Novel Palestine

Front matter

NOVEL PHLESIINE

NATION THROUGH THE WORKS OF IBRAHIM NASRALLAH

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Foreword

All settler colonies wager on the passage of time to cover their crimes against the natives. Not only do they make the Indigenous populations disappear, but they also strive to thrust their disappearance into oblivion. It is not for nothing that David Ben-Gurion, Israels first prime minister, reduced the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes before and after 1948 to a matter of time; given time, he brazenly claimed, “the old will die and the young will forget.” Regardless of whether these were his actual words or whether they were misattributed to him, it is indisputable that Ben-Gurion categorically opposed the return, let alone the resettlement, of Palestinian refugees after the Nakba. What counts for Ben-Gurion is not the actual crimes of the Haganah and other terrorist militias but the amount of time it will take before they are completely forgotten. The wager on the passage of time is less an expression of wishful thinking than a reflection of strategic intent; it is part and parcel of the method of settler colonial dispossession. Its final goal is not only the elimination of Palestine and Palestinians but also the elimination of that elimination. For that to happen, memory must be made finite and forgetting infinite. What unsettles settlers, though, is their inability to forget their own crimes and, even more, the capacity of the dispossessed Palestinians to remind them and themselves of those crimes. Memory may at times override the actual crime, but without the retrospective and repetitive work of remembering there may no longer be a locus of the crime.

The memory of historical Palestine strikes fear at the heart of the Zionist entity. An alternative grand Palestinian narrative would surely result in an acute Israeli crisis of legitimacy were it to acquire worldwide diffusion, recognition, and support. Israel knows that much, which is why its Knesset and state officials vii viii FOREWORD routinely target and censor Palestinian counternarratives (as was the case with the attack on Netflix on its December 2022 release of Darin J. Sallam’s 2021 film on the Nakba, Farha). Inversely, Palestinians know that their survival hinges on reiterative narrative memory and storytelling. Palestinians have never asked Israel for permission to narrate their own national story. Israel, though, keeps denying the Palestinian narrative the right to circulate. The Zionist fear of a substantial Palestinian national narrative fuels the creative imaginations of poets, novelists, and filmmakers. As Mahmoud Darwish once proclaimed, part of what makes life on this earth worth living is “the invaders’ fear of memories” (khawf al-ghuzat min-al-dhikrayat). It is tragically ironic that a settler colonial state whose raison détre is the constant invocation of the Holocaust should fear and censor the right of its victims to the memory of their own Nakba. It is as if the memory of the Jewish tragedy served to sanction rather than guard against the repudiation of the Palestinian Nakba. With Israel's relentless onslaught on the commemoration of the Nakba, it is not implausible that future generations may forget about it. Such a scenario would constitute de facto a second Nakba. Little wonder then that generations of Palestinian artists and littérateurs took Ben-Gurions wager on the eventual hegemony of forgetting as an incitement to multiple creative and discursive practices of remembering. Not that they needed more ammunition to inscribe the atrocities of the still-unfolding Nakba but that the threats of amnesia and erasure remain tangible perils at a time when the settlers and the Israeli state continue to commit countless crimes with no accountability. How much Palestinian history had already gone missing, had been displaced or disfigured and turned into a locus of forgetting? How much can be rescued before it is too late?

There may still be a time when it will become incumbent on Palestinian artists and curators to reconstruct memory out of archival neglect or void, but with the number of Nakba survivors dwindling by the day, it is even more urgent to attend to, collect, and inscribe the actual testimonies of the survivors who are still alive. Survivors are the prime witnesses of the Nakba. They carry the proof of its occurrence in their experiences, testimonies, and accounts. Ibrahim Nasrallah launched his creative career in response to the impending threat of amnesia nested in Ben- Gurions chilling words. For fear that the survivors may disappear without a trace, Nasrallah sought to collect their oral stories in one book before it became clear that the massive archive that he ended up with would require more than one book. Hence, the series of novels that came to constitute what Nasrallah calls al-Malhat al-filastiniyya (the Palestine Comedies), with the proviso that malhdt conveys the root sense of an abiding interest in or a preoccupation with Palestine. While tragedy is a major theme in his multivolume epic drama, Nasrallah finds the word ma 'sát (tragedy) not pertinent to the contemporary historical juncture of Palestine because it imparts the sense of a premature or unwarranted verdict on an ongoing struggle for liberation from Zionist oppression.

