Circulating the peripheries: Small publishers,short story collections and Madinah : City Stories from the Middle East

The value of short story collections and small publishing houses for world literature studies

Although criticism on the short story is less prolific than that on the novel in postcolonial and world literary studies, the short story is arguably a more significant form within the development of many non-Western literary traditions (Cooke, 2004: 393; Derks, 1996: 342; Pravinchandra, 2012: n.p.). Sabry Hafez argues that in the Arab world the short story has emerged as the most popular and arguably the most significant literary medium” (1992: 270; see also Johnson-Davies, 2001: 4; Kahf, 2001: 227). Discussing the Middle East, Miriam Cooke explains the prominence of the short story over the novel as being connected to its proximity to folk writing traditions. Within the development of contemporary Middle Eastern literature, the novel seemed too wedded to “the needs and interests of the European bourgeoisie”, whereas the brevity of the short story form lent itself to the kinds of socio-political expression that have become central to modern Middle Eastern literature (Cooke, 2004: 399; 410). Paul March-Russell discusses how the short story’s emphasis on the small fragment makes it “potentially a more dissident form than the major genres, especially with regard to rethinking the postcolonial” (2009: 247). The central importance of the short story in many anticolonial, postcolonial, and “peripheral” literary cultures means that the form merits further attention in debates about postcolonial and world literature.

Within academia, the tendency to marginalize the short story as a less significant form than the novel has continued into debates about postcolonialism (March-Russell, 2009: 247; March-Russell and Awadalla, 2013: 7) and world literature studies (Pravinchandra, 2012: n.p.;emphasis in original). Discussing the case of Indian literature, where the dominant forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were poetry, drama, and the short story, Orsini (2004: 323–4) points out that this suggests limitations to novel-based models of world literature such as Moretti’s in accounting for how specific literary traditions relate to global patterns of literary production. ² Making a related criticism of debates about world literature, Shital Pravinchandra (2012: n.p.) explains the marginalization of forms such as the short story as connected to the emphasis placed on “mobility”: “world literature is typically the study of genres that travel”. Pravinchandra calls for world literature to “actively engage literatures that challenge us with their refusal to wear their contexts lightly and read them precisely because of this refusal” (2012: n.p.).

This call to read literatures that would usually fail to travel has been heard within the world of academic and literary publishing, where important work is being done translating, circulating, and publishing literatures that do not have the mobility of global bestsellers (Booth, 2010: 152–8). Small publishers, literary magazines and the internet have an important role to play here because they are less subject to the market demands of commercial book publishing. In Postcolonial Manchester (2013: 154–206), Lynne Pearce emphasizes the importance of short stories, poetry, and anthologies to the anti-commercial dynamics of independent Manchester publishers that have developed partly in response to the exclusion of the region’s literatures within London-centred UK publishing. Despite the hierarchies of commercial publishing, Ann Steiner outlines how the rise of internet book trade has the potential to expand the circulation of minor literatures by facilitating the distribution of a wider variety of books than were available in traditional book shops (2011: 320; see also Squires, 2007: 32–3).

The internet also provides fertile space for the circulation of short stories outside of these commercial frameworks. Carlos Jáuregui (2000: 360–1) argues that “the short story, or rather, storytelling is enjoying a notable revival” thanks to the internet. Lisa Bernstein suggests the importance of online resources for circulating “newly emerging authors and texts that may not yet be translated or anthologized in print publications” (2013: 57). New media technologies also provide new spaces for researching and debating world literature outside of the conventional commercial and academic frameworks (Bernstein, 2013: 57). ³ The internet enables increasing access to Arabic short fiction in translation, some of which is available for the price of an internet connection. Since 2010, Words Without Borders, on online magazine dedicated to translating and promoting international literature, has had issues with short fiction from Iran and Iraq, as well as in two issues on the Arab spring and one on modern Middle Eastern writing.

