Middle East/North African Lit discussion

Hello everyone ,
We will start our last read for this year soon , time flies by !:)
Please feel free to share your thoughts with us , what did you like last year ? and what do you want to experience next year ?

Waiting for your feedback ! :)

Hello,

I am a bit surprised that none of my books, especially The Gardener of Baghdad, which has sold over 35,000 copies in 40 countries was never added to your lists. It is the most sold originally English Written Fiction sold by an Iraqi, and the first to be published as an ebook, paperback and audiobook.

I would appreciate if you had a look at it, and consider for the months to come.

Regard,
Ahmad

Well, I'd love to read a book of poetry, I just don't know where to start...

I'd like to see monthly nominations and book discussions - not ones planned far in advance, but maybe 4 weeks before the discussion starts.

Themed threads, by topic, could also lead to interesting discussions and shared of suggestions Perhaps a quarterly theme focused on a single country? Just a thought.

Fl wrote: "Well, I'd love to read a book of poetry, I just don't know where to start..."

For contemporary Arab poetry check out anything by Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish.

A Time Between Ashes and Roses, Adonis

Victims of a Map, A Bilingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, (Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Samir al-Quasim), translated from the Arabic by Abdullah al-Udhari.

Adrenalin, Ghayath Almadhoun.

Fifteen Iraqi Poets, Edited by Dunya Mikhail.

Carol wrote: Themed threads, by topic, could also lead to interesting discussions and shared of suggestions.

I was thinking of that type of organization, too. Such as books about the contemporary arts of the Arab world, or something like that. I thought of it while reading the Arablit blogpost:

https://arablit.org/2018/11/14/khatt-...

I'm usually much more of a fiction reader but I've been trying to come up with something that we haven't done. On the other hand, I don't have enough depth of knowledge to know what I'm missing.

My local book group is reading some non-fiction for a change this month: ON IDENTITY by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. It was origially published in 1996 and re-released recently under a different title, IN THE NAME OF IDENTITY. It's a fascinating look at identity of those who migrate from one country to another. (Very relevant to our current read, REFUGE). I highly recommend it for our 2019 list.

Carol wrote: "I'd like to see monthly nominations and book discussions - not ones planned far in advance, but maybe 4 weeks before the discussion starts.

Themed threads, by topic, could also lead to interestin..."


I like the idea of polls reads that are planed closer to the time of the discussion however every month is a lot, especially for moderators.
How about every two months.
People often need some time to get hard to find books.

In the Name of Identity is excellent! I agree with Eileen! I didn't know that it had a new title.

Fl wrote: "Well, I'd love to read a book of poetry, I just don't know where to start..."

>Safia Elhillo "The January Children"
>Zeina Hashem Beck "Louder than Hearts"
>A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know, by Golan Haji, trans. Stephen Watts and Golan Haji
>Amjad Nasser's Petra, tr. Fady Joudah
>Rachida Madani''s "Tales of a Severed Head," tr. Marilyn Hacker

Marcia is much too modest to share this, but you should know that there is a new quarterly in town! Introducing Pub Day for ‘ArabLit Quarterly Fall 2018: Beginnings’ – ArabLit
https://arablit.org/2018/11/15/pub-da...

ReemK10 (Paper Pills) wrote: "Marcia is much too modest to share this, but you should know that there is a new quarterly in town! Introducing Pub Day for ‘ArabLit Quarterly Fall 2018: Beginnings’ – ArabLit
https://arablit.org/2..."

:-) You embarrass me. But thank you!

I'm ready to shout from the rooftops to get the word out! It's the very least that I can do for you! Thank you for all that you do for Arab lit!

Jalilah wrote: "Carol wrote: "I'd like to see monthly nominations and book discussions - not ones planned far in advance, but maybe 4 weeks before the discussion starts.

Themed threads, by topic, could also lead..."

There are many ways to structure monthly reads — in my most active groups nominators lead reads, not mods — but I was responding to the inquiry, what would you like to experience. YMMV.

I am glad that we had different reactions from you :)

Ahmad wrote: "Hello,

I am a bit surprised that none of my books, especially The Gardener of Baghdad, which has sold over 35,000 copies in 40 countries was never added to your lists. It is the most sold original..."

So So many books were not read by the group , it just happened this way , hope there will be a chance in the future .

Fl wrote: "Well, I'd love to read a book of poetry, I just don't know where to start..."

