Arabic encounters in comparative literature

For Waïl Hassan, fictions are never innocent. And we, in our encounters with and attachments to fictions, are never innocent either. In his first book, Tayib Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction, Hassan writes that Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North uses the metaphor of migration to “invite a reading of postcolonial culture as a fluid dialogic negotiation of historical legacies, social boundaries and cultural encounters.” Putting Salih’s later novel Bandarshah in the context of the post-1967 crisis of Arab national sovereignty, Hassan writes that it “is a novel whose achievement lies precisely in the expression of discursive rupture.” Reading Hassan, I think of Edward Said’s late essay “A Return to Philology,” in which he wrote of humanistic study as a “technique of trouble” and glossed close reading as “ijtihad”: interpretive struggle with the goal of emancipation in mind. For Hassan, the practice of literary criticism is such a technique, a practice of exposing the tensions and contradictions at play within the stories nations tell about themselves. 

In addition to his work on Salih, Waïl Hassan has translated, authored and edited numerous volumes. He is the author of Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions and co-editor, with Rogério Lima, of Literatura e (i)migração no Brasil/Literature and (Im)migration in Brazil. He is the translator (Portuguese to Arabic) of لغز القاف / The Riddle of Qaf by Alberto Mussa and (Arabic to English) of لن تتكلم لغتي / Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language by Abdelfattah Kilito. He is co-editor, with Susan Muaddi Darraj, of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. His most recent book is Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism. 

During his recent visit to St. Louis to deliver a workshop and lecture at Washington University, I spoke with Hassan over breakfast. We discussed Orientalism, the politics of translation and the relationship between Arabic literary studies and the field of comparative literature. The transcript that follows has been edited for length and clarity. 

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After your first book, Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction, you devoted considerable time to a translation of the Moroccan literary critic Abdelfattah Kilito’s Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. Both projects, to me, seem to push anglophone scholars in comparative literature to reckon with Arabic literature and literary criticism in historical context and in complex relation to European literatures, rather than in isolation or as objects of a neatly defined “area studies.” What led from the first book to the second? 

They were not directly related, in the sense that I didn’t go straight from Salih to Kilito, but your characterization is quite accurate. The first book was a revision of my dissertation. I had been immersed in Tayeb Salih’s work for many years, and I wanted to write about his novel Season of Migration to the North. Eventually I realized that the best way to do that was to put it in the context of his other writings. Very few people read all of his works. Most read maybe a couple of short stories and the novella “The Wedding of Zein” — these are well known because they were published in translation in one volume, but his last novel is completely neglected, and the rest of his short stories haven’t been read by many critics. But what I realized is that all of his stories present a continuum. Most are set in the same village, and we see the same characters over generations, including the narrator of Season of Migration. That’s why I ended up studying them all together from a postcolonial perspective, for the most part, but situating them, as you said, in the context of Arab intellectual history.  

I became interested in translation studies as I was working on my second single-author book, which was about Arab American and Arab British immigrant writing. I came to translation specifically through the work of Ahdaf Soueif, because the novel that I was working on by Soueif is full of code-switching and phrases from different registers of Arabic — varieties of spoken Egyptian and standard Arabics literally translated into English. There were all sorts of linguistic maneuvers, and I thought these were intended to highlight translation as a fact of everyday life, even within the same language, especially in the Arabic language, but also within English, between different kinds of English (Victorian, modern British, American), as well as French. So that’s what led me to translation studies, and during that time when I was reading a lot of translation theory, I came across Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. When I began to read that book, I realized that it needed to be translated, and I wanted to write the introduction to it. 

I came to translation specifically through the work of Ahdaf Soueif, because the novel [of hers] that I was working on is full of code-switching and phrases from different registers of Arabic — varieties of spoken Egyptian and standard Arabics literally translated into English. There were all sorts of linguistic maneuvers, and I thought these were intended to highlight translation as a fact of everyday life, even within the same language...

I spoke to my editor at Syracuse shortly afterward and proposed the translation. They were enthusiastic about it. A few years earlier they had published Kilito’s The Author and His Doubles, a translation by Michael Cooperson. So they already knew Kilito, and this was an opportunity for them to publish another book of his. That's how it came about.

What did you think the intervention of Kilito could be? What felt urgent about that project?  

I felt his treatment of translation was important. He is writing not only about translation, but also about a way of approaching Arabic literary scholarship and comparative literature. The book comes out of the confluence of these three fields. Or rather, this confluence comes out very vividly in the book.  

The book was written in Arabic — as you know, Kilito writes one book in French, one book in Arabic and so on — so in this case he is consciously and deliberately addressing an Arabic-speaking readership. In translation, of course, the book would have a different audience. I was attracted to the idea of what he could be “made to say” through translation, to intervene in the kinds of conversations taking place in the American academy around the question of translation, comparative literature and Arabic studies. The field of Arabic studies, at the time, was really split into two tracks. There was the Middle East studies track: people who study Arabic in the context of area studies, a mode that can be traced back to European Orientalism. And then there was the newer track in comparative literature: people who come to Arabic having studied English or French, and then come to Arabic through comparative literature, and this is a very different kind of intellectual genealogy.

What I was really interested in at the time was the confluence of these schools: What does it mean to do Arabic literature within comparative literature or within Middle East studies? This is something I’d been thinking about for a number of years, going back to the late ’90s. The implication of this confluence was really a question of how the disciplines approached time. Comparative literature was a heavily periodized field because of its focus on European literature. Middle East studies wasn’t. Most of the people who did Arabic in Middle East studies were studying the “classical” or “pre-modern” literature. Meanwhile, people in comparative literature were mostly working on modern literature, with post-colonial studies as a main theoretical framework. These divergencies have largely eroded by now. There’s been a great rapprochement between the two disciplinary areas. People in Middle East studies now read a lot more theory. A lot of Arabists now go to the ACLA [the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference] and a lot of comparatists attend MESA [the Middle East Studies Association conference]. This wasn’t always the case. 