Anthologies, which collect together a range of literary texts within a single volume, have a potentially valuable role to play in expanding the circulation and awareness of regional literatures that struggle to travel. ⁴ Short forms such as poetry and short stories have a clear advantage over novels because they can be contained in their entirety. While the anthology form has played its role in instituting a restricted canon of regions and authors under the guise of world literature (Bernstein, 2013: 55), over recent decades it has also been a significant form in expanding literary canons (Damrosch and Spivak, 2011: 456; Lauter, 2004: 20; Ning, 2010: 4; Pearce, 2013: 154–99). Commercial publishers such as Norton and Longman endeavour to be increasingly representative, incorporating literatures that were traditionally neglected in their world literature anthologies. However, there remains a tendency within academic and commercial anthologies to select canonical “world” authors that excludes contemporary and less established writers. Smaller publishers and organizations like Words Without Borders play an important role circulating less well-known writers.

Anthologies are, of course, a fundamentally ambivalent genre, laced with potential problems. It is important to investigate the selection criteria and to ask how far texts published in the West privilege texts which are accessible to Western audiences (see Al-Nowaihi, 2000: 284). There is also a tendency towards decontextualization within the anthology form that may be problematic in collections that bring together disparate and unfamiliar regions, writers, and forms. Neil Lazarus argues that postcolonial and world literature and in fact any literature “is best approached contextually, in terms of its precise sociological and also literary-institutional coordinates” (2011: 133). In a critical account of Words Without Borders, Rajini Srikanth argues that offering various translated texts from unfamiliar locations without providing substantial contextual information to enable an informed and self-reflexive reading will “facilitate a faux familiarity […], inviting readers into the emotional lives of people elsewhere, in parts of the world significantly different linguistically, politically, philosophically, and culturally from the English-speaking regions” (2010: 130). ⁵ Lazarus’s and Srikanth’s warnings suggest a problem that is implicit to the project of reading world or Middle Eastern literature anthologies; the form does not encourage sustained engagement with the specificities of particular literatures and cultures. Although most anthologies provide some contextual information, this is often fleeting and readers may lack the contextual knowledge that informs the circumstances and styles of particular stories.

However, reading unfamiliar texts does not necessarily lead to superficial engagement. A struggle to follow contextual detail and culturally specific references may foreground the limitations of understanding. Indeed, I would suggest that there tends to be a productive interplay between moments of recognition and moments of confusion or alienation, moments where the reader recognizes an experience or feeling or situation and moments where they are thrown off by the unfamiliarity of the world that is represented. This dynamic has valuable potential. In a slightly different context, Stef Craps (2008: 200–1) adapts Dominick LaCapra’s model of “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra, 2001: 41) to discuss the value of postcolonial trauma literature that invites an empathic response to traumatic experience without enabling its easy assimilation. This notion of “empathic unsettlement” is more widely applicable to literature about experiences and cultures outside our frame of knowledge that invites empathy while simultaneously illuminating limitations to understanding and potentially implicating the reader in productive ways.

When considering the dynamics of particular anthologies, an obvious place to start is the paratextual framework where front covers, blurbs, and prefaces gesture towards the ideological decisions behind editorial selections, as well as intended audiences and markets. As Gérard Genette (1997: 1–2) has argued, paratextual elements such as authors’ names, titles, prefaces, and illustrations combine to create a powerful “influence” over how a text is received. While Genette focuses mainly on authorial paratexts, in translated literature anthologies it is important to explore how publisher’s paratexts such as front covers, blurbs, and introductions mediate the literary texts and to ask how far “the target culture’s dominating values and ideas” have been “imposed” (Alvstad, 2012: 79; see also Watts, 2006: 2–3; 13). The authority of the paratext arguably intensifies when marketing literature from unfamiliar regions, where it acquires a pivotal role in selling unconventional literary voices. In this article, I consider all the materials within an anthology that surround and present the stories as paratextual devices that direct our readings of the stories in certain respects.

