Literature& Literary Criticism

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Curfew, by Adalet Agaoglu. Translated from Turkish by John Goulden. 250 pages, endnotes. Austin, TX: The Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, 1997. $12.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-292-70479-8

Agaoglu (1929- ) is one of Turkey’s most distinguished contemporary writers. In each of her works, she creates a delicate balance between a lyrical approach to character, time, and language with a cogently realistic sense of history and society that frames the plot. All of her eight novels provide a wide and concrete social panorama built upon carefully chosen social and psychological details. These details are given from the contrasting and complementing perspectives of characters belonging to different genders, generations and classes.

Curfew (Üç Bes Kisi -1984) is typical of Agaoglu’s desire and success in bringing the social and individual stories into equal relief. The setting here is Eskisehir, which is investigated as the overlooked site of a new kind of industrialization and capitalism that developed out of an agrarian rural past. As such, Eskisehir is deliberately set apart from and contrasted with Istanbul and Ankara, which are respectively the loci of the old and modern histories of Turkey. The novel takes place during several hours before a 2 a.m. curfew in June of 1980, anticipating in its tone and details the coup in September. The story is divided into seven sections, each devoted to one of the seven main characters, whose individual thoughts and actions are narrated in a stream of consciousness. The main action, the individual life stories of the characters and the history of Turkish society between 1950 and 1980 emerge and acquire clarity as the fragmented and disjointed personal narratives overlap and connect.

Against the defeats of four characters, the novel introduces three ‘new kinds’ of people, idealized in the possibilities they represent for the future: Kardelen is a student activist and factory worker from a squatter settlement. Hers is a narrative of survival and sheer determination to be happy. Kismet is an unhappy middle class housewife who gathers enough courage to leave her husband. Ferit Sakarya emerges as a new type of businessman: he is ruthless in his business dealings, but an idealist in his vision of Turkey’s future and his responsibility in it. Goulden, a former British ambassador to Turkey, has given us in Curfew an able and highly readable translation of Agaoglu’s novel. I applaud him for his ability to stick to the original in conveying the various registers of narrative time, for each character deals not only with his/her past, present and future as s/he freely jumps from one memory/daydream to another, but imagines the future as several possibilities. Each possible future is told as if it is really what happened, but one does not understand what really happened till the next event that grows out of it is narrated. This is an interesting technique that Agaoglu uses to show that life is a sum of things that happened as well as things that could have happened, but did not.

Despite my general delight with the translation, I also have some criticisms. Goulden translates the names of some culturally specific things while keeping others in Turkish and explaining them in the endnotes. For example, simit is translated as “pretzel” (p. 6) and kese (p. 82) as “flannel,” while dolmu (p. 1) is kept in Turkish and explained as a “shared taxi” in an endnote. It would be better to keep all such names in Turkish with descriptions in the notes, for translations are inadequate to describe the objects they refer to. It would also be good to expand the endnotes since many more social and historical details need explanation. One of these is the reference to Ittihat ve Terakki which is simply translated as the “Young Turks” (p. 137).

There are two small translation mistakes. Kardelen works at the packaging section of an unspecified factory. In the translation, it comes across as if she is working at a packaging factory (p. 63). The other mistake involves the Oguz epic Ergenekon, which recounts the origins of Turks in Central Asia and their leaving their homeland following a gray wolf. The name of this epic has become a political shorthand for racist claims of pure Turkishness. In a passage which ironically brings up the diverse history and mixture of Turks as an alternative to the Ergenekon myth, Goulden does not recognize the reference and mistranslates Ergenekon as a family name (p. 61).

Printed on elegant white paper, the book is visually attractive despite a series of spelling mistakes on pages xii, 4, 49, 90, 145, 150, 249 as well as an unnecessary period in the middle of a sentence on page 87. There is also some inconsistency with Turkish orthography in the book. Only some of the Turkish letters (ç, ö, ü) are represented whereas, inexplicably, i (undotted)and s (with cedilla) are not.

