[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Akashic Books on the theme of Middle East Noir. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Edited and Translated by Salar Abdoh
About the Book
About the Editor
In the Media/Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Edited by Iman Humaydan
About the Book
About the Editor
In the Media/Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Edited by Yassin Adnan
About the Book
About the Editor
In the Media/Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Edited by Samuel Shimon
About the Book
About the Editor
In the Media/Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
_________________________
Edited and Translated by Salar Abdoh
About the Book
“There is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran’s case is no different—except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic. The city enforces its own morality police, and there are regular public hangings of drug dealers and thieves. Because of this, there is a raging sense of a split personality about the place—the imposed propriety of the mosque rubbing against the hidden (and more often not so hidden) rhythms of the real city...There is always an element of the end of the world about this place. A feeling of being once removed from the edge of the precipice. Elsewhere I have called it the ‘Seismic City’—the seismic sanctuary. All of this will end one day. Yes. And maybe sooner than later. And when it does, by God, we will miss it.” - Salah Abdoh
Brand-new stories by: Gina B. Nahai, Salar Abdoh, Lily Farhadpour, Azardokht Bahrami, Yourik Karim-Masihi, Vali Khalili, Farhaad Heidari Gooran, Aida Moradi Ahani, Mahsa Mohebali, Majed Neisi, Danial Haghighi, Javad Afhami, Sima Saeedi, Mahak Taheri, and Hossein Abkenar.
About the Editor
Salar Abdoh was born in Iran, and splits his time between Tehran and New York City, where he is codirector of the Creative Writing MFA Program at the City College of New York. He is the author of The Poet Game and Opium. His essays and short stories have appeared in various publications, including the New York Times, BOMB, Callaloo, Guernica, and on the BBC. He is the recipient of the NYFA Prize and the National Endowment for the Arts award. He is the editor of Tehran Noir and the author of Tehran at Twilight, his latest novel.
In the Media/ Praise for Tehran Noir
Vali Khalili’s story “Fear Is the Best Keeper of Secrets” has been named a finalist for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award for Best P.I. Short Story!
Named a Notable Translation of 2014 by World Literature Today
“This entry in Akashic’s noir series takes the gritty sensibilities born out of American film and fiction to Tehran.”
“A tour de force not to be missed.”
“Tehran Noir is not only a solid crime collection, but an illuminating look into day-to-day life in the Middle East, with religious and political implications galore, as well as racial tensions bubbling just beneath the surface . . . The stories in Tehran Noir aren’t always easy to read, but they are engaging in the extreme.”
“The 15 stories in this collection also come from a stellar and diverse cast of Iranian writers. . . . A collection such as this is able to bring Iran to life for the foreign reader in a way other fiction and non-fiction cannot. . . . Superb.”
“Tehran Noir is a worthy addition to Akashic’s collection . . . bloody and beautiful.”
“Tehran Noir will prove fascinating reading to anyone with an interest in Iran. It will be equally intriguing for a reader who is simply curious about a theocratic society in the 21st century, or what became of a vibrant, cosmopolitan society after the fall of its dynastic ruler.”
Interview with editor Salar Abdoh on Voices of the Middle East and North Africa.
Additional Information
October 2014
280 Pages
$15.95
Paper ISBN: 9781617753008
Where to Purchase
Akashic Books
IndieBound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Excerpt
© 2015 by Salar Abdoh, used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com)
Introduction
The Seismic City
Back in the day, so my mother tells me, on the rare occasions when my father took her along to one of the cabarets of old Tehran, the tough guys—the lutis—the bosses, the knife brawlers, and the traditional wrestlers, would lay out their suits and jackets on the floor of the place for my mother to walk on. It was a gesture of supreme respect for one of their own. And it says a lot about a Tehran that simply doesn’t exist anymore—a Tehran of chivalry and loyalty, a place where allegiances meant something, where friendships harked back to a classical world of warriors from the great Persian epic, the Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), and to the medieval Islamic notion of the ayyar brotherhood in Iran and Mesopotamia where the bandit and the common folks’ champion were one and the same, and where every man followed a code of honor set in stone.
Or else, all of this may simply be wishful nostalgia for something that didn’t exist even back then. Back then means a time before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. That watershed event that sits in the mind of every Iranian as a chasm, a sort of year one after which everything strange became law. The brutal eight years of war with Iraq—the longest conventional war of the twentieth century—the persistent pressures from America in its own everlasting twilight war with Iran, the official corruption of the new ruling class, and the snowballing inflation turned just about everyone into a “night worker.” Living an honest life was no longer an option. Prostitution, theft, an explosion in the drug trade and addiction, the selling off of raw materials and historic national treasures—plus endemic, in-your-face bribery—became a way of life. Meanwhile Tehran grew and grew, until it was one of the megacities of the world, now pushing at fifteen million stray souls—a leviathan that can barely stand itself, a purgatory of unmoving traffic, relentless pollution, and noise and anger and inequity, surrounded by some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the world.
Tehran, then, is a juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty that breaks the heart. A place where not one but two inept dynasties came to miserable ends, and where, arguably, the third most important revolution in history (after the French and the Russian) was started. It is also the city where Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met to divvy up the world while the flames of WWII were still burning. And it was where one of the CIA’s first manufactured coups (with the prodding and support of the British—who else?) against a democratically elected government was put into motion, thus ushering in years of a dictatorship which in turn was swept aside by the first real fury of fundamentalist Islam, a harbinger of the world we now live in and call post–9/11.
In other words, there is something of both the absolutely spectacular and positively disgraceful about Tehran. But most writers around the world are inclined to think that their own sprawling metropolis is the capital of every imaginable vice and crime, of impossible love and tenderness and cruelty and malice in measures that seldom exist anywhere else. For me, Tehran’s case is no different—except that there really is a difference here. The city may be a hothouse of decadence, a den of inequity, all that. But it still exists under the watchful eye of a very unique entity, the Islamic Republic. The city enforces its own morality police, and there are regular public hangings of drug dealers and thieves. Because of this, there is a raging sense of a split personality about the place—the imposed propriety of the mosque rubbing against the hidden (and more often not so hidden) rhythms of the real city. At the start of each day, and particularly in late evenings, Tehran remains a schizophrenic beast always at odds with itself, always trying to figure what will be the next design for it that won’t fit, or fit horribly.
