Shifting Frameworks for Studying Contemporary Arabic Literature of Migration to Europe: A Case for Border Studies

Contemporary Arabic literature of migration in Europe is often labelled and marketed as exile literature (adab al-manfa). However, the valences of this term (and many of its cognates) are fluid and changing. In contemporary Arabic literature of forced migration to Europe, modernist and postcolonial discourses on exile and migration found in literary narratives that centered on topics such as political exile, students travelling abroad for study and labour immigration have been giving way to literature that explores the perspectives of refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants. This more recent writing grapples with subjectivities born of mass migration and encounters with borderlands, and explores spaces located outside citizenship. Although terms such as ‘exile’ and ‘migration’ continue to be used to situate this literature, they are quite fluid. This spaciousness is vital and offers us a wide array of linkages and possibilities for situating and analysing these literary texts. While keeping the literature’s contemporary contexts in mind, we can also attend to the ways that it is being reimagined with earlier literary texts and frameworks. One of the important questions to attend to is how to situate the postcolonial in these twenty-first-century literary texts of migration.In an interesting juxtaposition, in a review of the 2004 novel Aqmar ʿIraqiyya Sawdaʾ fi al-Suwid (Black Iraqi Moons in Sweden) by the Sweden-based Iraqi novelist ʿAli ʿAbd al-ʿAl, the reviewer places the book alongside classic colonial and postcolonial Arabic novels of migration to Europe, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1938 ʿUsfur min al-Sharq (Bird of the East), Yahya Haqqi’s 1944 novella Qandil Umm Hashim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim) and Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (Season of Migration to the North). A recurring trope in Aqmar is that of the exile as a moon that has lost its orbit. Extending the metaphor of Salih’s iconic postcolonial novel Mawsim al-Hijra, the reviewer notes that the characters in Aqmar are living a season of forced migration, mawsim tahjīr. This metaphor situates the novel within a distinct period of time that both flows from and marks a break with a form of migration and literary expression located in a particular postcolonial past. How do we describe this new season?Since the 1990s, Arabic literature of migration to Europe has increasingly foregrounded the perspectives of refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants.