Choukri on al-Khubz al-hafi:

“In Al-Khubz Al-hafi, I depict immoral scenes to search for morality and ideals. My characters are not content with their immorality: they do not rejoice in their corruption as they are compelled to act corruptly under the strain of disgraceful social oppression. Their life is commodified and they consequently lose their humane values. My life among them is emblematic: I got an education then made education my profession. I used my writing to protest against oppressive exploitation. It is an attempt to set things right, regardless of whether I win or lose.”

For Bread Alone (the Arabic version!) example of Arabic literary realism (“national realism” in words of Semah Selim); thus, it is a work literary commitment in a realist vein.

Realism? Commitment? Is there a contradiction between the two?

For Bread Alone As A Modernist Text?

How can we define literary modernism?

Clarity of purpose (ideological underpinning), clarity of perspective (narrative voice and narrative structure), and clarity of prose style (rejection of literary opacity)

“Non-realist writing is frequently privileged by postcolonial critics searching for a form to hold disruptive politics because of the assumption that its various forms are inherently conducive to political subversion due to their capacity for presenting multiplicity. The prevailing idea, as it has been developed or assumed by many postcolonial critics, is that realism is almost necessarily conservative, and non-realist forms are inherently somehow more postcolonial -- and therefore have greater potential for resistance.”

“Theoretical responses to realism produced in postcolonial locations have ranged from viewing it as a form that interpellates the ideology of imperialism, to characterizing it as naïve or simplistic, to configuring it as an attempt at the representation of a single authenticated experience. Realism is seldom established as a viable form for resistance narratives.” (Laura Moss, University of Manitoba, 2000 [http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/moss.htm])

In summary,Realism = individual, non-communal perspective; one single “truth”“Non-realism” (ie, postmodernism) = multiplicity of view, more “conducive to political subversion”

The problematic of literary realism in postcolonial literature; what is “literary commitment” in post-independence Arab world?

So what next??? Postmodernity!

Political, social, and economic roots?

“The changes [in creative activity in the Arab world] have coincided historically with what might be called ‘the crisis of ideology and authority’ in Arab cultural and political life. The great ideological projects of the fifties and sixties reached a point at which they appeared to have lost their appeal to large sections of society; such dreams as the nationalist, socialist and secularist ones have been said to have failed to fulfill the great expectations which they had been thought to be capable of fulfilling; a sense of disillusionment and loss began to dominate Arabic discourse in its various forms” (Kamal Abu-Deeb, “The Collapse of Totalizing Discourse and the Rise of Marginalized/Minority Discourses”, in Tradition, Modernity, and Postmodernity in Arabic Literature [2000]: 335).

Literary repercussions of disillusionment?

From late sixties onwards:

“A more personal, anti-ideological or non-ideological art, an art evolving outside the space of consensus, has been taking shape and acquiring prominence” (Abu-Deeb, 2000: p. 336)

“Two possible ways of theorizing what has been happening [in postmodern Arabic literature] present themselves: to conceive of this as a process of fragmentation which will lead to the collapse of all notions of center, unity, cohesion, harmony as well as oneness and singularity; or to see it as an emergence of a spirit and vision of multiplicity and a renunciation of singularity and monotheistic ideologies…Furthermore, a rather fascinating theoretical possibility needs to be examined at length: that the collapse of totalizing ideologies and ‘grand narratives’…and the crumbling of unifying theories, both in the West and in the Arab world, are connected to the proliferation and coming to prominence of marginalized discourse and minority consciousness” (Abu-Deeb, 2000: p. 34).

Meta-literary(?) example of fragmentation and multiplicity (from Halim Barakat’s Inanna and the River, cited in Abu-Deeb, 2000: pp. 336-37)

‘In the past, the joyful celebration of the [festival of the Virgin] was a single, unified project. People would form a ring around a single group of dancers…women and men, old and young dancing to the rhythms of the drum, the flute and the double flute. Anybody who wished to participate in the dancing and singing would do so; those who just wanted to look on would do so, all doing what they wanted without trouble or disturbances…Then death struck [the most famous and charismatic dancer] and the second [the most famous musician and poet] no longer showed up in the celebrations…After all these transformations, and when the two stars of the celebrations who used to unify the people of the village in a single, homogenous, solidly-cemented mass, had disappeared, the state of affairs grew increasingly worse year by year. Each group now had its own party, drum, flute, heroes…and its own stars who would find more and more different ways of performing the [dancing] and singing. Because of the proliferation of groups and the limited space within which the celebrations could take place, the various tunes began to get entangled and jumbled up, and to corrupt one another; so much so that it was no longer possible to dance to a single tune and a single rhythm; therefore they invented new dances which would to some extent fit the mixture and jumble of the tunes and rhythms. A witty commentator, who took interest in politics, compared the state of affairs to that of the Arabs in these wretched times.”

Formal consequences of literary fragmentation and multiplicity:

“Not only [has] the enunciating ‘I,’ and the self of the subject generally, begun to fragment, but texts themselves [have] begun to show signs of fragmentation in their actual construction and design; a multiplicity of voices [has begun] to appear in poetic and fictional texts; a multiplicity of narrators [has also begun] to emerge…Its intensification together with the collapse of consensus and the sense of totality and organic wholeness would…lead to the emergence of new conditions within which writing will sever its intimate involvement in ideology and its close links with political authority and begin to explore wholly new spaces of human experience” (Abu-Deeb, 2000: p. 339).

“The crisis of ideology…began to intensify in the mid-seventies; a state of doubt, anxiety and bewilderment began to replace the tone of utter certainty and faith that had dominated the earlier decades. But the most significant transformation has been the collapse of totalizing discourses and the rise of marginalized/minority discourses. In the previous decades, marginal identities were, or appeared to be, dissolved within a totalizing, larger, singular identity: Arab, socialist, anti-imperialist, secular, some would even say, revolutionary. As this identity began to crumble, marginalized/minority voices began to make themselves heard” (Abu-Deeb, 2000: p. 348).

Which marginalized voice would come to the fore most clearly in the post-modern era?

“Yet, the most significant aspect of the rise of feminist writing is undoubtedly the shift which has occurred within women’s discourse and the historical conjunction between this shift and the collapse of totalizing ideologies, the liberation of cultural activity – and literary production in particular – from the demands, constraints and values of ideology and authority, and the return of the subjective, personal tone or voice to Arabic writing” (Abu-Deeb [2000]: p. 350).

“It appears possible to situate the entire phenomenon of the rise of feminist discourse within an epistemological structure of loss and hope, of collapse and quest for revival, of agony and search for joy and of a shift in emphasis from the collective, ideological and cerebral to the individualistic, concrete and particular. Is it perhaps this more than anything else that explains why the feminist-oriented discourse grows increasingly into a more concentrated and physical discourse, focusing not on the ideological level of the female’s quest but on concrete reality and, particularly, on the body” (Abu-Deeb [2000]: 359).