None of this is of course helped by the fact that Iran happens to be one of the biggest drug conduits on the planet. The vast Afghan opium crop, transformed into heroin, needs its transit routes for the European markets, while Iran itself remains a major supplier of methamphetamines. The country and its slatternly capital sit at the crossroads of the world—to the north is the specter of Russia, ever daunting, to the west there is Turkey and the gates of Europe, to the south is the Persian Gulf, the Arab lands, and the immensity that is Africa, and to the southeast and east is India and the rest of the great Asian continent. Each of these have had their say in Iran at some point. Each has left its indelible mark. And you only have to traverse the country to experience the dozen languages and as many shades of color and appearance—all of them inevitably converging on Tehran, impregnating it and aborting it, lending it life and destroying it, and, sometimes, praying for its redemption.
You would think that such fertile terrain would be the stuff of powerful fiction from the past. Not so. And the reason why so little of it all has been tapped thus far is something worth noting here: censorship. That ogre which hounded Iranian writers before the revolution and even more so afterward. Before 1979, there were two types of censorship, and at opposite ends of the political spectrum. One was the predictable and narcissist censorship of the king’s court, and the other the knee-jerk braying of the leftist/Communist intellectuals who believed that any written work that was not in the service of the “masses” was bourgeois and of no consequence and therefore in the royal court’s favor. This boded particularly unwell for serious genre fiction of any sort—which is why, for example, a minor gem like Qasem Hasheminejad’s An Elephant in the Dark went utterly ignored.
Nevertheless, with the advent of the Islamic Republic, what had mostly been a thorn in the side of writers and their creative lives ballooned into absurd and unfathomable proportions. Consider this typical example of the censor’s verdict regarding a sentence in a simple children’s manuscript: There is a conversation between an apple and a pear. The apple tells the pear, “Come and take a bite of my red cheeks and see how delicious I am.” The Ministry of Culture and Guidance’s ruling on the sentence: “Too sexy. Too provocative. Must be removed.” From this small example you can imagine what Iranian writers have had to contend with for the past thirty-some years. Imagine having to write in an alternate universe where there is to be no mention of sex, little genuine interiority of character, no delving into social issues, no politics, and nothing that could convey a society at some internal conflict with itself. In such a universe, if a writer does not kill himself first, or instead simply gives up and becomes a cab driver (I’ve known cases of both), he might resort to one of three modes of writing that have, unfortunately, a fighting chance to pass the censor’s obtuse gaze: 1) fluffy and vague symbology meant to say one thing and mean another; 2) derivative and tired magical realism that has every other character and their mother growing wings and flying to who knows where; 3) thin, bloodless texts of angst and self-absorption with little context or reference to the troubled world outside.
In such an atmosphere, to even begin to attempt the noir mode—which at its best is in complete, albeit harsh, engagement with the world—is an act of courage, a political act. Which is why the writers drawn for this collection happen to be those who have tasted the city and know its wounds. They depict a Tehran at its most raw and least forgiving—Sima Saeedi and Majed Neisi in their inimitable portrayals of life after a war or revolution; Mahsa Mohebali and Danial Haghighi unmasking underground life in the Islamic Republic; Farhaad Heidari Gooran, Yourik Karim-Masihi, and Lily Farhadpour showing the tough, multicultural reality of a pullulating city bursting with prejudice; Azardokht Bahrami and Javad Afhami revealing the lugubrious weight of religion; Mahak Taheri and Aida Moradi Ahani exhibiting the systematic and inescapable corruption in the chambers of power; and Vali Khalili and Hossein Abkenar displaying the grit and harshness that is the quintessence of the capital. (Since I translated all but two of the stories from Farsi into English, I’ve included a glossary of Persian terms at the back of the book.)
In each story you can find more than one and often all of the themes I just mentioned. But Tehran’s narrative would not be quite complete if we did not cross oceans in at least one tale to land smack in the middle of Southern California. In Los Angeles, to be exact. In the Los Angeles Valley, to be even more exact. After the revolution, the exodus of many Iranians took them all over the globe. But nowhere did they flock to with more verve and the sense of finding a home away from home than a city that is often dubbed Tehrangeles. LA, then, is where Gina B. Nahai’s story takes us—this other unwieldy Goliath of occasional instant riches but mostly shattered dreams, the noir city par excellence, where the two Tehrans finally converge. And it’s only right that they should, as both cities, Tehran and Los Angeles, sit on top of major tectonic fault lines. The clock is ticking for them. But who cares about dire predictions of earthquakes and eventual annihilation when there is real estate money to be made today? Who gives a damn about the day after tomorrow?
So take what you can get when you can get it. It is this sense of impermanence about a place, expected one day to be swallowed up whole and disappear, that drives the inhabitants of Tehran, my Tehran, to—as we say in Persian—press hard on the gas pedal. There is always an element of the end of the world about this city. A feeling of being once removed from the edge of the precipice. Elsewhere I have called it the “Seismic City”—the seismic sanctuary. All of this will end one day. Yes. And maybe sooner than later. And when it does, by God, we will miss it.
Salar Abdoh
Tehran, Iran
July 2014
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Beirut Noir
Edited by Iman Humaydan
About the Book
“Beirut is a city of contradiction and paradox. It is an urban and rural city, one of violence and forgiveness, memory and forgetfulness. Beirut is a city of war and peace. This short story collection is a part of a vibrant, living recovery of Beirut. Beirut Noir recovers the city once again through writing, through the literary visions of its authors...
