Set in the late nineteenth century on a mythical island off the coast of Yemen, Radwa Ashour's Siraaj: An Arab Tale tells the poignant story of a mother and son as they are drawn inextricably into a revolt against their island's despotic sultan.
Amina, a baker in the sultan's palace, anxiously awaits her son's return from a long voyage at sea, fearful that the sea has claimed Saïd just as it did his father and grandfather. Saïd, left behind in Alexandria by his ship as the British navy begins an attack on the city, slowly begins to make his way home, witnessing British colonial oppression along the way.
Saïd's return brings Amina only a short-lived peace. The lessons he learned from the Egyptians' struggle against the British have radicalized him. When Saïd learns the island's slave population is planning a revolt against the sultan's tyrannical rule, both he and Amina are soon drawn in.
Beautifully rendered from Arabic into English by Barbara Romaine, Radwa Ashour's novella speaks of the unity that develops among varied peoples as they struggle against a common oppressor and illuminates the rich cultures of both the Arab and African inhabitants of the island. Sub-Saharan African culture is a subject addressed by few Arabic novelists, and Radwa Ashour's novella does much to fill that void.

Siraaj: An Arab Tale (CMES Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation)

Literature & Fiction

Ashour, Radwa

Contemporary

Ctr for Middle Eastern Studies UT-Austin

Winner of the Cairo International Book Fair Prize Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their work lives (one a professor of literature and the other of history), their personal relationships, and their respective books. With her novel's structure, Ashour pays tribute to the Arab qareen (double or companion, and sometimes demon) and the ancient Egyptian ka, the spirit that is born with and accompanies an individual through life, and beyond. 
 This lively metafictional novel is a mix of genres: part autobiography, part oral history, part documentary, part fiction. As the narrative moves back and forth between Radwa's novel Specters and Shagar's history Specters (about the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948), Ashour unites the projects of history and literature and blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political in one compellingly readable meditation on contemporary life in a fractured world.

Specters

Literary

INTERLINK+BOOKS

This translation is an homage to a great literary figure, and to those which carry on her legacy in their work. Never neutral and deeply engaged in politics, literature, peoples struggles, and what she calls the most urgent causes of our times, a young Radwa Ashour charts her years as a student in the US of the 1970s, where she would become the first PhD student to graduate from the newly founded W.E.B Du Bois department of Afro-American Studies and the English Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. A political progressive and leftist writer, critic, and activist, her memoir reflects not only on her own journey and struggles but those of the people she met and engaged with in the United States, especially African Americans. The Journey narrates the years which Ashour spent in the US and captures so vividly the spirit and ethos of the time it chroniclesthe early 1970s. Anti-colonial movements, a commitment to popular struggles and peoples liberation, as well as linking scholarship and work on the ground, are all alive and real in her memoir. First published in Arabic over thirty years ago and written about a period (19731975) a decade before, the text is still vibrant and relevant today. Just emerging from the devastation of the Six Day War in 1967, Ashour talks about the pain of what we call the sixties generation in the Arab world and intermeshes the pressing questions and issues of the time within a quotidian story, as well as the life of an Egyptian woman within a deeply divided US society at war both with itself and abroad. Radwa Ashours workthrough the unique lens of this incisively observant visitorreminds us of what the issues and debates in the US of this period were like and how deeply connected they are to struggles today such as Black Lives Mater and Ferguson-Palestine.

The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Olive Branch Press

Granada: The Complete Trilogy

Hoopoe

Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations―massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered kuffiyehs and suicide bombers, a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction. This novel does not shy away from such painful images, but it is first and foremost a powerful human story, following the life of a young girl from her days in the village of al-Tantoura in Palestine up to the dawn of the new century. We participate in events as they unfold, seeing them through the uneducated but sharply intelligent mind of Ruqayya, as she tries to make sense of all that has happened to her and her family. With her, we live her love of her land and of her people; we feel the repeated pain of loss, of diaspora, and of cross-generational misunderstanding; and above all, we come to know her indomitable human spirit. As we read we discover that we have become part of Ruqayya’s family, and her voice will remain with us long after we have closed the book.

The Woman from Tantoura: A Palestinian Novel (Hoopoe Fiction)

Heikkinen, Kay

The American University in Cairo Press

Ruqayya was only thirteen when the Nakba came to her village in Palestine in 1948. The massacre in Tantoura drove her from her home and from everything she had ever known. She had not left her village before, but she would never return. Now an old woman, Ruqayya looks back on a long life in exile, one that has taken her to Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf, and given her children and grandchildren. Through her depth of experience and her indomitable spirit, we live her love of her land, her family, and her people, and we feel the repeated pain of loss and of diaspora.

The Woman from Tantoura: A Novel from Palestine (Hoopoe Fiction)

British & Irish

Nada is no stranger to protest. She is five years old when her French mother takes her to visit her Egyptian father, a political activist with a passing resemblance to President Nasser, in prison. When he returns home a changed man five years later, their little family begins to fracture, and eventually Nada’s mother moves back to Paris. Through her teenage years Nada is surrounded by the language of protest--"anarchism," "Trotskyism," communism"--and, one summer in Paris, she discovers the ’68 movement and her first love. And how to slam doors in anger.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Through student sit-ins, imprisonments, passionate arguments, accidental alliances, fallen friends, joys, and regrets, Nada’s story grows into the story of Egypt’s many celebrated activists, such as Arwa Saleh and Siham Sabri. Moving, uplifting, and deeply human, Radwa Ashour’s masterpiece is the story of Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century and a paean to all those who choose a life of activism and quiet defiance.

Blue Lorries

Bloomsbury USA

ArabLit Quarterly: Fall 2022: WEDDINGS

Nuwās, Abū

Al-Hakim, Tawfiq

Marwan, Zahra

Nasreldin, Nashwa

Rau, Leonie

Harize, Ouissal

Azzam, Samira

World Literature

Independently published

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