Nasrallah is an unclassifiable writer, poet, novelist, critic, at home in multiple forms of artistic creativity and adept in the art of mixing genres, straddling them,

FOREWORD ix or holding them in tandem. Born in a refugee camp in Jordan to a family expelled from Palestine during the Nakba, Nasrallah boasts a vast autodidactic knowledge that has become, in combination with his exilic and refugee condition of life, the wellspring of his prolific creative output. Nora Parr's Novel Palestine is the kind of book that we have all been waiting for. A book in the English language devoted to Nasrallah's oeuvre has been long overdue. Novel Palestine is an accomplished critical examination that travels back and forth between the shimmering depths of Nasrallah’s intertextual influences and the immediate theoretical and conceptual conundrums in Arabic and comparative literary studies. Parr's abiding interest in the intertextual and technical aspects of Nasrallahs writings in combination with her acute sensitivity to comparative conceptualization renders Novel Palestine essential for avid readers of Nasrallah as well as for those who may never have heard of his magisterial stature (if unacknowledged for a while) in the field of contemporary Palestinian and Arabic literature.

Novel Palestine focuses partly on al-Malhat and partly on al-Shurafat (Balconies), yet another multivolume work conceived in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and devoted to the scrupulous scrutiny of the interconnectivities between patriarchal and state structures of power within society. If al-Malhat excavates the making of a novel nation, al-Shurafat explores the unmaking of a corrupt state. Parr demonstrates that Nasrallah's series devise a novel image of Palestine, a serial novel in the making, a constellating imaginative project, constantly reconfigured, in artful forms, carrying past influences and contemporary preoccupations. Inscribing Palestine, like inscribing the Nakba, is a matter of seriality and iterability. It is a project that bears the signature of Saturn, a project committed to identification over identity and to becoming over destiny—in short, it is a project in which Ben-Gurion's wager on the passage of time reaches an impasse. As the boy of Tuyür al-Hadhar (Birds of Caution) quips, “I didn't really know what the passage of time meant? No matter what happens to the old, clearly the young are not forgetting.

With Novel Palestine, Parr will establish herself as the foremost specialist on Nasrallahs wide-ranging creative repertoire. All the more since Nasrallah has started to garner the international and critical attention he has for so long deserved. The renowned anthologist, literary critic, and translator Salma Khadra Jayyusi recounts on the back cover of the Arabic edition of Zaman al-khuyül al bayda’ (Time of White Horses) how fulfilled she feels that the “Palestinian Iliad" about which she had been asked for so long is finally in her hands. Time of White Horses was shortlisted for the Arabic Booker in 2009, but it was not until 2018 that Nasrallah won the lucrative and most coveted literary prize in the Arab world for his highly self-critical and cautionary tale, Harb al-kalb al-thaniyaa (Dog War II, 2018). Reading Nasrallah is clearly a must. Parr shows the way.

Nouri Gana Series Coeditor

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ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES

FIGURES

Map of Dante’s celestial realms 31 Ellipses as they are used in Balcony of the Snow Man 77 The map of Rashid's workplace in Balcony of Delirium 80

Image of former US president George W. Bush as it appears in Balcony of

Delirium 82

A visual rendering of the different texts of Olives of the Streets 104 A still from the movie Forrest Gump, as it appears in Balcony

of Delirium 136

TABLES

The novels of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Palestine Project xii

The novels of the Palestine Comedies by date added to the series 2: The novels of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Palestine Project by order of addition 27

Chapter structure of Balcony of Disgrace 94

NOVELS OF IBRAHIM NASRALLAH'S

PALESTINE PROJECT

TABLE 1 The novels of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Palestine Project, in the order they were added to their respective series (the novels shaded in gray are those analyzed in the present work)

al-Malhat al-filastiniyya First published Shurafat (Palestine Comedies) (Added to series) (Balconies) Tuyür al-hadhar 1996 Birds of Caution (2000) Tifl al-mimhat 2000 Eraser Child Zaytün al-shawari' 2002 Olives of the Streets A ‘ras Amina Aminas Weddings 2004 Tahta shams al-duha Under the Midmorning Sun 2005 Shurfat al-hadhayan Balcony of Delirium Zaman al-khuyil al-bayda’ 2007 Time of White Horses 2009 Shurfat rajul al-thalj Balcony of the Snow Man 2010 Shurfat al- ‘ar