“From within this collection of stories, a general attitude toward Beirut emerges: the city is viewed from a position of critique, doubt, disappointment, and despair. The stories here show the vast maze of the city that can’t be found in tourist brochures or nostalgic depictions of Beirut that are completely out of touch with reality. Perhaps this goes without saying in a collection of stories titled Beirut Noir. But the ‘noir’ label here should be viewed from multiple angles, and it takes on many different forms in the stories. No doubt this is because it is imbricated in the distinct moments that Beirut has lived through and how they are depicted in the stories.” - Iman Humaydan (translated by Michelle Hartman)
Featuring brand-new stories by: Rawi Hage, Muhammad Abi Samra, Leila Eid, Hala Kawtharani, Marie Tawk, Bana Baydoun, Hyam Yared, Najwa Barakat, Alawiyeh Sobh, Mazen Zahreddine, Abbas Beydoun, Bachir Hilal, Zena El Khalil, Mazen Maarouf, and Tarek Abi Samra.
About the Editor
Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer, creative writing teacher, translator, editor/publisher, and journalist. Her novels B as in Beirut, Wild Mulberries, Other Lives, and The Weight of Paradise, all written in Arabic, have been translated and published internationally. She is the co-founder of the Lebanese chapter of PEN, and splits her time between Beirut and Paris. She is the editor of Beirut Noir.
In the Media/Praise for Beirut Noir
“Humaydan writes in her introduction to this haunting anthology that ‘all of the stories are somehow framed by the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from approximately 1974 until 1990. . . .’ The crimes in this Akashic noir volume are often submerged in the greater tragedy of a beautiful city constantly torn within and without by violence.”
“The stories’ individual approaches to noir are as diverse as the Beirut landscape, its residents and exiles.”
—Middle East Monitor
“In Beirut Noir, Iman Humaydan has selected a beautiful and often heartbreaking jigsaw portrait of its eponymous city. . . . These are writers, multiple generations of Beiruti, who live and breathe the neighborhoods of their capital, and each seems to care about even the worst of it. And there is occasional humor to be found in the darkest of its spaces. Beirut, as Humaydan explains in her introduction, is a ‘city that dances on its wounds.’ This is a book that transcends its place in a series and stands on its own as something terrific.”
“The Lebanese authors featured in the collection draw from a much broader palette of Beirut life, and, true to the genre, they tap into their city’s dark past and uncertain present. Some stories are absurd and humorous, but almost all are haunted in some way by a nagging memory, a war, a death.”
“The ArabLit count in 2014, which attempted to be global, was 7/40, or 17% by female authors. All of this excludes anthologies, which are more likely to be egalitarian. For instance, the excellent 2015 Beirut Noir anthology, ed. Iman Humaydan, featured more than half women’s work.”
“No book could possibly describe the different faces of 21st century Beirut better than Beirut Noir. This anthology of short stories by Lebanese writers living in different neighborhoods of Beirut covers the spectrum of the city’s paradoxical moods and colors—urban, rural, glorious, broken, traditional and liberal Beirut. Edited by Iman Humaydan Younes and including stories by Rawi Hage, Muhammad Abi Samra, Leila Eid and others, Beirut Noir forsakes nostalgia and exposes the city with crude honesty. This book will not sugar coat Beirut, but will show you the city in all its vulnerability and let you fall in love with it as it truly is.”
“The fifteen new stories of Beirut Noir were assembled by Lebanese novelist Iman Humaydan and deftly translated by Michelle Hartman. They were written in all of Lebanon’s three main languages—Arabic, English, and French—and they approach the noir genre in markedly different ways. But they are united by loss: their characters have been left behind after so many countrymen have fled for the Lebanese countryside, Canada, the Gulf, the United States, South America, and Europe.”
Additional Information
December 2015
288 Pages
$15.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781617753442
Where to Purchase
Akashic Books
IndieBound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Excerpt
© 2015 by Iman Humaydan, used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com).
Introduction
Violence of Loneliness, Violence of Mayhem
Beirut is a city of contradiction and paradox. It is an urban and rural city, one of violence and forgiveness, memory and forgetfulness. Beirut is a city of war and peace. This story collection is a part of a vibrant, living recovery of Beirut. Beirut Noir recovers the city once again through writing, through the literary visions of its authors.
Assembling this collection was an ambitious experiment for me; editing it was fascinating and full of challenges. It is by no means easy to bring together a book of fifteen short stories by writers with such different perspectives on Beirut. Fourteen Lebanese writers, and one Palestinian writer born and raised in Beirut, contributed to the book you are holding today. Taken together, their stories reflect the city’s underworld and seedy realities. Each story is only one tiny piece of a larger mosaic; they all coalesce here to offer us a more complete picture of the city.
There are so many clichés we must confront when examining Beirut. It is difficult to write about it without describing it as a city that never sleeps, as the center of life, and also as a city that is the companion of death. These two descriptions are inextricably linked, though they may seem contradictory. Those of us who live here and know the city well recognize these powerful characterizations that we hold in our collective imagination. Elsewhere, I once described Beirut as “the city that dances on its wounds.”
We know that Lebanon is a country with a long and rich history of diverse cultures and religious traditions, as well as a wealth of languages. Every school in Lebanon teaches three languages—Arabic, English, and French; I kept this trilingual background in mind when choosing the stories for this collection. Michelle Hartman, who has previously translated two of my novels, meticulously translated these stories from both Arabic and French into English; there are also three stories originally written in English.
From within this collection of stories, a general attitude toward Beirut emerges: the city is viewed from a position of critique, doubt, disappointment, and despair. The stories reveal a vast maze of a city that can’t be found in tourist brochures or nostalgic depictions that are completely out of touch with reality. Perhaps this goes without saying in a collection of stories titled Beirut Noir. But the “noir” label here should be viewed from multiple angles, as it takes on many different forms in the stories. No doubt this is because it overlaps with the distinct moments that Beirut has lived through.
All of the stories are somehow framed by the Lebanese civil war, which lasted from approximately 1974 until 1990. The war here serves as a boundary between the memories of the authors and the memories of their characters. Indeed, whether the stories include time frames during, before, or after the war, all of them invoke this period somehow—even if only to recall other times of which nothing remains.
