HOTLIST 2020

This study narrates the diaries of two Armenian deportees of the Armenian Genocide in 1915, Nerses Tavoukdjian and Krikor Bogharian, originally from Antep in Cilicia. It covers their stay in Hama and Salamiyah in Syria between 1915-1918.

Vahé Tachjian documents and highlights through vivid testimonies the miserable and difficult life of the Armenian deportees who took refuge in Syria, especially the city of Aleppo - the main center of the Armenian exiles gathering. That is the bottom of the abyss, the hell, where deportees lived in misery, hunger, epidemics, pain and psychological exhaustion.

The book brings attention to self diaries and testimonies as a main and reliable source of information about the events that took place between 1915-1918.

Translated from Italian into Armenian by Vaskin Bambakian

Skylark Farm is Antonia Arslan’s first novel, based on the experience of an Armenian family, which is in fact the writer’s family, during the 1915 massacres planned and executed by the Ottoman authorities in Ottoman Turkey during the First World War.

The protagonist, Sambat, an affluent Armenian pharmacist who lives with his family in an Anatolian town, wants to visit his brother Yerwant, who immigrated years ago to Italy to build his future. While Sambat and his family are immersed in their daily life affairs, the Turkish government is preparing the genocide of the Armenians because they suspect them to be in sympathy with the Russian Empire, a familiar and well-known narrative.

The horrific details of this tragedy are mitigated by a story of sacrifice...

The novel was turned into a movie entitled Lark Farm.

Translated from Arabic into Armenian by Hori Azazian

The first chapter of the book examines Armenians’ lives in the Ottoman Empire since the seizure of the Armenian regions that were called "Western Armenia", through the Armenian intellectual awakening and until the transformation of the Armenian question into an international affair after the Berlin Conference in 1878, and the Armenian, regional and international reactions that resulted from it. This transformation led to the massacre of defenseless Armenians during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909).

Muhammad Rifaat al-Imam then reviews the growth and amplification of the Turkish nationalism that pushed the Unionists and Young Turks to eradicate the Armenian race from the Turkish demographic structure. This second chaper demonstrates how the Unionists committed the first genocide against the Armenians at the beginning of the twentieth century. It also follows the birth of the Republic of Armenia in 1918 and the circumstances of its development.

In the third chapter, the author traces the emergence of Kemalism in Anatolia and its impact on the Armenian people. Then he examines the Kemalist wars in Anatolia and beyond the Caucasus and the accession of Armenia to the Soviet bloc, and thus the assassination of the Armenian cause and the rights of the Armenian people at the Lausanne Conference in 1923.

Eleven black feet exposes the history of football in Africa, since its inception with poors, bypassers in ports, attendees of Sunday schools and monasteries, and those who denounced colonialism.

The book talks about football without separating it from politics. Africans who were not allowed to speak about politics or choose their presidents managed to participate by encouraging their clubs with their own free will. They learned democracy by criticizing harshly and sometimes with rudeness the referees, knowing that no one would imprison them or suppress them for such acts. They loved football and played it for more than a century not because it was a game that gave them pleasure, but because it gave them life itself.

Throughout the pages of this book, we travel across deserts, forests and Mediterranean coasts, tracing the origin of football in Africa, from the beginning of the colonial era to our current period. It is a long story because it is the story of true Africa.

The boat sets sails for exile, leaving a miserable East and pursuing salvation. The voices of the travellers rise to narrate their alienation, the tragedies they lived and their eternal longing for their homeland.

The journey starts with the sea, which first welcomes them warmly before flooding some of them later. Finally, those who reach the shores of the supposed salvation will try to heal by narrating memories from the East they departed.

They search for their lost dream and hope, only to find that it was just a mere illusion. They describe their experiences with human traffickers who lead them through barren roads, forests, seas, and states borders. In the West, the faces do not resemble the faces in their homeland, nor the sky is like its sky. Everything has changed, everything portends anxiety, pain, sadness, and nostalgia. Finally, the protagonists ask to return to their homeland, where they could get rid of alienation and pain.

It is an anthology of Cigerxwîn’s poetry from eight collections in which his various poetic tendencies are highlighted: intellectual, artistic, liberal social nationalist as well as his position towards women rights.

The poet imitated older generations of poets in an apparent attempt to prove his artistic ability to emulate recognized Kurdish poets.