We have a section for poetry :
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

not sure why it is not that popular , please join the thread poetry in general discussion and let us see who would love to join reading a book .

We used to have themes and topics before and had closer polls to our reads like (2013 readings (Regional tour))
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

2012 was historical and year of Eve
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

2011 was our first tour
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

It was nice , and yes it took a lot of work , so I guess we will need volunteers ( lately we already depended on so many great members here ...thanks !) , I guess as Carol said nominators will lead in general .

What topics or themes are you interested in ?

Thanks Niledaughter for pointing anyone interested to the Poetry section.

Thanks Carol and all for the idea of regular group reads led by nominators. We welcome your suggestions for how to do things next year. I think it would be great to have nominators lead discussions. If you want moderators to arrange polls, that will take some time, so quarterly would be better than monthly. If you want to avoid polls, we'd need to see some member interest (for example, if Eileen wanted to lead a discussion of Amin Maalouf's In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong April-May, it would help if Jalilah or anyone else agreed to read the book at that time). It might also help to have members agree on frequency of group reads (monthly, every two months, quarterly).

For my part, here are some books on my To-Read List:
- Novel: Always Coca-Cola by Alexandra Chreiteh; translated from the Arabic by Michelle Hartman.
- Short Fiction: Marrakech Noir edited by Yassin Adnan.
- Folktales: Pearls on a Branch: Arab Stories Told by Women in Lebanon Today by Najla Jraissaty Khoury; translated from the Arabic by Inea Bushnaq.
- YA: The Turtle of Oman by Naomi Shihab Nye; illustrations by Betsy Peterschmidt.
- Graphic Novel: I Remember Beirut by Zeina Abirached

I would definitely be willing to lead a discussion of In the Name of Identity next year.

Also, I would love to read The Turtle of Oman as a group read.

I generally find that monthly member nominations and polls produce higher engagement. Then again, the question was, what would you like to experience. The reason I’m so much more active in other groups, notwithstanding my higher interest in the subject matter of our group is, they have monthly nominations, polls and active discussions, and those monthly discussions are not only enlightening but allow members to get to know one another. This group can and will just keep on going as it has in any event, but I thought it made sense to speak up, once invited. In the meantime, my TBR is over-flowing with wonderful MENA selections I’ll get around to some day.

Carol wrote: "There are many ways to structure monthly reads — in my most active groups nominators lead reads, not mods — but I was responding to the inquiry, what would you like to experience. YMMV..."

Hi Carol,
I just want to clarify that I very much like your idea of having the group read nominations closer to the actual reads! I think it would definitely encourage more participation, as would having the nominations lead the discussion. I know from the group I co-moderate that it often happens that the people who originally nominate the books often don't even join in on the discussion afterwards and it's frustrating!
In our case we don't have discussion leaders, but I might suggest this to our other co-moderators.
I was just questioning the every month. How does it work? One week for a nomination thread, one week for polls, then 2 weeks to prepare find books? The only reason I questioned this is sometimes when books are hard to find it might take more time.
I'd love it if you'd explain more how it works!

As for what I'd like to read, I'm happy continuing the way we have, reading different books from different MENA countries. I've discovered so many wonderful books through this group and I'm so grateful and appreciative of this!

Here are a few books that I am interested in reading :
The Map of Salt and Stars
Secret Son: A Novel
Always Coca-Cola
Sunset Oasis
In the Language of Miracles
A Caravan of Brides: A Novel of Saudi Arabia Kay Hardy Campbell The autor is not originally from a MENA country but lived in KSA many years. She's in this group so who knows, maybe she'd like to participate in a discussion?

As far as reads for 2019, I am a student of the wonderful contributors to this group. I've had such great reading taking your suggestions. Thank you, keep up the great work! Mostly I read with a Kindle so downloads from Amazon, if they exist, are instantaneous. E-books from the library which is in the US can take weeks, if not months to come off hold, therefore I do like the year in advance road map. When the Booker long list comes out, I put all those books on hold and get them over the year. Used books arrive in Australia in 7-10 days so these are my windows of opportunity.

Translations are hard. I'm reading Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson and I happened to get two different translations of the book. They're so different! Then I read an interview with one of the translators, Damion Searls, and was astounded at the liberty translators take to make the reading "feel" as it does in the original. Poetry is an order of magnitude more difficult I would imagine. (I sought out translations from the the song sung in Spanish from the movie Talk to Her) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1emgU...
Even though I didn't understand the Spanish, the English translation just didn't hold a candle to the original.