Some of the stories explore the memory of people wounded by Beirut during the war, who have not yet healed. These works include Mohamad Abi Samra’s “Without a Trace,” Leila Eid’s “Beirut Apples,” Marie Tawk’s “Sails on the Sidewalk,” Abbas Beydoun’s “The Death of Adil Uliyyan,” Bachir Hilal’s “Rupture,” and Hala Kawtharani’s “The Thread of Life.” Other stories are told by new and fresh voices born amidst the violence of this war. These brim with playfulness within their dark visions, such as Hyam Yared’s “Eternity and the Hourglass,” Najwa Barakat’s “Under the Tree of Melancholy,” and “Dirty Teeth” by a young author writing under the name of The Amazin’ Sardine. Some suggest the complexities of class issues in a society marked by sectarianism, like Tarek Abi Samra’s “The Bastard” or Mazen Maarouf’s “The Boxes.”
While the tales might be playful, the characters’ lives can be unstable, and they often have no confidence whatsoever in the future. Despite this, we laugh darkly while reading Bana Beydoun’s “Pizza Delivery”—its melancholia takes us right to the limit of what we can find humorous. This is also true of Rawi Hage’s “Bird Nation,” as well as the stories by Hyam Yared and Bachir Hilal. Beirut is like that. So much gloom and wasted lives; we weep even as we laugh. In Beirut, chaos is a way of life.
This is not all there is to Beirut though. The city is still crowded and on the move; indeed, it can be boisterous at night. But these crowds and mayhem are not the same as those during the day. Beirut nights are different. It’s as if in the absence of day, the city is freed from its severity. Nighttime somehow softens its harshness and anxiety; the city can be seen in its lights reflecting off the sea, its expansive sweep under the nearby mountains, and its truly beautiful vistas. The contributions from Bana Beydoun and Mazen Zahreddine offer portraits of the city at night, through the lives of young people born after the war. This is a Beirut where the violence of loneliness and the violence of mayhem come together.
Chaos reigns here—it is the source not only of violence but also the diversity and dynamism of every aspect of the city. Most stories in the collection confirm this—but especially those by Rawi Hage, Zena el Khalil, and Alawiya Sobh.
And yet time is precious in Beirut. Hyam Yared’s story, centered around an hourglass, is a reflection of the fear people have of time flowing through our fingers and being lost, just as Lebanese people lost fifteen years of their lives during the civil war.
Through the eyes of the dead child who is the eponymous narrator of el Khalil’s “Maya Rose,” we see a panoramic scene of Beirut’s coastline from above the Corniche by the lighthouse and beyond. This story, like the entirety of Beirut Noir, allows us to glimpse beautiful things in Beirut, even as it wakes and sleeps in violence and disorder.
Beirut lives through time, always oscillating between war and peace; these moments make Beirut Noir’s scenery as naked as the edge of a knife.
Iman Humaydan
Beirut, Lebanon
September 2015
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Marrakech Noir
Edited by Yassin Adnan
About the Book
“Despite their variety, these stories remain rooted on Moroccan soil—allowing the contributing authors to bring readers closer to the linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic reality of Marrakech, whether Arab, Amazigh, African, or Muslim, as well as its historic Mellah—the Jewish Quarter.
“Here is the capital of tourism, the city of joy and sadness, the city of simple living, the city linked to international capitals through daily flights, the city of the new European community, a winter resort for French retirees, and a refuge for immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Marrakech is also known for its sex tourism and a new generation of crimes. All of these aspects of the city are reflected in these stories, no matter how sordid. The authors haven’t written only stories, they have tried to write Marrakech as well. Together their stories present a comprehensive portrait of the city, its sadness, violence, tension, and darkness, without neglecting its joyful spirit.” - Yassin Adnan (translated by Mbarek Sryfi)
Brand-new stories by: Fouad Laroui, Allal Bourqia, Abdelkader Benali, Mohamed Zouhair, Mohamed Achaari, Hanane Derkaoui, Fatiha Morchid, Mahi Binebine, Mohamed Nedali, Halima Zine El Abidine, My Seddik Rabbaj, Yassin Adnan, Karima Nadir, Taha Adnan, and Lahcen Bakour.
About the Editor
Yassin Adnan was born in 1970 in Safi, Morocco, but grew up in Marrakech where he still lives. He is best known for his weekly cultural program Masharif on Moroccan television. He has published four collections of poetry and four books of short stories, along with a nonfiction volume entitled Marrakech: Open Secrets, with Saad Sarhane. His novel Hot Maroc, which takes place in Marrakech, was nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He is the editor of Marrakech Noir.
In the Media/Praise for Marrakech Noir
“Armchair travelers will relish this collective look at Marrakech through the eyes of those who know its people and culture well.”
“Marrakech Noir . . . stands out for its sense of humour, ranging from screwball to wry . . . The 15 stories in Marrakech Noir are translated from Arabic, French and Dutch, and the crimes within are suited to a city where extreme wealth and poverty brush shoulders. There are women fleecing men, youths fleecing elders, guides fleecing tourists, and stories where everyone is trying to cheat everyone else . . . And what better way to get to know a city than to meet its criminals?”
—The National (UAE)
“As Adnan warns in his charming introduction, this is an unusually joy and humor-filled noir collection, although it also has its share of murders, accidents, abuse, and theft.”
“Marrakech is known as Morocco’s ‘joyful city,’ and as editor of the collection Yassin Adnan details in his marvelous introduction to the anthology, it was at first difficult to gather enough stories to fill this volume in a country with no tradition of noir. Luckily for readers, the joyful city had enough scandals, smugglers, and other sordid tales to inspire writers to pay homage to the complexities of their city through crime writing.”
—CrimeReads, Included in August’s Best International Crime Fiction
“Thanks to all of this diversity and difference found in just one place, Marrakech supplies everyone with what they’re looking for. The work, as a whole, does a stellar job at showcasing the city’s importance, influence, and cultures . . . Whether you’ve been to Marrakech or not, this anthology promises to take you there.”
“Edited by Yassin Adnan, this powerful collection of diverse and unique tales dives into a Marrakech mostly unknown by outsiders. The stories paint an in-depth portrait of a city and traverse the spectrum of emotions, from joyful to sadistic.”
