Migration Narratives in Contemporary Arab Novels

Migration has been a structuring topos of Arab modern and contemporary literature (Censi and Paniconi 2023). In the first decades of the Twentieth century, the “Mahjar” poets established a new literary sensibility that exercised a vast influence on modern Arab poetry. Meanwhile and later, up to the Fifties, several canonical Arab novels like Adīb (1935) by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Qindīl Umm Hāshim (1945) by Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī and al-Ḥayy al-Laṭīnī by Suhayl Idrīs (1953) employed the literary trope of cultural migration to Europe to develop plots including discourses about citizenship, modernity, identities, and cultural westernization, therefore creating a new narrative space (Casini 2013). Since the Sixities the Arab migration/exile in the Gulf area has been increasingly expressed through modernist techniques, and inscribed in narratives of historical alienation, particularly after the 1967 military and political defeat of the “Naksa”. After discussing the formative phases of Arab migration narratives, our chapter will focus on literary texts written after 1990, from the perspective of undocumented migrants, refugees, and exiled. In particular, we will analyze Taytānīkāt ifrīqiyya (2008) by Abū Bakr Khāl (Eritrea), a novel about the failed crossing of the Mediterranean sea; Sāq al-Bambū (2012) by Saʻūd al-Sanʻūsī (Kuwait), a story of transcultural identity between Kuwait and the Philippines; the epistolary novel Barīd al-layl (2017) by Hoda Barakāt (Lebanon), dealing with the general condition of homelessness experienced, in the European metropolis, by migrants from the Global South. 21st-century Arab narratives on migration overcome the old, fixed identity paradigms, such as the idealization of the European experience, the national-based characterization of the (male) heroes, and the modernist – often idealized - understandings of exile (Sellman 2022). Giving voices to hyper-realistic narratives of forced migration, recent novels from the Arab world explore both new forms of processual identities (Nyers 2006, Nail 2015) and new discourses within the global migration movement.