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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Sharp Metal

Sharp Metal

This selection is taken from various authors from several Arab countries especially from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. It is the first anthology of its kind I have seen; and one must be grateful for the fact that the translator has spread his net so wide, and allowed each of his authors to be represented by one story only apiece. I will not try to comment too closely on the methods of the authors, but it is possible to distinguish a number of recurring themes in their work – love, destitution, the monotony and folly of the bureaucratic age, and the harsh but in a sense sacred simplicity of village life. In the long run it is an exploration of the meaning of destitution that gives these stories their peculiar magnificence and strength, as in the story, ‘The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid’, by Taieb Salih –

page 410

All this happened before the village was built up. It is as though this village, with its inhabitants, its water-wheels and buildings, had become slit off from the earth. Anyone who tells you he knows the history of its origin is a liar. Other places begin by being small and then grow larger, but this village of ours came into being at one bound. Its population neither increases nor decreases, while its appearance remains unchanged. And ever since our village has existed, so has the doum tree of Wad Hamid; and just as no one remembers how it originated and grew, so no one remembers how the doum tree came to grow in a patch of rocky ground by the river, standing above it like a sentinel.

When I took you to visit the tree, my son, do you remember the iron railing round it? Do you remember the marble plaque standing on a stone pedestal with ‘The doum tree of Wad Hamid’ written on it? Do you remember the doum tree with the gilded crescents above the tomb? They are the only new things about the village since God first planted it here; and I shall now recount to you how they came into being . . .

This iron-hard parabolic prose belongs in the first instance to the market story-teller; but in all the best stories in this book (and none of them is mediocre) it is taken over in various ways for various intellectual purposes – in ‘The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid’, to signify the total lack of relation between the life of the peasantry, continued at a level of deprivation where they become part of and in a rather terrible sense share the strength of the earth they inhabit, and the plans and slogans of the national bureaucracy; and in another story, ‘A Space Ship of Tenderness to the Moon’, by Laila Baalabaki, it is used to indicate the despairs and moments of communication that occur in a love affair, again with a rigour that resembles the work of a craftsman engraving on metal. This quality is apparent in some degree in all these stories. Perhaps it is Arabic. Certainly I covet it. I can think of none of our own writers except occasionally Henry Lawson, who have had it. Our affluence makes us soft-minded.

1967 (463)