These are small mistakes that can be easily fixed, and that do not lessen the success of the translation. The publisher has done a great service in publishing the translation because this is a beautiful and important book. The bad news is that Curfew is already out of print. Recently, a colleague who teaches a large survey course and has been using Curfew as her Turkish book called me frantically to find an alternative to the novel. The alternatives were not as satisfactory. I hope the publisher takes this opportunity for corrections and reissues the translation as soon as possible.

Sibel Erol
New York University


In Search of Walid Masoud, by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Translated from the Arabic by Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar. 289 pages. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. $26.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8156-0646-X

Jabra, who left for Iraq when evicted from Palestine in the late forties, is without a doubt one of the best known Palestinian writers living in exile. His novel Al-Safinah (1969), translated as The Ship (1985), has become a classic. Now Al-Bahth ’an Walid Mas’ud, first published in 1978, is available in English translation, ably rendered by Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar. Though the setting and cast of characters are different in this more recent novel, the preoccupations are the same: exile, the painful separation from homeland, and love. Once again, Jabra depicts the lives of bourgeois, educated Palestinians who sometimes seem to see little beyond their own love affairs, their intrigues and jealousies.

The physical absence of the novel’s central character, Walid Masoud, makes his presence all the more consuming. The action of the novel is set in motion by Walid’s mysterious disappearance from Baghdad. Only after his exit from their lives do those remaining feel compelled to analyze and account for this man they have known in a variety of ways and degrees. These friends and lovers know different parts of the story (very often hidden from or inaccessible to others), and thus have different versions of Walid. The novel is, in fact, a presentation of shards or strands of Walid's life, offered in various forms by various characters. The only way we can construct anything approximating a full sense of any self is by collecting the disparate stories. There is the stream of consciousness tape Walid made just prior to his disappearance. There is a short story written by Walid’s friend Dr. Jawad (who himself becomes a sort of compiler for the whole story). Issa Nasser tells of Walid’s idyllic childhood in Bethlehem and his departure for Italy to become a monk. Dr. Tariq Raouf, a psychiatrist, reads Masoud through the lens of the Oedipal myth. Maryam al-Saffar and Wisal Raouf lament the loss of their erstwhile lover.

The novel’s content and structure display a distinctly modern view of the self. In the end, we have a puzzle with missing pieces―not a coherent life, but fragments subjectively rendered. Even speculations as to Walid’'s fate seem to be little more than individual projections, serving each character's psychological needs. Maryam sees a unique, complex man with much of his inner nature and activities hidden from view. Amer sees him as a poet: "His life, his views, his end are simply parts of the poem he couldn’t write" (p. 268). Ibrahim al-Hajj Nawfal suggests he was kidnapped, then killed in Lebanon. Wisal is convinced he is alive, working in Palestine, perhaps avenging the death of his son. Gradually, a tragedy unfolds from the tellings of all these stories. We learn that Walid’s brother Elias was killed in an explosion set off by Zionist terrorists, that his wife Rima went mad, that Walid’s testicles were fried by Israeli agents, that his son Marwan was killed in a freedom-fighter attack on a village in Israeli-occupied Palestine, and that a string of women who fell passionately in love with Walid are left devastated. The novel demonstrates how extraordinary human beings manage to carve out lives for themselves despite tragic events and shattering conditions. Yet the pain and anguish they carry is an immense burden brought to every relationship. So deep are Walid’s thirsts and needs, for instance, that no woman can possibly meet them. The loss of the body of Palestine is the source of this wound; its recovery is seen as the only means of regaining wholeness and health.

Allen Hibbard
Middle Tennessee State University



Three Tales of Love and Death, by Out El Kouloub. Translated by Nara Atiya. 137 pages. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. $24.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8156-0627-3

In her translation of Three Tales of Love and Death, by Out El Koloub El Demerdashiyya, Atiya, author of award winning Khuul Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories, competently repaints scenes of love and death in the idyllic Egyptian countryside, busy streets of Medieval Cairo, and Europeanized suburbs of British occupied Egypt.