Despite the risks that attend anthologization and the paratextual framing of texts, these structures also have potentially positive dynamics. Richard Watts observes how, while colonial paratexts had a colonizing effect on texts, postcolonial paratexts often serve a valuable critical function by interrogating their own authority and addressing their processes of construction (2006: 119). Similarly, Sarah Lawall argues that the anthology is “a theoretically interesting form” with the potential for opening debate on the circulation and reception of world literature (2004: 47). Focusing in particular on academic anthologies, Lawall observes how contents pages, prefaces, editorial apparatuses, and the self-reflexive identity of many anthologies “bring to the surface a web of communicative relationships that might otherwise remain obscure” (2004: 47).

I have identified five areas of investigation to assess the limitations and merits of particular anthologies. First, an analysis of how the paratextual framework presents the book and its value to readers gives an important indication of the aims and intentions behind a particular collection. Second, a critical reading of the paratextual framework may indicate problems or reveal points of tension or contradiction between the aims and actuality of the collection and the way it is being marketed. A third area to investigate is whether or not sufficient context has been provided for individual stories, locations, writers, and literary traditions, as well as the effect of reading about unfamiliar locations without contextual knowledge. Fourth, analysing the relationship between the paratext and the stories can indicate how (well) they relate to each other; do the stories fulfil, extend, or undermine the objectives of the collection in any way? This is perhaps the most substantial task as it involves a close reading of individual stories to determine their specific meaning and any individual challenge they make to literary norms or expectations, as well as the cumulative effect of their collection. Finally, it is important to think about the larger institutional and commercial contexts in which these anthologies circulate.

Comma Press and the ambiguous potentiality of Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East

While commercial publishers favour novels and marginalize regional writing, Pearce discusses how Comma Press and other independent Manchester publishers deliberately resist this trend, choosing to promote anthologies, short stories, poetry, and regional writing (2013: 154; 172–7). Comma Press is becoming a highly respected publisher of contemporary short fiction; however, despite the quality of the texts it publishes, it has been generally overlooked within academic debate. Two exceptions are Lynne Pearce, Corinne Fowler, and Robert Crawshaw’s Postcolonial Manchester (2013) and March-Russell’s The Short Story: An Introduction (2009), both of which emphasize Comma’s significance in raising the profile of the short story in the UK by publishing innovative short fiction in a climate that marginalizes the form (March-Russell, 2009: 75; Pearce, 2013: 172–84). It is perhaps the lack of an economic infrastructure (March-Russell, 2009: 75), the small size of Comma Press, and its location in Manchester outside the main publishing circuit in London (Fowler and Pearce, 2013: 9) that has led to its work being largely overlooked within academia and the mainstream media. Pearce emphasizes the need for scholars to pay attention to Manchester-based publishers like Comma and Commonword to demonstrate how “technically innovative and culturally relevant short fiction” (2013: 197) by the writers normally excluded in the world of corporate publishing can be. Although independent publishers often struggle for their works to gain widespread recognition, the lack of commercial constraints enables a salutary emphasis on “quality and political integrity” (Fowler and Pearce, 2013: 9).

Comma’s dedication to translating and circulating marginalized literature makes it a publishing house that is worth exploring further for those interested in literatures with limited mobility. On its website, Comma declares its commitment to “a spirit of risk-taking and challenging publishing, free of the commercial pressures on mainstream houses” (Comma Press, n.d.a) and its intention to “prioritize translations from smaller, regional and minority languages” (Comma Press, n.d.b). Discussing an early Comma anthology, Pearce argues that the “postcolonial footprint and general politics” are hard “to pin down” (2013: 176). However, Comma’s publication of five collections of stories from Middle Eastern regions and its recent development of an Arabic translation imprint indicates an interest in postcolonial politics and Britain’s (neo)colonial footprint. Comma’s translation editorial policy emphasizes concerns that are regularly voiced within postcolonial and world literary studies, such as the desire to promote marginalized regions, languages, and literary traditions against a commercial hegemony that deals in fashionable Otherness but not the actual heterogeneity and cultural difference of regional literatures. Comma’s translation policy seeks to “preserve the texture and character of the original texts”, resisting the “over-domestication” (Comma, n.d.b) that is often favoured in more commercial translations. Booth (2008: 199) and Sevinç Türkkan (2012: 164) discuss how English translations of Arabic and Turkish literature often employ an approach that avoids emphasizing cultural difference in order to facilitate the reader’s sympathy and understanding of a world that is conventionally Othered. While Türkkan suggests the potential value of this strategy, the choice to preserve cultural difference is a strength of Comma’s translation imprint.