At the same time, he developed some poetic contents and images pertaining to modern society. The poet refined poetic language and replaced words from foreign languages with Kurdish ones. By doing this, he bypassed the problematic linguistic mosaic adopted by the ancient Kurdish poets.

Damascene Cupid offers pleasure to the eye as well as to the mind of the reader. Neither the texts are the basis for it nor the drawings, but rather they complement each other to produce an art book that we rarely find in our libraries. Al-Maari tries to be as simple as his paintings, simple in his texts and ideas that he calls stories and that are not without a poetic whiff or literary value. Damascus also is strongly present in his texts and he is not apologetic in showing his longing to his mother-city, so he celebrates it from a distance as if he is still walking in its streets and alleys like any young lover.

Through this book, Al-Maari tries to attract the ordinary audience - as he calls it – and lead them through the door of reading and savoring art from his simple yet sophisticated way of drawing and writing.

Nashwan Al-Atassi attempts, perhaps for the first time in Syria, to delve into modern Syrian history in its various phases. His research analyzes major events that took place in and around Syria (especially in Palestine). It also looks at their consequences on Syrian society, and at its political and economical transformation. His work is a permanent harmony between history and political sociology. Nashwan Al Alatassi summarizes without simplifying a dangerous history, and provides a new approach to students of political science and contemporary Middle Eastern studies, with two innovations: one is related to the amount of information presented smoothly and with excellent references, and the second is the authenticity of observations for a writer residing in Syria with firsthand experience.

The Criminal Sent by Heaven is a thriller written by a young “outcaste” author who lives in a conservative city and tries to break all the taboos and restrictions of his extremely conservative intolerant society with a tremendous wit and great boldness. He describes what is happening behind luxurious streets and towers, which is not known to many people who live in this very same city! Prostitution, drogues, crimes and more take place in the dark when the upper class is sleeping or enjoying their luxurious lives in fancy restaurants and malls.

What distinguish the writing of Al-Zaabi are the visual scenes that he depicts, so that the reader can clearly form characters in his imagination and feel that he is following a movie! The element of suspense and speedy rhythm keep the reader alert till the last page.

It is the story of many people oppressed by their society and traditions.

In Salt Water is a feminist autobiography. Rafeeqa Al-Bahuri did what many Arab biographers, men and women, did not dare to do. She talks about her life, surroundings, relationships, adventures, visions, dreams, disappointments and in this she swims in the transparent salt water with rare boldness.

Al-Hadi Al-Taymoumi poses a crucial question: do we harness history for politics or do we employ politics to serve history? He argues that when politics are employed to serve history we witness in our regions more human development in general and contemporary Arab societies development in particular.

The author sheds light on the politicians’ mal reading of history and relates this to the negative implications of such readings on the Arabs’ understandings of their histories and self-identities. In that context, he is calling everyone and historians in particular to make history reading independent of the political power and domination practices. By this, he suggests, citizens will be liberated and new humanism can have the potential to emerge.

El-Houmani Sandour is a narrative biography. The author narrates the biography of El-Sandour who traveled in the 1940's between Kerkennah and the city of Sfax.

Through real-life characters, the author tells the history of a city through the events and people who lived that period. He reveals some of the secrets about the emergence of the national trade union movement and sheds a light on the coexistence of Jews, Christians and Muslims with all the paradoxes and diversity.

The Bull's blood: the missing chapter from "Kalīla wa-Dimna" is the adventure of three Arab archaeologists who travel to Iraq in the late nineties, during the siege of Baghdad which was ruled by Saddam Hussein, on an exploration mission accompanied by a mysterious Spanish photographer.

The journey turns into a search for a lost chapter from Kalīla wa-Dimna book by Abdullah bin Al-Muqaffa.

During this search, the characters' worlds are revealed, and the stories of their individual and private lives are engraved, by presenting their cultures, ideas, and opinions about life, humanity, love and war. However, these ideologies get into conflict with the problematic presentation of Arab cultural history and eventually on how to re-read it.

An interesting work written in a delicate language resembling the language of poetic films; and an author who manages to stimulate thoughts and provoke emotions at the same time.

The world of organized and random oppression that a person lives in this age, is a world that is neither suitable for man nor for the growth of his humanity. Rather, it is a world that cultivates the "animality" of man (i.e. turning him into an animal). The writer deals with this topic like a researcher, but with the mentality, the temperament and the style of a writer. He is not going to propose another theory or refute another.

