On the Weave of the Sun Read online

  On the Weave of the Sun

  An Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories

  By

  Accomplished Arab Writers

  Translated by Abdallah Altaiyeb

  Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.

  Copyright © 2012 Abdallah Altaiyeb.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the publisher.

  Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.

  12620 FM 1960, Suite A4-507

  Houston, TX 77065

  www.sbpra.com

  ISBN: 978-1-62212-763-4

  Dedication

  To my parents Mohammad Altaiyeb and Hanim Asal

  To my wife, Jamilah, and my children Lama, Maen, Reema, and Mudar

  To my hometown, Madinah

  To the world of literature

  Praise for On the Weave of the Sun

  This treasure chest of short stories from contemporary Middle Eastern writers has been a revelation to me.

  I can only describe the stories as distinctive shards of light.

  Somehow, the writers have captured unique moments of life—life in places and societies that we in the UK, in truth, know very little about, other than what is fed to us by the popular news media in print and on TV.

  Each writer, in his or her own brave and unique way, manages to get under the skin of every living and breathing moment, seeming to capture truth from the inside out, rather than the outside in.

  These stories are like snapshots—literal Polaroids—blending and blurring the real with the imagined. The gritty real and longed-for escape into the imagination and soul, when the pain of the real becomes unbearable. They all capture a unique moment in time: A precious breath, the sudden realisation or awakening of a feeling, a memory, a smell, a dilemma, a turning point, a crossroad—all of them through the power of their language evoke sensory reactions in me:

  “She was a bottle of sadness corked with silence, floating over a sea of unfairness … ”

  Or …

  “I was enchained to his kindliness and handcuffed to his tenderness … ”

  And …

  “To wipe off the tiredness of their feet … ”

  “The dew was sauntering on the trees.”

  Rich and decorous in this fine and easily accessible translation, I was transported to the heat and the dust, to the rigidity, and the seething passions underneath. The sheer pleasure and exaltation of language and words simply oozed like essential oils from every page. The music and rhythm of each writer is very distinctive; yet as a collection, like tributaries flowing to the sea, they come together and make a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

  As a body of work, I feel the collection is distinctive and will resonate with readers everywhere, because we are all human and the emotions expressed here are very real, heartfelt, and common to all of man and womankind.

  With themes of love and loss, of fear and recrimination, and inner pain and turmoil in the wake of conflict and violence, I was left pining for the lives of the characters who lived within these pages. They stayed with me for days after: The shock of a father whose son dies before him in a terrible accident by the side of a road; the wife, now widow, who sleeps next to her dead husband’s body; the man who had to dig graves and bury dead bodies, thinking each grave would become his own; the young woman, confronted on an isolated path by a man, a tramp she thought was mad, who fell to his knees and through a deluge of anguished tears declared his desperate love for her.

  Moving and touching—each one, in turn, left me wanting more.

  As we are always told, always leave your audience wanting more. The poetic musicality and richness of the language was profoundly surprising, and I feel a little embarrassed and somewhat ashamed at my ignorance and assumptions of culture and understanding—my ethnocentrism.

  This fine body of work has awakened a curiosity in me to read more. Not from just these writers, but to dive into the sea of work from other contemporary Middle Eastern writers as well. So thank you, Abdallah, for introducing me to this collection.

  I wish each writer the warmest of appreciation for his or her work, and I also wish them luck, joy, and bravery for their future writing.

  I would like to leave you with something that 20th century Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas, wrote about poetry, all of which I felt while reading these stories: “It’s what makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared, and forever all your own.”

  Jonathan Lewis

  British award-winning playwright and actor

  Author of Our Boys, the Writers’ Guild award-winning play

  Acclaimed director for television and theater

  London

  October 2011

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  A Sea of Sand

  Ah

  Catch the Thief

  Don’t Leave the Door Open…Please

  Not Like That

  Disappearance

  A Luminous Woman

  Dominos

  Girls’ Route

  Less Than a Goodbye

  Mister Jumah

  One(s)

  Snow in Damascus

  Zehra

  The Courtyard

  The Crow

  The Museum Girl

  The Walk of Men

  About the Authors

  Words from the Authors

  Foreword

  Great writing causes us to think in new and unique ways, and to derive a deeper understanding of the world around us. Multiple perspectives, including those of other cultures and ethnicities, can profoundly broaden and enhance our understandings and insights. This remarkable Arabic anthology deftly achieves these important goals, and offers considerable illumination to anyone wanting to better understand humanity throughout the world.

  As a sociologist with a deep interest in and experience with cultures and literature, I have long been intrigued with literary works of this nature, and was deeply honored to be able to contribute the Foreword to this outstanding collection of contemporary Arabic fiction. Not only is each of the stories unique and profoundly engaging, in and of themselves, but they also offer meaningful insights into Middle Eastern culture and the thoughts and experiences of the people. I was particularly struck with the universality of the challenges herein addressed, that face us all in one form or another—unrequited love, marriage and family life, bereavement, disabilities, the pain of gossip and betrayal, the numbness of despair, and the sought after joys of reconciliation and restitution.