Balcony of Disgrace

(Continued)

NASRALLAH’S PALESTINE PROJECT

TABLE 1 Continued al-Malhat al-filastiniyya (Palestine Comedies)

Qandadil malik al-jalil Lanterns of the King of Galilee

Mujarrad 2 faqat Just the Two of Us

Arwah Kilimanjàrü Souls of Kilimanjaro

Thulathiya al-ajras (Bells Trilogy) Zilal al-mafatih Shadow of the Keys Sirat al- ‘ayn Biography of the Eye Dabbaba tahta shajarat ‘id al-milad Tank beneath the Christmas tree

Tafülaty hata alan My childhood until now Shams al-yawm al-thamin Sun on the eighth day

First published (Added to series)

2013 1991

(2014) 2014 2015

1990 (2022)

xiii

Shurafat (Balconies)

Shurfat al-hàwiya Balcony of the Abyss

Shurfat al-firdaus Balcony of Paradise

Harb al-kalb al-thaniya Dog War II

Ma 'sát katib al-qisat al-qasira Tragedy of the short story writer

‘Aw Howl

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a very long journey. Its principal pleasure, without question, has been the people who have taken interest, supported, challenged, and cheered it on along the way. And of course the books. For all to whom I owe a debt of thanks, it has been my honor to have had the chance to think and read with you. I only hope that what follows has, in some measure, captured the richness of thought that you (and you all certainly know who you are) have engaged me in over the years.

The final phase of this book was supported by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

XV

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSLITERATION

This monograph uses the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) transliteration system to render text from the Arabic. On first reference to a work, word, or author, transliteration is carried out in full, and the translation is given. All subsequent uses of the name, word, or title refer to the given translation, unless words are being defined through analysis, in which case the Arabic term remains. For authors with Arabic names who have been formally published in English, or whose publications in Arabic also give English spellings, the spelling as it exists in those publications has been used.

Citation follows the Modern Language Association format. In cases where a single work is the topic of a close reading, page numbers are included in the text to avoid unnecessary repetition in the notes. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

xvii

Introduction

When no straight line leads from home to birthplace to school to maturity, all events are accidents, all progress is digression, all residence is exile.

—EDWARD SAID

[There is] difficulty implicit in making one’s way through a world which is jumbled in this fashion. . . . [Giving the reader] a disordered experience of geography and space and time... [is] . . . clearly unavoidable if the novel is to tell its story, as I fully intend that it should, in a single burst.

—GHASSAN KANAFANI, ALL THAT’S LEFT TO YOU

There were more books than in the school library, more books than I had seen in my life, numbered series of books . . . and between them the most surprising, Don Quixote, which I had never imagined was in two volumes!

—SALWA, IN IBRAHIM NASRALLAH'S OLIVES OF THE STREETS

In her Arabic teacher's home library, Salwa has a realization: a story, her story, doesn't need to be told from a "beginning" to a conclusion in one fell swoop. The epiphany happens as the young woman runs her fingers along the spines of what seem like endless rows of books—books she is surprised to find in her refugee camp near Beirut. Of the many works, Salwa is uniquely drawn to the “numbered series of books: the novels of the Hilal publishers, Hilal’s critical editions” (a bit like the Penguin classics in English). When she sees Don Quixote she exclaims, “I had never imagined [it] was in two volumes (juz ayn)!"! Salwa then takes out the middle volume of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy. She flips through its pages and reads some passages out loud. As she does so, Salwa appreciates that by dint of a series title diverse works covering diverse spaces can be harnessed to express something beyond the scope of their individual covers (or, later, borders). This encounter, for Salwa, redefines what it means not only to tell, but to have a “story” —and the realization is transformative.

