Jabra Ibrahim Jabra – författare

Walid Masoud disappears. A Palestinian intellectual, he has been living in Baghdad since the first Israeli War of 1948. As a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel, suspicion arises that he has gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of garbled utterances through which Jabra Ibrahim Jabra artfully crafts the basis for the narration. He transforms the transcription of the tape by each of Masoud’s comrades into a study of character. Through a series of monologues, each becomes a narrator of his own experience.Readers of The Ship (also translated by Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen) will remember the ingenious way the political themes emerge through the dialogue between passengers on a ship crossing the Mediterranean from the Arab to the European world. This novel echoes identical subjects: the misperceptions between Western and Islamic cultures, personal landscape as a shaper of culture, and the necessity of political commitment.A tour de force that places the evolution of the Faulknerian style into a political register, this book is a testament to the brilliance of one of Palestine’s preeminent writers.

When Palestinian intellectual, Walid Masoud disappears, suspicion arises that he may have gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy tape recording which is transcribed by each of his comrades in a series of monologues narrating their own experiences.

This book continues the personal story of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920â€"1994) that began with The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood. Jabra was one of the Middle East’s leading novelists, poets, critics, painters, and translators (he was the first to translate The Sound and the Fury into Arabic), and is the writer who is given credit for modernizing the Arabic novel. This book not only helps us understand Jabra as a writer and human being but also his times in postâ€"World War II Baghdad when Iraq was enjoying an unprecedented period of creativity in literature and the arts. As a bright and inquisitive young man he became friends with the archeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, who, he later learned, was Agatha Christie (she wrote The Mousetrap during this period, in a little mud brick room). Jabra’s intellectual autobiography quickly developed as he traveled to Jerusalem, Oxford, and Harvard University, where he studied with I. A. Richards and Archibald MacLeish. A number of different teaching posts in Baghdad provided him opportunities to become friends with many leading poets, such as Buland al-Haydari and Tawfiq Sayigh; historians like George Antonius; and the renowned translators of Arabic literature Desmond Stewart and Denys Johnson-Davies. But this book is not only about matters of the mind, it is about matters of the heart as well. Jabra beautifully describes his lengthy love affair with a young Muslim woman, the beautiful Lamica, whom he first met near Princesses’ Street and whom he eventually married. He recounts all of the difficulties they had to surmount, and the pleasures to be had. This is the last book that Jabra published during his lifetime. Not only is Jabra’s life an outstanding example of the circumstancesâ€"and fateâ€"of the Palestinian in the twentieth century, but it also provides countless interesting insights into the cultural life of the Middle East in general and its modes of interconnection with the West.

The First Well is an engaging autobiographical account of Jabra’s boyhood in Bethlehem, where he was born in 1920, and later in Jerusalem, where he moved as a teenager with his parents.Through the eyes and heart of a sensitive, highly imaginative boy, Jabra describes the first sources of his artistic sensibility—the houses, fields, and orchards of his childhood and the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The First Well is the story of his intellectual and spiritual growth nurtured and encouraged by his family, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and his teachers. His story is both captivatingly innocent and full of wisdom. Wordsworth’s observation, “The Child is father of the Man,” is entirely apt as Jabra’s literary and artistic interests take root and blossom. Here is a chronicle of the experiences and events he drew upon as he became one of the leading authors of the Arab world.