Presented here are a foreword to Rashid El-Daif’s Paving the Sea (2026) and the complete Chapter 17, republished by Rusted Radishes courtesy of Syracuse University Press.
Rashid El-Daif and the Parody of Consciousness
Zeina G. Halabi
The Nahda, the nineteenth-century awakening also known as the Arab Enlightenment, was never simply a historical event. It was, rather, a cultural and intellectual movement that sought to engage with European ideas while revitalizing Arabic heritage. It sparked major reforms in language, sciences, and religious thought that have defined the modern Arab world for the last two centuries. Its thinkers searched for coherence in a world newly fractured by the pressures of colonial intrusion, the weight of translated texts and traditions, and Eastern/Western epistemic asymmetry.
Chief among Nahda thinkers is Jurji Zaidan (1861–1914). Originally from Beirut, a peripheral city in what was then Greater Syria in the Ottoman Empire, Zaidan imagined that reason could reconcile revelation, that knowledge could deliver Ottoman subjects from the burdens of tradition. Yet, since its first articulation, the Nahda carried the shadow of its own contradictions as its enlightenment unfolded in borrowed vocabularies; its language was already a practice of translation, its confidence born estranged.
What began as estrangement at the turn of the nineteenth century would morph into alienation in the second half of the twentieth century. Historical tides that began with the Nakba and the June War, all the way to the Lebanese Civil War and the Gulf War, bore epistemological and aesthetic implications and a collective intellectual introspection about what modernization means and what it entails. At each of these major historical junctures, thinkers and writers were left struggling with a paradox: the impossibility of fully appropriating the edicts of the Nahda and the impossibility of eschewing them entirely.
In Lebanon, where Rashid El-Daif (b. 1945) was born, such ambivalence was amplified by the unfolding of the civil war. It was a pivotal era in which intellectuals who identified with the ethos of the Nahda began questioning their prevailing modernist convictions. Those, like El-Daif, who had espoused a firm belief in binaries such as tradition/modernity, theory/praxis, or retrograde/progressive were the most transformed by the collapse of ideological referents and the growing anomie of the civil war. It was a moment of introspection, of looking at what caused such collective doubt and abysmal loss of the self. And so intellectuals reexamined their primordial ties—not as critics and rebels, but, this time, as disenchanted subjects reckoning with the angst of having ruptured traditional structures of identification, of having contributed, tragically so, to their own alienation.
It is this tragic sensibility that drives El-Daif’s fiction. Emerging from the debris of Lebanon’s civil war, El-Daif has produced a corpus that chronicles the slow disintegration of faith in ideology, in revolution, in love, and, most devastatingly, in literature itself. His novels are about disoriented subjects who confuse introspection with redemption and irony with understanding. A Marxist who once believed in history’s redemptive logic, El-Daif addresses disenchantment through narration. In his hands, the novel becomes a space where defeat might be contemplated, catalogued, and restaged. Self-deprecating, digressive, often embarrassingly confessional, his narrative stance enacts a theater of disillusionment in which intellectuals confront their tragedy not through solemnity but through irony and self-parody.
El-Daif’s prose appears deliberately fractured, ruthless in its precision, excessively nostalgic, echoing the broken syntax of the contemporary Arab intellectual’s predicament after faith in progress has waned. His characters are the weary heirs of reform: educated, ironic, ambivalent, forever negotiating the distance between admiration and despair. Suspended between collapsing orders, they articulate the exhaustion of a figure once entrusted with moral and historical authority, one that is now reduced, in El-Daif’s imagination, to a self-conscious parody of its former gravitas. In his work, modernity ceases to be a horizon to be reached and gradually materializes as a condition to be endured, though not without irony.
Paving the Sea (2026; Tablīṭ al-baḥr, 2011) both extends and interrogates El-Daif’s lifelong engagement with the Nahda project. The novel functions as a philosophical prequel to his earlier explorations of translation, imitation, and the crisis of modern subjectivity in Dear Mr. Kawabata (2000; ‘Azīzī al-sayyid kawābātā, 1995) and Learning English (2013; Līrnīng inglish, 1998). If translating the modern engenders loss, El-Daif fleshes out in Who’s Afraid of Meryl Streep (2014; Tistfil miril strīb, 2001) a moment of regression to the premodern, to the state of primordial attachments invoking the family, the tribe, the church, the patriarchy.