Having previously translated Ramza and Zanouba, another El Koloub volume, Atiya recreates the aura of the original text, which was published in French, with the mastery of experience. The language is supple and the style melodious. Even the songs translate smoothly to recite the love stories of Zariffa, Nazira, and Zaheira. The reader is given a glimpse of the world of the harem with which both the author and the translator are familiar. The juxtaposition of ancient traditions and the newly imported Post-Renaissance European ideology embodies the Middle Eastern intellectual schizophrenia. This tension is evident in the protagonists' erotic choices, which El Koloub creates and Atiya translates in the stories of Nazira and Zaheira.

Each woman’s existence is independent of her husband’s. Both women make non-stereotypical romantic choices. Perhaps this is due to the fact that El Koloub, the daughter of the founder of a Moslem religious order, al-Tariqah al-Demerdashiyya, chose to become a financially independent single mother. In the first half of the twentieth century, she went on to host renowned Egyptian and Western intellectuals in her ‘salon,’ entertaining progressive thought in her household, yet strictly adhering to the teaching of Islam. El Koloub experienced this spiritual and intellectual dilemma first hand. This is probably why she portrays it so well.

Atiya captures the spirit of the work in what she calls “free translation” (p. xvi). As she puts it in her introduction, it makes “the stories of one culture accessible to another” (p. xi). This, she says, is achieved through the fine equilibrium of “staying true to the original text without denying the validity of one’s own heartfelt responses” (p. xvi). Her creativity, in most cases, helps the western reader grasp concepts, which are otherwise foreign to his or her experience, as, for example, when she describes the Moslem prayers by specifying their sequence (the first prayer, second prayer, and so forth), instead of their Arabic names (Salat El Fajr, Salat al-Duhr, and so on), or when she calls the wives of one man ‘co-wives.’ However, calling architectural designs on buildings ‘gargoyles’ seems inaccurate, even contrary to the abstract nature of Islamic architecture, which refrains from producing human figure-like replicas. With the exception of a few other minor mistakes: “to located” (p. xi), “If you wife” (p. 49), “not have know” (p. 118), “His look of warmth, this thanks.” (p. 128), Atiya has done an excellent job in reviving the rich heritage of one of Egypt’s first talented women writers of the twentieth century.

Maggie Nassif
University of Pennsylvania


In Wineseller’s Street: Renderings of Hafez, by Thomas Rain Crowe. 88 pages. Bethesda, MD: IBEX Publisher, 1998. $12.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-936347-67-8

Crowe, contemporary American poet and translator, presents here his modernized, Americanized poetic version of a collection of seventy-four poems by the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafez, with occasional illustrations of Persian motifs by Ali Dowlatshahi. The collection consciously orbits around the wine metaphor.

This interpretation of “more literal and academic translations done earlier this century” (p. 8) rightly makes no claim to any scientific recognition. No reference to any of these unnamed literal and academic translations is given, nor to any Persian edition of the divan of Hafez. A detailed comparative exercise of the poems with their academic ancestors or Persian originals would involve a frustrating and pointless search. Inspired by his personal reading of the divan, the author simply tries “to be true to the ‘folk’ and/or peasant sensibilities” which he believes “to be inherent in the original Persian...written for the common man in common everyday speech” (p. 8). In this spirit, and considering for example that Central Asian towns were not representative of modern culture, he has paraphrased the famous mesra' “be-khāl-e hendūyesh bakhsham Samarqand o Bokhārā-rā”[88] into "For that man’s birth-mole I’d trade England and Thailand too” (p. 15), as if Hafez had “suddenly appeared in Chicago...sitting with us on the barstool in the town pub” (p. 9).

Accordingly, In Wineseller’s Street exemplifies the occidentalization and vulgarization process of classical Persian poems which have reached a summit of multifaceted refinement and the full comprehension of which still poses tantalizing problems to both native and scholarly students.

I have no authority to judge here the quality of the American verses, which make pleasant reading. A study of In Wineseller’s Street might yield results as to the American psychological process of adoption, transformation, and interpretation of a Persian poetical collection, but does not concern Persian studies proper. As to this volume’s contribution to the field of Middle Eastern studies then, I propose it be an awareness of how its academic translations might convey the genius of the Persian poems and inspire non-Orientalist readers who then may interpret them according to their own modern sensibilities.

