On the Way to the Wind: Contemporary Writing from the Middle East and North Africa

Caveats aside, a segment in Callaloo on Middle Eastern/North African contemporary works seems timely and natural-as natural as including an excerpt from Basrayatha, Mohammed Khudayyir's book-length meditation/lover's discourse on his native city of Basra, Iraq, a city recently devastated, but one where the great Arab writer of African descent, al-Jahiz, also began his career in the ninth century A.D. Equally apt are Florence Marfo's scholarly work on the memoirs of African Muslim slaves in America, Maymanah Farhat's charged essay on the convergence of race, identity, and politics vis-à-vis western representations of contemporary Arab art, as well as the visual artist Y. Z. Kami's magiste rial invocations on canvas, and the tender remembrance of the noted poet D. H. Melhem about her lifelong friendship with African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Take, for instance, the excerpt from the novel My Thousand & One Nights, novelist Raja Alem's tale of women's lives in the Mecca of bygone days, or Ibrahim al-Koni's use of his native North African Tuareg folklore to write a dream-like sequence about a boy's desert search for his father in Anubis. In Pauline Kaldas's short story, "A Game of Chance," a young man in Cairo lays everything on winning the annual lottery that allows fifty thousand hopefuls to emigrate to America; in Salwa Bakr's The Golden Chariot, we are given a window into the inmost recesses of Egyptian life as told from inside of a women's prison; and in an excerpt from the classic novel of a Palestinian who becomes a citizen of Israel, the late Emile Habiby writes a tragicomic account of the life of Saeed, a man whose survival turns into an accumulation of absurdities in a land that is and isn't his. [...]in a passage from Leïla Sebbar's autobiographical novel, I Do Not Speak My Father's Language (immaculately translated by the distinguished poet Marilyn Hacker), the author imagines the world of her father during the brutal war years when the French colonialist regime battled the hardened nationalists in Algeria. [...]these dislocations cover centuries. [...]I am enormously grateful to all of the translators and to my friend Percival Everett for his sustained support of this project.