LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

peter clark2000: 73). In the Arab world perhaps an even smaller minority speak theprescribed taught formal Arabic (Parkinson 1994: 207–10).The teaching of literature in schools and universities has been similarlynationalistic. Most literature is taught according to the language in which it iswritten – English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and so on. Thestudent and common reader have generally had to discover world literature,usually in translation, on their own. But when we look at writers who have animpact and an influence we find they often defy the concurrence of languageand territory. Arabs of North Africa have long expressed themselves in French.The French educational and cultural influence from the 1930s onwards inTunisia, Algeria and Morocco was overwhelming. A nationalist writer, such asKateb Yacine, thought the French ‘wanted to destroy our nationalism … Thus,whoever wanted an education had to attend French schools.’ Algerian literature,written in French, argued Yacine, was ‘independent of the language it uses,and has no emotional or racial relationship’. Yacine wrote initially in French inorder to address the French directly, showing them what was wrong with thecolonial system, rather than telling his people about a situation they knew in alanguage they did not read (Salhi 2000: 102, 149). Some North African writersin French, such as the Moroccans Tahar bin Jelloun and Driss Chraieb, havewon French literary prizes. The Egyptian Albert Cossery has written from the1930s to the 1990s in French. Others, such as the Algerian Rachid Boujedra,have switched to Arabic in the 1980s and 1990s. Kateb Yacine’s later work wasin the Algerian Arabic and Berber dialects. But is their work only Arabic if it iswritten in Arabic? Is their French work part of Arabic or French literature? Inthe last ten years we have witnessed a growing literature of Arab consciousnessexpressed in English. The Sudanese Jamal Mahjoub, the Jordanian Fadia Faqirand, above all, the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif have all received critical acclaim intheir English novels.We must get this in proportion. The British are today insular and are singularlyfortunate in having English as a global language. But most people in theworld have a choice of languages in which to express themselves. Seventy percent of the world’s population operate in two languages, forty per cent in three.Early in the twentieth century the Pole Joseph Conrad and the Russian VladimirNabokov mastered the English language to the extent that their works haveentered the canon of English literature. In earlier centuries even the British hada choice of languages in which to express themselves. In the eighteenth centurythe first published work of that master of English prose, Edward Gibbon, was inFrench. In the seventeenth century John Milton wrote poetry in Latin. In thecenturies before that writers from Britain were part of a Latin-writing Europeancivilisation.Again throughout the twentieth century there have been Arabs writing in— 182 —www.taq.ir