Christine van Ruymbeke
Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium),
University of Cambridge (UK)


Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa & Other Stories, by Ghassan Kanafani. Translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley. 199 pages. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. $13.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-89410-890-5

Kanafani was assassinated in Beirut in 1972. He had lived the life of a 1948 refugee, struggled to complete his studies, worked as a teacher in refugee camps in Kuwait and Lebanon, and became a successful writer and spokesperson for The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In his writings, he unabashedly depicts the hardship of life in the refugee camps, the agony of succumbing to numerous political or ideological shifts, and life nearly devoid of hope. In delivering his message, he often employs young characters who witness events that no adult should be made to endure.

Palestine’s Children features fourteen short stories and a novella about the predicament of Palestine and Palestinian children. Four of these stories are interrelated around a single character named Mansur, who aches to confront the threat of British troops and Jewish immigrants of pre-1948. Frustrated by not owning a gun and unaided by his wealthy brother or local Palestinian landowners, he goes to battle unarmed where he witnesses his father’s death. The stories “A Present for the Holiday,” “A Child Goes to the Camp,” “He was a Child That Day,” and “Guns in the Camp” take readers to the depth of Palestinian experience, show them the hopes and desperation of the fighters and refugees, relate the horror of a roadside massacre of Palestinian travelers, and describe how the atmosphere in the refugee camps changes after the Palestinians take up arms in 1965.

The novella “Returning to Haifa” speaks volumes about the enduring traumas of war. Written in 1967 it depicts the sad mixture of relief and despair accompanying the new possibility for Palestinians exiled in 1948 to return to their towns in what is now Israel, but to return only to look at, not to touch or repossess, what was once theirs. A couple travels from Ramallah to Haifa to see their former home. They go with worried hearts because in 1948 they had left their baby son behind in the chaos surrounding the evacuation of Haifa. We learn that the son was raised by a Jewish family, that his name is Dov and that, at twenty, he is a soldier in the Israeli army. All attempts by the father to get through to the boy that he is Palestinian and Arab fail. In the end, the father hopes that his second son, who he has left behind in Ramallah, has disobeyed his order to stay out of trouble with the new occupying forces, and has instead left to join the fidayeen. In a moving, concise manner, this story touches upon many small issues that together contribute to the conflict between the Palestinians and Zionists including identity, language, class strife, and the deceptively difficult task of defining ‘homeland.’

Harlow’s translations of these stories were published previously in 1984 by Three Continents Press, but the present text is improved in several ways. The introduction has been revised and updated. Riley joins Harlow, contributing a separate erudite biographical essay. Together these pieces fittingly present the personal as much as the literary life of Kanafani, one of Palestine’s most cherished authors and activists. The 1984 edition displayed on the cover a drawing of two Palestinian children holding a brimming basket of produce. The present cover contains a stark photograph of two Palestinian children standing in what is likely the street of a refugee camp, sad and empty handed, better reflecting the tenor of the collection’s contents.

Christine Dykgraaf
The University of Michigan


Reading Mystical Lyric: The Case of Jalal al-Din Rumi, by Fatemeh Keshavarz. (Studies in Comparative Religion) 194 pages, notes, bibliography, index. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 1998. $29.95 (Cloth) ISBN 1-57003-180-0

In the past fifteen years, the Persian Sufi poet Rumi (d. 1273) has emerged as a best-selling poet in English, thanks in large part to Coleman Barks’s popular versions. Somehow, however, the scholarly studies of this indubitably central figure had lagged behind. Keshavarz’s masterly analysis of Rumi’s poetics is a monumental contribution to Rumi studies, and (along with Frank Lewis’s recent encyclopedic work) ranks as one of the two most significant works on Rumi in the past decade.