Where those foundational novels depict late twentieth-century intellectuals confronting the humiliations of linguistic and cultural dependency, Paving the Sea returns to origins: to the nineteenth-century Nahda, where the seeds of modern disillusionment were first sown. As he weaves a hybrid narrative that borrows motifs from diverse genres such as historical fiction, biography, and travel literature, all construed at the turn of the nineteenth century, El-Daif reconfigures the historical narratives that imagined and reified modernity.
El-Daif articulates his contemporary ambivalence toward hegemonic historical narratives by displacing Jurji Zaidan’s secular, nationalist, and modernist legacy in relation to the paradoxes inherent in the translatability—or impossibility thereof—of the concept of modernity in the Lebanese context. What better way to parody Jurji Zaidan’s plight than by building the fictional character Fares Hashem as Zaidan’s alter ego, a fictional double on which the narrator projects a wide spectrum of hopes and regrets?
The story of Fares Hashem begins at the intersection of two historical moments that transformed Greater Syria: the civil war of 1860 on the one hand, and the increasingly visible British and French colonial interference in Greater Syria on the other. While Fares aspires to translate Europe’s vocabulary of reason into an indigenous idiom of renewal, El-Daif exposes reason as performance: a theater whose gestures reveal the fragility of knowledge rather than its stability. Fares’s obsessive pursuit of learning in missionary institutions, his faith in the salvific potential of education, ultimately collapses into absurdity, as rendered in the title of the novel.
Borrowed from a Levantine idiom, to “pave the sea” (tablīṭ al-baḥr) is to attempt the impossible: to render the fluid solid, to impose coherence on a world structurally incapable of holding shape. Enlightenment here becomes a labor of futility, a rationality that crumbles under the weight of its own contradictions. The tension between the purposeful and the futile, the push and the pull, the domestic and the wild, the desired and the imposed, is at the center of El-Daif’s displacement of the past. The rite of passage to the modern becomes both the quest for the impossible and the rejection of that which is forcefully imposed.
El-Daif’s treatment of the Nahda is neither celebratory nor condemnatory. He inhabits its contradictions until they expose themselves, revealing how imitation becomes creation and how the very failure of progress gives rise to a new language of critique. The narrator oscillates between admiration and ridicule, between the desire to emulate Europe and the impulse to mock that very emulation. Fares’s adoption of the clichés of Western representation, the mirror through which he perceives himself, becomes a means of exposing their emptiness. The Nahda hero is thus both the embodiment of ideology and the stage of its disintegration, dissection, and mockery.
By exaggerating the orientalist gaze, El-Daif turns it inside out. The reader, suspended between irony and empathy, is compelled to engage in a doubled act of interpretation. The first reading encounters satire that materializes in the grotesque intellectual, the absurd reformer, the farcical dialogue between civilizations. The second reading, slower and more attentive, perceives the critique within the comedy: an interrogation of the very categories through which modernity has understood itself. Irony, in this sense, becomes both method and ethic. It refuses resolution, insisting instead on ambiguity as a mode of truth.
This double structure—what might be termed a “dialectic of parody”—recurs throughout El-Daif’s oeuvre. In How the German Came to His Senses (2015; ‘Awdat al-almānī ilā rushdihi, 2013), El-Daif fictionalizes dialogue with the German writer Joachim Helfer; the encounter between Arab and European intellectual traditions becomes a stage for the reenactment of Orientalism under liberal guises. The narrator’s feigned innocence, his exaggerated adherence to patriarchal and sexist values, lure his interlocutor into a performance of moral superiority that exposes the persistence of the colonial gaze within modern humanism. The irony of Paving the Sea thus extends seamlessly into the global context: The dialogue between Beirut and Berlin repeats, in another register, the comedy of misunderstanding that has haunted the Arab Enlightenment since its inception.
Both texts dramatize the failure of dialogue—precisely, the impossibility of translation—within a world still governed by asymmetries of knowledge and power. The sea, unpaved and infinite, stands as the figure of this refusal: Every attempt at mastery dissolves into motion, every certainty into doubt. Thus, El-Daif writes from within the ruins of ideology, and yet his irony corrodes even the possibility of redemption. His laughter is not cathartic but corrosive, eroding object and subject alike until only the act of exposure remains.