Our perception of the human being that we should be is not impossible to achieve, even if it comes from a literary or artistic conception. But this perception makes us, "when we see the reality in which we live", feel the size of our losses during our human journey, which are cumulative and continuous losses as long as the world of oppression and humiliation exists and continues. And we will end up becoming creatures of another type whose name was “man”, or aspired to be a human being, without changing form.

Salman visits the dead cities to make a documentary film about them, that were symbols of ancient civilizations, before they became cities of broken columns and remnants of stone. But there, in the house of one of the city's elders, he finds a painting of a wounded deer, bearing the signature of his mother, Fatima. Soon, the owner of the house presents him with possible scenarios for his movie, all of which revolve around Fatima, and he finds himself entering a magical world and a confusing maze while he is peeking in on the hidden faces of his mother, realizing that he only knew one face of her. In this novel, Khairy Al-Dhahabi plays with the times and the multiplicity of voices, to write about dead cities and Fatima with her multiple mirrors. Who is she? What is its truth? What is the secret of wishful thinking? If only her name was not Fatima?

After twenty years of work, Salem finishes his service in the gendarme’s cavalry and returns to his home and family in Deir al-Qarn, bringing with him the only companion who has stayed with him for all those years: his horse. Family members have mixed feelings towards this guest, who will now be part of the family. The storytelling chains take place between the five children and the mother, and as they rotate, they weave stories and build worlds. In this novel, Mamdouh Azzam writes, in a new and different way from his previous novels, a tale about a simple family living its tranquility and fear, its surrender and rejection, its peace and struggles, to move within us endless questions and reflections, while freedom writes in its broad sense the chapter of the end.

A book of variations that contains poems in the Syriac language in addition to historical, religious and social articles. Written over ten years, the book also contains correspondences between clerics of the Syriac sect discussing the conditions of the community in the region and the parish around the world. The last chapter is devoted to translating many works of international writers into the Syriac language, Victor Hugo as an example.

The author was preoccupied with sect matters and expressed this in a collection of articles where he discussed the subjects of education, unification of educational curricula and different social conditions at the time of writing the book.

Various attempts were made to study Syriac music. However, there is no agreement about a serious study examining the roots of Syriac music and demonstrating its origins, how it was adopted and what were the criteria upon which it entered the Syriac Church. There were no answers on how it developed, and why there were variations of the melodies from city to the village, from the field to the mountain, and from one monastery to another. All publications are mere collections and recollections of already published materials that are not based on reliable sources, especially when it comes to the pre-Christian history.

The art of music constitutes a significant part of the heritage of peoples and it was not possible throughout history for nations and tribes to live without music. Music flourished in Mesopotamia, the Levant and along the borders of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires as well as all the Aramaic kingdoms spread in the region.

The Hijaz Torah develops three notions that radically challenge the entirety of Western Biblical studies:

1- The Umm al-Qura and its environs are the holy land that God provided to Abraham and not Palestine.

2 - The Israelites were defunct Arabs believing in the Hanifiyas, then in the law of Moses, and in the disbelief - after the conquest of Nebuchadnezzar. They finally became Muslims with Muhammad. Most of the Jews today, including those in Palestine, do not belong to Abraham according to studies of nucleic acids.

3- The texts of the Torah, mainly the tablets of the covenant of Moses, were written in an ancient Arabic language, which was the first dialect of the Kinānas, who inhabited Tihama al-Hijaz since the 3rd millennium B.C. The texts were written in Jazm script which contradicts the dictation of Sibawayh's writing rules.

Kamal Al-Salibi, who had an exceptional understanding of the Torah, enable Muhammad Mansour to reconsider its language and geography. He revealed the greatness of the Arabs history, which is indispensable to understand the present of the Arab nation and the vitality of its heritage.

Many researchers overlook the history of the first Saudi state revealed in the sources of southwestern Saudi Arabia, considering that many of these resources are still manuscript. They are usually satisfied with Najdi and foreign sources, thinking that the ones from southwestern Saudi Arabia may not contain any information about the first Saudi state. For these reasons and given the abundance of historical material provided by the sources of southwestern Saudi Arabia, The Saudi State intends to draw the attention of those researchers to this valuable historical material. Additionally, it offers a critical examination of the methodologies and the chronology of events appearing in the southwestern Arabian Peninsula archives documenting the emergence of the first Saudi state. This book also tries to uncover the positions of historians in southwestern Saudi Arabia, and to reveal their prejudices against Wahhabi missionaries, which was a major factor in founding the first Saudi state.