Middle Eastern and Arabic literatures have a history of being sidelined within Anglophone publishing (Al-Azzawi, 2012: 4; Booth, 2010: 154; Brennan, 1997: 42; Neuwirth, Pflitsch and Winckler, 2010: 9). There are indications that this is changing (Obank, 2011: 66; Yassin-Kassab, 2010: n.p.). ⁶ Arabic literature is becoming increasingly fashionable; the Arab World was the Market focus of the 2008 London Book Fair. However, questions remain as to what kinds of Arabic literature find their way into the commercial marketplace. Booth emphasizes problems in the way that commercial publishers market select texts through “familiarly exotic tropes” such as the “homogenized figure” of “the Muslim Woman” (2010: 150; 152). By contrast, smaller and academic presses are increasingly translating and publishing regionally celebrated literary Arabic writing, albeit with “little remuneration” (Booth, 2010: 154).

Madinah: City Stories from the Middle East (Haddad, 2008) is a collection of ten stories, each based in a city from a different region in the Middle East. Like other collections of Middle Eastern short stories, Madinah states an explicit concern to translate and circulate quality literature that is marginalized in commercial Anglophone publishing (see Johnson-Davies, 2001: 1–3; Hafez and Cobham, 1988: n.p.; Husni and Newman, 2008: 7) and to oppose the commercial hegemony that favours stereotypical themes, such as terrorism and conflict (see Azlan, 2011: xx; Glanville, 2006: 9; Shedd, 1998: vii). ⁷ Although in many ways Madinah’s paratextual presentation is typical of contemporary collections aimed towards a general English-speaking readership, I will outline how Madinah’s paratexts and selected stories make the collection a valuable addition to the expanding selection of quality Middle Eastern short fiction available in English translation.

As Boyd Tonkin suggests in a brief review of Madinah for The Independent, “the Gulf remains terra incognita for most British readers of fiction” and the collection does something valuable in presenting literatures from various Middle Eastern cities, particularly those like Riyadh and Dubai that “feature more rarely on fictional maps” (2008: n.p.). The cover design, blurb, and introduction all indicate ways in which Madinah sets out to resist the Orientalist clichés favoured in commercial publishing of Middle Eastern literature, such as the veiled woman (see Booth, 2010: 150; Faqir, 2011: n.p.). The front cover features a geometric pattern that readers will readily associate with Islamic and Arabic culture, following a common strategy in the postcolonial marketing of Middle Eastern literature whereby stereotypical images are avoided in favour of less politically loaded but nevertheless recognizable signs (see also Azlan, 2011; Husni and Newman, 2008; Johnson-Davies, 2001).

On the front cover, the title “Madinah” is accompanied by its translation in Arabic lettering, thus evoking Arabic as the original language of these stories (even though this is not true for all the stories) and foregrounding the act of translation that is often rendered invisible within mainstream publishing (see Venuti, 2008). The subtitle “city stories from the Middle East” and the listing of ten city names without reference to country resists claiming a comprehensive representation of the Middle East. The blurb on the back cover emphasizes the collection’s aim to subvert Western stereotypes of the Middle East: “For all we think we know of the conflict and exoticism of the region, nothing opens more doors to what we don’t than its writing” (Haddad, 2008; emphasis in original). ⁸ These stories, the blurb tells us, will “open just such a door”. The blurb and a picture of the front cover are replicated in the epitext (the accompanying discourse outside the material object of the book) on Comma’s website, which also provides links to reviews and further information about the authors.