This vulnerability is what gives Paving the Sea its distinct texture. Far from mocking the Nahda, El-Daif mourns it. His prose parodies its exhausted language without denying its splendor. The novel constructs what might be called a “poetics of aftermath,” one that continues to speak in the language of reform while knowing that history has moved elsewhere. Rather than resolving the contradictions of enlightenment, El-Daif allows them to resonate, transforming failure into reflection. Fares’s journey becomes that of a thinker who confuses learning with salvation, who believes that knowledge will heal what time has undone, and who discovers, at last, that education is another name for repetition. The more he learns, the less he understands. His search for meaning becomes ritual, his curiosity an act of survival.
Read in this light, Paving the Sea imagines the first moment of fascination with Europe, the initial translation of progress into the idiom of reform. Fares’s predicament is civilizational, as he embodies the modern subject who inherits two genealogies, one of reason and one of faith, and finds himself unable to reconcile them. His failure is that of a modern subject that cannot locate itself except in mimicry of the other.
El-Daif’s achievement lies in turning irony into a form of compassion, in making disillusionment feel like understanding. To read him is to enter a world in which knowledge has lost its innocence but not its desire, where thinking continues out of habit, longing, and the stubborn will to imagine that meaning, however fragile, still matters. Paving the Sea thus emerges as both elegy and affirmation: an elegy for an enlightenment that never fully arrived and an affirmation of the mind’s enduring impulse to search, question, and hope.
If El-Daif offers no consolation, he offers lucid disillusionment. His writing dwells in the fatigue of the Nahda rather than its triumph. Yet within this fatigue lies a persistent, if fragile, hope embodied in the act of questioning itself. Paving the Sea asks what remains of reason when belief in reason has collapsed, what remains of intellectuals when their authority has disintegrated into irony. The answer, if it exists, resides in persistence: in the gesture of narrating, of doubting, of translating again, and laughing throughout.
El-Daif’s original prose is haunted by the rhythms of French and English, the grandiloquent patriotic idiom of Nahda litterateurs, and the sober, pained, saccadic prose of mid-century intellectuals. As it demonstrates a spectrum of linguistic sensibility, El-Daif’s narrative language performs the layered contradictions of modern Arab consciousness. Paving the Sea evokes such layered consciousness: to oscillate between fidelity and betrayal, to risk reproducing the gestures of imitation it critiques. Yet this risk is productive, for it reveals the universality of El-Daif’s insight: that modernity itself is a form of mistranslation, a continuous negotiation between origin and echo.
Nicholas R. Lobo and Alfred J. Naddaff’s translation extends El-Daif’s experiment into new linguistic terrain, inviting readers to confront the paradox of translating a writer whose very subject is the untranslatability of experience. And so the translators’ task, like Fares Hashem’s, is both hopeful and impossible: to pave the sea, knowing it will not hold. Yet it is in this impossibility that El-Daif’s work finds its endurance. Uninterested in the pursuit of certainty, El-Daif remains with the question.
To translate Rashid al-Daif is to join in that act, to continue thinking in the wake of failure, to affirm that meaning, even when fragile, still deserves pursuit. For the English-language reader encountering El-Daif for the first time, Paving the Sea offers both a point of entry into his body of work and an invitation into the intellectual landscape it evokes. The novel speaks from within the crisis of the Arab intellectual in the contemporary era, yet its insights reach beyond the regional, articulating a sensibility that belongs to our shared modernity. El-Daif’s prose unsettles, to make the reader inhabit the unease of a world where knowledge no longer guarantees meaning, where thought no longer redeems. It is a world where seas have dried, where pavement has never offered steady ground.
Paving the Sea
Rashid El-Daif
Translated from the Arabic by Nicholas R. Lobo and Alfred J. Naddaff
Fares was astonished by the paved streets for vehicles, juxtaposed with sidewalks for pedestrians—men as well as women! The women walked alone: unperturbed, undaunted, and unaccompanied by men.
Fares knew French fairly well, which facilitated his ability to find the brothels. He was joined by a young man from northern Lebanon whom he had met at the hotel and whose company he had come to enjoy. His name was Rashid. Rashid was planning to join his relatives and siblings in Puerto Rico, where he would later die. Several years later, he caught syphilis from the large number of prostitutes he had slept with without protection or discretion. When Fares learned of his death, he wrote a letter to Rashid’s siblings to offer his condolences. He bemoaned the ignorance of the time and Rashid’s alienation from his homeland.
But Fares was extremely prudent when sleeping with prostitutes. His medical knowledge helped him to be so. He didn’t dare do everything he wanted to. He prioritized what he was able to do over what he dreamt of doing. His principle: as much pleasure and as little risk as possible.
