“The Quest for a Grammar: Arab Literature in English and the Time of Revolutions”

The fractures of time

Hisham Matar has published three novels and a memoir which focus on Libya, In the Country of Men (2006), Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), The Return (2016), and My Friends (2024). ⁵ The first three are concerned with the abduction and disappearance of a father figure: the father of Suleiman, the narrator of his first novel; the father of Nuri, the narrator of the second novel; the father of the author, in the memoir. Matar’s own father was Jaballah Matar, a well-known anti-Qaddafi activist, who was abducted in Egypt in March 1990, imprisoned in the infamous prison of Abu Salim in Tripoli, and ultimately disappeared. ⁶ The chronological span of his publications defines a body of texts that straddle the period of the Arab revolutions. His writing addresses the contemporary in non-contemporary ways. It shares a concern for the present in its inextricable links with the past, and perhaps with the future, and questions the unfolding of events in time through narrative construction. Post-Arab revolutions and especially confronted with the instability of Libya in the present, Matar’s novels constitute a healthy reminder of the all-pervasive power of Qaddafi’s dictatorship, perhaps of all (Arab) dictatorships. Reading them after the Arab revolutions, Matar’s novels help restore some sense of continuity to history, some understanding of the complex logic of events.

His novels are built around a young narrator who grows from pre-puberty to adulthood. Suleiman, in In the Country of Men, is nine when the main events of the narrative take place, but the author introduces a dual perspective between the young self of the narrator and the older self, narrating or recollecting from the doubly distant vantage point of adulthood and of Egypt. While the nine-year-old boy is immersed in the flow of events and in the day-to-day happenings, the older narrator can reflect and understand, ponder over the nature of the narrative, for instance: “The only things that mattered were in the past” (Matar, 2006: 11). The duality of the narrative voice, the articulation of past to present are encapsulated in the tension of the first sentence of the book: “I am recalling now that last summer before I was sent away” (Matar, 2006: 1; emphasis added). Nuri, in Anatomy of a Disappearance, is likewise the fourteen-year-old boy whose father disappears at the beginning of the Christmas holidays and the young man, who, having turned 24, has come into his father’s inheritance but is also awaiting his return. The intricacies of past, present, and future are carefully woven in the narratives, which never separate the consciousness of the past from an understanding of the present, and always see the present (and indeed the future) as dependent on the past.

Likewise, My Friends opens on the evening of 18 November 2016, as the main protagonist, Khaled, has just parted with his friend Hosam, who, having got back from Benghazi, is emigrating to America. As he decides to walk home, he starts reminiscing about his life in London, about the political events of the previous three decades, and above all about his friendship with Hosam and with Mustafa, the three of them Libyan exiles in London. The whole novel takes place during the couple of hours it takes him to walk from St Pancras to Shepherd’s Bush. In ways which recall In the Country of Men (2006), My Friends moves between past and present and reflects on the complexities of time: “He looked at me then as if we had already parted ways and the present was the past, I standing at the shore and he on board the ship sailing into the future” (Matar, 2024: 4). The intricacies of past, present, and future are carefully woven into the narrative, which never dissociates the consciousness of the past from the understanding of the present and defines the present (and indeed the future) as dependent on the past.

The Return was written between 2012 and 2016; its title refers to the return of the author to Libya after the revolution, to the absence of return of his father from jail, to the return of other detainees from captivity (including in his own family), as well as to the return of fictional characters. ⁷ Like Matar’s previous novels, The Return, which starts like an autobiography, is a quest for a missing father, a personal memoir, as well as a political meditation on prison, on dictatorships, and on revolutions. ⁸ The tensions that play out in Matar’s novels find further expression here, connecting the specific situation of the narrator with exile and finding in the contradictions of the exilic condition the principles of narration: “What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?” (Matar, 2016: 2)

Written in uncertain times, the memoir outlines the hesitant destiny of a country caught on the edge, where optimism and foreboding coexist. Recognizing that revolutions have their own temporality, the writer tries to capture the destiny of characters caught in the turmoil of the post-Qaddafi years. Writing of Benghazi, Matar outlines the complexities of the present: “I had never been anywhere so burdened with memories yet also so charged with possibilities for the future, positive and negative, each just as potent and probable as the other” (Matar, 2016: 140; emphasis added). Writing with knowledge of future events, of the descent of Libya into civil war, Matar reflects on a period when everything seemed possible, when these tensions and contradictions seemed to open a way where democracy and the rule of law could take precedence over violence and dictatorship.

