Editorial

We have made reference to the Arab Spring in two of our previous Editorials (Chambers and Watkins, 2011; 2012), but this pivotal event of the twenty-first century is worthy of further exploration. After initial revolutionary successes which included the rapid and ignominious fall of Tunisian President Ben Ali; emotional scenes of protest in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, leading to the departure of Mubarak; and the ousting and repellent murder of Libya’s Qaddafi in the spring and summer of 2011, the movement towards unseating Arab dictators is now taking on a darker aspect. The clear binary that could be identified earlier between, on the one hand, the initial protesters’ dignity, courage, and humour, and the authorities’ disproportionate violence on the other, is giving way to something altogether more terrifying and incomprehensible. The conflict in Syria has been going on for more than two years, making it the bloodiest and most protracted of the Arab rebellions. This led to a recent intervention by the UN calling for all sides to “adhere to international humanitarian and human rights law” (Dieng, 2012: n.p.), which ratcheted up speculation as to whether full-scale genocide is taking place in the country — most of it instigated by the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad. Many Egyptians have come to feel that their president of a year, Mohamed Morsi, is not only following the despotic steps of Mubarak in the way he rules the country, but that he is also using his authority — in the name of religion (Islam) — to turn the Egyptian political and economic scene into a system that only works for one group (the Muslim Brotherhood), while ignoring other social groups and their interests, and even stripping them of their human rights.

From an academic perspective, it is difficult to narrate the rapidly unfolding story of the Arab Spring. Ziauddin Sardar locates the revolutions within what he describes as our current “postnormal society” meaning “an in-between period where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things really make sense” (2010: 435). Hamid Dabashi similarly argues that the Arab Spring quickly moved beyond “race and religion, sects and ideologies, pro- or anti-Western” (2012: xvii). He uses the term “post-ideological” to describe the uprisings (2012: 11; 13; 155−70). Sardar’s term “postnormal” and Dabashi’s use of “post-ideological” suggest that increasingly people are challenging the previously pervasive idea of a clash of civilizations (Huntington, 1993; 2002/1996). Hamid Dabashi even goes so far as to ask if the current situation in the Middle East signals the end of postcolonialism. Building on this, he argues that — for all their problems, tensions, and uncertainties — the Arab revolutions are neither straightforwardly secular nor religious, and the revolutionaries and rebels are proving that the region “is no longer the middle of anybody’s East” (2012: 6).

In spring 2012, we commented that “[w]riters, artists, and film-makers are at the forefront of revolutionary activity, but are also being sickeningly punished for their courage and farsightedness” (4−5). Literature is not only reflecting, but also anticipating, resistance. For example, Alaa al-Aswany, the Egyptian author of The Yacoubian Building (2002) and Chicago (2008), made some prophetic statements, collected in his book of essays, On the State of Egypt (2011). In 2009, more than a year before the Tahrir Square protests, he wrote, “The time has come for us to leave our seats in the auditorium and create the next scene ourselves. Democracy is the solution” (2011: 6). This sounds like a call for revolution, and the author’s words proved prescient. Al-Aswany was also instrumental in Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq’s resignation after only a month in power after he attacked Shafiq on television in March 2011 for being a Mubarak regime holdover, in an example of writers directly causing political events.

In the Muslim world and beyond, the arts are less prone to being compartmentalized or considered elitist as they are in the West, and more likely to be part of everyday life. In Arab countries and the nations of the Indian subcontinent, for example, many of the great poets have had their verses set to music and sung by the most popular singers (think of Noor Jehan singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Pakistan). British−Syrian author Robin Yassin-Kassab told Claire Chambers in an interview, “working-class Arabs have as much access to poetry as the higher-class people. In the Middle East, poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani become towering nationalist figures, in a way that is almost unheard-of for poets in the West” (2011: 205−6). Authors have therefore used their popularity to push for change during the last two years of revolution. For writing the inflammatory song “Bashar Get Out”, for example, Syrian amateur poet Ibrahim Qashoush had his vocal cords ripped out before he was murdered by the regime.