Salwa is a Palestinian orphan who was subject to the sexual abuse of a political official in the refugee camp her family fled to during 1948. Her father was “martyred” in Palestine not by Zionist or Israeli forces but by her uncle. These simple facts well beyond Salwa's control have meant her story never “fit” into the national frame. She felt she did not have the words to narrate the experience to herself, let alone others. Until the library realization Salwa had understood herself to be invisible; the sideline of a fragment who had no place in the Palestinian story. As a refugee, she understood, she was a part of a “broken” nation whose meaning was in waiting to return, or in supporting the work of the fighters in their effort to liberate Palestine. She felt, like the title of the novel she appears in, that refugees were as Olives of the streets, rotting unconsumed away from the homeland. As a woman being abused by an official in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Salwa knew her story was one that none in the community wanted to exist. She was “evidence; somehow, of an impurity of cause. When she tried to articulate the violences done to her, she felt as though her “teeth were stuck together, no, my teeth had melted, one into the other.” It was her community’s closed ears that melted her teeth. To hear about and understand the abuse she underwent was to tarnish the hope for justice that the PLO embodied. This was Beirut in the late 1970s, and all hopes were pinned on a new political movement.

In the idea of a series, Salwa could imagine herself within and alongside all the other stories of Palestine. “I want to read all of these books,” she told her teacher, as a way to rehabilitate her capacity for narrative. What she had been told, she fumed, did her no service. “Theyd rather us live in fragments . . . fragments of bread, of books, of hope, of a dream—fragments of the homeland, and fragments of memory,’ she told Sitt Zaynab. The “they” that had imparted the expected shape of narrative here is multiple. It includes (at least) European colonizers and an imposed teleological way of seeing; a “developmental” trajectory that posits Palestine and Palestinian narrative as always “not yet somehow part of an unrealized whole? a Zionist narrative that literally and figuratively erases Palestinian existence;* a Palestinian political apparatus that, in striving for legitimacy on a Euro-American colonial stage, amplifies existing harms;? and all the individuals with power over Salwa who stand by while she suffers. As she absorbs how thinking as a series affects her own story, Salwa begins to see the implications of her fresh discovery. If her life—as an orphan, a woman, a refugee, an assault survivor, a Palestinian—is read as a series, there could be articulated "a single complete memory" of her life, of her community, of Palestine. Such an articulation, she saw, ^would suffice to return it [the homeland, that which is in fragments] to us"—or at least to her.

Salwas story is, in fact, part of a series. Not only conceptually, as she begins to imagine in her teachers library, but in actual bookshops across the Middle East. From Jerusalem to Beirut, Amman to Kuwait, Olives of the Streets (Zaytün al-shawári ', 2002) sits next to (depending on stock) at least twelve other novels each emblazoned with the same series title: the Palestine Comedies (al-Malhat al-filastiniyya). Each novel in this series is, by and large, a standalone text. Almost no characters appear in more than one volume (with some delicious exceptions explored later). Each work is set in a different place or time, covering both the expected (Second Intifada-era Ramallah) and the unusual (the summit of Kilimanjaro) locations of Palestinian experience. Beyond this vast scope, the writing styles and techniques deployed differ vastly between novels. There is historical fiction, stream of consciousness, and the utterly experimental intermixing of genre types. In its construction and execution, the Palestine Comedies does precisely what Salwa had hoped it would: it “returns” a telling of her life within a “single complete” imaginative universe. In practice, this means the generation of a narrative of Palestine without the imposition ofa trajectory or a predetermined “whole? But the series does not achieve this vision entirely on its own.

Shortly after the fifth novel in the Palestine Comedies series was published, Nasrallah launched a second and parallel series. As chapter 1 goes on to argue, this second series is what opened a possibility for the continuation of the first, expanding the properties and parameters of Salwas “single complete” imaginative universe so that it was open-ended. This second series was devoted largely to explorations of the structures of state, family, and narrative (and how these structures enact administrative violence). Hinting at this alternative view that the new series offered, they came to be known collectively as the Balconies (Shurafat). Each novel in this series told the story of structures that limit Palestinian life. Balcony of Delirium (Shurfat al-hadhayan, 2004) looked at the structures that war leaves behind in government administration; Balcony of the Snow Man (Shurfat rajul al-thalj, 2009) traces the generic and bureaucratic violence of a state newspaper; Balcony of Disgrace (Shurfat al-'àr, 2010) examines the overlapping claims of authority exercised by state police, family, and class structures; and so on. From the early 2000s on, the two series grew in tandem: every year a work was published in one and then the other.