The coexistence of opposites and fractures of the present moment, in which both past and future can be glimpsed, proceeds from the narrator’s personal quest. The meditation on the father-son relationship — it is impossible to accept that he is dead or alive — echoes the hope and apprehension palpable in Libya as a whole: “Not knowing when my father ceased to exist has further complicated the boundary between life and death” (Matar, 2016: 166). The narrator is torn between enduring hope and “that place I was meant to have become accustomed to, where, through veiled speech, I was to understand the obvious, that my father was dead” (Matar, 2016: 127). His father provides the thread which leads him through past and present history of the country. Ultimately, in his relationship to his absent father, Matar places both the impossibility to tell the story — the literally unutterable predicament of his disappearance — and the means of understanding the complexities of time: “My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future” (Matar, 2016: 167). The structure of time itself is transformed by the disappearance of the father and by the absence of closure provoked by the uncertainty over his fate. In his writing, Matar explores the potentialities of narrative time and the many articulations of past, present, and future, endeavouring to account for this absence of “grammar”.

The quest for his missing father governed Matar’s political life, and the memoir is, in some ways, an attempt at closure, a gesture that tells of the physical, emotional, political need to come to terms with the unfulfilled quest. Written from both the return to Libya and the predicament of exile, characterized by the “condition of waiting” (Matar, 2016: 25), the memoir outlines the mutual recognition of author and country, as well as a possible, hesitant reconnection between past and present self. The memoir offers no certainties, no answers, but only questions — questions about his father of course, questions arising from stories told by former prisoners, questions about a country which has kept few archives. It tries to come to terms with loss and grief. It also recognizes the precariousness of lives, in the sense offered by Judith Butler who has argued that specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first considered as living (Butler, 2004). He records the stories of those who were imprisoned in the infamous prison of Abu Salim, of his uncle who spent 21 years in confinement, only to come out victorious: “like all stories, what Uncle Mahmoud’s recollections were saying, was: ‘I exist’” (Matar, 2016: 52). But also, those of all the people who had a relative imprisoned in Abu Salim and who found that the civil records had been altered by the regime, unbeknownst to them, to account for “deaths from natural causes”, of the woman who cooked meals for five years for a son who was in fact dead.

In My Friends, Matar pursues his exploration of the breakup of families, the overpowering presence of the dictatorship, even in Britain, where the central character has gone to study. Khaled’s steps take him back to St James’s Square, where, on 17 April 1984, the Metropolitan Officer Yvonne Fletcher was killed by a shot fired from the Libyan Embassy, and where, mixing real political events with fiction, Khaled and his friend Mustafa were wounded: “St James’s Square appeared to me now as the kernel at the center of my life, the place from which everything unraveled” (Matar, 2024: 263; emphasis added). This defining moment forces him to leave Edinburgh where he was studying, for fear of government spies, to invent stories for his family back home because of tapped telephone lines, thus reminding the reader of the tentacles of dictatorships. Returning to past events in the retrospective narration, My Friends approaches the complexities of understanding the past. It extends the quest of the other novels in and for the present moment, and it shows, like The Return, the present moment’s inscription in a past and in a future from which it is inseparable.