Once he met a prostitute who didn’t know French very well so he asked her, in Arabic, if she was from Mount Lebanon. She replied in broken French that she was from Spain. He looked at her in astonishment.
“So how in the world did you understand my question?”
She panicked and ran away, leaving him naked in the room. She must’ve been from Mount Lebanon, or from one of the villages or towns in Greater Syria.
“Poverty, hardship, ignorance!” Fares sighed. He wanted to know more about that woman, but she was gone.
The journey to Paris was by rail. Fares was dumbstruck by the train with its iron cars slinking through the streets like a snake, passing the city squares and the fields in the countryside.
The smoke billowing from the locomotive’s smokestacks resembled a salute, a bright indication that reason would triumph over ignorance and tradition. It dispersed into the air like a grin, like a sign that victory was night and hope smiled upon the future with brightness and clarity.
The train’s whistle made Fares feel as if he could fly. In his euphoria he felt lightweight, as though he could soar like a bird. This was long before the invention of the airplane would appear on the horizon.
But he also felt a sort of despondency as the train traversed the countless identical plains under gray skies. The sun seemed to him like a gift from the sky as it periodically peeked out over the world, illuminating those wide-open spaces.
Fares wished he could stay in Paris longer, but he was worried that the ship, L’Atlantique, would arrive and depart from Le Havre before he could make it.
He managed to walk around for a few hours through the neighborhoods surrounding the station. He was amazed by the wide, straight boulevards—but what most captured his attention was people’s clothing.
Men and women dressed in elegant, clean suits. He sensed in them a pride in something that he was unable to identify. This pride he deduced from their attire, the way they walked, and the way they spoke to one another. One man called another monsieur, “my lord”—sídi in Arabic—no matter how humble his interlocutor’s status.
Everyone was in a big hurry in Paris. Fares noticed he hadn’t seen a single person—man or woman—standing on the sidewalk and passing time without a reason.
“Where are they going in such a hurry?” Fares wondered to himself.
His companion, Rashid, didn’t understand anything he was seeing. It was like he lived in a world of vague illusions, a world of dust. It resembled our world, just as God alone perceived it prior to its creation—but with a tint. Rashid couldn’t see or hear well. He was floating someplace without gravity to pull him in any particular direction.
But Fares was aware of his surroundings and what was happening around him. He knew especially well that he was in a land civilized and developed, sophisticated and free.
Suddenly the two heard a rumbling sound, like the roar of crashing waves, growing closer. They panicked and began making their way back to the station, where they’d be safe. But the streets had filled up with overlapping throngs of countless people, marching and shouting, waving cloth banners bearing written messages, their fists held high with rage.
Then the two of them suddenly heard a roaring sound approaching, like the crashing of waves, and they panicked. While on their return to the train station to find safety from a potential danger, they crossed an immeasurable number of humans. People gathered in close proximity, marching, shouting, carrying signs, raising their fists.
“Workers!” Fares said to Rashid, in an attempt to mitigate his worries. But the word did nothing to calm Rashid’s unease.
“What?”
“They’re workers! Workers!” Fares replied. “Supporters of Darwin!” he added with overwhelming joy.
Fares set aside the memory of Darwin as he explained to Rashid what “workers” meant, how they work and where, how they organize themselves into what they call “unions” and demand something called “rights.” He explained how most of them don’t really believe in religion, that some demand to be ruled by one of their own, that they openly despise kings and monarchs. Rashid grew scared and felt he’d lost his balance. Every certainty had been shaken. He wanted to go back to his village.
At the port of Le Havre, Fares purchased a first-class ticket at quite a high price—not only for his comfort, but for a greater reason. He wanted to give a good impression that his country was not only a land of poor, wretched people. No—there were many people who aspired to greatness, who wished to live as foreigners did, or even better.
At the travel office, Fares astonished the clerk with his elegant and precise French. He’d absorbed it from reading books at the schools where he studied in Beirut. It was only natural to the clerk that Fares should travel first class, considering the expertise he’d acquired in a language other than his native tongue.
“Where did you learn French?” the clerk asked him, impressed.
“In Beirut,” Fares replied, then added: “At school!”
He added that detail so the French clerk understood that there were important schools in Beirut where people learned languages to the point of mastery.
