Epigraph (from American novelist John Edgar Wideman's essay, "Whose War: The Color of Terror," which appeared in Harper's magazine, March 2002):

In [war], one of the first victims is language. Words are deployed as weapons to identify, stigmatize, eliminate, the enemy. One side boasts of inflicting casualties, excoriates the other side as cowards and murderers. One side calls civilians it kills collateral damage, labels civilian deaths by its opponents terrorism.

From their initial appearance in English to describe the bloody dismantling of royal authority during the French Revolution (Burke's "thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists ... are let loose on the people") the words terror and terrorist have signified godless savagery. Other definitions--government by a system of coercive intimidation--have almost entirely disappeared. Seldom if ever perceived neutrally as a tool, a set of practices and tactics for winning a conflict, terror instead is understood as pure evil. Terror and terrorists in this Manichaean scheme are excluded even from the problematic dignity of conventional warfare.

One side's use of terrorist to describe the other is never the result of a reasoned exchange between antagonists. It's a refusal of dialogue, a negation of the other. The designation terrorist is produced by the one-way gaze of power. Only one point of view, one vision, one story, is necessary and permissible, since what defines the gaze of power is its absolute, unquestionable authority.

To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist's gaze confers upon the native. Dismissing the possibility that the native can look back at you just as you are looking at him is a first step toward blinding him and ultimately rendering him or her invisible. Once a slave or colonized native is imagined as invisible, the business of owning him, occupying and exploiting his land, becomes more efficient, pleasant.

A state proclaiming itself besieged by terrorists asserts its total innocence, cites the unreasonableness, the outrageousness, of the assaults upon it. A holy war may be launched to root out terrorism, but its form must be a punitive crusade, an angry god's vengeance exacted upon sinners, since no proper war can exist when there is no recognition of the other's list of grievances, no awareness of the relentless dynamic binding the powerful and powerless.

Iraq

A truly adequate approach to something as huge as "World Literature" would study the complicated ways in which all contemporary cultures are multiple. That is, it would seek to understand how different cultures have circulated and come into contact with one another, how they have mutated and cross-bred, how they've become hybrid and interdependent, courtesy of the global systems that were put in place by the imperial history of the last few hundred years. And that, in turn, would mean seeing how the experiences of colonizer and colonized, "developing" nations and overdeveloped nations, East and West, the Global North and the Global South, however divergent and unequal, are nonetheless overlapping and intertwined. Imperial history has profoundly affected the psychology, economics, politics and cultures of the "First" World just as surely as it has those of the "Third." And taking account of this discrepant but overlapping experience requires what the late critic and theorist Edward Said called a "contrapuntal" approach, one that tries to hear and to think through, together, two different, often opposed, melodies which are nevertheless intricately related and which occupy the same space. "Life in the subordinate realm," said Said, "is imprinted by the fictions and follies of the dominant--and the reverse is true, too, as a dominant society comes to depend uncritically" on the fantasies that it has imagined and projected onto the "dark spaces" of the world’s map.

"The fictions and follies of the dominant." The U.S. has long tried to impose its fictions on various countries of the Middle East, not least--but not exclusively--during the dark years of Bush I and II, each of whom waged ruinous war on Iraq. In the chaotic wake of that country's long military occupation (and the even longer occupation of Afghanistan), any person of conscience is bound to wonder what exactly the counter-narrative to such deluded and deadly fantasies might be. In part, I suppose--in Iraq and Afghanistan, anyway--it has been written with guns, mortar shells and IEDs, drones and aerial bombs, although such instruments don't speak with much clarity. During the "Arab Spring," it was often written with bodies in the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Israel & the West Bank, and Syria--bodies of people demanding, protesting, celebrating, mourning, dying.

Those people surely complicated the picture that Americans hold in their minds of the Middle East. And yet our news media and our pop culture are still awash in representations rooted in the "Orientalism" that Edward Said famously decried (and which, even as it demonizes, infantilizes, and sexualizes Middle Eastern people, somehow makes it seem as though what's going on over there is ultimately all about us). Unless you've got a satellite system with access to Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiya, say, you probably haven't heard what ordinary--or even elite--Iraqis, Egyptians, and Palestinians have to say about what's been happening in their countries.

The Web has opened up a few cracks: for several years, even before the most recent Iraq war began, a 29-year-old Iraqi architect writing under the name of "Salam Pax" produced an amazing blog, in English (his writing was subsequently published in book form under the title Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi). "Riverbend," a young Iraqi woman, also kept a blog, "Baghdad Burning," before going into exile in 2007; her writings, too, appeared in book form. And in 2004, OpenDemocracy.net published a fascinating exchange between another Iraqi blogger, Faiza al-Araji, and American Gulf War veteran (and author of Jarhead) Anthony Swofford, under the title "America though an Iraqi lens." (Al-Araji, a former engineer and manager with a water-treatment company, lived in Baghdad with her husband and three sons, though she eventually went into exile in Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. She has kept a blog since 2003 called "A Family in Baghdad" which features English translations of many entries, as well as photos of Baghdad and elementary lessons in Arabic for English speakers.)

