The subjects addressed by Arab authors in recent years are many. What have the main themes been?

Arab literature, or rather the many Arab literatures as they should be called, and as Arab and Western critics have been saying for decades, has as many facets as the countries in the Arab world. For us Westerners instead, the Arab world continues to be perceived as monolithic, and it is thus that we consider its literary production simply because it is all written in the same language. Even the subject I teach at my university is called “Modern and Contemporary Arab Literature”, but which literature and from which country? It is like teaching generic “European literature.” With the words “modern and contemporary” one at least defines a specific period, starting with the nahdah (the 19th century renaissance) to modern times, and not the pre-Islamic period or The Thousand and One Nights. So there are differences between the different various literary outputs in the 22 Arab countries [those belonging to the Arab League], and the subjects addressed are many, ranging from love to politics, life and death, or totally imaginary ones as with every literary tradition in the world.

Arab literature is entering the new millennium giving signs of greater eclecticism. It continues to produce authors born in the Fifties and Sixties, while new talent born in the Seventies and Eighties emerges, reflecting new trends and whose books go straight to the top of the best-seller lists. They are trying to keep up with the times.

Effectively those continuing to write and hold their own are the authors of the so-called “Sixties generation” [now “young” seventy-year-olds] but in almost all Arab countries there is an air of innovation, not always positive from a strictly literary point of view. New talent emerges on the literary scene and unknown authors make the best-seller list with first publications that would be envied by Nobel Prize winner Nagib Mahfuz. He certainly sold many books, but without the prestigious award he probably would not have achieved the success he deserved here in Europe. Nowadays, many books by new authors are also very quickly translated here in the West, where everyone hopes to repeat the sales boom of the now famous The Yacoubian Building by the Egyptian author/dentist al-Aswani. In recent years a number of important publishers have began to distribute famous Arab authors such as Hoda Barakat or Elyas Khuri, but many authors of importance in the Arab fiction sector are still ignored, or are only known at an academic level and their books are published by small and very small publishing houses. They include, to name a few, Libyan Ibrahim al-Koni, Edward al-Kharrat from Alexandria and the Palestinian Kanafani, as well as many others.

Do you believe that market rules aimed at quick profits have tainted some aspects of Arab literary creativity?

The problem is not that the Arab market taints literary creativity, but rather the Western market that requests only low level literature from the Arab market. They are now translating books that would have once horrified readers and so some authors have adapted simply to achieve success and earn money. Luckily there are real authors who do not comply with the market’s requests although their books remain unknown to those who do not read Arabic.

In the Middle East readers have learned about comic strips by reading European ones (French and Belgian). Things are changing now. I refer to the recent publication of Samandal Magazine, a Lebanese magazine specialised in Arabic, French and English comic strips as well as graphic novels by the Egyptian author Magdy Al Shafee. Is this becoming a editorial phenomenon among young Arab narrators? What about satirical comic strips?

Cartoons have a long history in the world of Egyptian publishing since the 19th history, when satirical newspapers were published in Cairo, such as those founded by Yaqub Sannu‘ or Ibn Nadim. Comic strips are therefore linked more closely to political satire and hence not always tolerated by the various regimes past and present. One cannot forget the political role played by artists, such as Palestinian Naji al-Ali, creator of the little-great hero “Handala”, who has become a symbol for the still unresolved Palestinian issue. Comic strips are now a thriving industry in Egypt, in Syria and also in the Maghreb countries and the Arabian Peninsula. Then there is also the children’s market that prefers comic strips. The Kuwaiti magazine “al-Arabi”, for example, has a children’s version called “al-Arabi al-saghir”, which has published comic strips for decades. Furthermore, the many book fairs held throughout the Arab world and international events dedicated to comic strips now see an increasingly massive presence of Arab authors.

Poetry competitions such as Prince of Poets and Poet of the Million (the final for the last edition had over 70 thousand viewers glued to their TV sets) created by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage (ADACH, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), have revived an interest in poetry. Do poems still have a special place in the hearts of Arab readers?

Yes, good poetry certainly plays an extremely important role in Arab literary production. One must bear in mind great poets such as the Tunisian Abu Qasim al-Shabbi at the start of the 21st Century, or the great 20th Century poets such as Mahmud Darwis (Palestine), Adonis (Syria), Nizar Qabbani (Syria) and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati (Iraq), to mention only a few. If one visits any Arab country one understands to what extent poetry is deeply rooted in the national consciousness, from the taxi driver reciting the verses of his favourite poet to crowded stadiums listening to readings of great poets, events that are unimaginable in Europe. I will never forget the thousands of Syrians who, during the Nineties, rushed to an unbelievably overcrowded stadium to see and listen to the great Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish. Televised poetry competitions instead seem like magniloquence circuses. One must not confuse great Arab poetry and competitions for hopeful poets although there may be a new al-Mutanabbi (a famous 10th century poet, editor’s note) hidden among them.

The arrival of the internet has brought changes to Egyptian literature. What do you think explains the popularity of the so-called “bloggers generation” which includes names such as Ahmed Nagi, Ghada Abdel Aal and Ahmed Al Aidy?