The novel grapples with the events and consequences of the 2011 revolution. While Khaled’s friends have returned home to take an active part in the fighting, Khaled stays in London, realizing that he needs to preserve the delicate balance of his life there. Leaving would force him to reconstruct a new life, as he faces the predicament of exile: “it is a myth that you can return, and a myth also that being uprooted once makes you better at doing it again” (Matar, 2024: 325). At the end, he understands the lesson of his wanderings around London, the lesson of his life in exile, he understands that his greatest achievement lies in not wanting a different life. While this is at one level a reflection on the political trajectory and upheavals of Libya, it is also a quest for friendship, a meditation on the relationships which bring these three men together as well as on the distance which separates him from his family in Libya, on the pains of absence and the impossibility of return.

Khaled, who is an avid, systematic reader, holds on to precious books, such as his father’s annotated copy of The Epistle of Forgiveness by the Syrian poet Al Ma’arri. He finds in the literature of exile, in the works of Joseph Conrad and of Jean Rhys, means to make sense of his own life. He understands the connections between writers, the continuities and correspondences that come to form the whole of literature. He ultimately finds in the power of books, and this echoes through all of Matar’s writings, the means to address the fractures of the world: “we ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends: to help us mediate and interpret the world” (Matar, 2024: 341). ⁹ Through his writings, from In the Country of Men to My Friends, Matar finds himself in, and perhaps brings his reader to, a familiar territory, that of writing and of imagination. Having tried to find information about his grandfather’s arrest during the war, he is faced with the absence of archives because Italians kept few records and most were destroyed during the war. Comparing the past to a house, he comments: “I was back in that familiar place, a place of shadows where the only way to engage with what happened is through the imagination, an activity that serves only to excite the past, multiplying its possibilities, like a house with endless rooms, inescapable and haunted” (Matar, 2016: 161). This comparison defines his enduring quest as well as his writing. The spatial apprehension of time, the definition of time past and time present as territories to be inhabited, as countries to be explored, inhabits Matar’s conception of writing. The distance which separates sons from fathers is likened to a country in which the former are at risk of getting lost: “Telemachus, Edgar, Hamlet and countless other sons, their private dramas ticking away in the silent hours, have sailed so far out into the uncertain distance between past and present that they seem adrift” (Matar, 2016: 57). His novels explore the “place of shadows”, as a mode of approaching what cannot be understood.

The quest for form

While Matar approaches the Qaddafi regime and its collapse and reveals the complex temporality of revolutions apprehended through individual destinies, recent engagements with the Egyptian revolution help us investigate further the modes of writing revolutions in our present times. ¹⁰

One of the features of the Arab revolutions is the fact that they have been well documented, including visually. ¹¹ Thus Omar Robert Hamilton’s work around the revolution has led to the creation of an archive. Such precise involvement with events and their history coincides with Hamilton’s writing of his first novel (and only one to date). The enigmatic title, The City Always Wins, echoing perhaps Ahdaf Soueif’s memoir of the revolution, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, makes of Cairo the hero of his narrative. ¹² At times, the city is in danger because of both the political violence and the urban developments taking place in it, while the past and the present grapple for attention:

The starless city […] is many things to many people. A city of women and another of men stalking in dark parallel. A city of refugees living invisibly between restaurants, rooftops, and relief agencies. A city of hotel bars and street carts where the same plate of beans can cost a pound or a day’s wages. A centralized city being slowly sucked out of itself, hollowed out by the satellite suburbs surrounding it. A city of thousands of years past piled high upon each moment of the living present. An underground city of police cells and hidden dungeons and transport trucks keeping its victims in secret circulation between its high-walled and watchtowered prisons. (Hamilton, 2017: 147; emphasis added)

The different, superimposed layers of the city embody the different narratives and the different lives of Cairo, as well as the world of surveillance it inhabits. While Matar envisaged time as a geographical space in which fathers and sons wander, Hamilton finds in the urban structure of the city the physical signs of the interconnectedness of past and present.