Keshavarz deliberately approaches Rumi differently from other scholars who have tended to focus on Rumi’s mystical teachings and imagery. In problematizing the approaches that privilege ‘Rumi the mystic’ over ‘Rumi the poet,’ Keshavarz does not minimize the importance of Sufism in understanding Rumi. Her study complements—rather than dismisses—the more conventional studies of Annemarie Schimmel and William Chittick. It is only after reading Keshavarz’s text, however, that even the seasoned readers of Rumi realize how much they have overlooked in reading his poetry. For this understanding, and so much more, we are greatly indebted to Keshavarz.

Keshavarz problematizes—and successfully transcends—two persistent approaches in the study of Rumi: the first recalls Rumi’s alleged dissatisfaction with the medium of poetry. Many of those who rely on this perspective cite Rumi’s own statements in the Fihi ma fihi: “In my homeland and among my people there was no occupation more contemptible than” being a poet (p. 15). Keshavarz insightfully argues that such ‘complaints’ are actually a sign of great sensitivity to the medium of poetry, and the recognition that a new type of dynamic dialogue and transformation with the reader must take place. Her presentation of this point is most convincing. The second approach Keshavarz debunks is the common tendency to bifurcate Rumi’s thought into separate realms of ‘poetry’ and ‘mysticism,’ and somehow view the poems as a ‘suitcase’ which contain the mystical content. Keshavarz finds this bifurcation distinctly unhelpful.

Keshavarz utilizes insights from contemporary discussions of literary theory and comparative literature, from a wide range of figures such as Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Heidegger, Husserl, and others. It would be easy in today’s world of post-everything to dismiss this engagement as merely trendy. That would be a most unfair assessment of Keshavarz’s sophistication. To her great credit, she manages to deploy insights from many of the above theorists without either overwhelming the reader or being overwhelmed herself. The theory and the application in this case go hand in hand, illuminating the subject, not obfuscating it.

Reading Mystical Lyric is a must-read for all those seriously interested in Rumi, Sufism, and Persian as well as Islamicate literatures. Its reasonable pricing and manageable length make it ideal for a variety of undergraduate and graduate classes, including Persian literature, Sufism, Islamic Civilization, and Comparative Literature. Every serious student of Rumi would do well to add this work to the short bookshelf of the essential studies of Rumi, which includes Gülpınarlı, Foruzanfar, Zarrinkub, Huma’i, Chittick, Schimmel, Frank Lewis, and now, Keshavarz.

Omid Safi
Colgate University


Women Without Men, by Shahrnush Parsipur. Translated by Kamran Talattof and Jocelyn Sharlet. 108 pages. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998. $22.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8156-0552-8

Women without Men is an important and long overdue translation by one of Iran’s most important women writers, Parsipur, who now lives in exile in the United States. Parsipur’s work is banned in Iran, but has continued to influence an emerging generation of young writers who are confronting not only the expectations and edicts of the Islamic Republic, but also an excessive and unpredictable censorial establishment that regularly closes down publications dedicated to women’s issues and writing.

Talattof and Sharlet’s thoughtful and careful translation of Parsipur’s novella conveys to Western readers the shifting consciousness of women writers and feminist thinkers whose views have found innovative ways to make themselves heard. The themes and writing style of Women without Men push the limits of Parsipur’s critique of male oppression and privilege, and eventually cost her the ability to continue to write and live in Iran. Parsipur is particularly drawn to magical realism as a narrative tool to express some of the irrational and inexpressible aspects of women’s existence. Talattof and Sharlet have remained truthful to the original Persian by attempting to convey the simplicity of the language and the straightforward narrative voice, while also communicating its complex subtext as a counter-narrative to dominant Iranian ideologies about women.

