In the country of the oldest novels in the world... the Algerian text shelters the Palestinian

Participants in the Algeria International Novel Forum 2024, which was held in the Algerian city of Djelfa (Al Jazeera)

Algeria -

Participants in the Algeria International Fiction Forum unanimously agreed on the necessity of supporting the Palestinian presence in Arabic writings, and the importance of exporting these novel writings to the Western community through translation.

The participants in the forum - which concluded on the 22nd of February in its founding session in the city of Djelfa, south of the capital, Algiers - expressed the need for “Arabic writings that involve the other, through the use of the language that the northern countries understand and the logic that accommodates it.”

Forum participants considered that the recent war on the Gaza Strip exposed the face of the world as well as the reality of the Arab narrative regarding its issues and history.

The head of the Novelist Forum, Ismail Yabrir, said in his interview with Al Jazeera Net, “Palestine is present in contemporary fictional work through young writers and veteran names, by moving the characters towards talking about Palestinian history.”

The forum witnessed diverse participation despite the distance of its venue from the Algerian capital (Al Jazeera)

Palestinian presence

For his part, the Algerian academic and critic Wahid Ben Bouaziz considered that “Palestine has a presence that cannot be ignored in Algerian literature, from the poetry and articles of the Association of Muslim Scholars written by Al-Bashir Al-Ibrahimi (1889-1965).”

Bouaziz noted many works written by Algerian writers about Palestine, such as Kateb Yassine (1929-1989) through “The Corpse Play,” and also Rachid Boudjedra in his memoirs during his trip to Beirut. Salah Shakiro also wrote the novel “Our Rendezvous in Jerusalem,” and Azzedine Mihoubi wrote “The Biography of the Snake.” Wasini Al-Araj wrote “Sonata for the Ghosts of Jerusalem.”

For his part, the novelist Wassini Al-Araj said that “Palestine has an important area in contemporary Algerian and Maghreb novels, and that the motivation behind his writing of his novels (Ashes of the East) and (Sonata for the Ghosts of Jerusalem) was human legitimacy.”

Wasini Al-Araj had allocated the proceeds from his novel “The Biography of the End... I Lived It as You Desired Me” to support the literature of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli occupation prisons.

Wasini evoked Palestine in many of his literary works, as in “Sonata for the Ghosts of Jerusalem,” where he wrote, “You do not know Jerusalem well. Jerusalem is God’s bread and water, a city sufficient for everyone. Its heart is wide and its religion is great. Its faith is numerous, its trees cover all the nakedness, its mirrors are not blind, and its walls are not blind.” not for sale".

Novel and translation

Palestine was also present at the heart of the dialogue session that brought together the Algerian novelist and translator Amal Bouchareb and the Palestinian publisher and translator Wassim Dahmash, who reside in Italy.

The session, which was titled “Translating the Novel... Managing Narratives,” covered two of the forum’s axes, the first of which deals with the currentity of the Arab narrative, and the second of which is the liberation of narratives in the era of cultural industries.

Bouchareb stressed the strategic dimension played by the novel as a soft power, stressing that we have not lived in our Arab history a moment that highlights the importance of narratives more than the moment we are living now in light of the war of extermination that Gaza is experiencing.

Hence the duty of the novelist, says Bouchareb, “to convey the voice of his culture faithfully and not to accept compromises that would hijack the Arabic narrative and domesticate it in accordance with the narratives of the mainstream, especially since the translation of the novel has become a market subject to the laws of the neoliberal moment that the world is experiencing.”

For his part, Palestinian publisher Wassim Dahmash stressed that there have always been two narratives within any group: “the narrative that serves the interests of the oppressor and the narrative of the masses.”

Dahmash, the owner of the Italian Q publishing house, added that his publishing house is not concerned with novelists who write for a Western audience, and they only seek translation.

The Palestinian publisher considered culture to be a tool of resistance, noting that he chose the first letter of the name of his publishing house that he founded 25 years ago in Italy, “Qaf,” after the Algerian Kasbah neighborhood, considering it the most important stronghold of the Algerian liberation revolution during French colonialism.

In answer to a question related to the transformations that may occur in the Palestinian novel after the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Dahmash stressed that it is difficult to predict the face of Palestinian literature that will take shape in the coming years, recalling that Palestinian resistance literature did not appear until many years after the 1948 Nakba, due to trauma. The depth that touched the Palestinian conscience at that time.

The universality of the Algerian novel

The participants in the International Fiction Forum concluded that Arab narratives should be facilitated and transferred from the Mediterranean basin to the North, so that the Arab writer can present his vision of life, without being a passive recipient of Western narratives.

The discussion took place on the third day of the forum, held in the city of Djelfa, about the main stages that the Algerian novel has passed through throughout its history, and about the necessity of moving out of the Arab local shell towards the global.

Regarding the universality of the Algerian novel, the novelist Ismail Yabrir said that it “began with the novel The Golden Donkey by the Berber-Roman writer Lucius Apuleius, a son of the Algerian city of Madour.”

Apuleius is a Numidian prose writer (referring to the Berber kingdom of Numidia, which included parts of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and eastern Morocco). He was born in the city of Maduros, or what is currently known as Maduros in Algeria, and he is the author of the only Latin novel that has survived in its entirety.

Ypreer considered that the first modern novel also has a relationship with Algeria, as Cervantes' "Don Quixote" wrote its most prominent chapters in Algeria, at the top of Belouizdad Street in the capital, in one of the caves that have today become a historical landmark in the city.

Ybrir adds to Al Jazeera Net that modern Algerian literature witnessed “the first novel in the Maghreb, which was the novel “The Nationalist Ahmed Bin Mustafa” by Muhammad Bin Sharif (1879 - 1921), the son of the city of Djelfa, and therefore Algeria has more than the previous novels.

Dr. Wahid Bouaziz says that the West, given its “global economic and political dominance, even dominated the history of literature, and marketed itself as the primary producer of the novel, and succeeded to a great extent, even though the truth of history says otherwise and the matter is well known.”

The novel “The Golden Donkey,” which was later translated by Abu Al-Eid Dudu, is the first novel written in the history of humanity. However, the West insists on “Don Quixote” as the first fictional text in history, given that its author is Spanish.

The Algerian and Arab novelists participating in the International Novel Forum unanimously agreed that the novel must bear the concerns of societies, and that the real burden that the contemporary writer bears is to protect his history and market the facts instead of consuming them in a negative way.

"Golden Donkey"

The novel "The Golden Donkey" is a classic literary work by the Roman writer Apuleius, dating back to the second century AD.

This novel is considered one of the oldest preserved prose novels in their entirety from ancient times. It combines fantasy, adventure, and humor, presenting a narrative texture that enriches the imagination and expresses the human search for salvation and meaning.

The novel "The Golden Ass" by Lucius Apuleius is described as the first novel in the history of humanity (Al Jazeera)

The story is told by its hero, Lucius, who shows a passion for magic, and finds himself the focus of an unexpected and surprising transformation, as he is accidentally transformed into a donkey.

Through this strange transformation, Lucius experiences a series of strange adventures and situations, during which he meets various characters, including humans, gods, and mythical beings, highlighting human nature with all its contradictions, through a keen, and often sarcastic, look.

Source: Al Jazeera