The critical underpinnings that inform the choice of title and cover design become more explicit in Madinah’s introduction. As part of this attempt to represent the region from an inside perspective, Comma chooses a Lebanese editor to select and introduce the stories. Written by Joumana Haddad, who also contributes one of the stories, the introduction echoes concerns voiced in academic debates about problems with the circulation of Middle Eastern, postcolonial, and world literature. Haddad emphasizes the lack of translation of Middle Eastern and particularly Arabic literatures into English (viii), criticizes the tendency of Western publishers to focus only on “notorious” and “censored” works “or works from areas which are in a state of crisis” (viii–ix), and she foregrounds some of the problems implicit in Madinah’s project. First, making a point that is often highlighted in similar collections, Haddad problematizes the concept of Middle Eastern literature given the multiple literary and geographic realities that this encapsulates (viii; see also Azlan, 2011: xxii; Shedd, 1998: viii). Second, Haddad highlights the inevitable partiality of her selections and the difficulty of selecting ten stories from such a broad range of available texts. Third, she resists any claim to representativity (xi). Foregrounding such limitations is conventional in contemporary literature anthologies. Like some other collections of Middle Eastern literature (see Azlan, 2011; Shedd, 1998: vii), Haddad emphasizes how literature can reveal the shared humanity between East and West (xiv) and suggests that this is an important means of resisting the way that the Middle East is often othered in contemporary Western culture.

The paratextual framework claims a certain subversive impetus for the collection: Madinah translates quality short fiction and publishes it in English for the first time; it introduces both established and emerging contemporary writers from famous Middle Eastern literary cities but also those with a less visible literary profile; it resists the conventional stereotypes and homogenization of the region; and it is aware of the problems implicit in its own project. Madinah’s paratextual direction can be read as positive for the way that it resists presenting itself as comprehensive while emphasizing problems in anthologizing Middle Eastern literatures and asking readers to be aware of their position and their lack of knowledge of the regions represented.

However, I also want to consider how these positive aspects of the paratext need to be read against different dynamics within the paratext and text, as well as the larger structures in which these texts circulate. In emphasizing Arabic and in employing the concept of “Middle Eastern” literature, arguably there is a homogenizing dynamic to Madinah that writes over the actual linguistic diversity of the region’s literatures and the collection itself. ⁹ Magda M. Al-Nowaihi (2000: 282) problematizes the very notion of “Middle Eastern literature” for the way that it “replicates colonial premises and tactics” by homogenizing the region in relation to Europe/the West. ¹⁰ While Madinah begins to gesture towards the region’s diversity by translating stories from Hebrew and Turkish, there are no stories translated from Kurdish or Persian.

In choosing an arabesque pattern for its cover to evoke the Middle East, Madinah is typical of the way that Arabic literature anthologies and postcolonial literary texts more generally “continue to be covered with visual cues” that “distinguish them from metropolitan literature” (Watts, 2006: 3). ¹¹ In relation to Swedish literature anthologies, Alvstad reads the use of arabesque frames as an exoticizing strategy which “inscribes the book into the target culture’s tradition of orientalism” (2012: 90). Similarly, the language used in introductions and blurbs is sometimes reminiscent of a certain exoticization of the Orient. In Madinah, Haddad offers the stories as a window on a “colorful” world; they will “take us on a hypothetical tour” (x) and present us with “a colorful, diversified yet strangely consistent, convincing and harmonious puzzle” (x). The words “colorful” and “puzzle” echo the way in which the Orient has traditionally been constructed in colonial discourse as an exotic, colourful, exciting but ultimately mysterious place. ¹² While the collection declares its resistance to stereotypes of “conflict and exoticism”, a reviewer for The Times commented that “if readers once observed these countries through an oriental veil, this collection will leave them staring down the barrel of a gun” (Fordman, 2008: n.p.). Almost all of the stories in the collection revolve around conflict and to a certain extent the collection echoes the tendency within the Western media to represent the Middle East in terms of violence and extremity (see Poole and Richardson, 2006: 5; Shaheen, 2001: 9). Haddad’s interest in “exile, alienation and solitude” mirrors themes favoured in postcolonial studies, at the expense of more politicized and less accessible or fashionable concerns, such as solidarity and socialism (Brennan, 1997: 42; 50; see also Lazarus, 2005: 423). It is important to recognize the role that editors and publishing houses play in selecting certain kinds of fiction (Booth, 2010: 152). Putting the case perhaps too stringently, March-Russell argues that an anthology reveals more about the editor than it does anything else (March-Russell, 2009: 57). However, the editors at Comma had a particular idea of the Middle East in mind when commissioning the collection. Ra Page at Comma said he had wanted to include an Israeli Jewish writer in the collection because he wanted it “to be from and representative of the region in reality” (personal communication, 18 September 2012). ¹³ Comma struggled to find an Arab editor who would take on a project that included an Israeli Jewish author, because of the cultural and academic boycott of Israel. ¹⁴ This indicates how the notion of “the region in reality” is itself ideologically charged and changes depending on context; different collections offer different geographical visions of the Middle East. ¹⁵

