The Dissident Blog #26 - Arabic Literature

It is now eight years since the Arab spring started in Tunisia. The protests led to many writers and journalists being forced to leave their home countries to seek asylum in exile. In this issue of The Dissident Blog the journalist Trifa Shakely, our guest editor, and Jesper Bengtsson, Swedish PEN’s new chairperson, have collected voices from the countries that experienced this sudden rush of rebellion for democracy. As a result we can therefore publish ten unique and emotional texts from countries such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Palestine.

In the foreword Jesper Bengtsson writes: “In this issue of the Dissident Blog we have assembled texts written by a few of these intellectuals; these voices cannot possibly reflect the whole of the Arab world, but they can give us some insight into contemporary reality, give us fantastic images of everyday events and of small steps of development in the writers’ countries, impart images of life in exile, of on-going resistance, and continuing oppression. In combination these images come to symbolize something vital: they show that the right to free expression can make life better and more fun to live and it can open up the world to the experiences of others.”

“Everything around me is changed. The garden—now a diminished desert. The house—an abandoned skeleton. My bed—a library. My empty notebooks have become an aeroplane and the family a meagre poem,” writes Rasha Alqasim, an Iraqi writer in exile, in a furious and desperate poem about his flight. Afrah Nasser, a journalist from Yemen, writes: I am the result of a culture that challenges every Arabic citizen to emigrate to the West.” The Syrian writer Aboud Saeed narrates a bizarre experience of life in exile—how does one handle selling an inherited family house when all the siblings are spread around the world? “And so the discussion continues in this way between my sisters and brothers and their wives and their husbands. One wants to sell, one refuses to sell, and my mom wants the whole sum of money plus a house in Manbij to return to, and she wants the regime to fall and wants to be a tourist in Turkey—she wants it all.”

Trifa Shakely comments on her work with this issue: “It has been extremely interesting and worthwhile to work with these texts that would never have been published in the writers’ home countries. Many of these texts spring from the experiences of, for example, being a woman, an HBTQ person, or belonging to a minority group forced to write in Arabic. Here The Dissident Blog really becomes a true platform for the free word.”

Read the whole blog here.

For more information about this issue please contact:

Jesper Bengtsson,
Chair of Swedish PEN
E-mail: jesper.bengtsson@svenskapen.se

Trifa Shakely
Guest Editor
E-mail: trifashakely@gmail.com