Geography Criticism includes six studies. The first one is about “Jerusalem during the Bronze Age,” reinforced by the latest archaeological discoveries about the city (its name, meaning, first builders and origin). The second study, “Criticism of the Torah Asiyer-geographic origins”, uses critical analysis to respond to theories of Dr. Kamal Suleiman Salibi and others. The third study is devoted to a criticism of the Yemeni Torah geography, provided by the researchers such as Dr. Ahmed Eid and Fadhel Al-Rubaie. In the fourth study, the author discusses several opinions of the Egyptian writer Dr. Yusef Zaidan, echoing allegations of Zionist researchers and orientalists. In the fifth study, “Critical tampering with the history of religions”, the author presents a critical reading of a selected book in this area of discussion, which he considers to be a model of historical forging.

Planet Earth suffers more and more from antagonisms and confrontations between nations and peoples. Excessive globalisation, in its secular and globalist Western vision, only accelerates the irreversible process of the clash of civilisations. The survival of the fittest – the law of the jungle – exerted on the globe by the holders of capital, a whole elite hungry for supremacy, can only produce ethnic, religious, political, socio-economic and environmental conflicts.

Few books have tackled the roots of evil as much as this book. The author's extensive analytical work and documentary research have laid bare the criminal intent of freedom-stirring and troublemaking states in countries and regions desperately trying to escape their infernal stranglehold. For their own interests, these states use and abuse all means to provoke wars, ethnic conflagrations and popular revolts wherever and whenever they want, most often led by their powerful armies or by armed groups, created from scratch by them, such as al-Qaeda, al-Nosra, Daech... 

On the outskirts of the village of Nawa, the Don, a beekeeper, leads an ascetic life with his bees, away from the news. However, when he discovers the mutilated bodies of his “daughters”, he has to face the facts: the march of the world has caught up with him, putting him face to face with a formidable adversary. To save what he holds most dear, he will have to conduct his investigation in a country turned upside down by its very recent revolution, and seek the light from afar, all the way to the land of the Rising Sun. Yamen Manai paints with liveliness and humor the bittersweet portrait of a vibrant Tunisia, where God's fanatics are not safe from His lightning. A modern and exquisite fable.

The book was translated into English and Italian.

Shortly before the fall of Ben Ali's regime, in a country adrift, the young Alaeddine drags his discomfort into the shallows of the capital. Orphaned by his father, lulled by the tales of his beloved grandmother, he abandoned his studies for odd jobs. As for his mother, this woman whose beauty arouses jealousy, it is whispered that she is a sex worker? Mother and son struggle each in their own way against poverty, frustration and social oppression, but the odious trap will close in on them. Inspired by a savage crime committed in a working-class neighbourhood of Tunis, this intense novel gives a voice to the executioner and the victim to understand the spiral that leads to tragedy. 

Enamoured of freedom and justice, Daoud left his country to escape the burden of authority, that of his father, but also that of the French protectorate. It is in New York, in the bustling Little Syria neighbourhood that he would finally like to put down his suitcases and build his future alongside the beautiful Elena. The dreams of the young Tunisian will however rub up against the clashes of History. What place do a man's desires hold when the world's march is accelerating? From slavery to trench warfare to the struggle for independence, between political upheavals and marvellous inventions, Cécile Oumhani invites us on a teeming journey.

The book was translated into German.

The Beast Inside Me is a story about the life of two generations in Syria, who have lived in the time of Al-Asad family (father and son), during the worst years of culture of fear and mass killing. Salar, the narrator, tells his teacher’s story in the primary school, who had been arrested in prison in the time of Al-Asad (the father) for political charges. After the death of Al-Asad (the father) the teacher got out of prison. Between this two times the issue of the big beasts whom had been tamed by the father’s generals is unfold. The beasts moves increase, and these alien beings spread all over the country. People are starting to lose their humanities little by little, they are slowly transforming into monsters...