In terms of the criticism that anthologies provide too little contextual information, Madinah also offers scant contextual background to the stories. This is conventional within collections aimed at a general non-academic readership where lengthy introductions and extensive auxiliary materials are avoided (see Johnson-Davies, 1983, 2001; Shimon, 2012). By contrast, collections directed towards students of Arabic language and literature, such as the bilingual collections published by Saqi, provide notes offering useful contextual information, situating the stories within their wider literary, linguistic, and cultural context (see Hafez and Cobham, 1988; Husni and Newman, 2008).

However, despite potential issues with how these collections mediate and construct the Middle East, I want to argue that Madinah is ultimately a thoughtful collection of quality short fiction that encourages a constructive and difficult engagement. My brief reading will be unable to account for the complexity of each story; rather I focus on how Madinah engages with the issues I address in this article. I begin by examining the recurring interest throughout several stories in the political ambiguity of literature and its relationship to literary institutions. I go on to discuss how the culturally specific references that permeate most stories expand awareness of the literary and cultural traditions of the region without enabling their facile assimilation. I discuss the collection’s engagement with the colonial legacies of the Middle East. Finally, I examine how several stories subvert stereotypical expectations of the Middle East through their thematic exploration of under-represented identities and through the choice to represent conflict using unconventional form.

Several stories engage with debates about literature in different Middle Eastern contexts, foregrounding the potential of literature both to resist and be contained by dominant political and cultural frameworks. Some do this by reflecting directly upon the politics of literary prizes and the mobility of literature. In “The Passport”, a Palestinian writer living in Israel cannot travel to Britain for his reading tour; while this implies his writing is accorded a certain value among literary circles in Britain, his physical mobility is restricted by the Israeli bureaucracy that will not renew his passport. In “Meningitis”, also set in Israel but told from an Israeli perspective, Israeli literary prizes and their “contribution to state security” (75) are mocked alongside the patriarchal militarism of Israeli nationalism they are shown to buttress. The story I want to focus on is the opening story, Nedim Gürsel’s “The Award”, for the way that it reflects upon censorship, the paraphernalia of literary prizes and fashions and their precarious position within nationalist and neoliberal structures of power. Like “Meningitis”, “The Award” sounds a note of cynicism about the consolidation of literary value.

The opening position of “The Award” in the collection, juxtaposed as it is with Haddad’s introduction, enables Gürsel’s representation of the politics of literary value to reflect on the work of Madinah itself. The writer wins his award because of the “authentic and innovative” way he expresses “the sorrows of exile” and “the tragedy of his generation, the crisis of young intellectuals during the military regime, the irredeemable wounds of a period of oppression” (3). These themes, the discourse of authenticity and the celebration of innovation are the same qualities prized in publications like Madinah. In the story, the writer’s global success and the national celebration of his early writing are in tension with his current position in national literature debates, where his “random musings” and borrowed “second-hand phrases” appear distinctly unfashionable (3). This reflexive play on the story’s own form calls forth the narrator’s repeated quotation of song lyrics and sayings. One of these “second-hand phrases” creates disruption at the prize ceremony. When the writer sings “separation never ends”, he is promptly whisked away, his blunder is edited out of the awards ceremony, his celebratory drinks ceremony is cancelled and the new editions of his book are stalled (3). When the “first separation” is associated with the political violence at Taksim Square, the writer’s message “separation never ends” links the violence of past regimes with the current power structures. Written in 1991, the story of an exiled writer of global acclaim who is censored in Turkey because of his criticism of the state foregrounds how Gürsel and many other writers have been censored and tried by the Turkish state, most famously in the case of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk in 2005 (see Afridi and Buyze, 2012: 3). “The Award” evokes Gürsel’s own experience of winning various Turkish and international literature prizes, including Turkey’s prestigious Prize of the Turkish Language Academy in 1977, while also repeatedly being charged and censored by the Turkish state (Lea, 2009).

Although the references to violence at Taksim Square and “bloody Sunday” evoke right-wing violence against protestors in Turkey in 1969 and 1977, beyond this context, the story anticipates the response of the Turkish state to the post-2013 protest movement in Turkey. The writer’s feeling of alienation is associated with the neoliberal urban “regeneration” of Istanbul (6), the opposition to which was a central galvanizing force of the 2013 Gezi park protests, which started a countrywide wave of resistance and changed the political landscape. References to “bloody Sunday” will also have a particular resonance for British readers; the story in its English translation links the cycles of repressive violence in Turkey to Britain’s colonial legacy and its own violent oppression of protest in Northern Ireland. Indeed, this sense in which the representation of violence in Madinah calls forth the violence of Western colonialism and neoliberalism recurs through several stories.

In “The Award”, and in most of the other stories in Madinah, there are numerous specific historical, cultural, and literary references that remain unexplained and this can make it difficult for the Western reader to assimilate the unfolding events easily. This potentially draws the reader’s attention to the limitations of their knowledge. One significant device in this respect is the depiction of an enigmatic map in the paratextual space preceding each story. The reader encounters a simplified line drawing locating the city within a surrounding geographical area before each story is named. The only place on the map that is named is the city and, although lines indicate major rivers and borders, none of these are labelled. If readers struggle to recognize these geographies, they will be drawn up against their lack of knowledge of the region before they have entered the world of the story. Maps denoting the contemporary borders of Middle Eastern countries also have clear colonial overtones and this colonial history is referenced in several stories.

Nabil Sulayman’s “City of Crimson” depicts the violence of the Syrian state’s crackdown on opposition in the 1980s, while also drawing attention to the legacy of European colonialism and the limitations of Western knowledge. Although it predates the 2011 Syrian uprising, its violent suppression, and the ensuing civil war, the story has a clear contemporary resonance. The depiction of sectarian conflict within a wider historical frame that encompasses several colonial powers situates contemporary violence in Syria. “City of Crimson” directly invokes the forgetting of Syria’s complex history. At the centre of the story is a traumatic event that stains Latakia and the central protagonist’s mind with “crimson”: when Abd al-Rahman is murdered by state security forces, Wasif loses his faith and the story depicts his psychological deterioration. Before the traumatic event is narrated, readers are told that it happened “in some forgotten month (April, perhaps) of some forgotten year (1980, perhaps)” (11). While the “perhaps” can be read as a sign of Wasif’s memory, it is also evocative of the ease with which such events are forgotten or rendered invisible outside of their region. If the reader does not recognize the dates this begins the process by which the story implicates the reader in a lack of understanding of the layered history it depicts. When Wasif goes to visit his father-in-law, their argument and their opposing viewpoints embody conflicting perspectives on Syrian violence. Wasif emphasizes the violence of the current regime and blames the multiple religious divisions in Syria for tearing Latakia apart. Wasif’s father-in-law preaches a longer historical view, arguing that sectarianism is a problem of the current generation. In his unsuccessful attempt to give Wasif a lesson in Syrian history, philosophy, and art, Wasif’s father-in-law accusingly asks Wasif a rhetorical question that the story ultimately directs at the reader: “But what would you know?” (16). Indeed the non-expert reader’s lack of knowledge is likely to be signalled in this story through footnotes that gesture towards the complexity of Syria’s historical, philosophical, and literary culture.