But another counter-narrative was--is still being--written by Iraq's poets. Poetry is hugely important throughout the Middle East in a way that we in the U.S. might have a hard time fathoming. Ordinary folks, even illiterate ones, hold poets in high regard and quote poetry by heart in daily conversation, much as we pepper our speech with proverbs now and then. (The late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was a national hero in Palestine and revered throughout the Middle East; "it was not uncommon," wrote one of his eulogists, "for Darwish readings to draw thousands of people.") True: when U.S. bombs began raining down on Baghdad, many Iraqi poets who had been critical of Saddam Hussein's regime had already been in exile for decades; others who couldn't leave had lain low for just as long. And since American publishers generally have had very little interest in translating anything from Arabic anyway, all of those poets were equally silent to western ears. (Further installments in the "Why we can't read any recent fiction from Iraq" saga: "Why Aren't More Iraqi Stories Being Published" and "Baghdad's Readers.")

Over the past decade or so, however, that's begun to change. In the May 26, 2003 issue of The Nation, Iraqi novelist and poet Sinan Antoon published a memoir/survey of the contemporary Iraqi poetry scene called "Dead Poets Society." (See also the follow-up letters in the June 16, 2003 issue.) That same year, another Iraqi exile, Saadi Simawe, a professor at Grinnell College in Iowa, edited a collection called Iraqi Poetry Today. (You can hear Simawe speak about the book on Wisconsin Public Radio.) On the eve of its publication, Simawe wrote a nice piece for the London Guardian entitled "Poets for Peace"; subsequently the late American poet Adrienne Rich wrote an appreciative review (which is also a good essay in its own right) for Poetry International. Among other things, she smartly discusses the pressures that international poets now feel either to have their work translated into the dominant global language--English--or simply to write in English in the first place.

Rich's essay includes several poems from Simawe's anthology; Poetry International also reprints another fine poem that plays with the idea of Empire, "In My Spare Time," by Fadhil Al-Azawi, one of the writers anthologized in Simawe's collection. The website of the Fauconer Gallery at Grinnell College also features work by and interviews with some of these same poets. (My favorite: Dunya Mikhail's "The War Works Hard," which was eventually the subject of a story on NPR's Morning Edition.)

Around the same time, the British website OpenDemocracy.net presented several poems by the Iraqi poets Fadhil Assultani, Salah Niazi, and Hashem Shafiq, two of whom had also taken part in a public conversation not long after the start of the war in 2003. And Masthead, an online literary journal from Australia, included a feature on "Twenty One Iraqi Poets" (with work by those poets in English translation) in its March 2005 issue (No. 9). Subsequently two more anthologies appeared: one, Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq (Michigan SUP, 2008; the publisher offers a web excerpt here), comprising poems that emerged from the war, and another, Fifteen Iraqi Poets (New Directions, 2013), edited by Dunya Mikhail. (It's available as a free download from the Poetry Foundation.)

But my conceit here is "counter-narrative," and poets don't write narratives, at least not usually. Luckily (for us), there's also been a burst of interest in fiction from the Arab world over the past few years. 2008 also saw the publication of Contemporary Iraqi Fiction: An Anthology (hear two podcasts with the editor, Shakir Mustafa, at the Syracuse UP website), and in 2011, the online journal Sampsonia Way made the first translation of a short story by Iraqi writer Hameed al-Mukhtaar. University presses and small independent publishing houses such as Interlink (which had already built a considerable catalog of fiction translated from Arabic) have redoubled their efforts--and for the first time since Mahfouz won his Nobel in 1988, they've been joined by a handful of larger, mainstream trade publishers.

What Gets Translated

There's a lot to keep up with. In January 2010, Claudia Pierpont Morgan noted the "trending" of Arabic Lit in a review article for The New Yorker entitled "Found in Translation." This summer Egyptian novelist Youssef Rakha took a somewhat dimmer view of the "translation boom" in the Kenyon Review: there's a whole lot more--more interesting, more "sophisticated" things--going on in the field of contemporary Arabic literature, he argues, than what gets picked up and marketed by Western publishers, who have a predilection for books that feed Westerners' desire for "knowledge" about exotic places while reconfirming what they (think they) already know. (See writer/translator/resident-of-Cairo Marcia Lynx Qualey's report on Adam Talib's slightly cynical 2013 talk, "Translating for Bigots," for instance. And as Qualey remarks elsewhere, there's a whole cottage industry in books that flatter the West's paternalistic desire to "save" Muslim women from their oppression. Plenty of more interesting and more challening books that deserve to be translated instead, in her opinion. "Here's to Blowing Savior Literature Off the Shelves," tweeted Yasmin El-Rifae.) Laura Gribbon's "The Rise of the Arabic Novel" (Arab Hyphen, March 2015) and Qualey's "What Does It Matter If 'Leg Over Leg' Is the 'First Arabic Novel'"? also address the question of the cyclical popularity of "Arab" authors in the West. (See also this big report by the British NGO "Literature Across Frontiers" on the cultural politics and economics of translation, marketing, and publishing.)

To some extent, though, "new media" makes us less dependent on such traditional gatekeepers, tastemakers, and panderers-to-prejudice. In late 2009, for example, the above-mentioned M. Lynx Qualey started the indispensable blog Arab Literature (In English) in order to track the region's thriving literary scene; she continues to keep very close tabs on all things literary in the Middle East (including comics and graphic novels) and tells you, among other things, where you can read new work by emerging writers--and, for that matter, established writers--online.

So, student of (world) literature: if, after the next fifteen weeks, your view of the Middle East is still myopic, the song you're hearing single-voiced, then open your eyes and ears.