The narrators/protagonists of this novella are all single women, whose seemingly disparate lives and narratives eventually come together in a country garden in Karaj, which serves as a kind of utopian women’s space, free from the dictates and brutality of male society. Each of the five protagonists eventually makes her way to the garden, but along the way must deal with and confront the harsh realities of male society. Zarrinkolah, for example, a twenty-six-year-old prostitute, becomes disgusted with serving men’s sexual desire. To cleanse herself, she goes to a bathhouse and seeks spiritual absolution. After a night of crying next to a religious shrine, she is advised to go to the garden in Karaj. Another protagonist, Mahdokht, is traumatized after witnessing a young girl being deflowered by a man in a greenhouse. She equates her own virginity with being a tree and immediately turns into a tree and decides to plant herself in the garden so that she “would become thousands and thousands of branches” (p. 11). In mid-spring her body erupts in a surge of growth that causes her to become a tree that turned into a mountain of seeds that is spread all over the world by the wind. This bizarre and magical realist image suggests the way that Parsipur has tackled the taboo subject of virginity and made it relevant to the characters who strive to find that impossible utopia, free from the influence of men, in the garden in Karaj. Other taboo subjects that the book artfully broaches are rape, suicide, murder, love, and the possibility of spiritual transcendence.

Women without Men is not an easy text for Western readers, but it is a necessary beginning to understanding the ways that Iranian women writers have artistically and innovatively tackled their social and sexual conditions, particularly since 1979. Because of the complexity of issues both in theme and narrative style, however, Women Without Men would have benefited from a more extensive introduction. If I am to teach this novella to my students, where and how do I begin to tackle some of the challenging questions that all literary scholars and critics face when reading and teaching literature from significantly different, and, in this case, Muslim context? This is a solid translation of a most provocative piece of recent Iranian literature. What we need is an even more provocative introduction for readers who might feel blindsided by its power and its challenging literary techniques.

Persis M. Karim
San Jose State University



God’s Banquet: Food in Classical Arabic Literature, by Geert Jan van Gelder. 179 pages, notes, bibliography, index. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000. $35.50 (Cloth) ISBN 0-231-11948-8

God’s Banquet benefits from van Gelder’s expertise in adab and complements his studies on parody and satire in Arabic literature. The introduction lays out the rationale for a difficult and necessary selection in view of the massive literature available. The focus is on dishes and banquets rather than ingredients and foodstuffs. The material is organized according to literary genres in loosely chronological order, from pre-Islamic poetry to the eighteenth century. Thus pre-Islamic poetry and the ties between food and ‘Bedouin ethos’ precede representations of food in the early Islamic texts and their new ethics of eating. A major focus of the book is the multi-faceted connection between food and adab. The chapter “Food for Satire and Parody” includes an examination of the paragons of satirical and humorous literature (for example, Ibn Sudun [d. 868/1464], Ibn Hajjar [fifteenth century] and the seventeenth-century Egyptian al-Shirbini). Starting from the precept that “whenever food is the theme of even the blandest kinds of literature, one must look out for hidden layers of parody and jesting” (p. 21), van Gelder shows how food is used to parody a wide range of conventions and topoi, from qasid (p. 61) and poetic themes such as ritha’, elegiac poetry (p. 85) to literary debates (p. 97). Food is also used to “vilify” an enemy (non-Arabs during the “shu`ubiyya debate”) (p. 33) or denigrate a social group (Shirbini’s satirical treatment of peasants). The last chapter reviews, very briefly, the uses of food as metaphor in literary criticism and in the interpretation of dreams in addition to the connection between food and sex.

The exposition is for the most part clear and swift. The narrative is entertaining at times as the writer, operating within the spirit of adab as a mixture of “jest and earnest,” to use his own terms, ‘spices up’ his otherwise potentially dry exposition with anecdotes and verse. However, the author’'s tendency to engage in tangential comparisons with other traditions appears out of place and often hinders narrative fluidity. In spite of his resistance to potentially enriching theoretical interpretations, van Gelder offers an austere but hearty plat de resistance to those interested in literature and food in Arabic culture. Students of culinary history will find here a chronological outline of representations of food in Arabic writing, which range from the expected recipe books and descriptions of banquets and eating etiquette to the wealth of literary sources they tend to overlook. The monograph is most useful, however, as a concise sourcebook on who, where, and how food is represented in Arabic pre-modern written sources. If God’s Banquet is neither a theoretical nor a methodological groundbreaking study, it nevertheless provides necessary and timely groundwork for further research.

Mohamed-Salah Omri
University of Exeter