Yet what is the role of literature in this conflict? Aside from the direct political activism undertaken by al-Aswany and Qashoush, the imagination has a crucial role in revolutionary activity. Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi poet and novelist who migrated to the US after the Gulf War of 1991, but who has recently returned to Iraq, argues that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were sparked by poverty and oppression, but fuelled by “poems, vignettes, and quotes from novels [which] were all there in the collective unconscious. […] The revolution introduced new songs, chants, and tropes, but it refocused attention on an already existing, rich and living archive” (Antoon, 2011: n.p.). He cites 1934 verses by the late poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, “To the Tyrants of the World”, which were used as a slogan in al-Shabbi’s home country of Tunisia, and spread to Egypt and beyond. Written in the second person to make the poem direct and accusatory, its tone is insulting and full of righteous anger. The apparent calm of the spring al-Shabbi describes belies the coming apocalyptic weather and an ominous, fiery future which is rising out of the ashes of the tyrants’ destruction.

Keeping the importance of literature to the Arab Spring in mind, we are delighted to announce that The Journal of Commonwealth Literature now publishes occasional pieces of creative writing. Unfortunately we are not able to accept submissions of proposals or completed creative works, but will instead be drawing on suggestions from our readers, editorial board, and others in the field to make invitations to up-and-coming and established writers from broadly postcolonial or diasporic backgrounds on something of an ad hoc basis. The quality and intellectual passion of the two poems by John Siddique, our invited poet for this issue, as well as their timeliness and significance, convinced us that they merited inclusion and analysis.

Siddique was born in 1960s’ Rochdale in Lancashire to an Irish Catholic mother and a Muslim father originally from Jalandhar. He is a best-selling poet, and has written Full Blood (2011), Recital: An Almanac (2009), Poems from a Northern Soul (2007), and The Prize (2005), as well as working as a co-author of the story/memoir Four Fathers (French et al., 2006). Siddique has also contributed poems, stories, essays, and articles to many publications, including The Guardian, Poetry Review, and The Rialto. More recently, his memoir−essay about his father, “Six Snapshots of Partition” (2010), was published online as an addition to Granta: 112 on Pakistan. Full Blood has been described by Jackie Kay as “a brilliant balancing act”, a comment that resonates both in aesthetic terms, but also with Siddique’s eloquent poetic representations of his mixture of Anglo−Irish and Indian/Pakistani roots. The two new poems we collect here are this multifaceted poet’s response to the even more complex situation in the Middle East, and will eventually form part of his next collection. Neither poem is written within a particular form, but each is a development and echo of the villanelle pieces in his previous collection Full Blood (Siddique, 2011), so that the musicality inherent in the poem’s language reinforces its emotional layers. Siddique hopes to travel to Egypt, Tunisia, and Palestine within the next year to research ideas for his next book further, and to converse with and bear witness to ordinary people’s lives and their small acts of rebellion.

Revolutions are usually discussed in general terms, but the tiny spark that lights each uprising is often what Siddique terms “a specific”. This is borne out in Albert Camus’ densely philosophical book The Rebel, in which the French−Algerian “pied-noir” author writes:

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes as soon as he begins to think for himself. A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command. (2000/1951: 19)

Just as Camus identifies a moment at which the “slave” abruptly refuses to acquiesce any longer, so too the specific Siddique explores in his titular first poem is the experience on 17 December 2010 that led to Mohammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller’s self-immolation in protest at the humiliating and extortive actions of law enforcement officers in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bou Said, who repeatedly shut down his stall, demanded money, and abused him. Moreover, Siddique plays with Camus’ exploration of the rebel’s usage of the words “yes” and “no” in “A Specific”, in the lines “These things: / A no / A yes / A something in the heart of the fruit seller” (ll. 8–11).

