Land of No Rain (23 page)

Authors: Amjad Nasser

BOOK: Land of No Rain

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When I began reading this book, I could smell the country that Amjad Nasser calls Hamiya. This smell has never left my skin since I went to Amman after the defeat of June 1967. The city is engraved in my memory by the term âwhite city'. Memory is deceptive and, as we shall see in this novel, is a product of, or another name for, the imagination, or its image in the mirror of time. But Amjad Nasser is not telling the story of Jordan, but is using the fragrance of memory to write a delightful and profound novel about the hollows of time and the lessons of a life dissipated in exile.

In this novel the reader may find a story about Arab governments and also about the way they are opposed, and this is correct, because the whole eastern part of the Arab world has seen an illusion transformed into political and social facts that have become entrenched. I exclude Egypt here because its recent history is different, though it has now come to resemble other Hamiyas in almost everything.

This reading is not mistaken, and it may be a necessary one, as part of reading the transformations in Arab consciousness and to understand the major changes that have led to a conceptual upheaval at a time when fundamentalist currents are in the ascendant.

But I am not inclined to that reading. The magic of this text lies in its ambiguities and what is unspoken, and in the dualism with which the text glows, turning the narrative into a sturdy structure that reaches completion through what is missing and indulges in a nostalgia that avoids the temptation of nostalgia, but drinks the bitterness of nostalgia to the point of drunkenness.

In the beginning I believed I was dealing with something that resembled a memoir, only to discover that what looked like a memoir was only a trick. The novel uses the approach of a fictional autobiography, told in the first person, but the hero, a writer and a poet, splits in half: Younis and Adham. Younis is his real name; Adham is the pseudonym with which he signs his writings. This split, which seems at first sight to be the incarnation of the writer's real personality, rapidly vanishes when we discover other characters in the book and when we feel that the division of the ego is the structure of the novel, not its medium. The autobiographical approach has often been used in contemporary Arabic literature. Ghalib Halasa, who gave most of his heroes the name Ghalib, may have been the pioneer of this approach, but Amjad Nasser's novel and Halasa's story Sultana have something deeper in common than just this superficial approach. What unites them is the smell of place, the fragrance of memory that resists being dispersed by writing.

The narrative text begins at the first moment. Younis's, or Adham's, journey back to his homeland, after an absence of twenty years, forms the key to memory. We are dealing with a memory that reconstructs the past, not to recover it or mourn it, but as a mirror for the self. Younis stands in front of this mirror and finds someone else in front of him. And Roula is retrieved, not as an eternal love but as mother to the division that will afflict the narrator's son. Younis, who married on the Island of the Sun after the great exodus from the City of Siege and War, will name his son Badr, after the great Iraqi poet that he loves, and when he comes back to Hamiya he will discover that Roula has given her first son the same name, at a moment when the relationships and the significances are ambiguous, in that we don't know whether Younis is the father of the second Badr or whether the hero's division into two people will continue through two sons who bear the same name.

It's not conventional for an introduction to include literary criticism, but as I was reading and rereading this text, I found I couldn't stop talking about it. That stems from the magic of what I like to call the lyricism of the novel.

This lyricism has nothing to do with what we might call the lyrical novel, which pads the narrative text with meaningless poeticised meditations. It is the product of disciplined prose that is both economical and discursive, in order to tell the story. When the text succeeds in telling its stories, it restimulates the reader's appetite for the story, and in various forms. The lyricism of the novel opens the infinite doors of the story and takes us on a journey to a world where there are no longer any distinctions between reality and imagination, or between memory and dreaming.

The City of Nowhere that the reader comes upon through Amjad Nasser is the place where Arabic calligraphy intersects with poetry and with return to Noplace. In other words it's a literary place first and foremost and a framework in which we can see not only the treachery and helplessness of individuals, but also the treachery and vagaries of time, and the brutality of history.

The novel ends in the cemetery. Young Younis (the nephew of Younis al-Khattat) leads his uncle to the graveyard to visit the dead. The narrator doesn't tell us what he said to the dead nor what he heard from them. But this novel, like any great work of real literature, addresses the living in order to open a window for dialogue with the dead, making the hero's return to his country another journey into the unknown.

Elias Khoury

A Note on the Author

Amjad Nasser, a Jordanian poet born in 1955, has written numerous volumes of poetry and several travel memoirs. He has worked for newspapers in Beirut and Cyprus and since 1987 he has lived in London where he is managing editor and cultural editor of
Al-Quds Al-Arabi
daily newspaper.
Land of No Rain
is his first novel.

A Note on the Translator

Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator, and the editor of the
Arab Media & Society
journal. He joined the Reuters news agency in 1980 as a correspondent, and has been based in the Middle East for most of the last three decades. His translations include
Taxi
by Khaled al-Khamissi and
Judgment Day
by Rasha al-Ameer.

First published in English in 2014 by

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing

Qatar Foundation

PO Box 5825

Doha

Qatar

www.bqfp.com.qa

First published in Arabic in 2011 as Haythu la tasqut al amtar by Dar al-Adab

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Translation © Jonathan Wright, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise