Between traditional heritage..
If we confine ourselves strictly to Saudi Arabia as we know it today, we must remember the date of September 22, 1932, which marks its official creation. This does not, of course, in any way detract from the long history of the Hijaz, home to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, nor from the ancient literary tradition of the Arabian Peninsula, where Nabati poetry flourished from the 16th century onwards. Nabati poetry was the first to succumb to modernity as it entered the 20th century, associated with a new era. Following on from the conservatism of the 17th century, when themes were essentially religious, and the classicism of the 19th century, this new period - known as the period of creativity - readily embraced the Western currents of Romanticism, Symbolism and Realism. This was fertile ground, as confirmed by the career of Mohammed Surour Sabban, who founded the region's first independent publishing house and published the modernist poet Mohammed Hassan Awwad as early as 1925.
However, the delicate question of balancing tradition and modernity, respect for roots and foreign influences, was already at the heart of what is considered the first Saudi novel, and more broadly of the Arabian Peninsula, The Twins (1930) by Abd al-Quddus al-Ansari, born in 1907 in Medina. As the title suggests, the film depicts the destiny of two brothers: Rasheed, who achieves great success after studying at the national school, and Fareed, who is doomed to decline and exile after attending a Western school. However, this dichotomy reflects distrust rather than a lack of open-mindedness. Indeed, in 1936, when Abd al-Quddus al-Ansari founded Al-Manhal, one of the oldest and most renowned Arab cultural magazines, he opened his columns to a number of writers who went on to have successful literary careers, even if their lives were not free of drama, such as the Algerian Ahmad Rida Huhou or the Saudi Hamza Chehata, considered one of the pioneers of modern poetry. The discovery of oil in 1936 and the ensuing alliance with the United States eased tensions to a certain extent, but certainly did not resolve the ambiguity of a country that, while creating economic ties with the rest of the world, the fact that Abdul Rahman Mounif's (1933-2004) pentalogy on this period was banned is proof of this, and we can now read part of it in French from Sindbad (Actes Sud) with Villes de sel : l'errance.
...and aspiration to modernity
Censorship notwithstanding, literature was nevertheless progressive, thanks in part to the influence of women - for example, Samira Khashoggi (1935-1986), whose role as mother of Dodi Al-Fayed (who died with Lady Di in a car accident in 1997) may be misleading, but who was above all a leader in women's publishing, publishing Wadda't Amali in Lebanon in 1959, then by becoming editor-in-chief of Al-Sharkiah magazine in 1972 - and secondly, thanks to the Saudis who went abroad to study or work, like the diplomat Ghazi Al-Gosaibi (1940-2010), proclaimed bard of modernity, whose work can be found in a small part of the L'Harmattan collection(Il et elle : dialogue, Revenir en touriste: d'Arabie à la Californie, Soheym: l'esclave-poète amoureux). Borders became more and more porous, and the secrecy that characterized Saudi Arabia did not stand up to certain works with a strong ethnological connotation that enthralled crowds, such as Sultana, princesse saoudienne by the American Jean P. Sasson, who lived in Saudi Arabia from 1978 to 1990, or La Ceinture, written in French by Ahmed Abodehman and published by Gallimard in 2000, recounting his youth in the 1950s among the Kahtani tribe.
Soon, writers no longer hesitated to seize upon recent events, risking a fatwa but affirming their desire to change mentalities, as claimed by Turki al-Hamad, born in 1953, who offended with his trilogy Atyaf al-Aziqah al-Mahjurah devoted to the adolescence of a young Saudi, but who sold 20,000 copies in Arabic alone. Her contemporary, Fawziyya Abou Khalid, born in 1955, dusted off her poetry with feminist themes in her first prose collection (literally "Until when will they kidnap you on your wedding night?"), published when she was just 18. Another sign of openness: in 2010, Abdul Khal was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for Tarmï bi-sharar(Les Basses œuvres, Books éditions), which reveals the violence of the contemporary Saudi community, a path also explored by Yousef al-Mohaimeed in Loin de cet enfer (éditions Sindbad), and a societal evolution explored by Omaima al-Khamis in Femmes de la mer (L'Harmattan).
To spread their message, the authors use every means at their disposal: Hissa Hilal achieved notoriety in 2010 by taking part in Million's poet, a very popular show in the Emirates, while Raja Alem devotes herself to crime fiction(Le Collier de la colombe, Points).For his part, Mohammed Alrotayyan represents Saudi Arabia in the Gulf Literary Festival and wins the title of best writer by public vote, while Yahya Amqassim uses the codes of the historical novel in La Patte du corbeau (Sindbad), where he mixes epic breath, dialect and literary Arabic. His youngest by a year, Abdullah Thabit, born in 1973, abandons poetry to tackle the hot topic of the September 11th attacks in Le Terroriste N°20, translated into French by Actes Sud, a subject just as political as the exile evoked by Mohammed Hasan Alwan in Le Castor (Seuil). The generation born from the 1980s onwards is even more willing to mix the arts - as did the artist Ashraf Fayad, whose death sentence was commuted to a prison sentence and whose poetry was reprinted in Le Temps des cerises(Instructions, inside) - and to take hold of the digital world, following the example of Rajaa Alsanea, who in Les Filles de Riyad tackled the question of female sexuality. Initially sold under the table at exorbitant prices, her book was picked up by Pocket in French. Ensaf Haidar, wife of blogger Raif Badawi, who was imprisoned for apostasy, chose to go into exile in Quebec, from where she continues to publish both her testimony(Mon mari, ma douleur, mon espoir, Archipoche) and novels(La Geôle des innocents, Archipel), a painful choice also made by Rana Ahmad, author of Ici, les femmes ne rêvent pas (Globe). Finally, we should mention Aziz Mohammed, whose fine reception of his first novel Le Cas critique du dénommé K (Actes Sud) suggests that Saudi literature has not said its last word.
