Final Night

Buthaina Al Nasiri, Denys Johnson-Davies

Description

Short stories from an Iraqi writer
Love and death and the passage between entry into the world and exit from it are the focus of this collection of short stories. Buthaina Al Nasiri is an Iraqi author who has lived in Cairo since 1979. Despite this physical and temporal distance from her homeland, much of her material derives from it and many of the stories in this collection reflect her deeply felt nostalgia for Iraq. In contrast to many contemporary female writers, she confesses to being less interested in the position of women in society than in that of people in general and the sufferings they experience between birth and the end of life. None the less, some of her best stories depict the many-colored relationships that exist between the sexes.
Buthaina Al Nasiri's work has been widely translated into European languages, but this is the first volume of her stories to appear in English, for which renowned translator Denys Johnson-Davies has selected work from a career of short-story writing spanning some thirty years.

Sujets

• Short Stories
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617971457
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

English translation copyright © 2002 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.aucpress.com
First paperback edition 2008
This translation of “The Return of the Prisoner” was first published in Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World , selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, AUC Press, 2000. This translation of “Homecoming” was first published in Culture, Creativity and Exile , edited by Munir Akash and Amira el-Zein, Jusoor, 1996.
Arabic copyright © 1974, 1977, 1995, 1998 by Buthaina Al Nasiri
First published in Arabic in 1974, 1977, 1995, and 1998
Protected under the Berne Convention
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dar el Kutub No. 10185/07
eISBN: 978 161 797 145 7
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Al Nasiri, Buthaina
Final Night: Short Stories / Buthaina Al Nasiri; Selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies.—Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2008
p. cm.
1. Arabic fiction I. Johnson-Davies, Denys (trans.)II. Title
813
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 12 11 10 09 08
Designed by Wafaa Ismail/AUC Press Design Center
Printed in Egypt
Introduction
Final Night
Circus Dog
The Mansion
The Return of the Prisoner
Daily Report
I’ve Been Here Before
All This Land
A Time for Waiting
The Story of Samah
The Boat
Man and Woman
Why Don’t We Go More to the Sea?
Omar’s Hen
Homecoming
The Man Who Made Changes
Death of the Sea God
A lthough she has lived in Egypt for the past twenty years and was a frequent traveler to Europe in her youth, Buthaina Al Nasiri is very much an Iraqi writer, an Iraqi with a heart that yearns for its homeland and is moved by its present troubles. It is in the short story that she has found her ideal mode of expression and during some thirty years of writing she has produced five volumes of this genre. As is to be expected, it is her earliest stories that are most local and whose background is specifically Iraqi, stories in which she often uses words and phrases taken from Iraq’s local dialect. In these early stories, too—stories such as “The Boat,” “Man and Woman,” and “Circus Dog”—the style is more direct, less relaxed than those in her recent volumes; to the translator it sometimes seemed that he was dealing with the work of two separate writers.
In an interview she gave to the literary journal Alif , the author denied any specific interest in such matters as woman’s place in society, her rights, and such topics as are of concern to many women writers. In fact, she states, it is the plight of mankind as a whole that provides the material for her writing— man, no less than woman, in her opinion, deserves our attention and our pity. This is seen starkly portrayed in her early story “Man and Woman,” which describes a brief encounter between an aging prostitute, who has been standing around the street in a fruitless attempt to find a client, and a taxi driver who is equally luckless in picking up a fare. The two treat each other heartlessly, but this is not the oppression of man over woman, simply the unfairness of a society where both men and women are exploited by their fellows.
The relationship between man and woman is central to many of the stories—and such relationships include the overworked theme of love. In Buthaina Al Nasiri’s hands, love and sex take on a hue slightly different from that provided by other writers. In “Final Night,” she describes, largely through dialogue, the desperation of two people in love who nevertheless find that living together is emotionally impossible; another story tells of a man and a woman falling in love through a protracted exchange of letters—something no longer uncommon with lonely hearts columns and the opportunities provided by the internet.
