reviewed by Muhammad Eissa. American Journal of Semiotics 17, no. Man, New Series 25, no. Edited by Bernd Radtke. Relections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard University Press, Translations all by Denys-Johnson Davies: Heinemann, ; Season of Migration to the North. England, Europe and the Upper Nile, — Gibb Memorial Series, vol. One of his hands clutches his mother's breast and the other her braids, and all the while flies gather around his eyes and pustules; they crowd around the wounds of his rickety body.

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Then they move to his mouth, hoping to share in his mother's milk; but nothing is there, so they return to assailing his emaciated body, falling upon its every wound - if there is no milk then let there be blood. Uncertainty, poverty, racism, border guards I can't say it's hugely memorable although there are some well-written passages. But brings the plight of the immigrant to life. Oct 01, Yvonne Kraak rated it liked it. Story of a migrants' voyage from Sudan, to Egypt to Europe. In general, I think the main flaw the author makes is that he tries to put 1,5 years of a trip into a very tiny book.

Better take one part and describe it in detail. But for people who don't like reading and are interested in migrants' stories or travelliterature, this book can be recommended. It's a bit of a sad cliche story, but nicely put. Feb 20, Raya Al-Raddadi rated it liked it. Jul 22, Garryvivianne rated it liked it. He learns the hardships of being an migrant worker having to live the hard life of an illegal immigrant.

Well done book by Tarek Eltayeb. Sep 07, Kerryevelyn rated it really liked it. Bleak and sad, but poignant, and the first piece of Sudanese literature I'd ever read. Really sad, but I guess such is the life of an illegal Sudanese immigrant from a small, famine-ridden village Jun 18, Marla Griffith rated it liked it. It is amazing to read about people who live on the edge of society. I read it for this month's Kutub book club. I read it in one sitting. It's not very long, more a novella than a novel but that doesn't detract from the great writing. As with many of huge books I have read recently it is emotionally draining.

Hiba Essa rated it really liked it May 30, Aisha rated it really liked it Jun 24, Hussam rated it liked it Jun 22, Helen rated it liked it Nov 01, Iset Haby rated it liked it Feb 27, Zeinahuballah rated it really liked it Nov 23, Kate rated it really liked it May 02, Mazen Jubayli rated it liked it Jun 08, Reece David rated it liked it Jul 26, Rees rated it liked it Aug 16, Susan rated it it was ok Jun 11, Majd Iwidat rated it really liked it Sep 15, Hamish Danks Brown rated it liked it Oct 13, Elashger rated it really liked it Apr 22, Maha rated it really liked it Jun 09,