“Marrakech Noir is unreservedly recommended.”
Included in ArabLit’s 5 to Look for in August 2018
“Marrakech Noir, ed. Yassin Adnan, is the third Arab city to join the Akashic Books series, following Beirut Noir and published simultaneously with Baghdad Noir.”
—Bulaq (Podcast)
Additional Information
August 2018
256 pages
$15.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781617754739
Where to Purchase
Akashic Books
IndieBound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Excerpt
© 2018 by Yassin Adnan, used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com).
Introduction
City of Joy and Grit
When I agreed to edit Marrakech Noir, I didn’t realize that I had just stepped into a well-laid trap. Marrakech—al-Hamra, the Red City, as Moroccans call it—has been linked to the color red since the Almoravid ruler Yusuf Ibn Tashfin founded the city in 1062. How could I change its color today? And to black, of all colors! For the city is red, and the people of Marrakech pray night and day to protect it from darkness, despair, and moodiness.
No one but palm trees remember that remote past, when bandits hid behind their slender trunks, waiting to ambush passing caravans. Whenever the convoys of al-Massamida tribes reached the place now known as Marrakech, they would whisper morkosh to each other in muffled fear, which meant walk fast in their language. According to some stories, this is where the city’s name came from. But over the centuries the name has lost much of these dark connotations.
Moroccans today also call Marrakech “The Joyful City.” The city is pledged to joy in all its forms, and the inhabitants actively seek it out. The city’s days are bright and its nights are well-lit. Marrakechis are willing to read every type of story about the city—except those that are garbed in black. Even the storytellers of Jemaa el-Fnaa, the city’s leading narrators, have always avoided dark tales in their enchanting halqas.
I used to frequent Jemaa el-Fnaa as a child, and I enjoyed listening to Gnaoua music as I rushed past snake charmers. Monkeys never appealed to me, and neither did the dancers and singers, but I would sometimes linger to watch an uneven boxing match, like a flyweight pitted against a cruiserweight. Sometimes girls faced off against boys, and many times the boys suffered a resounding defeat. But only the storytellers truly captivated me—stories such as The Thousand and One Nights, al-Azaliya, al-Antariyah, and Hilaliya. As soon as I spotted the so-called Doctor of Pests, one of my favorite storytellers, staggering toward one of the square’s corners, I would drop everything and run to him. For me, he was the biggest star of the square. When he would disappear, I missed him. I knew that because of his addiction and his penchant for drinking in public he could be arrested at any time. When he would return, I would always ask him: “Where have you been, Doc?”
“I was in Hollanda,” the doctor would reply quietly, using the Arabic name for the Netherlands. Thanks to the doctor, Hollanda became a euphemism for prison. The doctor once vanished from his halqa for many months—and when he reappeared again, I welcomed him with the same eagerness. That time, he claimed he had been in America. “I was working for the American army,” he said.
No way, I thought. “That’s too much, Doc,” I said in disbelief.
“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean I was fighting beside them. God forbid! I was working with a special Moroccan delegation to prepare a salad for the American army,” he explained.
The doctor’s tall tale had attracted a great audience, all of whom hung onto his every word. The doctor told us that the American army was so big that they couldn’t find a bowl large enough to prepare the salad. So they drained a huge lake and dumped in truckloads of tomatoes, onions, and green peppers à la marocaine while fire trucks pumped gallons of olive oil into the mix. As for the salt, pepper, and cumin, helicopters sprinkled them onto the vegetables from above.
“And you, Doc? What was your part in this fantasy?” I asked.
The doctor rebuked me with a look before he continued: “I had an essential role. They gave me an inflatable boat. I rowed across the lake and radioed the helicopters. This area needs more salt, I’d say, and the helicopter would respond to my order and add salt. This area needs pepper, I’d say, and so on.”
The Doctor of Pests, the most famous entertainer in Jemaa el-Fnaa, told this outlandish story so he wouldn’t have to confess that he had been behind bars. His storytelling helped him block out the dark memories of the prison and its guards.
Marrakechis can invent colorful stories to avoid the darkness of reality. The doctor thought it was important to protect his tale, and to preserve the joyfulness of the Marrakechi soul. My task with assembling this book, however, was to search for adventurers who could dive into the grit without any qualms.
One prominent Marrakech author refused, saying, “When you need a story about Marrakech, you’ll find me at your service. I can write about the secrets of the city, its dreams, and its scandals—but not about its crimes.”
Maybe he’s right, I thought to myself. This city is prone to scandals, not crimes. The Marrakechis never tire of recounting scandals. They tell these stories with enthusiasm. They add a lot of spice to past events. But they quickly forget the dark stories, for the Marrakechi impulse is to always remain joyful.
Most of the writers I approached were eager to participate in principle, but they all asked: “Why darkness? Why crimes?” The questions are legitimate. Morocco has no tradition of noir literature. Under King Hassan II, defamation took the place of investigation, and fabrication took the place of interrogation. Moroccans had to wait for the death of the king, who ruled the country with an iron fist, to read the first detective story, “The Blind Whale” by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, one year after he passed. In this way, we are similar to our neighbors in Spain, where crime fiction didn’t proliferate in earnest until after the death of Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco in 1975.
In the last two decades, Moroccans have written no more than thirty detective stories. They are all novels—not one single collection of short stories among them. For that reason, I seemed to be seducing Marrakechi authors into some kind of virgin land, an untouched wilderness, which would be the ultimate challenge to tame. Some authors refused to participate because they didn’t want to intrude upon a literary genre that they didn’t know. Others tried but failed, while a third group succeeded.
The contributing authors took inspiration from old crimes that the city had kept hidden behind its ancient gates, as well as crimes that have happened more recently due to the changes Marrakech has experienced as it becomes a global tourist destination. Prostitution appears alongside arbitrary detention, violence, and terrorism. Poverty, corruption, and betrayal factor in too, as well as tales drawn from the dark reality of psychiatric hospitals.