Hamilton’s novel addresses the events of 2011 in three parts — Tomorrow, Today, Yesterday — which express the complexities of the time of revolutions. While they seem to outline a retrospective narrative, the titles of the parts reflect the meaning of events rather than their unfolding, the loss of a “tomorrow” after the crushing of the revolution, the ways in which, like in Matar’s novels, the present is inseparable from its articulation to past and future. The roughnesses of time are further apparent through the different time-schemes — the first part being constructed like a diary suggests a direct, present account of events which tries to capture their spirit as they unfold. ¹³ It points to a continuity between non-fiction and fiction, to the integration of non-fictional modes of narration into fiction. Part two ranges from November 2012 to 14 August 2013, the day of the Rabaa massacre, when police forces killed 900 people according to Amnesty International. ¹⁴ While the dates extend the form of the diary, they are shaped by newspaper headlines, giving the narrative the rhythm of the political events being described, from the tragic to the grotesque (“Deadliest balloon crash in Egypt kills 19” (Hamilton, 2017: 160)), to the personal, when his cousin, one of the most prominent political prisoners in Egypt, is arrested: “Alaa Abd-el Fattah arrest ordered for instigating violence” (Hamilton, 2017: 170). ¹⁵ This is another instance of non-fiction giving its rhythm and its sense of urgency to fiction. Read in succession, these headlines convey the unrelenting march towards the Brotherhood’s takeover of the country. In turn, the third part, “Yesterday”, is even more fragmented, written mainly in the form of an interior monologue which conveys the thoughts of Khalil as he contemplates the failure of the revolution.

The turmoil of the times is initially conveyed to the reader by the many voices of the revolution, the text messages, the tweets, graffiti, television programmes, websites and podcasts, political speeches, the individual voices which find their identity in the collective voice of the people which can be heard in the text:

The revolution is unstoppable. Chaos will cry news, and tactics and triumphs from Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Palestine. ¹⁶ […] They can’t keep up with us, an army of Samsungs, Twitters, HTCs, emails, Facebook events, private groups, iPhones, phone calls, text messages all adjusting one another’s movements millions of times each second. An army of infinite mobility — impossible to outmaneuver. […] How can they control us when, at last, we can all see one another, talk to one another, plan together? First in Arabic and then the rest of the world in English. Empire sows the seeds of its own defeat. (Hamilton, 2017: 20–21; emphasis added)

In this initial cry of hope, we hear the various means through which the revolution operates, the mobility of modern technology which carries the aspirations of the fighting multitude. The issue of language and of its logic surfaces: Arabic and then English, because the revolution is a world-wide event. Writing about the revolution in English does not merely pay lip-service to a wider readership but expresses the urge to reach out across languages and cultures to make the revolutions resonate. It turns the logic of empire against itself. Beyond the national borders, the revolutionary moment gives birth to new allegiances and affiliations.

The novel reads as an elegy to the revolution, addressing the sense of loss, the mistakes that were made, the experience of repression. It reflects on possibilities, on roads not taken, on political failure. As one of the characters, Myriam, laments: “This is what the revolution was for? To deliver Egypt to the Brotherhood?” (Hamilton, 2017: 168). Caroline Rooney has argued that one of the features of the revolutions has been the marginalization of the Arab left, focusing the struggle for power between Authoritarians and Islamists. What the dominant discourse has enacted is “the calculated attempt to conflate left-wing radicalism with extremism and thus discredit its values or more specifically its alignment with certain values” (Rooney, 2020: 2). After the revolution has failed, the questioning of action and meaning takes on the form of unreal counterfactuals, of a narrative which returns to past events with knowledge of their outcome. ¹⁷ In the novel, the turmoil of hope and despair gives way to a dark, satirical tone: “Downtown Cairo has become a military-themed fairground of Sisi sandwiches and fridge magnets and posters and cooking oil relabeled with his name and cupcakes iced with his face and women in camouflage pants posing for selfies, flashing their vampiric smiles and CC claws” (Hamilton, 2017: 212). ¹⁸ The posters on the streets once devoted to martyrs of the revolution now portray dead policemen. The crushing of the protests in Rabaa — the defining moment of the victory of the forces of repression — combines with what the narrator identifies as the “vanquishing of imagination” to shape the defeat (Hamilton, 2017: 284). This echoes Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s lament: “We have been defeated, and meaning has been defeated with us” (Abd el-Fattah, 2021: 308).