The importance of woman fulfilling her role as the begetter of children is a theme that runs through various stories, in particular “All That Land” and “The Man Who Made Changes.” The woman who fails in this role is an inevitable loser, particularly in a society where children are in demand and where the husband can easily provide himself with a second wife, who, he hopes, will be more accommodating. In “The Man Who Made Changes,” the subject is treated with a certain dry humor and concerns peasant folk; in “All That Land,” the couple involved are from the moneyed class and both the material and the emotional aspects of their marriage are at risk. Even in the story “Man and Woman,” the issue is mentioned in conversation, where the taxi driver tells with regret about his wife not becoming pregnant. The prostitute suggests he take himself another wife, and the man is too shy to admit that he would not want to do this as he loves his wife—though not sufficiently shy not to extract his fare from the prostitute in kind!
Death, too, is present in many of the stories, not least in “The Story of Samah,” where the tragic death of a young girl in an accident is treated with a matter-of-factness that borders on the sentimental but that none the less shows, in particular in the attitude of the siblings to her preparation for burial, the essential normality of death.
Buthaina Al Nasiri has a keen sense of both place and time. “The Mansion” recounts the story of a house and of the changes that come over it and its inhabitants, more especially the old lady, the owner, whose own sense of time is more dilapidated than the place in which she lives. In “Homecoming,” the theme is less gentle: how does it feel for an Israeli family to take over the home of an Arab who has been forced out of it by a foreign invader?
Politics, too—Iraq’s war with Iran—have their place in stories such as “The Return of the Prisoner,” where an Iraqi prisoner-of-war returns home after many years away, not to the friendly embrace of wife and children but to a family who are strangers to him and who, in their own way, have also suffered from the years of separation.
If there is humor in the volume—and humor is seldom found in Arab writing—it is in the oblique form that runs through the very short and early “Circus Dog,” in which a man and the dog he has rescued from the roadside strive in vain to make some sort of a living; it is no one’s fault, simply that neither of them has the necessary talent for earning their daily bread.
It is in another very short story, “I’ve Been Here Before,” that Buthaina Al Nasiri gives evidence of her ability to create an atmosphere of mystery. Reading through the few pages one finds oneself wondering what it is really about—and then, with startling finality, the story comes to an end.
B ut this isn’t fair—you’ve taken me completely by surprise.”
“Does the timing matter if the result’s the same?”
“Yes. Perhaps we should give ourselves another chance.”
“You know how impossible our life is together.”
“But this isn’t fair. Why tomorrow? I never imagined it would be so soon.”
They were sitting side by side on the couch in a small bedroom with a single large window overlooking the main street, where the shouting of boys playing football broke through the evening’s solemnity.
He was thirty-six years of age, with a tall body, his thin, delicately featured face framed in fine black hair. He was sitting with his head bent, examining his fingers. She was thirty-four, with short hair and a rounded face. She was concentrating her eyes, whose green color was increased through the reflection of the color of her dress, on some point on the opposite wall.
“Tomorrow? How can you allow yourself to take the decision all on your own?”
“One of us had to a long time ago.”
“How much time have we left?”
“A whole night.”
“Six hours and thirty minutes . . . and how many seconds?”
She turned to him. Her fingers were trembling. She put out her hand and grasped his firmly.
“You’re prolonging our agony this way.”
A tear fell on the back of her hand and she raised her eyes to his face and let go his fingers. She put her arms around him while he sat motionless, bolt upright, his tears flowing silently.
“Have pity on me.”
He looked at her for the first time and said, “Who must be the one to ask for pity?”
She sat up straight and went on staring at the wall opposite.
“Do you think I’m happy about this decision?”
“You’re at least in control.”
“Can’t you understand that I’m trying to appear so, just not to break up into pieces in front of you?”
He turned to her. Taking hold of her arms, he shook them.
“Then, why the parting?”
“Do you believe it was an easy thing for me to do? But you know that life between us is impossible.”
“Is there nothing I can do to make you change your decision?”
“If you really love me you should help me.”
Getting up, h