As a teenager in Cairo in the early 1940s, Inji Efflatoun made two great discoveries: art and the Communist Party. Although she was from an elite French-speaking background, Efflatoun chose to “re-Egyptianize” herself, pursue painting and throw herself full-heartedly into anti-imperialist, feminist and leftist agitation. She was eventually arrested during President Nasser’s repression of Communists in the early 1960s. It was in prison that she embarked upon the most productive stage of her career as an artist. Today, her prison portraits and the vibrant, luminous paintings of Egyptian rural life she painted after her release are iconic.

In this episode we speak to Ahmed Gobba and Avery Gonzales, co-translators of Efflatoun’s 1993 memoir, “The Memoir of Inji Efflatoun: From Childhood to Prison.” The memoir is the nucleus of a new book, The Life and Work of Inji Efflatoun, published by SKIRA and edited by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi and Suheyla Takesh. It comes out in the US on October 7 and is available to pre-order now.

You can view a digitalized collection of Efflatoun’s work on the Barjeel Art Foundation’s website and read a review of the book in the National by Razmig Bedirian.

This episode was produced in collaboration with the Barjeel Art Foundation -- an independent Sharjah-based institution, founded in 2010 by Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi to preserve, exhibit and research one of the most extensive collections of modern and contemporary art from the Arab World. One of the Barjeel Art Foundation’s objectives is developing a public platform to foster critical dialogue around art practices, to convey nuanced Arab histories beyond the borders of culture and geography. For more information about the Barjeel Art Foundation’s activities and exhibitions, please visit www.barjeelartfoundation.org

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The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month. Several years ago, we discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim’s most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.”

Show Notes:

Hosam Aboul-ela is a professor of English at the University of Houston and the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher.

Ibrahim’s first novel, That Smell, and his prison diaries, have been published in a single volume, trans. Robyn Creswell, from New Directions.

Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela’s translation, from Yale University Press.

Hosam’s translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth is available from New Directions.

Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat, in Tony Calderbank’s translation, is, unfortunately, out of print.

Ursula wrote a little something about her meetings, interviews and memories of Ibrahim here: https://www.ursulalindsey.com/blog

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The Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri grew up poor and illiterate on the streets of Tangier in the waning years of colonialism. He told the story of his childhood in his autobiographical novel For Bread Alone – El Khubz El Hafi in Arabic, Le Pain Nu in French. Choukri went on to write much more, chronicling life in post-independence Morocco during the “years of lead,” and the marginalized underclass of Tangier: its barflies, prostitutes, petty criminals, day-to-day survivors. We spoke to scholar and translator Jonas El Busty about the unique subversiveness of Choukri’s work, and why it still resonates so strongly today. We also talked about the reception of Choukri’s work, and the power dynamics embedded in its translation.

SHOW NOTES

Jonas El Bousty is a professor of Arabic at Yale University. He has translated Choukri’s short story collection Tales of Tangier, as well as the third installment of Choukri’s autobiography, Faces, and is the editor, alongside Roger Allen, of the scholarly anthology Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives: Hunger in Eden.

For Bread Alone was translated by Paul Bowles, in a process that remains contentious to this day.

Choukri’s writing about some of the famous Western writers – Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles – who visited or lived in Tangiers is collected in In Tangier

Ursula recently wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on Choukri, Tangier, colonialism and nostalgia.

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