Abd el-Fattah appears directly on a few occasions, but his writings irrigate The City Always Wins; his political reflections on the revolution are echoed in the novel, entering in dialogue with the fictional world created by Hamilton. Abd el-Fattah for instance develops the connectedness of the revolution to the world:

So we were not surprised by the revolution: we had sought it. And we were not surprised that it inspired protest movements in Europe and the US — were we not inspired by the protests in Seattle and Genoa? Did we not protest together against the war in Iraq? Wasn’t our work for change and reform linked to open debates, shared struggles and virtual communities that brought together comrades from every continent? (Abd el-Fattah, 2021: 307)

The centrality of the revolution is what makes these novels, and The City Always Wins in particular, interventions in a global debate. The tone of the novel, the sense of defeat experienced by the main character, echoes that of Abd el-Fattah, at the same time as it underlines the importance of finding the appropriate narrative form. While he admits the defeat of the revolution, Abd el-Fattah also acknowledges the necessity of an alternative narrative to “take in the excluded voices, to document the missed opportunities and the aborted ventures” (Abd el-Fattah, 2021: 426). In The City Always Wins, one of the characters, Hafez, reflects: “‘I got it!’ he says. ‘It’s a movie! The twenty-eighth is a movie! It’s the only way to do it. You can’t write a thesis about it or a poem or a song or a book. It’s too big. It’s too cinematic […] Nothing can do the twenty-eighth justice other than cinema’”(Hamilton 2017: 81). This quest for form, apparent in the mingling of headlines, events, and fiction, aims to convey the complexities of the revolutionary moment. While the many texts and documents and typefaces used by the novel could at first be seen as an echo of the energy of the revolution, at the end the fragmentation has become more extreme, even as the hopes generated by the revolution have faded. They embody the state of society after the triumph of the counter-revolution. Hamilton thus shapes the intricacies of time, the fractures of the present, the reminiscences of a future which never happened.

This portrayal of the revolution finds a different expression in Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer. A Novel of Egypt (2016), because she does not address the events of the revolution directly, but uses the life of the narrator to trace the development of a young woman in contemporary Egypt. The novel’s construction of time around three different summers, 1984, 1998, 2014, enables the interactions of political events and personal trajectory to come to the fore. While the narrator grows from childhood, to student days, to adulthood, readers are made aware of the political context and propaganda of the Mubarak years, of the corruption, of the dissent which her cousin Dido encourages her to join. Rather than confronting the present of the revolution, the third part of the novel first gives intimations of the revolution to come, then moves on to the aftermath, when it has taken place and been crushed by the counter-revolution. Looking for her vocation, the central character, who is a film-maker, tries to shape the events of her life into an appropriate narrative:

What I thought was a script is slowly turning into a book […] Can literature, the novel, be written in the form of a script? At what point would it become that, a script? I think about this as I relive summers and try to write, grapple with the beginnings of a manuscript. (El Rashidi, 2016: 136–37)

Like the narrator of The City Always Wins, she tries to find the relevant narrative form, discusses with Dido what “a new Eyptian modernism” could be (El Rashidi, 2016: 140). She remembers the betrayal of the revolution by the Brotherhood and by the police, she reflects on the ways the revolution brought people together and then created rifts between them. Her personal history is woven into the narrative of the revolution with the return of her father who had left some years before, to escape corruption by the regime. Making notes, returning to a diary she kept the first year of her father’s return, looking back over events, she understands both what led to the revolution and the weight of past events on her father, ¹⁹ she comes to terms with the necessity of shaping a position from which to assess events. Unlike Dido, who believes in absolute principles and prefers anarchy to former president Mubarak’s regime, she wonders whether the weighing of things and the search for some form of objectivity is a clear position, or none at all. This extends to her practice of writing: “I wonder about my writing, if fiction is a political statement or simply no position. Is the silence of objectivity and being an observer, witness, the same as complicity?” (El Rashidi, 2016: 152). She thus makes of the quest for form a political stance.