Despite their variety, these stories remain rooted on Moroccan soil—allowing the contributing authors, writing in Arabic, French, and Dutch, to bring readers closer to the linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic reality of Marrakech, whether Arab, Amazigh, African, or Muslim, as well as its historic Mellah—the Jewish Quarter. Here is the capital of tourism, the city of joy and sadness, the city of simple living, the city linked to international capitals through daily flights, the city of the new European community, a winter resort for French retirees, and a refuge for immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Marrakech is also known for its sex tourism and a new generation of crimes. All of these aspects of the city are reflected in these stories, no matter how sordid. The authors haven’t written only stories, they have tried to write Marrakech as well. Together their stories present a comprehensive portrait of the city, its sadness, violence, tension, and darkness, without neglecting its joyful spirit.
The stories take us into the ancient city to wander through Dar el-Basha and Riad Zitoun, from Bab Doukkala to Bab Ghmat, from Derb Dabachi to Derb Sidi Bouloukat. We pass through the ancient walls of Marrakech to the new neighborhoods which have grown since independence. Some have turned into pockets of poverty, like Sidi Youssef Ben Ali, and others have become middle-class enclaves, like Hay el-Massira or Hay Saada. One of the stories even takes us to Amerchich, both the psychiatric hospital and the nearby neighborhood that shares its name.
The place that no one can avoid in Marrakech, however, is Jemaa el-Fnaa—which is present in most of the stories. Either the story starts in Jemaa el-Fnaa or it ends there. Sooner or later, the reader finds him or herself at an intersection where dark storytelling crosses this square full of life, which UNESCO has designated as part of humanity’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Jemaa el-Fnaa is a reliable source of joy—the square is a gathering place for singers and dancers, storytellers and charlatans, buffoons and dream snatchers, monkeys and snake charmers, fortune-tellers and women with henna-stained hands. Every evening the square transforms into the biggest open restaurant in the Arab world. Who would dare to follow these dark elements in the middle of such a joyous place? This, then, is what has made Marrakech Noir such a challenge for an editor, and for all the contributors as well. I will leave it for the reader to decide if we have succeeded.
Yassin Adnan
Marrakech, Morocco
June 2018
Translated from Arabic by Mbarek Sryfi
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Baghdad Noir
Edited by Samuel Shimon
About the Book
“While all Iraqis will readily agree that their life has always been noir, the majority of the stories in Baghdad Noir are set in the years following the American invasion of 2003, though one story is set in 1950 and three are set in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet it is this recent history of Iraq—over the last few decades—that serves to inform its present . . . Cementing the destruction of Iraqi life was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But that was hardly the end of Iraq’s noir story. In April 2003, the US invasion, though it precipitated the end of Saddam’s dictatorial rule, killed off any possibility of a secular, modern Iraq once and for all.
“Taken as a whole, the stories in Baghdad Noir testify to the enduring resilience of the Iraqi spirit amid an ongoing, real-life milieu of despair that the literary form of noir can at best only approximate. Yet the contributions here manage to hold their own as individual stories, where the rich traditions of intersecting cultures transcend the immediate political reality—even while being simultaneously informed by it. Much like the diverse tapestry of cultures that join together on the banks of the Tigris to form the City of Peace, Baghdad Noir reveals that there’s nothing monolithic or ordinary about the voices of its writers.” - Samuel Shimon
Brand-new stories by: Sinan Antoon, Ali Bader, Mohammed Alwan Jabr, Nassif Falak, Dheya al-Khalidi, Hussain al-Mozany, Layla Qasrany, Hayet Raies, Muhsin al-Ramli, Ahmed Saadawi, Hadia Said, Salima Salih, Salar Abdoh, and Roy Scranton.
About the Editor
Samuel Shimon was born into an Assyrian family in Iraq in 1956. He is the cofounder of Banipal, the renowned international magazine of contemporary Arab literature in English translation, and the founder and editor of the popular Arabic literary website Kikah. His autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris was published in five languages, and he edited Beirut39, an anthology of new Arabic writing. He is the editor of Baghdad Noir.
In the Media/Praise for Baghdad Noir
“Among them these writers encompass, if not a Baghdad entire, then at least a Baghdad of diverse experiences and perspectives, and absolutely a Baghdad focused on the Arabic world and not the Western.”
“This anthology’s status as perhaps the first collection of Iraqi crime fiction ever published makes it a landmark.”
“Including literary heavyweights such as Ahmed Saadawi, whose novel Frankenstein in Baghdad was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, Baghdad Noir offers a unique opportunity to explore the inventive genius of various authors and to read haunting stories set in a rich and diverse city.”
“Baghdad Noir is a monumental achievement for Akashic’s long-running Noir series. The collection goes so far beyond the Iraq most of us have been exposed to over the last twenty years and offers up a vision of this important world city in all its complexity and humanity. Crime fiction may not have a long tradition in Iraqi literature, but the authors assembled here by editor Samuel Shimon embrace the finest noir traditions by shining a critical, incisive light on their city, ravaged by war and discord but full of moments of life and hope, some fulfilled, others crushed. This is a vital book, in every sense of the word.”
—CrimeReads, included in The Best International Crime Fiction of 2018
“Characters in this collection are frequently on the receiving end of unpleasant epiphanies. And as this engaging group of stories amply demonstrates, betrayal — whether by authorities, religious leaders, neighbors, colleagues, or liberators — is a subject that Iraqis know all too well.”
“Most of the 14 entries in what the editor believes is probably the first collection of Iraqi crime fiction to focus on the aftermath of the 2003 American invasion are by contributors, 10 of them Iraqi, who will be unknown to U.S. readers.”
—Publishers Weekly, Fall 2018 Announcements
“The overall effect of this gathering of stories is kaleidoscopic: shifting fragments that, coming together in the collection, create a sense of Baghdad’s uneasily beating heart . . . It is a superbly multidimensional, many-voiced, defiant collection.”
—Banipal
“Characters in this collection are frequently on the receiving end of unpleasant epiphanies. And as this engaging group of stories amply demonstrates, betrayal—whether by authorities, religious leaders, neighbors, colleagues, or liberators—is a subject that Iraqis know all too well.”