I also thought Kilito’s emphasis on the politics of language was crucial. I felt it could be understood and analyzed through the prism of postcolonial theory and translation theory. He talks about classical Arabic literature, starting from Al-Jahiz, but then he gets to the modern period, to the 19th century, and then he moves on to 20th-century American fiction. So it’s a comparative book. It ranges over a long period of time. It bridges that divide between classical and modern Arabic, and I felt his approach could help bridge this gap in the Anglo-American academy, in Middle East studies and in comparative literature. I found all of this entirely fascinating and productive. I wanted to at least write something about him, if not translate him as well.  

What struck me especially about Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language is the provocative argument that we should take seriously the idea that translation involves a kind of intimate conflict and struggle between languages. I thought of that argument as I was reading your most recent book, Arab Brazil, in which you suggest that Brazilian Orientalism contains internal tensions and contradictions. On one hand, Brazilian Orientalism seems to participate in a national discourse of mistura, cultural mixing. On the other hand, it illuminates deeply rooted racial and gendered inequalities, as well as Islamophobia. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of paying attention to these contradictions? 

Arab Brazil is a book that could not have been written if I had not written Immigrant Narratives. I also paid attention to questions of translation, which, of course, Kilito helped me think through.  

But Arab Brazil is not a postcolonial book, per se. The reason for that is simple: There is no colonial relationship, historically, between Brazil and the Arab world. I mean, we can go back to the medieval period and talk about Iberia and North Africa, but that’s a different story. Brazil was a Portuguese settler-colony, geographically remote and politically completely isolated from the Arab world, with little economic exchange, until the 20th century. There are cultural and historical ties, but to access them, you have to go back centuries — that is, the ways in which elements of Arab culture and the Arabic language are embedded in Brazilian culture via Portugal. But there is no colonial relationship in the modern sense. 

So what happens if we think of Orientalism, as Said taught us to think about it, as a discourse of power? There isn’t that power relationship here. And yet, there are Orientalist representations. There has always been an audience for mainly French Orientalist texts in Brazil, because the intellectual elite, since independence in the 19th century, have been a predominantly francophone elite. This was one way for Brazil to assert cultural independence from Portugal — to turn away from Portugal toward France, and that is the case with other countries in what we call Latin America. We see a pattern of independence from Spain, then turning away from Spain, toward its rival, France. Many Latin American intellectuals were educated in France or at least have knowledge of the French language. So in the case of Brazil, French becomes the largest cultural influence, besides Portugal. So what do we make of the circulation of French Orientalism in a place like Brazil, outside the sphere of colonial power? That is the question that animates the book.  

How do you hope Arab Brazil might challenge postcolonial scholarship in the anglophone and American academies? 

What I had in mind was that it could affect American scholarship on Brazilian literature and Brazilian critics, as well as Brazilian readers of Brazilian literature, by bringing to their attention this dimension of the representation of Arabs. As to how the book might affect American perceptions of the Middle East, I'd like to think more about that.  

The flow of influence remains from the North to the South. Brazil is much more sensitive to ideas coming from the United States or from Europe than the other way around. Look at how much is being translated from Portuguese into English, for instance. It’s very little, and it’s less than what’s being translated from other Latin American countries, from Spanish into English. I don’t have the figures handy, but what gets translated from English into Portuguese or Spanish far outpaces what gets translated the other way. That’s just a fact of cultural hegemony, which follows political and economic power structures.  

I do hope that the book will lead people to think more about the mutations of Orientalist discourse, the ways in which representations of the “East” don’t go away. They are recycled. One of the great books I often teach is The Myth of Continents, by Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, which has a chapter that traces the idea of the East/West split and how it shifts over time, where the boundary changes. The first “East” in Christian European history was really the Byzantine Empire, associated with “Eastern Christianity,” as opposed to “Western Christianity.” That was the first East/West split. Fast-forward to the Cold War and the division becomes between the Eastern bloc and the Western bloc. So there are discursive mutations, but what doesn’t change is that there’s always an “other” who is perceived as totally different, who is to be, if not eliminated, at least managed or controlled in all kinds of ways, including in the realm of knowledge production. 

And that’s what explains, for example, that toward the end of the First World War, as the British forces were advancing and taking Jerusalem and Damascus, all of a sudden, these military conquests were described in crusading terms. Think of the scene of Allenby standing at the tomb of Saladin in Damascus saying, in a sense, “Here we are, we’re back.” Which is to say, we are the new Crusaders. So we had the Crusades a thousand years earlier, but nevertheless here we are again — how do you explain that, if we think that discourses are bound by their particular epistemes, to use Foucault’s terms?  

Discourses are bound by their own time period, but they make use of representations from the past. This is the significance of cultural memory. ... The past is never completely forgotten. It’s repurposed.

Discourses are bound by their own time period, but they make use of representations from the past. This is the significance of cultural memory. This is how cultural memory really works. The past is never completely forgotten. It’s repurposed. And that’s how you have this continuity of ideas about Islam being the enemy, for instance, from the medieval period, even before the Crusades, until the present — not because it’s all one and the same “Western discourse,” but because there are several discursive formations in which these ideas are recycled, reinterpreted, repurposed. Some representations are neglected if they don’t have an immediate function. This doesn’t mean they disappear; they may very well resurface later on when conditions change. That’s very important. Thinking about Orientalism then becomes not just thinking about how representations change, but how they can be completely transformed, yet still remain with us.