She digs in her memory to try and understand events, while seeing in the city the “scars of our most recent history” (El Rashidi, 2016: 160). In a conversation with a record-shop owner, she reflects on the different revolts which Egypt has seen over one hundred years, on the nature of a revolution, on whether 1919, when the Wafd party rebelled against the British, or 1952, when Gamal Abdel-Nasser seized power, or 2011, or even 2013, when President Morsi was ousted, count as revolutions. She also remembers the events of the revolution, in particular the collusion between the Islamists and the police during the events of November 2011 when more than 30 protesters were killed and more than 1,500 injured.

Through the imprisonment of Dido and of eleven other activists who have been put on trial, the crushing of the revolution is reenacted. The weekly visit which she pays him brings about a realization, not only of the passing of time in jail, waiting for trial, but also of his fight against the breaking of his soul through imprisonment. In jail, Dido ages slowly, the consequence as he puts it of waiting “each day without knowing what you are waiting for” (El Rashidi, 2016: 172). Eventually, Dido and the narrator become close again, in spite of their different conceptions of political action, even though this might be in defeat: “I think to myself that none of us really seem to be fighting anymore, but don’t have the heart to tell Dido that few of his fellow activists, comrades, show up these days for the protests calling for his freedom” (El Rashidi, 2016: 175). This form of passivity is echoed by the author herself, reflecting on life in Cairo in 2016: “This same passive disposition had come to mark many of the rest of us too — activists, intellectuals, and people on the left. I kept tabs on the shrinking number of people who showed up to protest, and then on the decreasing number of protests” (El Rashidi, 2018: 45). Like The City Always Wins, the novel ends on an elegiac note, with the revolution having given way to Sisi, most of the narrator’s acquaintances having voted for him, and as an echo, with the narrator and her mother about to move out of their house with the promise of another future. It is also in this sense that the book chronicles “the last summer”.

Crushed bodies

As he is wandering aimlessly through Cairo, the narrator of The City Always Wins sits down in a café and hears a customer hope for the victory of Bashar al-Assad: “What do I think of Bashar? To tell you the truth I’m with Bashar. Why? I’ll tell you why. Bashar al-Assad is the only one who can save Syria. He’s the only one. The only one. No one else has the strength” (Hamilton, 2017: 272). This mundane conversation is emblematic of the triumph of counter-revolutions in the Arab world, of the loss of hope and the victory of despair, of the way it has infiltrated “common sense”. This is something which the Syrian writer Samar Yazbek has addressed in several publications. The dialogue between fiction and non-fiction, which we saw in Matar’s, in Hamilton’s, and in El Rashidi’s writings, is pursued by Yazbek in The Crossing (2015):

Everything I recount in the following narrative is real. The only fictional character is the narrator, me: an implausible figure capable of crossing the border amid all this destruction, as though my life were nothing but the far-fetched plot of a novel. (Yazbek, 2015: 5–6)

Yazbek’s latest novel, Where the Wind Calls Home (2023/2025), addresses the elusive present, the moment when it recedes into the distance both literally and metaphorically. It is set in an unspecified place and relates the dying moments of a young soldier of nineteen, who has been drafted by force into the army, and who has been mortally wounded by a bomb dropped from a plane. ²⁰ The precarious life is given another dimension, because the soldier comes from the Alawite community (like the Assads and the author herself), from a poor village in the mountains. In his dying moments, he revisits his life, through moments of consciousness when he examines his present condition, and moments of reminiscence, almost of direct vision of his past. The novelist offers a poetic vision of the world of the young man, possibly a simpleton, who finds himself (and his family) shaken by the war, by the poverty which it has provoked, by the absence of hope in their mountains which forces the men to go and work in the plains. His elder brother died some time before, also because of the war, although he may have enrolled in the army on a voluntary basis. The dying Ali sees again the burial of his brother, but perhaps, he does not know, it is his own burial which he is witnessing. As he lies dying, he finds himself buried under branches and leaves, feeling increasingly numb, and confused as to where he was. Nature, and in particular the presence of a tree, connects different states of consciousness, different memories: “He was confused by the presence of the tree. Perhaps it was the tree by the village maqam, or the tree by their house. And perhaps he was whoever was being lowered into the hole; he wasn’t certain of his imaginings, despite recalling that it was his brother’s funeral” (Yazbek, 2025: 18). ²¹ He hopes that this tree might protect him, like the tree in his village which would “protect the maqams and those who sought refuge there” (Yazbek, 2025: 38).