—The National, UAE
“While each new addition to the Akashic World Noir series includes a moody image of the volume’s setting, Baghdad Noir, with its minaret shrouded in fog, is perhaps the best evocation of a city that’s undergone many a transformation, and an acknowledgment that this anthology (which took 10 years to come together) can only hint at the true experience of life in Baghdad.”
—CrimeReads, One of the Best Book Covers of 2018
“Baghdad Noir is a monumental achievement for Akashic’s long-running Noir series. The collection goes so far beyond the Iraq most of us have been exposed to over the last twenty years and offers up a vision of this important world city in all its complexity and humanity . . . This is a vital book, in every sense of the word.”
—CrimeReads, Included in August’s Best International Crime Fiction
“If any city qualifies for noir status today, it is strife-tattered Baghdad . . . The latest volume in Akashic’s ‘Noir series’ maintains its high level of quality but adds a fillip: How do you address crime in a society that no longer has working protocols to cope with even the worst forms of violence?”
—Library Journal Xpress Reviews
“One of the newest additions to the massively expanding series, Baghdad Noir, details the chilling accounts of murders, crimes and those involved on both sides of the capers in one of the most war-torn cities worldwide.”
Included in ArabLit’s 5 to Look For in August 2018
Additional Information
August 2018
224 pages
$15.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9781617753435
Where to Purchase
Akashic Books
IndieBound
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Excerpt
© 2018 by Samuel Shimon, used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com).
Introduction
Garden of Justice, City of Peace
In the aftermath of the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 and the period of the British Mandate, modern Iraq came to consist of three provinces: Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad. After Iraqis rose up against British rule, Faisal I was crowned king of the Hashemite monarchy, with Baghdad as its capital—a city with a long, rich history that was founded by the Abbasid caliph Abu Jaafar al-Mansur in the year 762, and which he named Madinat al-Salaam (City of Peace). Since that time, Baghdad has remained a nexus of Arab culture, commerce, and learning, positioned literally in the cradle of civilization itself on the banks of the mighty Tigris River, within the area that once comprised Mesopotamia. When the modern Iraqi state was established in 1921, its population was barely three million; today, the population is approaching forty million—with nearly ten million people residing in Baghdad alone, making it the second-largest city in the Arab world, behind Cairo.
Historically, Iraq has been one of the world’s most ethnically diverse countries. In the more distant past, before Arab tribes emerged on the scene, it was the land of the ancient Sumerians and Assyrians. Then, as the center of the Islamic Caliphate for a thousand years, it attracted various commingling nationalities. Until relatively recently, marriage by Iraqis to Circassians, Turkmens, Kurds, and Iranian people was commonplace, along with intermarriage between these groups. If we add to this the many Mughal, Turkic, and Iranian conquests of Iraq, and the innumerable pilgrimages to the Shia holy sites by various ethnic groups over the centuries, we are confronted with a picture that makes it impossible to countenance the idea of a singular national ethnic identity.
Although the Arabic language is dominant, Kurdish, Turkmen, Assyrian, Armenian, Syriac, and Persian are also spoken across the country. And these diverse ethnic and linguistic groups likewise reflect a multitude of religious beliefs. (Officially, Iraq remained a secular country from the establishment of the monarchy until the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime after the American invasion of April 2003.) The majority-Muslim population is divided between Shia and Sunni adherents—and while there are no official statistics, it’s generally presumed that the number of Shia outnumber the Sunni. There is also a significant population of Kurds (majority Sunni Muslim) and Turkmen who are concentrated in the north, particularly around Kirkuk. Many Iranians settled around the holy sites in Najaf and Kadhimiya, as did Mandaeans in Basra and the greater south. The robust Christian population within the country comprises a variety of origins and denominations, forming a large part of the population in the north, while the Yazidis mostly settled around Mount Sinjar. Yet the once-vibrant Jewish community in Baghdad (and many other Iraqi cities) had mostly left for Israel by the end of the 1940s.
From amid this melting pot I commissioned fourteen brand-new short stories: ten written by Iraqi authors and four by non-Iraqis. Among the non-Iraqis, one author is American, another is Iranian, and two are Arab women from Tunisia and Lebanon. However, the latter four have all spent time in Baghdad and know the city well.
It proved to be a tough task to assemble the stories in this collection. In the Arab world we are not fully accustomed to the concept of commissioning stories around a specific theme or of a specific length—and in this case, even set in a specific location—then working with the author on revisions. In general, Arab authors are not familiar with the editorial process found in the West, which posed some challenges. More significantly, given that this is the first collection of Iraqi crime fiction that I am aware of, few of these authors had previously tried their hands at writing noir literature.
In general, the development of the modern novel is a relatively recent phenomenon in Iraqi literature. Most people consider Jalal Khalid by Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sayed, published in 1928, to be the first Iraqi novel. Structurally, the book takes the form of a memoir by an Iraqi man in his twenties who moves to India in 1919 to escape the British Occupation, and ends up marrying a Jewish woman he meets during his travels. After World War II, Iraqi writers grew more influenced by the giants of American and European literature, whose works were translated into Arabic—though many would also read them in English. Some of the pioneers of Iraqi fiction include Abdul Malik Nouri, Ghaieb Tuma’a Farman, Fouad al-Tikerly, and Mahdi Issa al-Saqr, who were then followed by well-known names like Fadhil al-Azzawi, Lutfiya al-Dulaimi, Muhammad Khudayyir, and Abdul Rahman Majeed al-Rubaie, Mahmoud Saeed, among others. Their short stories and novels explored Iraqi society and the matters of everyday life: love, revenge, romance, illness, and isolation. In more recent years, some of these works have even adopted formal aspects of magical realism and existentialism.