Some of the stories in Madinah focus on identities and themes that are unfamiliar in Western discourses on the Middle East, such as the representation of precocious female sexuality in Haddad’s “Living it Up (and Down) in Beirut” and the exploration of male rape and its traumatic repurcussions in Gamal al-Ghitani’s “Midnight on the Outside”. Haddad’s story stands out in the collection for its experimental postmodern style, which jumbles four nonsequential “Acts” exploring possible scenarios in a hypothetical love story, set against the backdrop of war. Haddad’s is one of only two stories by women in Madinah, thus the collection perpetuates the tendency to marginalize female writers in Middle Eastern literature collections. ¹⁶ However, the focus on confident female sexuality operates against stereotypes of the repressed Arab woman and, like several stories in Madinah, the story highlights the rebelliousness of individuals against oppressive social and political structures.

There is something of value, I think, in the way that Haddad and Ala Hlehel emphasize life and humour amidst war, resisting the serious tone conventional in representations of trauma and violence. While many stories in Madinah tend to foreground cultural difference, the use of humour in Hlehel’s “The Passport” decreases the distance between narrator and reader. Set in “Akka” during the 2006 Israel war on Lebanon, the story reinscribes the Palestinian presence inside Israel, focusing on a less globally visible aspect of Palestinian experience. Hlehel uses comedy to highlight the absurd limitations on Palestinian life but also explores more general experiences, such as overbearing mothers and generic demonstration slogans. When the narrator finds himself caught up in a demonstration, the protest chants are eminently recognizable in their rhyme and register: “We’re saying it loud and we’re saying it clear, We don’t want no Zionists here!” (64). This story’s shift in emphasis towards comedy and shared cultural experiences, alongside other differences in approach in the collection, makes Madinah valuable for its variety of perspectives and styles, which engage the reader in different ways. Indeed, the anthology form may be particularly suitable to foregrounding the diverse range of literatures within a particular language or region.

To conclude, Madinah and other anthologies that circulate writing from regions at the peripheries of mainstream Anglophone publishing do something valuable. While Madinah had a relatively small circulation and its impact in the UK was small in terms of reviews and coverage, this initial interest in translating Middle Eastern short fiction has led to four further collections, the success of which have enabled Comma to set up a translation imprint which will specialize in contemporary Arabic short fiction. ¹⁷ To date, Comma have published an anthology of Turkish short stories, The Book of Istanbul (2010), and three single-author collections: Hassan Blasim’s The Madman of Freedom Square (2009) and The Iraqi Christ (2013) and Gürsel’s The Last Tram (2011; the first publication of Gürsel in the UK). Until Madinah was published, Blasim’s work was untranslated and unpublished and yet Yassin-Kassab has referred to Blasim as “perhaps the best writer of Arabic fiction alive” (2010: n.p.). The Madman of Freedom Square has been sold for publication in five other languages and Penguin has compiled a selection of stories from Blasim’s two collections in a single volume entitled The Corpse Exhibition (2014). In May 2014, Blasim became the first Arabic writer to win the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for The Iraqi Christ and the first writer to win this prize with a collection of short stories. All this suggests how small publishers and magazines can play an important role in circulating lesser-known writers and regions, potentially impacting upon more mainstream publishing while contributing towards the expansion of world literary canons.

Comma’s cutting edge and non-commercial status, on a small but expanding scale, could be considered a valuable commodity in the marketing of newness and alterity. However, collections such as Madinah are important because, while operating within a structure that produces and packages the margins for consumption in the centre, they push against and illuminate the boundaries of that structure. World literature studies are arguably caught up in a similar double bind. As thinkers in this field address problematic tendencies within postcolonial scholarship, world literary studies become a valuable commodity at the vanguard of academic debate in this area. But it is important not to reduce literature or criticism to the problematic economic, institutional, and cultural structures in which they inevitably circulate. Furthermore, institutions and paratexts cannot contain completely the potential of literature — it is difficult to know what the effects of literature will be, to know how literature will be read. Madinah and collections like it remain important for the way they resist the privileging of certain regions and forms within commercial publishing, making room for quality literature that would traditionally struggle to travel.