That there are thematic similarities across the series is hardly surprising given their production schedule. But what a close look shows is that they in fact—at least when it comes to thinking about the representation of Palestine as a single imaginative universe—constitute a single literary project. To differentiate this larger effort from the two individual series, it is referred to here as the Palestine Project. It is this project that Novel Palestine explores. In reading the two series as interconnected, the chapters in this book argue, the full scope of Salwa’s realization takes form. Where one series (the Comedies) conjures the most expansive vision of Palestine hitherto available in written form, the other (the Balconies) shows all the structures that limit—in practical terms—the imagination of Palestine in such broad scope. The work of this study is to draw out the structure and function of this “novel Palestine.” To do this, it examines closely the characters, themes, textual structures, and modes of meaning-making employed within, between, and across the works. Because the series are both open ended, this is not (nor can it be) a conclusive analysis. It is only a start. It therefore takes only the “first” nine texts published in the two series—works published as part of the Palestine Comedies and Balconies series between 1996 and 2010. “First” is in quotation marks because the order of the works is not at all straightforward, as we will see.

In this reading of Nasrallah's Palestine Project, analysis finds a method of telling Palestine that includes the many different trajectories and locations of Palestinian exile, displacement, and diaspora. This method can absorb, as Salwa hoped, internal Palestinian contradiction. The linked series find a way of narrating structures of violence and demonstrating their impact on the story of Palestine and Palestinians without allowing them to impose limitations on life or imaginative possibility. The works thus take on the usual suspects (colonialism, Zionism, and neo-imperialism) but also the structures of violence that more perniciously limit the expression (and indeed realization) of Palestinian life (e.g., generic structures, like the narrative conventions of the newspaper or the autobiography). These limiting structures, in the novels, are rendered as one of the myriad stories (the story of the novel, the story of the newspaper) that make up an imaginative universe of Palestine. In this way, the Palestine Project can grapple with the relationships between these structures of power and how they function to limit or shape Palestinian lives and narratives. At the same time, accounting for these limiting structures makes it possible to broaden the representation and representability of Palestinian relationships—to imagine Palestine without these imposed limits. Without the structure of colonial and generic expectations, Palestine can be told across space and time in new ways.

While the possibilities of representing Palestine across Nasrallahs linked series are exciting, it is important to note that most are not entirely novel—either as literary innovation or analytic insight—at least not on their own. Across Palestine and literary studies, there is broad agreement that a more expansive Palestine can be imagined in a series. That the series provides a container for the representation of a more expansive idea of the nation has long been established." Scholars of postcolonialism* and gender studies? have for generations drawn out a language that expands and critiques mainstream national identity articulations. Palestine studies (and indeed theories of identity) has produced dozens of volumes that expand and critique the limits and meaning of Palestinian identity and representation.” Critics and historians have also used the concepts of the modern and the postmodern to explore the possibilities and limitations of representation through different concepts of time." Even intertextuality, the inter-referencing of one text within another and the theory around it (which is relied on heavily here), has already been identified as a mechanism for broadening an imaginative universe." This existing literary and critical work does not, however, render an exploration of Nasrallah’s project unnecessary. Rather, this work provides the tools and theoretical starting points for a deeper look at how all of these elements function in concert. This critical history is, then, what makes grappling with Nasrallah's expansive project possible.

Most of the literary themes and techniques developed across Nasrallah’s two linked series can be found in other works. This is, in some ways, the point. Nasrallah is the first to draw connections between the mission of his writing and the work of his literary predecessors. Speaking to a London audience in 2012, Nasrallah said he believed his novels “could definitely have been written by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Emile Habibi, and Ghassan Kanafani;”” if only these canonical figures lives had been longer. He saw his role, he told the room, as realizing a literary project left unfinished. And in his expansive approach, this is what Nasrallah does. Where Kanafani felt he had to excuse what he was sure would be perceived as a “disordered experience of geography” in his All That’s Left to You and Edward Said lamented that—reading Palestine within existing frames—“all progress is digression, all residence is exile; Nasrallah did not let these conventions get in the way of writing. He wrote, then he wrote about the conventions, and then he wrote some more and called it all Palestine. It is the prolificacy, expansiveness, and interlinkages embedded in Nasrallahs Palestine Project that make it so compelling to think about. More compelling—even mysterious—is why Nasrallahs work hasn't been thought about more before now. Indeed, critics have been inexplicably and often frustratingly silent on the meaning and importance of this literary project. Novel Palestine works to understand and then fill the gaps in the literary record.

