In a Fertile Desert

Modern Writing from the United Arab Emirates
By Denys Johnson-Davies

A volume of short stories from this commercially and culturally vital and vibrant centre of the Arab world - a selective sampling of a burgeoning literary output since the 1970s by the leading Arabic English translator.

Life before the oil in this region was harsh, and many of the stories in this collection - by both men and women from all corners of the country - tell of those times and the almost unbelievable changes that have come about in the space of two generations. Some tell of the struggles faced in the early days, while others bring the immediate past and the present together, revealing that the past, with all its difficulties and dangers, nonetheless possesses a certain nostalgia.

The volume includes stories by Abdul Hamid Ahmed, Roda al-Baluchi,Hareb al-Dhaheri, Nasser Al-Dhaheri, Maryam Jumaa Faraj, Jumaaal-Fairuz, Nasser Jubran, Saleh Karama, Lamees Faris al-Marzuqi,Mohamed al-Mazroui, Ebtisam Abdullah Al-Mu'alla, Ibrahim Mubarak,Mohamed al-Murr, Sheikha al-Nakhy, Mariam Al Saedi, Omniyat Salem,Salma Master Seif, Ali Abdul Aziz al-Sharhan, Muhsin Soleiman, andA'ishaa al-Za'aby.

Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as 'the leading Arabic-English translator of our time', has produced more than thirty volumes of translation of modern Arabic literature. He is the editor of The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim (AUC Press, 2008). He received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2007 for Personality of the Year in the Field of Culture.

Emirati writers reclaim their past

by Lisa Kaaki,

Read the article online on www.arabnews.com

For the first time, a selection of short stories from the United Arab Emirates, chosen and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, has been published in English.


Johnson-Davies wondered at first whether he would find enough writers, especially with Muhammad Al-Murr being the only Emirati writer known outside of the Middle East. But he was pleasantly surprised with the rich mine of short stories.


He has always preferred not to allot more than one story for each writer. 'The reason being it would, in my opinion, suggest that someone represented by, say two stories was a better writer than one represented by a single tale,' he says.
 Johnson-Davies soon discovered that finding short stories was not a problem.

A growing number of writers are now posting their work on the Internet like Maryam Al-Saedi whose story 'The Old Woman' is included in the book. 
It is interesting to note that women's creative writing in the Gulf is linked to the rise of girl's education and to the press which began publishing their writings in the 1950s. Shaykha Al-Nakhi was the first woman writer in the Emirates to have a short story, 'Al-Rahil' (The Departure) published in 1970. She eventually released her first collection of short stories under the same name in1992.
 All the stories translated in the book are infused with the idea of movement from the earliest published in 1974 and the latest, 'The Old Woman' by Maryam Al-Saedi, in 2008. This continuous shift from present to past, and past to present highlights the profound changes which have swept through the United Arab Emirates. 


Most of the stories, written both by men and women, have a distinct local flavor suggested by names, customs and traditions. However, Suad Al-Mana in her excellent introduction to Gulf literature in 'Arab Women Writers'says that 'It is striking that many women writers from the Emirates have embraced the techniques of modern fiction, with a focus on ambiguity and the use of myth, symbolism, or dreams'.
 This is especially true of the stories written by Omniyat Salem, Aishaa Al-Zaaby and Salma Matar Seif.


In 'Death', Omniyat Salem weaves a beautiful tale around a child' s perception of loss of life assimilated to darkness:
'What does darkness mean other than that thick, striking blackness, like a magic moving with a sort of foam towering over it? No one knows darkness as do the people of the sea and the desert: Cold, black, cruel sands, and a strange black wave, as though desert and sky were twins separated by an imaginary line like the line of the equator'. 
The boundaries between myths, dreams and reality are blurred and this creates a daunting atmosphere imbued with fantasy. 


In 'Fear Without Walls', Aishaa Al-Zaaby creates a story within a story. The author searches the past to understand how stories are made. She discovers that stories have a life of their own, even more complex than she had ever imagined:
'As everything in life is born small and then grows larger, except, that is, for sorrow and anxiety, which grows smaller with the passage of time, so this story died down until it was brought back to life by some chance occurrence in the village, though things would calm down once again, while remaining nonetheless susceptible to the slightest of winds to set it ablaze once more'.


Two of the most beautiful stories included in the book are written by Ali Abdul Aziz Al-Sharhan and Ibrahim Mubarak. They outshine the rest of the selection with their original and stylish reference to both past and present. The evocation of a not so distant way of life is rendered with strokes of poetry blended in a bitter-sweet reality.


In 'Grief of the Night Bird', Ibrahim Mubarak describes the distinctive world of the falconer. The ties between past and present, traditions and westernization are symbolized by the exceptional relationship between Hamdan, a falconer and his hawk, epitomizing the 'old life'.

'Hamdan is from old times' writes Mubarak but Said, who is taught by Hamdan how to call to hawks, shares his passion for hawking with his love for all the city has to offer: 'In the absurd and the beautiful, and in its clamor and strange and extraordinary ways, where the new and the old merged,and where strangers, with their different customs, had multiplied,while it was in a state between opening out, disintegrating,conserving, and taking root'.


During a cathartic night out in the city,Said, accompanied by his hawk, comes to realize, that the smoke, the noise and the sickness prevalent in the city, are nothing compared to the clean desert. An ignorant foreigner unties his hawk, removing its hood, and the bird takes off in a wild, frenzied manner, frightening everybody away. When the bird, responding to his master's call, lands back onto his hand, Said realizes that no one can flee his past: 'One day they'll all run away... You alone never will', Said told his hawk. 
In 'Abu Abboud', Ali Abdul Aziz Al-Sharhan, highlights the qualities of the pearl divers 'those men who had spared no effort to become examples to the generation that now lived on in their memory and enjoyed the good things of life that they had defended'.


Abu Abboud has dreamed all his life that his son will study, get a good job to give his children a better future but his son does not want to study: 'I see all those who have studied who haven't got anywhere. I know lots oft hose who haven't studied who are now becoming rich' he tells his father whose hot tear sliding down his cheek, reminds him of the drops of sweat that entered his mouth while he was working.


While Gulf writers only started publishing short stories and novels in the 1970s, Denys Johnson-Davies reminds us in his useful introduction, that before delving in these new genres, they composed poems, in the local spoken Arabic, known as Nabati poetry. One of the best studies of Nabati poetry has been written by the Saudi, Saad Al-Swayan. Traditionally, Nabati poetry is an oral form of poetry and the person who recites his own and others' verses is called a 'rawi', a bearer of traditions. 
Johnson-Davies tells us how surprised he was, when an old man he met in the UAE, in 1969, knew thousands of verses. Indeed, this is not uncommon, but the numbers of 'rawis'' are in sharp decline all over the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, and with them, is disappearing an invaluable literary heritage. 


All the short stories selected in 'A Fertile Desert' reflect contemporary life in the United Arab Emirates,a mixture of old and new. Despite the gargantuan changes which haven early wiped out their traditional way of life, Emirati writers are reclaiming their not so distant past through their literature.

Copyright: Arab News, 2003, All rights reserved.