A leap in the past
The romantic rediscovery of Petra could almost be a metaphor for Jordanian literature as seen by the rest of the world: one has to listen to the rumor that it exists, dig it out, before realizing its importance, its value and its durability. This incredible episode is also the one that gave rise to the first account of a trip to the mysterious Jordan, an intimate text that is unfortunately very difficult to obtain today, although this journey was well documented by its author, Jean Louis - also known as Johann Ludwig or John Lewis - Burckhardt. Born in Lausanne in 1784, Burckhardt was one of a long line of Swiss writer-explorers and showed a definite interest in other places from a very young age. After studying in Germany and visiting England, he initiated an expedition at the age of 25 to try to find the source of the Niger River. To do so, he decided to learn Arabic, to adopt the Muslim culture and to rename himself Ibrahim ibn Abdullah, thinking that he would blend in more easily. This was the beginning of a life of adventure that took him to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt... and, on the way, to what is now Jordan, where he heard the rumor of an ancient city on the outskirts of Wadi Moussa (now Gaia). Inventing a story of sacrifice and under cover of his disguise, Burckhardt will have the chance to cross the defended city on August 22, 1812 in company of his guide. He will share his discovery in his book Travels in Syria and the Holy Land
published post-mortem, because nothing could divert him from his first objective, he will continue his journey but will only meet an early death, of dysentery, in Cairo, at 32 years old. Nevertheless, the revelation of the existence of Petra spread rapidly and brought joy to the archaeologists who, from 1818 onwards, despite the mistrust of the local population, undertook regular visits to the invaluable archaeological site. Imbued with a religious heritage and influenced by the attraction for orientalism that permeated intellectual life at the time, the first scholars to study Petra undoubtedly had a tendency to build a veritable myth around it, which would not, however, undermine its importance in terms of what it reveals of an extinct but prestigious civilization, that of the Nabataeans. The origin of this merchant people remains poorly known, but they seem to be mentioned in texts that predate the birth of Christ by several centuries. The numerous inscriptions found on the rocks of Petra, which constitute their true heritage, have stimulated the research of scholars. The Nabataean script, itself derived from Aramaic, would indeed constitute the basis of the Arabic alphabet.Back to the present
After this historical parenthesis, it would be good to look at Jordanian literature in all its contemporary reality, the country having certainly a rich past but being finally very recent. Thus, it would be possible to cite Menippus of Sinope or Meleager of Gadara, one a philosopher and the other a poet, who lived in the first century B.C., but they remain above all the symbols of the many peoples who occupied the current Jordanian territory, in this case the Greeks, and not that of an identity that is today being constituted in a certain unity, although this has not been without difficulty, as the journey of Samith Al-Qassim (1939-2014) reminds us. He was born in Zarkah, a garrison town where his father was a captain in the border army. He studied philosophy and political economy with the same assiduity, became a journalist and poet, and then a publisher by creating Arabisk. His activism earned him many condemnations, but he is now considered one of those who have committed Palestine to the path of modernity. His works, translated into many languages, constitute some twenty collections. Five of them are published by Minuit under the title Je t'aime au gré de la mort. Elias Farkouh, born in Amman in 1948, is also interested in the political future of the Middle East. He was also a journalist and editor, first with Al-Manarat and then with the creation of his own publishing house, Dar Azminah, in 1991. His particularly moving portraits of individuals subjected to the turpitudes of history have earned him a great deal of recognition, crowned in 2008 by the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel The Land of Purgatory. Another of his titles, Columns of Foam, published in 1987, was also distinguished as one of the 100 (actually 105) best Arab novels of the 20th century selected by the Union of Arab Writers (full list to be found on the website arablit.org). Elias Farkouh lost his life in 2020, after a brilliant literary career that brought him international recognition. His perfect contemporary, Mahmoud al-Rimawy, also wrote for newspapers such as Al Ra'i and Al-sijill, and later on, he created a website - Qaba Qaosayn - which attracted a large audience. His literary work has been equally abundant, with more than a dozen collections of short stories and novels, one of which, Man you'nis assayida, was shortlisted for the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010. While Mahmoud al-Rimawy left his hometown, Beit Rima, to settle in the Jordanian capital, others have taken a longer journey, such as Wajih Rayyan who, at the age of 18, moved to Belgium. Two of her texts are available in French from L'Harmattan: De Jordanie en Flandres: ombres et lumières d'une vue ailleurs (2010), which as the title suggests is strongly autobiographical, and La Princesse d'une nuit (2016), which portrays a young woman from East Africa, also exiled in the flat country. Gradually, she will deliver her difficult story, between abandonment, violence and fundamentalism. Taghred Najjar, born in 1951, excels in a completely different field, since her abundant work - more than 60 albums since 1977, including two translated by the Quebec publishing house Crackboom! : Mon grand frère et moi (2019) and La Folie de la watermelon (2018) - is aimed at younger children. This approach, playful and educational, as she is also a graduate in psychology, has earned her a beautiful opening to the world, through translations, selections for major children's literature awards and participation in international festivals, including the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in 2018.