Whereas Bouazizi said an outright no, in Siddique’s second poem, “Blue Water Lilies”, the specific focused on is the death of an innocent man, Sayed Bilal, who went to an Alexandrian police station voluntarily to answer questions about a terrorist attack on a Coptic church. His death by torture there at the hands of five members of the police force was one of the triggers for the Tahrir Square protests, along with the similar torture and murder of Khaled Said and others. Siddique was influenced by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s piece of narrative non-fiction “A Tale of Two Martyrs” (2011), in which Jelloun itemizes Sayed Bilal’s identity components: “His name was Sayed Bilal, he was thirty years old, married, and his wife was pregnant. He was a practising Muslim, neither an activist nor an agitator. He had a job and did not stand out from the crowd in any way” (2011: 30). Siddique gives snippets of information about Bilal that are similar to those described by Jelloun and contemporaneous newspaper reports, but he goes further to create an evocative poem about torture. The line “We become questions we dare not ask” (l. 13) vividly evokes Bilal’s type of unplanned resistance. In interview, Siddique states,

Where Jelloun and I deviate in thought is that what happened in that room is unknowable. Yes, torture and death occurred, yet the inner life of Bilal in that lost room is that dread thing I want the reader to feel. That was the spark his death ignited: a horror which continues to be unbearable and meaningless. If and how he rebelled in his last hours we will never know, but the true rebellion is that his soul was untouched by the men who monsterize themselves so cheaply. (Chambers, 2013: n.p.)

Siddique’s “Blue Water Lilies” (the title refers to the national flower of Egypt) may therefore be read as a poetic reinterpretation and development of Jelloun’s passionate description of Bilal’s death. In the lines “How many rooms are there in this world / Hidden from the night?”, Siddique suggests that Bilal is disorientated in his windowless dungeon, unsure of where he is; the scent of the blue water lilies is his only marker of location. This is a bleak and horrifying rendition of an innocent man killed for the length of his beard and his peaceful but conservative Salafi beliefs. By way of a coda, just as this Editorial was going to press in April 2013 came the long-awaited news that two of Bilal’s killers had been sentenced to fifteen years each in gaol, while the two others were given life sentences in absentia (Al-Youm, 2013: n.p.).

In his poems, Siddique explores the personal in the political. The two men, Tunisian and Egyptian, were not revolutionaries, but rebels — in Camus’ sense of their making a sudden decision not to comply with the regimes. The men’s human responses to their circumstances acted as catalysts to the cataclysmic events still shaking the Middle East. However, of course, neither one of them is alive to see all that has come in the wake of their desperate bravery, so, as Siddique put it in an interview with Chambers, “there is a smallness and a blindness to their actions, even though they are now celebrated”. Siddique went on to argue that the people themselves are often forgotten in grand talk of the Arab Spring (Chambers, 2013: n.p.). Before presenting the poetry, we would like to conclude this section by suggesting that the act of witnessing is the artist’s most revolutionary act. Ernest Hemingway, who is one of Siddique’s greatest literary influences, reportedly once said “write hard and true about what hurts”, and we would argue this is exactly what this British−South Asian poet does in the two poems.

A Specific

In Memory of Mohamed Bouazizi

Take your pick of these things:

A fruit seller and his stall

A city enforcement officer

A slap

A spit

The officer’s certain smile

These things:

A no

A yes

A something in the heart of the fruit seller

A desperate moment built on all the desperate moments

An ending

A beginning

A can of petrol

A match

A shadow of a fox cast by the flame

A torch of human dignity — for all the desperate moments

when we are pressed, pushed, oppressed

And it seems like there will never be an end to how things are

And we deny ourselves, collude with lies and money

And hurt others and ourselves in the name of fear and belonging

And we cannot believe in change

And know there is no truth in the words of democracy and state

And we know there is no ending

  — we’re just doing the best we can

And Mohamed says no, says yes, says enough when he is slapped

by a grinning cop one morning, who thinks she is untouchable,

who knows nothing of these things. Secure in how it always will be,

behind the numbers, behind generalities, behind bureaucracy,

behind the sheer lack of belief in our own hearts

that there is something in the human spirit,

  — a no, a yes, a reason, an ending, a beginning

Blue Water Lilies

In Memory of Sayed Bilal

In a room where no sound gets in or out

there is a scent of water lilies.

