Ahlam Mosteghanemi is able to represent more than four decades of Algerian history as they interweave with the characters' trajectories and memories, from the revolt of 1945 in East Algeria to 1988 when, Khaled, the protagonist-narrator is writing a memoir of his in the form of the novel we read. The Algerian writer Ahlem Mosteghanemi made her name with a trilogy of novels: Dhakirat al-Jasad (1993), Fawda al Hawass (1997) and Abir Sarir (2003), all published by Dar al-Adab of Beirut. The novels were bestsellers, with claimed sales of more than 2 million copies and the author having the status of a glamorous celebrity.
Ahlam Mosteghanemi is a legend in Algeria: the daughter of an activist exiled during the country's war of independence, she became the first Algerian woman to publish fiction in the Arabic language. The ensuing misogynist backlash paradoxically empowered her exilic writings, making her novels bestsellers.
Mosteghanemi's ambitious trilogy, translated as The Bridges of Constantine, Chaos of the Senses and The Dust of Promises, is a testament of exile, an allegory of erotic love and an act of political resistance. Weaving through the trilogy, a trinity of characters links eros, art and war: Khaled, the wounded freedom fighter, is a celebrated expatriate painter; Hayat is an alluring novelist; the journalist narrator of this third book visits Paris to receive a prize for war photography. The narrative concerns the “intertwined, overlapping relationships” of Hayat's lovers.
As The Dust of Promises opens, the narrator has glimpsed Hayat after a two- year absence. Hayat cannot be possessed, any more than the novel's exiles can possess the Algerian motherland. The erotic is political: “A love that has lived at the mercy of murderers” hunkers behind the “barricade of delight”.
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Narrative moves slowly, under a luxuriant outgrowth of meditations on love, in the form of riddle, hyperbole, paradox. Description is dreamy and insubstantial, as images effloresce into conceits (“her laughter's high heels”; she “danced as if weeping”), tantalising the reader with a version of the lover's tantalisation. An element of postmodern illusionism adds a trompe l'oeil quality, for in this aesthetic world, memory precedes the event remembered; fiction engenders events in the “real” world.
Hayat, mirroring the author, is a courageous novelist who “battled history's tyrants” with “gunpowder disguised as a book”. Her elusiveness corresponds with her defiant ability to “outsmart Arab custom officials” and “find ways round checkpoints”. The novelist – Hayat, but also Hayat as a figure for the author, Mosteghanemi – tells “secrets that are, in reality, your own secrets”. The narrator longs to possess the beloved, who however possesses him.
“When we lose a love, we write a poem; when we lose our homeland, we write a novel,” wrote Mosteghanemi in the 1980s. The Dust of Promises integrates the two in a rhapsodic and voluptuous prose poem, whose central figure “wasn't Hayat ... whose name means 'life'. She was life itself”.
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Book: Memory in the Flesh by Ahlam Mosteghanemi. 1993 | ذاكرة الجسد، احلام مستغانمي
This prize-winning novel, the first to be written by an Algerian woman in Arabic, is concerned with Algeria's struggle against foreign domination as well as its post-independence struggle with itself and the fate of revolutionary ideals in a post-revolutionary society.
The story, spanning more than four decades of Algerian history, from the 1940s to the 1980s, revolves around a love affair between Khaled, the middle-aged militant who turns to painting after losing his left arm in the struggle, and the fiction writer and young daughter of his friend the freedom fighter Si Taher, all brilliantly told through Khaled's voice.
It was features such as this convincing embodiment of a male voice alongside narrative techniques in which the author subtly joins the acheivements of world literature with that of local storytelling and traditional modes of narration that particularly impressed the judges who awarded this novel the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
Arabic links: pdf version | epub version (for iOS devices, try kitabu if you're on a mac) | Online version
This book is fairly recent and hugely popular in the Arab world and so it shouldn't be much trouble obtaining a physical copy from your local bookstore. If you can't, try the download links above.
We'll discuss the book at the end of the month, so start reading. In the mean time, if you have any questions/any language problems/want something explained before the discussion date, post it here. This thread will be linked to from the front page and the sidebar. Yalla for real let's start reading our own literature for once.
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