Stories of Khanka provides a synthesis of the history of an Egyptian family and the institutions which formed the cities around them. The family emigrates from its village to establish a colony in the Khanka area. This adventure turns to be a leap into a new world organized by a cruel bureaucracy. The women of the family lead the family without taking the first rows. They build houses, arrange children marriages and determine the fates of husbands. Mothers and grandmothers appear to be strong when articulating family's life, while the men appear dreamy and adventurous, going through life as a game won by the mere fact of practicing it. The book covers more than six decades, from before the 1919 revolution to the 1973 war. It alternates between personal and public stories, and moves between subjective and collective matters, with technical writing resources closer to oral narration. Captivated with this narrative adventure, the author eventually leaves us saturated with questions and pleasure.

I keep you silent is about reading and writing as acts of resistance. Ahmed Nagy presents in this book a new experience in which he mixes his memories with some of his readings to present a joyful and painful work at the same time. The book tells about his experience in prison, but it is not only about this experience. It is also about the influence of books and writers on Ahmed who finds himself in the midst of a crisis he did not seek and a battle he did not choose. In the book, Naji alternates between prison diaries and memories from his youth by highlighting certain memories about books and literature. He narrates, in a sarcastic and bitter language, the relationship between authority and literature by recounting his own personal story. He relates this story to the stories of other writers who challenged authority, with some of them eventually managing to redraw the entire Egyptian literary scene.

Of yesterday and today Islam brings together reflections written in different contexts. What they have in common is the concern to historicise what are often presented as consubstantial categories of Islam or essential features of a religion without the effect of history on it and without any connection with the realities of the societies in which it has emerged and evolved. Some texts concern the classical period, from the beginnings of Islam to the end of what is presented as the "golden age" of Arab-Muslim civilisation; others deal more with the contemporary period marked by contradictory relations with the developments of modern times. This is not an exhaustive study of Islamic facts, but reflections on particular questions concerning this or that aspect of the past and present realities of Islam. 

Cities and architectures of Tunisia is a reference work with in-depth original contributions enabling the informed reader but also a wider public to understand the history of Tunisian architectural and urban knowledge in their interrelationships with the societies and the actors who implement them. Thus the various contributions dialogue and answer each other. They propose a panoply of themes and questions examined in the light of the methods of architectural and urban history. 

The many observations collected concern ritual practices that are several thousand years old and which, going beyond the local socio-cultural framework, are fundamentally part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, and many elements of which – because of their immateriality and, in particular, the oral nature of their transmission from mother to daughter – have unfortunately disappeared, or are in the process of doing so. This work would therefore make it possible, if not to ensure their total and complete safeguarding, at least to keep a written record of these oral traditions, which are fragile and in danger of disappearing. 

Nineteen is the first part of the Carthaginian trilogy by Sami Mokaddem. It is a book that combines suspense and Carthaginian history in an original mix that restores the nobility of the genre's literature. Through its trilogy, Sami Mokaddem presents the hidden facet of the story and the reader rediscovers with him what is hidden in the ruins of Carthage, learns more about Punic mythology and accompanies Hannibal in his conquest of Rome. A trilogy that encourages the reader to learn more about the ancient history of Tunisia and to go further in his research.  

You shall silence your living to free your dead, for you will find yourself again once the ghosts are spread How would you feel if you would run away from an unbearable secret, hoping to start a new life, far, leaving it and all its weight behind... only to discover that it has caught up with you? Would you face it, or would you run again? Lola, the main character of the book, has been in the exact same situation. What do you think she did? Did she face her secrets or did she run away?

Horror is a distinct literary genre. In Tunisia, Pop Libris was the first publishing house to promote this literary genre in Arabic. The author Tariq Al-Lamouchi now has two collections of short stories in this particular register, inspired by Tunisian urban legends: Dimencya and Insomnia. 

The city of smells, friend! A theater whose heroes are smells and ghosts. How can we see the ghosts? Take a piece of time and a piece of space to create the body. Add a handful of events to it. Now recite your incantation, O magician!, To create the word. Stir your mixture well so that the word descends like a soul into the body. And now your ghost heroes appear.

In this city, the unity of place is not like the scene in the ancient theater. The scene of the novel is a journey through space and time, a journey from town to town and from time to time. An old time, dreamy and sincere, an intermediate and lucid space, and a false and promising word. It is the adventure of a traveling narrator, of an exhausted exile, haunted by smells.

Here is a story and a journey. The story of a remote place, "like a house in a narrow lane, towards which you only go if you have something to do there". And the combat journey of a family from southwest Tunisia, alternating days of prosperity and days of famine. With the occurrence of fortuitous events, the climate and relationships within the family change. The family of Sheikh Salem Abdel-Aali, crossed by contradictions and oscillating between love and hatred, betrayal and loyalty, individualism and solidarity, is the image of a bigger family: Tunisian society in colonial times. Both resemble a body carrying within it the reasons for its disappearance and its survival; a boat swaying over a restless mother.