The Iraqi novel became much more ubiquitous after the US invasion in 2003 and the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In less than fifteen years, close to seven hundred novels have emerged from the country (more than had appeared over the entirety of the twentieth century), including works that deal with contemporary topics such as the UN-enforced sanctions, the Iraq-Iran War, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and, of course, the US invasion of Iraq. As reflected in these pages, the literature has condemned both the US occupation and barbaric destruction of Iraq, as well as the former dictatorial regime. Others have written about and criticized the dominance of religious and sectarian militias which largely control the streets of Baghdad today. The top Iraqi authors writing now (many of whom appear in this collection) include Ahmed Saadawi, Nassif Falak, Betool Khedairi, Ali Bader, Inaam Kachachi, Dheya al-Khalidi, Sinan Antoon, Muhsin al-Ramli, Duna Ghali, Dhia al-Jubaili, and Shahad al-Rawi, among others. Many of their works have been translated into other languages. Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and is a best seller in the United States.
While all Iraqis will readily agree that their life has always been noir, the majority of the stories in Baghdad Noir are set in the years following the American invasion of 2003, though one story is set in 1950 and three are set in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet it is this recent history of Iraq—over the last few decades—that serves to inform its present.
I fled the country mere months before Saddam seized power in July 1979. Back then, before the regime declared war on Iran, the Iraqi dinar was worth $3.60 US—today one dinar trades at $0.00084—and the country was at the height of its prosperity, boasting an international workforce and an upwardly mobile middle class. Upon arriving in Damascus, I was immediately arrested by the Syrian secret police for being a Jewish spy. This happened for two reasons: firstly, because of my name (I am actually of Assyrian descent); and secondly, when I explained that I was heading to Lebanon to look for work, one of the officers looked at me in disbelief and shouted: “How do you expect me to believe that, when everyone dreams of working in Iraq!”
The Iran-Iraq War was the beginning of the end for Iraqi civil society, with half a million soldiers and half a million civilians killed on each side, effectively wiping out an entire generation. Unfortunately, most of the literary production of that time glorified the war effort against what were known as the Iranian Magi—and, of course, very few other writings were allowed to be officially published in the first place. Cementing the destruction of Iraqi life was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The seventeen days of bombs falling on Baghdad and other cities, dropped by the US-led military coalition in defense of Kuwait, and the subsequent thirteen years of crippling economic sanctions took Iraqi society back to the stone age. But that was hardly the end of Iraq’s noir story. In April 2003, the US invasion, though it precipitated the end of Saddam’s dictatorial rule, killed off any possibility of a secular, modern Iraq once and for all.
To help guide the authors in this collection, I turned to one of the first books in Akashic’s Noir Series, Queens Noir. In particular, I found the story “Alice Fantastic” by Maggie Estep to be a quintessential noir story, so I asked the publisher for permission to have it translated into Arabic, then sent the translation to most of the authors to show them an example of good noir—one of the best I’ve ever read, one without a Monsieur Poirot–type character taking center stage. The author Hussain al-Mozany loved Maggie’s story and, after reading it, wrote his own tale, “Empty Bottles.” Unfortunately, “Empty Bottles” was the last story he ever wrote, as he died after a heart attack in December 2016 at the age of sixty-three. (Maggie also passed away far too soon in February 2014, at the age of fifty.)
The three stories set during the Saddam era tell readers about Iraqi life over the last fifty years. In “The Apartment” by Salima Salih, appearances may be deceptive when an old lady living alone is found dead after apparently hitting her head in a fall. “Tuesday of Sorrows” by Layla Qasrany and “The Night Sabah Disappeared” by Hayet Raies capture the atmosphere and climate of fear in Iraq in the 1970s, when Saddam Hussein was ruthlessly consolidating Baathist power. “Baghdad House” by Ali Bader is a tribute to Agatha Christie, who famously lived in Iraq during the 1950s.
The random kidnappings and abductions that have terrified Iraqi families since 2003 feature in the story “Room 22” by Mohammed Alwan Jabr; meanwhile, in “Getting to Abu Nuwas Street” by Dheya al-Khalidi, a story set after the American troops left Iraq, the protagonist wakes up in a living nightmare, held captive by schoolchildren in an abandoned workshop. “Homecoming,” by former US soldier Roy Scranton, is a dog-eat-dog tale of brutal savagery set in Baghdad just before Daesh occupied Mosul, in which an Iraqi soldier takes revenge against militia leaders; while “Jasim’s File” by Sinan Antoon is based on the true story of patients from al-Rashad mental hospital escaping en masse after the Americans invaded—but with a crucial difference. In “Baghdad on Borrowed Time,” Salar Abdoh writes about an Iranian war veteran and private detective who is tasked with investigating a series of murders of regime conspirators.
A prominent theme in the collection is family, and specifically the deteriorating relationship between parents, children, and even siblings. In “I Killed Her Because I Love Her” by Muhsin al-Ramli, two beautiful sisters are murdered by someone close to them in a whodunit that asks why? as it reveals the terrible fracturing of post-2003 Iraqi society. Nassif Falak’s “Doomsday Book,” set during the time of UN sanctions, unearths dire warnings, disappearances, secret directives, and riddles that end in assassination, ordered by mujahideen as “the express will of God” and all recorded in a ledger, line by line. Hadia Said’s aptly titled “Post-Traumatic Stress Reality in Qadisiya” is a skillful portrayal of the unraveling of a man’s mind as he returns to Iraq from abroad and encounters his destroyed and deserted family home. In “A Sense of Remorse” by Ahmed Saadawi, the protagonist Jibran combines a detective’s curiosity with pragmatic and persistent inquiry as he uncovers the surreal story behind his brother’s apparent suicide.
Taken as a whole, the stories in Baghdad Noir testify to the enduring resilience of the Iraqi spirit amid an ongoing, real-life milieu of despair that the literary form of noir can at best only approximate. Yet the contributions here manage to hold their own as individual stories, where the rich traditions of intersecting cultures transcend the immediate political reality—even while being simultaneously informed by it. Much like the diverse tapestry of cultures that join together on the banks of the Tigris to form the City of Peace, Baghdad Noir reveals that there’s nothing monolithic or ordinary about the voices of its writers.
Samuel Shimon
June 2018
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com