“I love the French language,” Fares added, “because it’s the language of the revolutionaries, the language of Robespierre, the orator of the great revolution who told the king’s messenger: ‘We are here by the will of the people, and only by the power of bayonets shall we depart!’”
“You know this, too!” the clerk exclaimed, nearly leaping up and kissing him. Straightaway, he proposed that Fares attend an instructional meeting of the socialist association he was a member of, stressing that this association was international, not nationalist. Instead of answering the question, Fares asked the clerk whether he supported Darwin’s theory.
“Who’s Darwin?” the man replied.
Fares was taken aback by the fact that this clerk, a self-declared international socialist, didn’t know who Darwin was. How could such a person be ignorant of Darwin? Fares thanked him for the invitation, telling himself that Syrians ought to look after their own first before concerning themselves with the world at large.
“We’ll meet soon, alongside the other nations!” Fares told the clerk, who didn’t understand what he meant.
But the real problem came when the American ticket inspector refused to let Fares travel in first class alongside the other tall, white, blond-haired, blue-eyed passengers.
Fares was of average height, with honey-colored eyes and olive skin. But they wouldn’t accept him in first class.
The American, uncompromising in his refusal, insisted that Fares travel in third class with the rest of the Syrians, despite the ticket he carried. Fares, however, insisted on first class, seeing this rejection as a denial of his country’s right to sit at the table of nations. He tried to slip past the inspector, but the man shoved him with such force that he knocked him overboard!
As Fares plunged into the Atlantic, he didn’t feel afraid— he was livid. But once he was truly submerged, he began to panic because he couldn’t swim well. He became convinced he was going to drown.
At the same time, however, he grew excited by the thought of dying as a martyr for his country—right in front of the other Syrian travelers, who were witnessing what was happening. As he began to drown he felt a sort of happiness and contentment, despite being in great distress. His countrymen could see him drowning, and they knew why. They’d tell everyone back home and in their new destinations what they were seeing with their own eyes. They’d honor him as a martyr who died for his country’s independence. They’d see him as a beacon that lit the way toward progress. As he sank, he wished he were able to tell them, “Bury me in my country, so my blood might fertilize the soil and make it sprout bright red flowers every spring.”
But there were small boats surrounding the Leviathan American ship, which swiftly rescued him and brought him ashore before he could swallow too much water and drown. His people gathered around him—most importantly, his friend Rashid—and took care of him. Since there was still ample time before the ship set sail, he went to the market and bought new clothes.
Fares purchased expensive, elegant clothing—the latest in men’s fashion in France. He visited the Frenchman who’d sold him the ticket and told him what had happened. Enraged at what he was hearing, the man assured him that the French constitution prohibits discrimination and treats all people as citizens with equal rights and duties. So long as Fares was in French territorial waters, this American had no right to stop him from doing as he pleased. The man sent for the port police and informed them of the situation. They took action and questioned the inspector, who denied having intentionally knocked Fares into the water. He claimed he only meant to prevent Fares from accessing the first-class cabin. They took issue with his excuse and informed him that his behavior was in violation of French law.
And so fate had it that Fares became the first Syrian, the first Easterner, to travel first class to America. He’d paved the way, and others would follow. Before, all people coming from the Eastern Mediterranean were forced to travel third class, in cramped cabins like crates, below deck, or in lounges overflowing with other travelers heading to America: mostly migrants from the poorest parts of Europe and from across the Ottoman Empire. They were crammed together like cattle and slept on top of one another amid the stench of waste, coal smoke, and bodies unwashed since birth.
Fares’s friend Rashid, for example, had never washed his entire body in his life. He used to wash only his hair once a month, maybe less. People in those days were afraid of bathing, as it was widely believed to cause deadly diseases.
Fares had a good time in first class. He had a compartment to himself, and the food was clean and delicious—unlike that of his friend Rashid and his countrymen.
Some of them, despite their hunger, routinely turned down meals because the food was tasteless. The gruel was served in buckets and pans. Each person was served a portion in a small, shallow bowl. As a result, they relied on the dried foods they had brought: figs, olives, jerky, and balls of shanklísh and lábneh. They would reach into their bags and nibble on small amounts when they felt very hungry—or when they wanted to feel connected to their homeland.
