Rick Simonson

My Ten Thousand and One Nights 2
August 15, 2007

Part of this story, part of it being told this way, is that it is one of 'a' time, but also time as played out. This was left off with arrival in New York for BEA two years ago, hot off of a round of Seattle-area readings and appearances by visiting Arab writers Raja Alem, Fadia Faqir, Choman Hardi, Alia Mamdouh, and Ibtihal Salem, with Brooklyn-born Suheir Hammad serving as erstwhile tour and language guide (she had been to Hedgebrook, the women's writers retreat where the group was ensconced, for a previous residency). When I say language, I mean more than Pacific Northwest drizzled English - she did some schooling in hiphop.

Going into New York, besides babbling about the books, recommending them, urging editors at New York houses to have a look, I even set about chasing a few agent types around, in one instance working on one both fluent in French (as some of this work is translated there) and even some Arabic. This did get woven in here and there, but WAS a BEA, and so had everything else going on, the friends old, the friends new (including those you couldn't believe you hadn't met before), the books, the authors, everyone else's stories.

Two years later, nothing comparable has been mounted again in Seattle, either by Hedgebrook (though there is conversation) nor by the local Arab American community. Contact there has been, with some regularity with some of the writers. And the books. Here and there, they have been coming along. They continue to come along, in greatest part, from the presses that have shown interest and initiative along the way. Syracuse University, Texas, Interlink, Feminist, and the American University in Cairo Press were the publishers of these writers here in the U.S., and they continue to work this ground.

Some notable occurrences elsewhere: Archipelago, early last year, publishing Lebanese writer Elias Khoury's extraordinary epic of Palestine lost, Gate of the Sun - now in paperback from Picador, which has signed on bigtime, with reissue of some of his backlist this fall, and pre-publication backing of Archipelago's publication of another Khoury novel, Yalo. Archipelago also recently published Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?. Copper Canyon has come out with a larger Darwish collection, The Buttefly's Burden, and recently had the highly successful launch, and U.S. tour, of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali's So What? Penguin Press recently released the young Saudi novelist Raja Alsanea's Girls of Riyadh, and Penguin Books has, for January, Wolves of the Crescent Moon,  a promising-looking novel by exiled Saudi novelist Yousef al-Mohaimeed.

Of the group that was in the Pacific Northwest two years ago, nothing new has been seen from the England-based Kurdish poet Choman Hardi, nor in translation from Egypt's Ibtihal Salem. Suheir Hammad, the one writer that did not have anything in print in spring 2005, did later that year have a vibrant collection of poems, ZaatarDiva, out from Rattapallax. Alia Mamdouh, last year, saw her Naguib Mahfouz Prize-winning novel, The Loved One, a psychologically-dense, rich book of an exiled Iraqi woman in a coma in Paris, looked after by a circle of Parisian friends, with her estranged son then come to visit. She works on many levels in this, and in different ways no less powerful, in the preceding Naphtalene. The American University in Cairo Press, which seems to have upped its publication of translated Arabic literature, was the original U.S. source for this; Feminist will bring it out this fall. (Should any eyes of interest be seeing this, I have a prospectus for a yet-to-be translated newer novel, Desire, recently published in Arabic in Lebanon. This is a writer worthy of any publisher with serious literary intentions attention.) Fadia Faqir has the most high-profile release of any of the writers yet, with her newest novel, the luminous The Cry of the Dove coming in October as a Grove Black Cat (a terrific paperback originals imprint, by the way). Set between the Levant and England, this is the story of a Bedouin woman seeking refuge from death in the form of an honor killing. This novel, in best hand-referral form, was put in my possession by both PGW rep Cindy Heidemann right at my very desk, and,  3,000 miles away, at this year's BEA, by Grove editor Elisbaeth Schmitz.

Then there was/is the coming upon of the last of these. The Saudi writer Raja Alem, in her first U.S.-published novel, Fatma, wrote in English but had it so heavily worked on by writer Tom McDonough, that he was credited as a co-author. Coauthors of novels are usually a kiss of death, in my book. Not so here.

In a box of catalogs our Suib Associates rep Pat Sorenson dropped off one day a few weeks ago, I delved thinking it only a matter of seeing what all she would be selling. To my surprise, here was a gorgeous advance copy of a new Raja Alem/Tom McDonough creation, My Thousand and One Nights. This, up there with the new Junot Diaz, the new Naomi Klein, and a few choice others, became one of the books of my summer, a shimmery, slippery, dense and allusive novel set in a Mecca few westerners can fathom. Working off material old and new, this is a novel with women deep at its considerable heart. It both invokes and does a play off of its illustrious, timeless, and imagination-molding namesake, that storied volume  commonly known as The Arabian Nights.

And there, dear reader, if you allow us another night, another day, will lead to a related tale.

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 15, 2007 | Comments (0)