New trends
At the same time, women were also becoming involved in political issues, as was the case with Fadia Faqir, who was born in Amman in 1956. Four years after moving to the UK at the age of 28, she began publishing novels whose sense of proportion and nuance have been unanimously praised. After Nisanit (1988), which depicts life in a conflict zone - in this case Palestine and Israel - came Pillars of Salt (1996), followed by My Name is Salma, which was translated into French by Liana Levi in 2007. This book tells the story of a woman who had to go into exile after becoming pregnant out of wedlock, which was unacceptable to the entire Bedouin village in which she lived until then. In her professional career, Fadia Faqir has also been concerned with the plight of her fellow women, coordinating a study project on Middle Eastern women for Durham University. Since then, she has continued to explore issues of dual culture and immigration in a stylistically elegant body of work that she writes in English. Her three-year-old daughter, Amal Naseer, was the first woman to earn a PhD in literature at the University of Jordan, and she has put her skills to use in the study of classical poetry, with a similar interest in women's issues. On the male side, in the same generation, we should mention Jamal Naji (1954-2018) who was born in Palestine in a refugee camp but grew up in Jordan, and then published some twenty novels, including The Road to Balharit, from the 1980s; Ibrahim Nasrallah, who was awarded the Arar Prize in 1991 for his body of work, which includes some fifteen collections of poetry and novels, notably The Time of White Horses; and above all Amjad Nasser (1955-2019), who embodied the renewal of Arab poetry. Politically engaged, his poetry is rather turned to the evocation of the everyday, pursuing a true aesthetic approach. In January 2021, Sindbad (Actes Sud) published his ultimate work, written while he was already struggling with illness: The Kingdom of Adam
, which has an epic breath unseen in his previous writings. This book is also an anthology of his previous poems, which allows us to understand his work, and its evolution, in its entirety. A new generation of writers has emerged at the dawn of the new millennium, and although it is still difficult to access French translations of their works, this shows that Jordanian literature is now flourishing in a more serene political climate. We could mention Jalal Barjas who received the 2021 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for Notebooks of the Bookseller, a choral novel, written during the pandemic, which takes place in Amman, Madaba and Moscow between 1947 and 2019. It describes the fate of a bookseller who gradually sinks into marginality and delinquency, a sad fate to which the voices of many other characters are added. Jalal Barjas is a poet and director of the Jordanian Narrative Labatory, and one of the most prominent writers of our time. Hisham Bustani, born in 1975, is also in the spotlight, as much for the subjects he tackles in his fantasy tales and poetry as for his talent for distorting language by breaking codes. Skillfully mixing disenchantment and ode to nature, willingly asserting himself as cynical or nostalgic, depreciating love and praising death, his works(Ani l'hubbi wa l'mawt, Al-Fawda Rratiba lil wujud, etc.) do not leave anyone indifferent, and are now conquering the Anglo-Saxon world after having seduced the Arab public. Finally, to conclude with a novel available in our language at L'Asiathèque, let's mention Fadi Zaghmout who evokes the question of gender on his blog and questions society in The Wife of Amman. This book focuses on the lives of four young girls and one boy of today, who are struggling with a tradition that dictates their love affairs as much as their professional ambitions.