Fares may have been riding first class, but his heart and mind were in steerage, where his people languished in the most squalid conditions. He visited them often and would also encounter them on the ship’s deck when they were allowed to come up. Once, Fares joined Rashid up there for an impromptu dinner of olives, a small ball of dried lábneh, and a piece of shanklísh. Rashid sat cross-legged at the bow and poured them each a glass of arak on that clear evening, and they drank a toast to their country. Then Rashid began to sing traditional ballads of separation and longing in his beautiful, wounded voice. As they sat there, the two suddenly caught sight of a young Syrian woman as she exited a sailor’s cabin, made her way to the edge of the ship, threw up, then slipped away out of embarrassment.
Then the ocean started playing around—and the ship, too! The vessel began to thrash to and fro, before they could even finish their arak. Rashid, in his Mount Lebanon accent, called out to the ocean:
“Are you playing tough, O Atlantic?” he reproached.
Rashid realized that this could be the opening line of a zájal—a kind of oral poem in colloquial Arabic. He considered adding to it but felt incapable, particularly as the boat had sailed into the storm’s more turbulent depths.
Seventy years later, that very line would resurface, woven into the opening verse of a poem by the famous Lebanese zájal poet Tanious Hemlawe.[1]Tanious Hemlawe (1912–1996), born in the village of Hemlaya, founded several choirs and edited zájal-focused magazines such as al-Shu‘la (1955–70). With a glass of arak in hand, he stood on the deck of a ship slicing through the vast Atlantic, bound for America. As the ocean rocked the vessel, his glass trembled and spilled, prompting Tanious to raise his voice and address the restless sea:
Had Tanious caught wind of Rashid’s turn of phrase and his desire to turn it into verse? Or perhaps Rashid was one of the many Lebanese mountain villagers who crossed the ocean without ever having seen the sea before, whom the sea provoked and taunted, who felt impotent before it and accused it of coming after unarmed men, nursing mothers, and helpless children—hardly a feat of manliness! Does the sea don a cloak of masculinity simply because it is a route that travelers must take toward their far-flung destination—America? Why would it roil and churn beneath them as they traveled across it, just wanting to be safe, not meaning any harm?
Later on, Hemlawe’s words came to be considered some of the most beautiful verses of zájal.
Once the ocean settled after days of raging winds and heavy rain, Fares and Rashid regained their interest in the woman they’d seen come out of the sailor’s cabin to vomit. They observed her carefully, with a hint of hesitation, and inquired about her to find out who she was and what village she came from. She was on her way to reunite with her husband, who had migrated two years earlier, just days after their wedding.
He wrote to her constantly, his letters filled with longing, and sent back what little money he could even though his work and living conditions afforded him little and didn’t allow for her to join him. But now his circumstances had improved and he’d started living on his own in a small room near Washington Street in New York.
She was full-figured without being overweight, of average height, and had brownish, wheat-colored skin. She had come to be known simply as “the woman” in their conversations; they never mentioned her by name, as though it’d be a personal affront to do so. They talked a great deal about her situation.
Rashid’s opinion was that it was wrong of her to visit the sailor in his cabin. Her actions tarnished not only her honor but that of her husband, her family, and all the Syrian travelers. Rashid wanted to hit her to put a stop to it. But Fares deterred him, reminding him that American laws were in force there aboard the ship and would apply to him if he struck her. And if she were to press charges against him, he’d go to prison.
“In America, women are free. They walk the streets unveiled, like we saw in Paris, Marseille, and Le Havre. They get drunk like men, they stagger through the streets like men. But the majority of them are honorable, and many are models of piety and refinement. They lead charitable organizations that support the needy and aid the distressed—keeping themselves far removed from anything that might detract from their reputation or bring dishonor upon themselves or their families.
“Women contribute the lion’s share of the effort in elevating the stature of the nation—and in them the words of al-Mutanabbi ring true:
“Do you know who al-Mutanabbi was, Rashid?” Fares asked.
Rashid shook his head, so Fares told him.
“Al-Mutanabbi is one of the most celebrated Arab poets. Some even say he’s the greatest poet the Arabic language has ever known. This was a man who held himself so far above others that one day he declared:
Fares had unwittingly entangled himself by reciting those lines. Rashid was illiterate: He couldn’t tell the simple vertical stroke of the letter álif apart from the mast of a ship. He asked lots of questions until he could make sense of the verse. He had to ask Fares about the meaning of the words “badlands” and “parchment,” about what the poet meant by saying they “know me.” All of these questions Fares had to answer in order to get what he wanted: to introduce his illiterate countryman to one of the greatest poets of his Arabic language. He’d chosen this verse carefully, because it glorifies both bravery and intellect in a single breath.