Thanks for all the thoughts so far. We moderators are discussing right now. FYI Here's another book of interest to me: Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms. I started reading it, and really enjoyed it (the free Kindle sample). It's written in English, in case you'd like a change from reading in translation (Steve).

Thank you all agsin for sharing your ideas with us and I am very sorry we are taking long time organizing plan ( big deal of the delay is my responsibility and I apologise) .

I was wondering, which topics do you find yourselves leaning to read about in the near future , certain country ? Historical period ?..a label ( minorities , diaspora, wars ..etc) , a genre , an author , a city ?

Please check our new thread "2019 plan"
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Also please check out the 2019 Challenge Ideas thread!
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Steve wrote: "Translations are hard. I'm reading Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson and I happened to get two different translations of the book. They're so different! Then I read an interview with one of the translators, Damion Searls, and was astounded at the liberty translators take to make the reading "feel" as it does in the original. Poetry is an order of magnitude more difficult I would imagine. (I sought out translations from the the song sung in Spanish from the movie Talk to Her) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1emgU...
Even though I didn't understand the Spanish, the English translation just didn't hold a candle to the original."

Following up on Steve's comment about translation, I want to share with anyone interested in the process of literary translation this new audio series by BBC:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...

The first interview is fun to hear about the translation process of a French poem, and then it explores implications of connotations and interpretations between different cultures.

First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North African Literature, so what intrigues me to know is why in this group are proposed books by authors that are not from Middle East or North Africa?

When I joined this group, I hope something more from it than reading Western authors writing about Middle East or North Africa (books that happen there, biographies, politics, history, etc).

In the last weeks I've seen more comments/ proposals of books written by Westerners about Iraq, Baghdad, Cleopatra,...

With the topic cities, I expected to discover those cities NOT through the eyes and words of a Westerner, and this applies to any other topic in the Middle East and North Africa, I want to read the voices of those places.

Maybe it's my mistake and I misinterpreted the group's objective or maybe the initial purpose of the group has been mutating.

Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North African Litera..."

Hi Kenza,

I don't think you have anything to apologize for. You have raised a concern and it needs to be addressed.

I'm just wondering if you've had a chance to browse through some of the discussion threads yet. If so, you’ll find a lot of books by Middle East and North African authors under discussion.

For example, the current discussion is Always Coca-Cola by a Lebanese author. Before that, there was a discussion of In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, also by a Lebanese author.

And if you browse through the thread of the 2019 Challenge, you’ll find a whole host of books that many of us intend to read and/or are reading whose authors are from the Middle East and/or North Africa.

Perhaps your concern is specifically about the preponderance of non-fiction books about the Middle East and North Africa by westerners. You may have a point there. But in my case, I don't know how to read Arabic, so I have to rely on books written in English and/or on translations--which, unfortunately, are few and far between when it comes to works of non-fiction.

I hope others will jump in to address your concerns. But those are my thoughts for now.

Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North African Litera..."

Many "Westerners" make their homes in Middle Eastern or North African countries. Some of us have lived there longer than in our native countries. So where are we "from"? People read books by North Africans (like Laila Lalami) and Middle Easterners (like Amin Maalouf) who have emigrated to Western countries to gain insight on life in those western countries. So why wouldn't we want to read books written by Westerners who have emigrated to North African or Middle Eastern countries to gain insight into life in those countries?

Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North African Litera..."

No offence is taken :) and yes what you mentioned is the target of our group .

This group started its activity since 2011 ,if you can check our discussions or bookshelves you will find that we read books according to this classification - by native authors- during these eight years we became more flexible and we may read for authors that are not from Middle East or North Africa from time to time . it was only a coincidence to be two books in a row .

For our next read about Beirut , there are six books by native authors on the poll - (I see you did not vote so I do not know what did you want to read ? )

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/1...

We will be very happy to host anther reading discussion for one of them as we encourage members to have buddy reads - but we have a problem with members willing to lead discussions , by the way Eileen and Tamara are both among our Heroines ! :D .
Please if you would like to lead any discussion for any of these books just let us know :) .

Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North African Litera..."

Hello Tamara,

I've taken a look at the books that were read at least in the last two years, and if it is true that the fiction books are by authors from the Middle East and North Africa, but as you said quite well most non fiction, at least so I've been seeing since I'm in the group, they're Western writers, and it's not a criticism to the group, this happens at a general level.