RECEPTION

Hailed briefly as the author of the national epic of Palestine—that elusive masterpiece that Palestinians (and indeed the world) had been anticipating for generations'*—critical interest in Nasrallah has been strangely patchy. He has been described variously as an up-and-coming Jordanian writer, put on the whos who list of Palestinian authors, noted as the most prolific Palestinian writer of all time, grumbled about for writing too much, criticized for simple language, and praised for the complexity of his narrative style. In some periods of his literary career he has been championed, while in others the critics have remained strangely silent. And while there is a sort of consensus that his two series are impressive literary endeavors, there is very little (and in the anglosphere almost nothing) exploring what they mean. So why have the Palestine Comedies and Balconies series (as series) been overlooked? Why hasn't Nasrallah—as the most critically acclaimed Palestinian writer of the past decade— been the subject of dozens of monographs? Why—when his work has been translated as much as canonical authors like Ghassan Kanafani—is he ignored in English? A brief overview of his reception across English and Arabic (with a quick reference to his translation into Italian, Danish, and Turkish) not only shows how belated a thorough exploration of his oeuvre is but also draws out some of the gaps in collected critical approaches (the blind spots of criticism around Palestinian literature), which this work also aims to address or even redress.

Part of the reason for Nasrallah’s patchy reception in Arabic can be boiled down to his writing. It was different. While the language was simple, the ideas were complex, and the works never shied away from the taboo. Before the 1990s, as he first started to publish, Nasrallah was read and reviewed as either an up-and-coming or underrated author." Some of his early prose novels were more concept than narrative, deliciously (for some) difficult to pin down in terms of just what was happening, when, or where. This pleased some critics and annoyed others. As Faisal Darraj commented on Just the Two of Us (Mujarrad 2 faqat, 1992), the work was a “narration of ambiguity.” Of the mix of simplicity and complexity, another critic wrote of Prairies of Fever (Barári al-humma, 1985) that it was “at its core an anti-modern novel that collides with the axioms of realistic literature.”!* Another, more critical writer noted that Nasrallah was a commendable author not because of “his high talent and broad culture, but in his great sense of national and human responsibility.” His topics, in other words, were important, as was what he was trying to say, but he wasn't a literary savant. Nonetheless, the more Nasrallah published, the more attention he earned. His poetry and reviews of his work appeared in literary magazines from Bahrain to Beirut, Iraq to Egypt.'?

Reception of his work (in English and Arabic) has also to a large extent been dictated by international politics. Wider recognition would come as global attention returned to Palestine amid the 1990s American-led Peace Process. This was particularly the case in English. What was available of his work in Arabic was, in the mid-1990s, rapidly sucked into a critical discourse that sought insight into contemporary Palestine and the sort of future it imagined for itself. So while Prairies of Fever had made something ofa critical splash in Arabic for its experimental prose and risqué depiction of desire nurtured by an isolated character teaching in Saudi Arabia (and discussed as a Jordanian/Palestinian work), in English it was represented as the latest in Palestinian fiction. The work was translated in 1993,” the same year that the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, shook hands on the White House lawn with the then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The world wanted to follow along, and interest in Palestinian arts proliferated. With so many of the canonical writers gone, or largely retired from writing, there was a push to introduce the world to a new generation of authors.

This era saw Nasrallah anthologized in three separate volumes, two of which published excerpts of Prairies of Fever.” He was also listed in a number of English-language resources detailing who to read (with the subtext: to understand Palestine at this moment of global attention). What had made a minor splash in Arabic was mobilized as part of a large wave of interest in English. On the back of this, Just the Two of Us was translated into English as Inside the Night.” Even with two works in English translation (the same works were rendered variously in Italian, Turkish, and Danish) Nasrallah’s readership internationally was small. Beyond their appearance in anthologies and on lists of what to read, the novels were reviewed only in niche Arabic literary or Middle East studies journals and

INTRODUCTION y magazines.? Though he appeared on myriad lists of who to read, few in English picked up the work. This, it seems, speaks more to the limitations of scholarly and public discourse in the anglosphere than it does of the quality of Nasrallah's texts. This was an era when Arabic literature was expected to illustrate a point, either asa stop on the imagined (developmental) progression from oral narrative to the novel or as one of the set landmarks in the "conflict"? Nasrallah’s work (at that point) did neither, so it was difficult to place on existing literary maps. After this surge of interest, Nasrallah largely disappeared from the anglosphere.