The arrival of the internet has certainly changed the way people write, but not only in the East. The diaries and thoughts entrusted to blogs can become real published literary works. They are not always, however, of good quality. These theme products do reveal to us a world of young intellectuals of so-called bloggers, hoping to establish a dialogue with each other and to exchange their personal and literary experiences. They want to pull down barriers, if not geographical ones, at least virtual ones. This form of literary expression certainly shortens the distance between us and them allowing us to discover, for example, the existence of a young author in Cairo called Ahmad Nagi, who writes novels listening to Pink Floyd, and uses his blog to invites people to read his novel Rogers, while listening to songs from The Wall. So one could wonder whether the “whole world is a village” and the obvious answer would be “Why not?” One must stop imagining Arabs wearing turbans and surrounded by odalisques, inspired by the usual clichés.

We can now read Italian translations of authors from the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. What is it that makes the Arabian Peninsula’s literary production so interesting?

While in Egypt and in the Syrian-Lebanese region the renaissance (nahdah) started at the beginning of the 19th Century and resulted in famous schools of thought and literary genres, the same did not happen in the Arabian peninsula. For that area one can only speak of a renaissance after 1960 if not later. Literary production in these countries is therefore very recent, and men and women write for a variety of reasons that are not always strictly literary ones. There are, for example, Saudi women who write in the hope that literature will help them emerge from the isolation they experience. Writing therefore becomes a podium for claiming denied human rights [see collection of short stories entitled Roses of Arabia, E/O, 2001]. Many young female writers are encouraged by authors to write poetry or make public stories about their lives. This is not always a good thing and at times a country’s level of literary production is lowered. The West then, anxious to confirm its prejudices concerning an entire population and its culture, translates and distributes this inferior literary production, to the detriment of more mature and important books. There are female authors such as Saudi writer Raja’ al-‘Alim, who produces sophisticated and beautiful plays, but she is not well known because all recent Arab theatre production is still little known in the West. Nowadays however, there are some excellent authors, both male and female, throughout the Arabian Peninsula, from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait. In Yemen, for example, there are important young authors such as Hoda al-Attas, Nadya al-Kawkabani, Ibtisam al-Mutawakkil, Wajdi al-Ahdal and Samir ‘Abd al-Fattah. One should add that this list could be much longer, because recent Yemeni literary production is certainly avant-garde [a collection of short stories recently published in Italy is entitled Pearls from Yemen, Jouvence, 2009.]

What kind of initiatives does the AWU (Union of Arab Authors) support these days?

Nowadays there are Pen Clubs throughout the Arab world, the result of initiatives taken by writers who also create websites for publishing poems, short stories, reviews, interviews or extracts from essays or novels. These websites have the great merit of promoting the entire literary production, making authors known and putting them in contact with other authors throughout the Arab world. The better organised websites also have an English section (in the Near East) or one in French (especially in the Maghreb) so as to make information available outside their countries. There are, of course, many personal websites belonging to authors and very useful for obtaining first hand biographical and bibliographical information. When authors’ associations are the expression of governments, then it is a different matter and one can legitimately wonder whether the authors publicised really are the best literary representatives of a given country, or if instead, they are only those more tolerant of or closer to an individual regime. So one has famous men of letters, such as the great Abd al-Rahman Munif, of Saudi origin, whose name was not published in the list made available by the Union of Arab Authors precisely when, during the Nineties, he was at the height of his success throughout the Arab world. [Three books by Munif have been published in Italy, the novels are A est del Mediterraneo and Storia di una città (Jouvence), Gli alberi e l’assassinio di Marzuk (Ilisso)].

What would you recommend to Italian readers wishing to start on contemporary Arab literature; a collection of short stories or a novel?

I would advise a good novel. Perhaps, however, short stories provide a broader variety of subjects in only a few pages. The Arabs are a people of writers and poets. One often meets people who give one their book of poems and short stories, it is then up to us to understand if the author is a person of letters or not. Otherwise one can rely on experts and get the names of the greatest authors so that we do not waste time reading the modest work of a minor writer. Taste is of course subjective, but it is important to try and read the best of a country’s literary production. In Italy there are small publishing houses (Edizioni Lavoro, Ilisso, Mesogea and others) that distribute contemporary Arab fiction. There is of course the role played by the publishing house Jouvence with its collection of “Contemporary Arab Authors” (for whom I spent a lot of time deciding on titles) which has published about forty novels by the greatest Arab authors. Many of these authors have been and still are leading players in contemporary Arab culture and have received important literary awards and acknowledgments in the Arab world and in Europe, where some of their work has been translated. Italy played a leading role in this sector as the first to discover a number of talents. [For an overview of translations available in Italy see my website www.arablit.it].

Is it true that more Arab authors are translated into Italian than into English? How important in this sense was the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair where the Arab world was the guest of honour?

I believe that that is true. Years ago this data emerged in a debate between European translators for the international project entitled “Mémoires de la Méditerranée”, where I represented Italy. As far as the Frankfurt Book Fair is concerned, thousand of words have been written on this subject. I would just like to add that perhaps the organisers were not aware (or were very aware, but…) that the monolithic Arab world of The Thousand and One Nights no longer exists, and they invited the “so-called Arab World”! sic! I now await a Book fair generically dedicated “to Europe” and would recommend that the European Union invite all individual governments, where, no doubt, all the under secretaries and ministers have friends and relatives who write and publish books…

Translated by Francesca Simmons