  Superimposed upon and intermingled with these, however, are experiences and challenges unique to region, culture, religion, and politics. Some cultural norms and practices we might perceive as abusive: strident male-female rules and restrictive cultural garb; corporeal punishments and deprivations of sustenance; the trauma of intra-national political killings and torture; the burdens of being a woman in a profoundly patriarchal society. Other cultural aspects simply enlighten and expand our view of the world about us: Religious rituals, culturally specific grieving patterns, and other traditions, expressions, and behaviors.

  We owe much to each of our authors and to our translator, Abdallah Altaiyeb. The authors are a diverse group of accomplished writers, with a remarkable grasp of language and ideas. They include novelists, poets, and short-story writers that hail from throughout th
e Arab World, including Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates. Abdallah Altaiyeb is an accomplished Saudi writer and translator with multiple advanced degrees. His command of literature and language is amply in evidence in this anthology.

  Together they bring to us breathtaking imagery and heart-stopping drama, drawn through the sieve of human consciousness and intimate perspective. In rendering the stories into English, the translator has done a masterful job of choosing wording that powerfully conveys the meaning and impact of the authors’ original works. These are never-before-translated short stories by outstanding Arabic authors. Truly, we are all indebted to these significant writers and to Abdallah Altaiyeb for his diligent interpretive efforts.

  Through our writers, we learn the folly of “looking the other way to stay alive,” and we feel the pain of unjust judgment and gossip, evocatively described as “vile, putrid words, seeping through…wretched lips…that scratch [the]… ears and devour [the]…body.” We are reminded of the damage done by one who vaunts himself above others, artfully described as “puffed up with pride…like a peacock.” We witness the stinging pain of a newly bereft husband who realized too late that “he had never…romanced [his wife] with words that would…nurture the roots of her love in the deepest part of her heart.” Our understanding is enlarged as we learn of the burdens of “being a woman” where efforts to grow are akin to “building a structure that collapse[s] [with] every…added…brick.” Our wisdom is increased when told that “Fate is the making of our hands,” as the author describes “one of the times that I made [my] fate.”

  Our authors also treat us to profound wording that infinitely deepens the meaning of emotion and experience. For a home burdened by suicide, we are led to observe the “fragile peace forged between the thin layers of dust and the room furniture.” Unkindness is better understood when described as “cold water [that] had turned into piercing thorns.” Buoyantly moving hair is evoked more clearly when “flying around like a free black bird.” A sense of threat increases when the “sky is dull, [and] the desert stretches like oppression [as] desolate dirt bit[es] at the[ir] faces.” Early morning awakening is richly visualized as “windows roused one after the other in the village.” The plight of the mentally ill homeless becomes more plain when one so smitten is described through a child’s eyes as “a scarecrow, possessed by the soul of a long-dead man, venturing away from its pole with ragged clothes, tossed hair, and freshly grown hands and feet.” The trepidation of a young teenaged girl out at night is palpably sensed as the “night drew its heavy curtains over everything” and the “trees swayed like vicious monsters ready to pounce.”

  Our appreciation of tradition is enlarged when, for example, the practice of preparing the dead is drawn back to its roots of “the Pharaonic body washing rituals.” The antiquity of the lands is more fully captured through phrases such as “ancient shadows of a nomadic nation that dwelled once upon a time in the wedges of the sand.”

  This anthology will introduce the reader to powerful thoughts, poignant and profound ideas, and the deep and rich traditions and cultures that exist throughout the beautiful and historically rich lands of the Middle East. As a sociologist, I can recommend it for many technically salient reasons; but as an individual, I will also recommend it for its majestic wording, deep insights, beautiful metaphor and imagery, and for the panoramic vistas of language, learning and meaning that it will bring to every reader.

  R. Moroni Leash, PhD

  Sociologist

  Sacramento, CA

  Preface

  Over the years, those whom I have met and worked with have continually urged me to publish my translations of Arabic fiction, to gather them into one anthology, and to share our beautiful literature with the world, so it could claim its rightful place. So, perhaps this anthology will be seen as “thanks” to the many of you who have contributed to the world of Arabic literature.

  I would like to thank a number of people who have encouraged me, including my dear friends, the authors, whose stories abound in this book: Wafa, Jubair, Samir, Awadh, Ibtesam, Faysal, Nabil, Leila, Fatima, Hoida, Hasan, Sherif, and, Khaled. We all met on Arabic Story Forum, enjoying the hospitality of Jubair. In that cyberspace, I had the pleasure of posting my first translated story, Catch the Thief. That was what started it all. I have benefitted from the kindness, teachings, and advice of some of the very best Arab writers, who took the time to contribute with their comments and corrections on the posted stories. They helped enrich the translations and encouraged me to continue the journey until this book was created. So, I would like to deeply thank them.