“Then there’s his name,” Fares explained. “The poet is known as ‘Mutanabbi’ because he claimed to be a nábi—a prophet.”
“Seriously?!” Rashid asked, astonished.
But Fares didn’t respond. He was lost in thought—annoyed once again by the image of that young woman. His annoyance, as he told Rashid, was first and foremost patriotic: She’d given a bad impression of their homeland by acting the way she did. The sailors, the ship’s crew, and the passengers of various nationalities might assume that all women from their country were like her. Moreover, it suggested she was cheating on her immigrant husband who toiled day and night—enduring cold and heat, wandering through cities and across the countryside alone like a drifter, with no idea where he’d spend the night or whether rain or snow awaited him—all so he could provide his wife and children with a decent life and a bright future.
The suffering of the immigrants from Mount Lebanon and elsewhere in Ottoman Syria was widely known. It was common knowledge that the vast majority of them worked as peddlers and faced countless hardships: language barriers, ignorance of local customs, the weather’s vicissitudes, discrimination due to their skin color and religion, and the long distances they traveled to sell the contents of the box they carried on their backs and hung around their necks, filled with combs, elastics, hairpins, shirt buttons, cufflinks, bobbins, threads, needles, scissors, hair trimmers, ear-rings, leather straps, bracelets, necklaces, and whatever else the distant and isolated housewives needed.
Peddling was harder for them than working in factories. But they still chose to do it, because it guaranteed them freedom that the factories did not . . . only for their wives to go out and cheat on them with strangers!
That was unacceptable.
Fares was disturbed, then, for patriotic as well as humanistic reasons. Had that woman been from one of the great, advanced nations, had her husband been well-to-do, he wouldn’t have felt the way he did.
And he felt humiliated!
Poverty, hardship, and ignorance must be defeated! Fares had been right to endure the pains of travel. Everything in life entitled him to do so.
Satirist, linguist, professor, and novelist, Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices on the contemporary Arabic literature scene. He has published three collections of poetry and numerous novels that have been translated into more than fourteen languages. El-Daif teaches creative writing at the American University of Beirut.
Nicholas R. Lobo is a doctoral student in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He earned his master’s in Islamic history at the University of Oxford and has worked for several years as an Arabic-English translator at the Arab Center in Doha, Qatar.
Alfred J. Naddaff is a Knight-Hennessy scholar and PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University. He earned his master’s in Arabic language and Near Eastern studies at the American University of Beirut and writes for various news publications.
Zeina G. Halabi is a writer, editor, and scholar of modern Arabic literature. Her research explores the contemporary legacy of 20th century emancipatory traditions, texts, and figures, with a regional focus on Egypt and the Levant. She is the author of The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual (2017) and essays and translations on topics ranging from literature to music and visual culture. She is currently Research Associate at the Orient Institute in Beirut and the Arabic Editor of Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal. She is no lover of translation, yet certain texts overtake her, insistently and without warning. *
زينة الحلبي كاتبة وأكاديمية ومحررة مختصّة بالأدب والثقافة المعاصرة. صدر لها كتاب عن نقد المثقّف العربي في الأدب والسينما منذ تسعينيات القرن الماضي، إضافةً إلى نصوص وملفات وترجمات عن الأدب والموسيقى والفنون البصرية. تعمل حالياً باحثة في المعهد الألماني للأبحاث الشرقية ومحررة القسم العربي في «فَمْ: مجلة بيروت الأدبية والفنية». لا تهوى الترجمة، ولكن هناك نصوص تعترضها دون خجل أو سابق إنذار.
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Zeina G. Halabi | زينة الحلبيhttps://rustedradishes.com/author/zeina-g-halabi-%d8%b2%d9%8a%d9%86%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ad%d9%84%d8%a8%d9%8a/
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Zeina G. Halabi | زينة الحلبيhttps://rustedradishes.com/author/zeina-g-halabi-%d8%b2%d9%8a%d9%86%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ad%d9%84%d8%a8%d9%8a/
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Zeina G. Halabi | زينة الحلبيhttps://rustedradishes.com/author/zeina-g-halabi-%d8%b2%d9%8a%d9%86%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ad%d9%84%d8%a8%d9%8a/
Footnotes:
| ↑1 | Tanious Hemlawe (1912–1996), born in the village of Hemlaya, founded several choirs and edited zájal-focused magazines such as al-Shu‘la (1955–70). |
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