Why do Arabs flagellate themselves over the Nobel Prize in Literature?
Each year, as the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature draws near, Arab intellectuals take up the same debate: is Arabic literature fit to win it, which of our writers deserves it, and does the committee that chooses the winner care at all about what is written in Arabic?
Most of these intellectuals then put forward the name of the poet and thinker Adonis as the one among us now closest to the prize, since the Algerian Assia Djebar passed away. She used to keep him company in our annual wagers, which were really our annual hopes, and which have been evaporating for 38 years, ever since Naguib Mahfouz won in 1988.
Running through this debate, or more accurately this chatter, is a strain of self-flagellation. It is as if Arab writers had stopped producing poetry, short stories, novels, plays, genre-crossing texts, not to mention non-fiction, autobiographies, biographies, translations, and studies in the sociology or history of literature. As if Arab universities had no eminent specialists in literary and cultural criticism and comparative literature.
But those who understand the nature of things refuse to indulge this recurrent sorrow, and look instead for its real causes. The Nobel Prize goes to a single writer each year, and no one should surrender to the fiction that the whole world holds only one pen worthy of it.The prize’s history is full of great writers who never received it, some of them of greater stature, wider reach and deeper influence than those who did.
Some laureates, meanwhile, sink into oblivion within a few years as their texts fade, while writers the prize passed over only gain in presence. They go on writing without pause or flagging; some even renew themselves and grow finer with age, adding still better work to their body of writing.
Those who resist self-flagellation know that the Arab world today has writers no less gifted or accomplished than those who have won the Nobel, and some who surpass them in both output and quality. They know it is mistaken, misguided and remiss to confine the Arabs worthy of the prize to one, two or three names, writers whose work may never reach the committee because of a language barrier on the committee’s side, not because of any poverty in what Arab writers create.
Eurocentrism
The prize committee reads in only five languages: English, French, Spanish, German, and Swedish. Yet Arabic has more speakers than three of them, and their number keeps rising with the Arab world’s growing population. Muslims are eager to learn Arabic as the language of the Quran, and people of other faiths and nationalities learn it for economic, diplomatic, academic or intellectual reasons.
Arabic is also among the world’s richest languages, whether measured by the size of its vocabulary, the highly onomatopoeic nature of its verbs and nouns, its grammar, the variety of its constructions, the depth of its rhetoric, and its sheer antiquity. It supplied the premodern world with words that still runs through the veins of English and French, to say nothing of the abundant traces left in Spanish.
Some of the self-flagellants forget that the committee does not read Mandarin, the world’s most widely spoken native language, nor Hindi, second by the same measure, nor Russian, which gave the world great writers before the Bolshevik Revolution and has hundreds of millions of native speakers. The neglect of Arabic, then, is part of a wider neglect of other languages, not necessarily a deliberate snub to Arabic literature.
Those who know linger over this language barrier in their search for causes, especially given how weak translation from Arabic into the committee’s languages remains. Worse still is the selection of what gets translated, which depends largely on factors other than the quality of the texts, the creative power of their authors, their record as writers, or their standing among readers of their own language. Add to this the insistence of Western publishers and academies on treating our literary texts as little more than sociological documents, a window onto how we live, especially before the age of social media. In doing so they overlook the artistic brilliance of some of this literature, across its genres, in form and content alike.
Authenticity and subordination
Some factor our present civilizational condition into the equation, along with our social, political and economic circumstances, and they may well be right. The chances of an Arab winning, they argue, recede under political despotism, economic backwardness and social unrest. Yet literature and the arts may flourish in precisely such conditions, as the evasive, oblique and guarded form of expression many writers turn to in order to escape retribution from the political authorities, or a head-on clash with social tradition and the guardians of conservative religious thought.
Indeed, many Western studies in the sociology of literature, cultural criticism and comparative literature have shown that literary creation can, in certain places and times, flourish under oppression and subjugation. Were it otherwise, we would not have seen such remarkable literature emerge from societies ruled by despotic and totalitarian regimes, military or civilian, across Latin America, Asia and Africa.
Fairness, then, demands rewarding the writers who live and work under such harsh conditions, not punishing them by making them carry the sins of the context around them. All the more so since some of them strain to share with their compatriots the burden of confronting these circumstances, and some press on in the face of imminent danger, for what they write or for what they do as organic intellectuals, to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s phrase.
I do not absolve some Arab writers of slipping into writing what pleases the “Other” or of persistently imitating it under the pretext that this grants their writings a universal or humanistic bent, a folly that strips their works of authenticity and roots. They forget two important things. First, the real test for any genuine writer is to win recognition in their own society and secure a place among its writers, and this counts in any assessment of a creative body of work. Second, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel so far reached the universal by going deep into the local, as did many laureates from outside Europe.
Quite apart from the unfair, disorganized and underfunded state of translation from Arabic into the world’s languages, particularly those the Nobel committee reads, Arab criticism suffers from a severe flaw. It fails to look at the record of the laureates, especially over the past quarter-century, and limits its Arab candidates largely to writers who work in a single form, even though recent winners have varied widely in both their literary output and their professional backgrounds.
They have included poets, novelists, short story writers, dramatists and writers of nonfiction. Some have combined criticism with creative work; others have joined literature with scholarship, investigative journalism, filmmaking, translation, music, the arts, political activism and public life. Yet across the Arab world, from Tangier to Salalah, some critics, cultural editors and prize juries still imagine that scholarship and criticism run on a separate track, wholly cut off from art. They miss the fact that the Nobel is awarded for literature in its broadest sense, a field that takes in the humanities alongside the novel, the short story, poetry, drama and texts that cross genres, and not for imaginative writing alone.