  Special thanks to my publisher and editor, Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Agency, for their abundance of talent and patience and for creating an enjoyable friendly environment for publishing books.

  Not least, perhaps, I should thank my wife, Jamilah, and my children, Lama, Maen, Reema, and Mudar for their patience, forbearance, understanding, and love while I spent a lot of hours working on the book.

  I can reassure the reader that as this is my first book on translated Arabic literature, at least for a while, I have put my heart and soul into it. Therefore, I hope that you will very much enjoy this anthology as well as find it immensely entertaining!

  A Sea of Sand

  Written by:

  Fatima Al-Nahidh

  “We disregard.”

  I emphasized every syllable of the word. Times change. We change. We grow up and start looking the other way to stay alive. But he said one sentence only, while staring at the horizon stretching endlessly before him,

  “If only those who said this would experience what I had been through.”

  It hadn’t been easy for me to know, in those moments when we reached that edge that the sun would drown in a well of darkness, and we would leave with a heartache. But I could swear that we, as creatures blended with myriad lusts, tend to forget our traumas, so we could go on. Our enemy, time, deliberately awarded us one motive after another to jostle forward with our pains and broken dreams on the road to the terra incognita of oblivion, only to lose them there and go back to perhaps resume the same sins and harvest desire and agony.

  It was neither a confession session nor a sudden strike of transparency, let alone a planned one. We just walked and let our feet take us toward calmness, and silence walked kindly between us like a mutual friend.

  He stopped for a while, as if trying to ascertain the place, so I stopped as well. He then marched on, and I walked next to him in silence.

  There was nothing but sand across the land. It rose a bit to form a dune, rose more to look like a hill, and rose more and more to perhaps become a mountain. Then, it went flat like a sea, spreading mercilessly, and then it levelled some more like an infertile dry valley.

  There was only sand, and nothing else! The immense moon seemed extremely close, much like a shield ornamenting a wall, sprinkling glistening silver on the peaks, and leaving us in a peaceful unknown.

  “We shall have a rest on top of that dune.”

  He uttered when we got closer to a sand hill about fifty steps away. I sensed that he said so because I had started panting from the effort of disentangling my bare feet from the softness of the sand with each step. I felt my back stoop a little as the walk upward toward the dune got steeper, as if the desert had been tilting.

  We had walked a distance, immeasurable with any decimal system, since we left the camp an hour before, going silently most of the time through silken sand, content merely with each other’s company.

  When we finally reached the top of the dune, we emerged onto a large open area of green meadow, with grass springing from the sand and extending to an end that was unknown to us. I screamed childishly,

  “O God, why didn’t we camp here? My God, where did this grassland come from? Is this your secret hideout?”

  We sat down, as silence along with everything before us bathed in an ocean of silver. He was looking at the far horiz
on, while my hands were playing with the soft and juicy grass. I could not believe that it was filling the spaces between my fingers, as I continued caressing it, touching the little flowers that glowed with sweet dew under the moonlight, forming circles, stars, lines, letters, and unlinked points.

  Then, like reading from a book, he said,

  “We cannot continue looking the other way. Our pasts don’t die; we are prisoners behind no bars. We foolishly think we left them behind, but they rise in their due time, to announce their barbaric presence.”

  My hands were still holding on to the coolness that was slowly slipping through my fingers. He was not waiting for a reply, and he continued reading,

  “That stormy night, they put us in the prison bus after covering our heads with sacks. I cannot remember how long we travelled, but it surely was a long drive. The only sound we heard was that of the squeaking joints of the bus. Sometimes, we heard the sound of air ripped by a car speeding like an arrow. And every so often, a coughing sound from the end of the bus broke our anxiety.

  We finally stopped, they got us down, uncovered our heads, and we found ourselves on sand like this.”

  He held his arm high with a handful of sand from the heart of the grass and started slowly scattering it in the wind away from my face. He then took a deep breath and said,

  “We didn’t know that there was another truck behind us. From it, they brought excavating tools, piled them in front of us, and told us to get to work.

  Our hearts were gripped with terror. The first thing we thought, while digging under the threats of the loaded guns and the slowly growing sandstorm that had been stroking our spines, was that they were going to bury us in mass graves dug by our own hands. They didn’t talk much. They were just prompting us to dig faster, but we stalled fearfully, hoping for more time to live, and slowed down the digging.

  We consumed about all the time we could stall for. After all, how much time do you need to dig a hole your size, and in a sandy area? We were around fifteen prisoners, but they asked each of us to dig two holes.