in La rivista di Arablit, a. XIV, n. 27, giugno 2024, pp. 149-154.

After almost sixty years from the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), intertextual references to Latin American “boom” literature are ubiquitous in contemporary Arabic fiction, and indeed contribute to defining its recent trends – especially those moving away from a broadly conceived realism. In contemporary Iraqi fiction, to consider one example where this non-realist trend is most salient, Muḥammad Ḫuḍayyir, one of the pioneers of the Iraqi fantastic, devotes two sections of his collection Ḥadāʾiq al-wuǧūh (The Gardens of the Faces, 2008) to Jorge Luís Borges and García Márquez1. More recently, Šahad al-Rāwī’s novel Sāʿat Baġdād (The Baghdad Clock, 2016) features extensive quotes from Cien años de soledad, while the most influential authors of the so-called Iraqi Gothic, Aḥmad Saʿdāwī and Ḥasan Blāsim, make constant reference to the Colombian writer in their meta-literary commentaries. In Palestine, ʿAbbād Yaḥyà’s epic novel Rāmallāh (2021) is an extremely ambitious two-century chronicle of a city explicitly built on the model of Macondo, while the Moroccan writer ʿAbd al-Raḥim al-Ḫaṣṣār has recently brought together magical realism and myisticism in his novel Ǧazīrat al-bukāʾ al-ṭawīl (The Island of Long Weeping, 2022), that revolves around Muṣṭafà al-Azammūrī / Estebanico, a slave member of the Spanish expedition of Álvar Núñez that travelled through Northern Mexico and the would-be Southern US in the 16th century.

To address the large set of direct or indirect intertextual ties between Arabic fiction and Latin American literature, criticism often employs categories (most notably that of magical realism), that are somewhat abstracted and considered part of a generic global postcolonial heritage. In this context, Abdel Nasser’s monograph Latin American and Arab Literature provides a long-overdue framework for grounding the study of the contacts and exchanges between Latin American and Arabic literature. A book-length comparative essay delving equally into primary sources in Spanish and Arabic, Latin American and Arab Literature aims at building a comprehensive account of the transcontinental, rather than global, routes between the two domains. Drawing from Franco Moretti’s definition of a centre and a periphery of world-literary systems, Abdel Nasser defines the geographical scope of her study as a relation between two peripheral or semi-peripheral domains of the world-literary map. For the author, studying this relation calls for overcoming postcoloniality as a theoretical framework, for two main reasons. On the one hand, postcolonial approaches focus on the coloniser-colonised axis and leave underexplored the horizontal, material ties between areas of the Global South. On the other hand, postcolonial studies foster an asymmetric chronology in which Latin America, where the decolonisation process started earlier, is generally overlooked to favour «the nations represented at Bandung» [p. 10]. To frame her South-South approach historically, Abdel Nasser draws mainly from Third-Worldist networks, especially from the legacy of tricontinentalism (from the name of the Tricontinental Conference held in Havana in 1966). For the author, these internationalist solidarity networks form the background of transcontinental (rather than world-literary) intertextual exchanges. Thinking through the legacy of tricontinentalism allows Abdel Nasser to reconsider both older phenomena like Orientalism and Arab migration to Latin America, as well as the most recent literary links between the two domains.
The book’s structure reflects Abdel Nasser’s horizontalist approach, addressing Latin American and Arab primary sources symmetrically. The first two chapters focus on Latin American novels that narrate human mobility between the two continents. Chapter One is devoted to Colombia, one of the main destinations of Arab migration in the late 18th century. The author shows how García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981) draws from orientalist imagery to characterise its Arab protagonist, Santiago Nasar. Santiago is depicted as the prototypical member of a community that has not fully integrated, and whose violence is feared by part of the population [p. 24]. In Abdel Nasser’s discussion, Crónica de una muerte anunciada, with its ambivalent mixture of Orientalism and Third-Worldism, represents a sort of “case zero” of contact between the two literary fields. The second part of the chapter leads us to contemporaneity and follows the opposite path of migration. Possibly of Arab descent himself, Héctor Abad Faciolince uses humour to deconstruct orientalist tropes in his account of a real visit to Cairo, Oriente empieza en el Cairo (The Orient Begins in Cairo, 2002). Abad Faciolince’s travelogue plays with expectations about the colonial subtext of a “journey to the Orient”. Yet, despite indulging in exoticising stereotypes, the narrator never fully complies with the colonizer’s gaze and rather draws a comparison between Egypt and civil-war Colombia, in which horizontality and solidarity can emerge.