No sound must break the night air,

this night has been arranged to appear

to be just like any other night.

You try to live,

to not stand out,

not attract attention

but they know you,

they know us all.

They call you to Al Raml Police Station

to help them they say.

We become questions we dare not ask.

How many rooms are there in this world

hidden in the night?

Rooms from which no light may spill?

Rooms in which Sayed Bilal thinks of his wife

at home seven months pregnant

  she must be tired,

  she needs me to make dinner.

Thinks of his brother Ibrahim,

his mother who will have to receive his body.

Rooms scented with blue lotus

though they have never seen a flower.

Both poems © John Siddique 2013

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Our concern with the current situation in the Arab world in this Editorial is continued in the first of this issue’s essays, David Farrier’s (2013) “Washing Words: The Politics of Water in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah”, which examines water as a key area of dispute in the Israeli−Palestinian conflict. Farrier argues that Barghouti’s memoir constructs, via its metaphorical and metonymical processes, a “liquid vision of life in exile and in the occupied territories”. Moving from Palestine to London, Noemí Pereira-Ares’s (2013) article on “The Politics of Hijab in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” addresses the varieties of meanings and implications attached to the hijab and the practice of veiling in the text. Pereira-Ares examines how Ali’s novel engages with the sartorial choices of a number of different characters in complex ways and makes clothing (the protagonist Nazneen becomes a seamstress) a central metaphor for identity, religion, and culture. The novel’s positive vision of textuality as a model for variety and difference is also a valid approach to a novel like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which Michele Braun notes has been called a novel of “undemanding multiculturalism”. However, Braun’s (2013) essay, “The Mouseness of the Mouse: The Competing Discourses of Genetics and History in White Teeth” pays greater attention to the way the novel makes use of discourses of genetics to engage with ideas of fate and determinism. Braun refers to Brooks Landon’s remark that the late twentieth century is a world that “has itself grown science fictional” (Landon, 2002: xiii) and in his attention to space−time compression and neo-liberalism in Salman Rushdie’s Fury, Mike Frangos could be said to draw on a similar idea. Frangos’s (2013) “The Future of Disillusionment: Rushdie’s Fury and the Politics of Time” examines globalization’s metropolitan centres and the idea of the acceleration of daily life. In this text, the science fictional has become the quotidian.

Our next two articles in this issue deal particularly with the representation of women. Elizabeth Jackson’s (2013) article discusses representations of Muslim weddings and their aftermaths in two contemporary anglophone novels by Indian Muslim women writers: Shama Futehally’s Tara Lane (1993) and Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004). Jackson notes that the two texts suggest “the wide diversity of cultural practices even within the same (privileged) class of Indian Muslims”. Abigail Ward’s (2013) “Assuming the Burden of Memory: The Translation of Indian Indenture in Peggy Mohan’s Jahajin” focuses on how Mohan’s 2007 novel returns imaginatively to the neglected past history of Indian indenture in the Caribbean in order to suggest the way in which Indian women, in particular, have been edited out of official histories of both Trinidadian and Indian migration. Staying in the Caribbean, Ben Thomas Jefferson’s (2013) article, “The Sea as Place in Derek Walcott’s Poetry” examines the various ways in which Walcott’s oeuvre makes the claim that human habitation, settlement, or dominion are not the only criteria for defining place. Jefferson suggests that by “emphasizing the relationship between non-human life and place, Walcott constructs or reveals place as something that exists before imagined space”. Our final essay, Tim Woods’s (2013) “South African Literature in the Time of AIDS” demonstrates a transition in the body of South African writing representing HIV/AIDS from “a depressed, debilitating doom to a new defiant defence”. Woods claims that such work constitutes what he refers to as a “transformative intervention” in the public discourse of HIV/AIDS.