The relationship between the political and the personal takes on a poignant dimension because of the position of the narrative voice. The politics of the revolution are not at the forefront of the narrative, but are incidental, in part because the central character is not able to formulate them. His confusion appears in a succession of questions without answers: “Who was he fighting, and on whose behalf? Who was he? It was the first time he had considered this question: Who was he really, and who did he used to be?” (Yazbek, 2025: 61). ²² The effects of the war waged by the regime on its people (suggested here in the dying Ali, killed by friendly fire) are everywhere to be felt, in allusions which the character records but cannot understand, such as the voice of the village which condemns as traitors two individuals who have evidently joined the resistance. The tragic irony of this is palpable through the narrator’s simple comment that one was the schoolteacher of the village and the other one the doctor. Ali desires not to be involved in any kind of political action but on the contrary seeks refuge with an Imam who initiates him into the (esoteric) religion of the Alawites. And yet he notices, again without comment, that in the middle of the shrine devoted to the saints of the area, the President has found a place, the central place.

The death of Ali is the occasion for the author to evoke a powerful relationship of the character with nature. ²³ The whole of his life, he has been attuned to the natural world. Unlike the other soldiers who were with him, the young man is attentive to the movements of nature, to the appearance of clouds in particular: “he was the only one who knew the states and transformations of the clouds: how they deceived and twisted, how they could dampen his breath. The clouds had been his playthings from the rooftop of his house, his companions along the rugged mountain paths” (Yazbek, 2025: 21). But he is also aware that the clouds which he sees are different from the clouds that he could observe from his village in the mountains. There he could climb a tree, and be one with the clouds, and forget about the passing of time. The wind has, further, a special place in his soul — “He believed he knew the wind even better than the clouds, the rain, and the snow” (Yazbek, 2025: 104) — and he hopes that the wind will restore some strength to his body. ²⁴

Through his contact with the trees, the clouds, and the wind, he understands the importance of the cycles of nature, which outweigh the cycles of human life: the young man has learnt from watching the clouds that “everything around him would disappear” (Yazbek, 2025: 24). He forges a conception of time which is based on phenological time rather than on the time of men: “Trees grow slowly, so they live a long time, and because they live a long time they grow wise. They have plenty of time to experience living, unlike people who, as soon as they become aware of life, leave it” (Yazbek, 2025: 67). The tree has for instance seen the revolts against the Turks and the French, and has sheltered life as well as moments of historical and political importance: “Inside the tree, where the trunk began to fork, three revolutionaries had slept as they escaped French troops. A century ago a newborn baby had been found by that trunk; here also, more than half a century ago, great men had held meetings, coming from Damascus, Hama, and Aleppo to discuss the future of the country — all stories and rumours that Ali paid no attention to” (Yazbek, 2025: 123-124).

The novel opens on the tiniest of perceptions, on the description of a leaf: “Just a small leaf. He couldn’t see it through his tangled lashes, beneath the midday sun” (Yazbek, 2025: 13). The connectedness of the character with nature gives its overarching form to the novel, one which inhabits his life as well as his death, when he cannot tell the difference between his limbs and the leaves and the branches that cover him. It echoes the relationship with nature which he developed through his childhood: “Trees were simple, unlike people. This he understood. They were like him, and he believed it when Humayrouna told him he was a tree” (Yazbek, 2025: 66). It further connects the precariousness of the lives of individuals like Ali with a physical dimension. As he is dying, he is reviewing his body, trying to make sense of what is left of it, of a torn-out heel, of a wound just above his ear: “a searing pain was accompanying the trickle of blood from his left ear, and the chill of his fingers extinguished a mysterious burning that had sprouted somewhere deep, very deep, at the base of his neck” (Yazbek, 2025: 77).

