Tetz Rooke

Mahattat: “Stations” on the Road to the Libyan Nation

It is 1945. The boy Kamel is ten years old. The war has just ended and the German and Italian troops have been expelled from his home town, Tripoli. It is a great day! For the first time the local school is opened to the legions of the Arab Muslim children. Previously it was reserved for the privileged of the city the Italian and Jewish children,1 but now the times are changing! In the schoolyard, a British major stands beside the headmaster and the local imam, who leads the Arab crowd in cheers to Great Britain, its king and queen, Churchill, Montgomery, and the allies, each in turn. To be able to attend school — what an adventure for inexperienced Libyan teachers and young pupils alike, boys who at best had learned to read and to write in Koranic school. Most of them had not.2 They are just ragged street children drawn to school by the bread and cheese that is distributed free for lunch. The girls’ time has yet to come.

Feathers from heaven: or what the paprika plant said to the hero

Abstract This article discusses some aspects of the ‘problem of identity’ explored in the novel al-Rīsh (1990) by the Syrian-born Kurdish writer Salīm Barakāt (b. 1951), against the background of the typology of history suggested in Bernard Lewiss History: remembered, recovered, invented (1975). As a member of a minority community denied their full cultural and political rights, Barakāt is arguably particularly sensitive both to the constructed nature of history and identity, and to how the processes of remembering, discovering/recovering and inventing work. The article presents a detailed analysis of al-Rīsh, concluding that the ‘problem of identity’ is never solved in the work: rather, the novel presents us with an array of partly conflicting, partly complementary identities, while the characters remain caught in a quest for a stable identity that disintegrates like a mirage as they approach it.