I'm not able to read a book in Arabic either, I can read simple texts, but I don't have the level to read an essay entirely in Arabic, and although it is true that a large percentage of non fiction books written by authors from the Middle East or North Africa are not translated into other languages, it's also true that there is a small percentage that is translated and to which we have access, there are fantastic books written by eminences that don't receive the same diffusion as those that are about the same subjects, but which are written by Westerners.

If this is a group to share literature from the Middle East and North Africa, let us make an effort to give more visibility to their voices and pay attention to them, both in fiction and non fiction, because western authors already receive a lot of diffusion by the media.

Tamara wrote: "Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North ..."

I understand your point Eileen and in some way refers to identity rather than the misappropriation of the West with regard to the East and the insistence of the media for wanting to always empower the Western vision.

Kenza wrote: "... and although it is true that a large percentage of non fiction books written by authors from the Middle East or North Africa are not translated into other languages, it's also true that there is a small percentage that is translated and to which we have access, there are fantastic books written by eminences that don't receive the same diffusion as those that are about the same subjects, but which are written by Westerners...."

I agree, completely, Kenza. And I would love it if you could share some titles with us that have been translated--especially in non-fiction.

Kenza wrote: "If this is a group to share literature from the Middle East and North Africa, let us make an effort to give more visibility to their voices and pay attention to them, both in fiction and non fiction, because western authors already receive a lot of diffusion by the media."

I think you will find a lot of support for your recommendation.

Eileen wrote: "Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North ..."

Eileen wrote: "Kenza wrote: "First of all, I don't want anyone to be offended and sorry if my words are rude for someone.
In my case, the reason for being in this group is to discover more Middle East and North ..."

You're right Niledaughter, I didn't vote on the poll and not because I didn't want but because I didn't see it (my mistake), otherwise I would have voted and my choice would have been Confessions, from what I see it isn't even among the most voted...

Since January I'm trying to pay more attention to the group, learn and get involved, I was never in a reading group, on another occasion, with some time and preparing it well I would be happy to lead some discussion, among other things, beyond my "topic" with the Western authors, I'm surprised that there is no more participation in the group and I assume it as something to improve also on my part.

In this group I’ve discovered and read lots of books from MENA authors who are still living there and have not emigrated to the West. True I’ve also read other books by MENA authors living in West, but not only!
I love this group for that!

Kenza wrote: "You're right Niledaughter, I didn't vote on the poll and not because I didn't want but because I didn't see it (my mistake), otherwise I would have voted and my choice would have been Confessions, from what I see it isn't even among the most voted...

Since January I'm trying to pay more attention to the group, learn and get involved, I was never in a reading group, on another occasion, with some time and preparing it well I would be happy to lead some discussion, among other things, beyond my "topic" with the Western authors, I'm surprised that there is no more participation in the group and I assume it as something to improve also on my part...."

I hope you will be able to participate :)

Jalilah wrote: "I love this group for that! ..."

We love having you with us :)

I'd like to recommend a book written and published posthumously by by dear friend, Mona Imady - Kan Ya Ma Kan: Folktales and Recipes of Syria and Its Ethnic Groups. Please purchase through Daybreak Press directly. I am in no way receiving any compensation for recommending this book. Mona lived through war in Damascus and it was her fervent mission to collect the folktales of Syria including the many ethnic groups that have lived in Syria for centuries. Sadly, Mona died unexpectedly after open-heart surgery - literally of a broken heart. This book is a delight to read and all the more meaningful in the context of the diaspora. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Marie wrote: "I'd like to recommend a book written and published posthumously by by dear friend, Mona Imady - Kan Ya Ma Kan: Folktales and Recipes of Syria and Its Ethnic Groups. Please purchase through Daybreak..."

Thanks for letting us know about this book! It looks amazing, but I am sad to know about the author.

I love the idea but it's a lot. There's no ebook version?
https://daybreak-international-bookst...

I posted this in the Arabic Literature (English) translation thread. But I thought I would post it here as well since we had a discussion about the paucity of Arabic literature in translation.

So, here is the great news:
The establishment of a Turjuman award for publishers translating Arabic books. This should go a long way to increasing the availability of Arabic books in translation. I'm just over the moon with excitement :)
Here's the link to the announcement:

https://publishingperspectives.com/20...

Great news :)