The metaphor of the body extends beyond the fictional character to the whole of Syria. In a tribute to the artist Najah Albukai, who was imprisoned and whose drawings were recently published, Yazbek dwells on the metaphor of the body under the title “The Syrian Body, Food for Nothingness” (Mardam-Bey, 2021). She goes back over the revolution and its crushing through the trope of the body: the body was at first the triumphant body, that which called for human dignity through raised fists and inflated chests which shouted against the despot’s reign, that which demonstrated, sang, danced, and laughed despite poverty and the violence of the secret services. And then these bodies were trampled on, incarcerated. And then they became, Yazbek tells us, offerings to the barbarity of the regime, left to rot away or to bleed to death, like the soldier dying on his own in the forest. They were raped, tortured, humiliated, covered in shame. The dismembered bodies that she witnessed under the rubble of bombings echo the dismemberment of Ali, as he lay dying. The crushing of these bodies is the crushing of the revolution, of the humanity of the people, so that they are left, in the words of a young man whom Yazbek attended, with “No need for big words, my body is dead”. And this sends the reader back to Albulkai’s drawings, to the piled-up bodies of the prisoners, to the deformed, enslaved body in chains, to the tortured bodies crying silently out from the drawings on the page.

Conclusion

These works try to offer a moment of closure at the same time as they acknowledge the impossibility of doing so. They are poised between the past events of the revolutions, the promised end which never materialized, and a present rife with competing temporalities. This article has shown that the work of literature lies precisely in the necessity to convey the unresolved nature of the revolutions as well as to preserve the voices of those who fought the dictatorships or were the victims of the counter-revolutions. Matar’s meditation on his father’s disappearance, for which he has no grammar, the inner monologue of Khalil while he wanders through Cairo transformed by the victory of Sisi, the moments of consciousness of the dying soldier which alternate with his recollections of the past through his relationship to nature offer distinctive perceptions of the revolutions. They further highlight the role of literature in our understanding of such events, and the necessary intervention of the imagination, as argued by Yazbek: “The novelist inside me, taking refuge in the power of imagination, defended me. Literature was the invincible force that protected me. I deliberately declined protection if it were conditional on my enslavement” (Yazbek, 2020). Imagination thus continues to play a crucial part in the revolutions — as Hamilton suggests, political defeat proceeds from the “vanquishing of imagination” (Hamilton, 2017: 284). These works do not contribute directly to “resistance literature”, but they offer a place where the fractures of the present moment can be addressed, where the voices of the vanquished and the disappeared live on, sustained by words or drawings, even as they can no longer be heard. ²⁵

The writer’s imagination in turn appeals to the reader’s own imagination, eliciting from readers a specific form of engagement. Writing about the revolution in Cairo, Soueif suggested that “[t]his book is not the record of an event that’s over; it’s an attempt to welcome you into, to make you a part of, an event that we’re still living” (Soueif, 2012: 51). In their transnational and transcultural dimensions, these revolutions call for connections. The nature of the revolutions brings the different national events closer to each other while the characters recognize the plight of others, identify with other parts of the Arab world, thus signalling the emergence of transcultural identities and of new political imaginaries (Mohamed 2021, 21–23). While the unfinished revolutions continue to inhabit literature and the world, from Los Angeles to Oxford to Paris and elsewhere, the tents which have been pitched in support of Palestinians are a reminder of this ongoing story. This sense of connectedness is at any rate the optimistic conclusion of Soueif’s Cairo which turns the Forsterian literary reference into a political imperative:

Only connect.

And the connections are happening. Not just within Egypt, not just among the Arab peoples, but across the world. […]

None of us is alone. (Soueif, 2012: 216)