Chapter Two focuses on two authors who developed an organic relationship with Morocco. Profoundly influenced by Paul Bowles, Guatemalan author Rodrigo Rey Rosa travelled to Tangier, where he set his La orilla africana (The African Shore). Abdel Nasser’s reading effectively shows how Rey Rosa’s Tangier works as the “other shore” for both the Atlantic (and Central America) and the Mediterranean. Yet while the issue of migration to Spain tells of a hierarchical form of bordering, seen from the Latin American protagonist’s point of view, the Moroccan city becomes a sinister mirror for contemporary Guatemala. The second work discussed in the chapter is the five-volume series Quinteto de Mogador (The Mogador Quintet, 1992), by Mexican Alberto Ruy Sánchez. The quintet is set in an imaginary version of contemporary Essaouira, with premodern Arabic literature as a main intertextual reference. In her discussion of the novel, Abdel Nasser addresses the representation of gender through the lenses of what she terms “horizontal Orientalism”: Ruy Sánchez’s «other shore» creates a «relation of affinity that is nonetheless expressed through the Orientalist treatment of an Arab woman» [p. 70]. The close reading of these two novels foregrounds and connects the horizontal moments that “jam” the expectations about subalternity in exotic encounters.
The remaining three chapters of the book discuss Arabic texts in dialogue with Latin American literature. Chapter Three is the most theoretically dense of the monograph, and centres on the issue of García Marquez’s legacy in Arab literature. The chapter compares García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad with Naǧīb Maḥfūz’s Layālī alf laylah (Arabian Nights and Days, 1982), and the already mentioned Crónica de una muerte anunciada with Ilyās Ḫūrī’s Maǧmaʿ al-asrār (The Box of Secrets, 1994). The discussion of Maḥfūẓ’s departure from social realism in Layālī alf laylah allows Abdel Nasser to tackle the issue of magical realism and its lasting influence on contemporary Arabic literature. Maḥfūẓ’s explicit admiration for García Márquez, and his use of the fantastic throughout the novel pose the problem of the Latin American specificity of the term “magical realism”, which originates from Alejo Carpentier’s definition of real maravilloso (“marvellous real”) to express the intermixture of European and indigenous epistemes in the Caribbean. Yet Abdel Nasser relies less on strictly literary categories (magical realism is defined both as “genre” and “style”), than on their political import. At its core, magical realism is conceived by the author as a challenge to “Western logic” concerning both representation and its political implications [p. 75]. In Maḥfūẓ’s Layālī alf laylah, Abdel Nasser argues, the magical and the reference to turāṯ converge in disrupting not just social realism but the reality of post-Nasserian Egypt. In other words, magical realism’s function is not to build an indigenous form of chronicle, as happens in García Márquez’s masterwork, but a political allegory. Looking at Ḫūrī’s Maǧmaʿ al-asrār, the article addresses García Márquez’s legacy beyond the issue of magical realism. A primary actor in the publication of Latin American literature in Arabic translation, Ḫūrī’s novel is a counterpoint to Crónica de una muerte anunciada, revolving around a descendant of García Márquez’s Santiago Nasar. Putting the events of Crónica de una muerte anunciada along a broad history encompassing 19th-century religious tensions in the Mašriq and the Lebanese civil war, Ḫūrī deconstructs the orientalist depiction latent in the Colombian source text, suggesting a chronology shared by both continents.
Chapter Four goes back to the Third-Worldist framework outlined in the Introduction, focusing on the import of Latin American revolutionary iconography into Egyptian leftist and internationalist fiction. Abdel Nasser situates Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s visits to Egypt in 1959 and 1965 as one of the pivotal moments in the horizontal relationship between the two domains of the study. The figure of Che Guevara is central in Ṣunʿ Allāh Ibrāhīm’s Wardah (2000), where the eponymous protagonist, a guerrilla fighter in the Dhofar revolution, writes a diary openly inspired by the memoir of the Argentinian revolutionary. Ibrāhīm, Abdel Nasser points out, depicts the Latin American imagery as a fundamental pole of a revolutionary geography that connects “central” Egypt to “peripheral” Oman. The second part of the chapter addresses non-fictional work, Muḥammad Maḫzanǧī’s Laḥẓat ġaraq ǧazīrat al-ḥūt (The Moment of the Sinking of the Whale Island, 1998). Maḫzanǧī’s book is a literary memoir focusing on two visits to the URSS, one in 1986, shortly after the Chernobyl incident, and the other after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this case, the Latin American imagery inspires the book’s poetics rather than its content, as Maḫzanǧī explicitly recalls García Márquez’s La aventura de Miguel Littin clandestino en Chile (Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, 1986) as a politically committed and yet aesthetically developed form of reportage, the «emotional reconstruction of an adventure» [p. 127]. The kind of South-South solidarity that Abdel Nasser so vividly traces in her discussion surfaces even at the level of contents: when they are asked why they are not worried about buying vegetables in Kyiv immediately after the nuclear incident, Maḫzanǧī and his group of friends from the “three continents” joke about life expectancy in the Global South.
The fifth and last chapter addresses 21st-century Arabic literature’s intertextual relations with Latin American fiction. In Abdel Nasser’s historical frame, the new forms of migration from the MENA region entail a profound change in world-literary geography, reconfiguring the internationalist, transcontinental framework outlined in the previous chapters. While Latin American “boom” literature remains central to the contemporary canon, the author argues that Arabic literature «is no longer local» [p. 136], moving towards the centre and reaching greater visibility in (Spanish) translation. The two authors discussed in the chapter, Ḥasan Blāsim and Ǧabbār Yāsīn Ḥusayn (Jabbar Yassin Hussin) are Iraqi refugees living in Europe whose translated works are increasingly part of the debate around World Literature. Both reference a global literary canon in which Latin American literature is prominent. Ǧabbār Yāsīn Ḥusayn’s collection al-Qāriʾ al-baġdādī (The Reader from Baghdad, 1999) features a short story, Yawm Bwīnūs Āyrīs (The Day of Buenos Aires) that rewrites Jorge Luís Borges’s La busca de Averroés (Averroës’s Search 1947). The Borgesian Averroes is the object of subtle irony, a character so confined to the “orb of Islam” that he is unable to grasp the meaning of Aristotle’s tragedy and comedy. In Ḥusayn’s version of the story, Ibn Rušd wakes up after a dream in which he travels through time to modern-day Buenos Aires, where he meets Borges himself. From a metonym for untranslatability and immobility, Ibn Rušd becomes then a migrant figure that brings Latin American literature into his canon and simultaneously defamiliarises it. A similar nexus between Latin American “boom” authors and Arab migration is found in Ḥasan Blāsim’s short story Kawabīs Karlūs Fwīntīs (The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes), in which an Iraqi refugee living in Belgium takes on the great Mexican writer’s name in order both to bury his past and to avoid Islamophobia. The analysis of the story allows Abdel Nasser to redress the poetic Blāsim has defined wāqiʿiyyah kābūsiyyah (nightmare realism). What brings reality “beyond European logic”, as in magical realism, is not Carpentejo’s “marvellous real”. Rather, it is the haunting presence of the Global South’s traumas in migration and refuge. Hence, the different logic is not that of wonder, but that of nightmare, excess, and the Gothic.
Abdel Nasser’s selection of materials is extremely interesting, and her comparisons are effective in sketching out a rich history of literary exchanges between continents in the Global South. Her horizontalist approach remains cogent throughout, the close reading brings to the fore the moments of direct contact between the two domains in their ambivalence and complexity. The most profound passages, in this respect, are those devoted to Arab rewritings of Latin American fictional works, Ḫūrī’s Maǧmaʿ al-asrār and Ḥusayn’s Yawm Bwīnūs Āyrīs: analysing these dialogic works, the author shows the political implications, as well as the aesthetic possibilities of engaging with “boom” literature from the Global South. In its more distant and “Morettian” argumentations, the book’s most evident contribution to comparative scholarship lies in its diachronic scope, which allows the author to devise a coherent chronology for wide and symmetrical comparison. This comprehensive framework is overall the book’s great credit, making it a reference work for every scholar wishing to engage with more punctual, and maybe more nebulous, zones of contact between Latin American and Arabic literatures.
The only objection that could be moved to Abdel Nasser’s historical and horizontalist approach is her lack of interest in translation, especially from Spanish to Arabic. While the various “waves” of translation from Spanish into Arabic are occasionally mentioned, little information is provided as to the actors and the literary forms of this wave. Translators’ role as gatekeepers would probably emerge as a fundamental factor in the South-South dynamics explored by the study (I am thinking for instance of a figure like the Palestinian translator Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAlmānī) and provide a crucial basis for intertextual analysis. Since the book moves fluently between Spanish and Arabic texts, discussing individual translation choices and/or problems could also enrich the individual close readings. Yet these issues could hopefully be addressed by further explorations in this promising line of research.

1On this collection see F. Caiani; C. Cobham, Muḥmmad Khuḍayyir from Saddam Hussein to the gardens of the south: writing the self in postcolonial Basra, in “Middle Eastern Literatures”, 22, 1 (2019), pp. 1-22.