"It's already dawn and I haven't left. It's already daylight and I haven't left. It's summer already and I haven't left, ”she said to herself. She remembered the intense moments of their encounters, the anger, the breakup and the blame, the desire and resentment, love and hate. Times when they took spiraling paths that confused and drunk them. And when they came back to reality, they experienced the coldness of lucidity and immediately resumed arguments, violence and insults.

Between two times the story of desertion moves, the time of the father who was arrested and killed because of his opposition, and the time of the new Lattakia. A new generation has lived through a different violence, trying to escape from it through love. In a language loaded with signs, Sumer Shehadeh enters deep into the psychological and human side of two families who are experiencing the violence of war, and two young men are trying to discover passion and love in their lives.

Abdel Nasser turned. He saw in the opposite mirror Zulekha from her back. He rose from the chair, saying in astonishment: "What a coincidence, golden curly hair, adorable dimples, a chunky lip, curved eyebrows. I can hardly believe, excuse me, I don't mean anything". She saw a strange spark in his eyes. She felt a shiver in the same place. A tremor that gave her goosebumps She felt numb as he began describing her. She felt attracted to him.

History of Egyptian Deities is divided into two parts. The first part is a history book entitled “History of the Gods of Egypt,” and the second part talks about the author’s life, his psychological illness, and his ambiguous relations with everyone around him. The novel is satirical all along, and all events are completely fictional and have nothing to do with reality. The author deals with the personality of the dictator, an absolute ruler, in a comedic manner that is not without depth in an analysis of the strange psyche of this type of personality that we have read about in the history books.

This sumptuous box contains two volumes. “Les Belles Heures”, which borrows its title from the manuscript of the Duke of Berry, proposes to discover Morocco through the images, quotations and paintings of artists that the country has inspired. “The Book of Recipes” is a collection of traditional recipes that pays tribute to the refinement of Moroccan culinary art. Both volumes are illustrated with watercolours and pastels inspired by ancient illuminations, signed Ernesto Angiolini and Taha Drissi. My Moroccan Cuisine is the English version of Ma Cuisine marocaine, published in 1987 as a co-publication by Sochepress and Jean-Pierre Taillandier.

2012. A group of young bearded men seize Sejnane, in the north of Tunisia, they soon proclaim the Emirate village. Dominated by Islamists, the government lets it happen.

This story, in which the village is called Sindayana, is a fictional account of the founding moment when terror was given a state project.

We follow the gradual takeover of places and spirits. Violence is not long in coming, then the leaden screed falls on the village. The facts unfold under the gaze of a narrator who is at first external to the events, then quickly caught in the vice. No thesis, but a climate, with some people wanting to control everything, others trying to resist, others still trying to trick misfortune. But when events gain momentum, there is nothing but fear, flight forward and, beyond the will for power, desire, as if against time, exacerbated by the feeling of the irremediable.

“An extraordinary autobiographical tale.” Catherine Simon, Le Monde, Paris

“It is a journey to the depths of Tunisian society to which Fawzia Zouari invites us.” Jeune Afrique, Paris.

Translated into French by Sandra Freland and into Arabic by Ahmed el Bachir Damani 

 All along the Atlantic coast of the Sahara, from the foothills of the Atlas Mountains to the banks of the Senegal River, the women of Saharan Morocco and Mauritania draped themselves in the same measure of fabric that they arrange in a similar movement. The melhfa, whose Arabic literally means “to cover”, “to wrap”, is wrapped around the body to be knotted at the shoulders before covering the hair, the end of the cloth being thrown back over the left shoulder. In this beautiful trilingual book, in French, English and Arabic, prefaced by Pierre Bergé and supported by the Agence du Sud, the photographer Hervé Nègre and the ethnologist Claire-Cécile Mitatre retrace the history of this garment which resembles the Indian sari and which competed with the djellaba when the haik was abandoned. 

Marrakesh is the city of tourism par excellence. Its medina, known worldwide, has been the subject of a large number of historical, urban and tourism studies. But the Guéliz, the new city, has rarely been the subject of research. Beyond the theoretical aspects that arise from this academic work, this book is above all an invitation to discover a neighbourhood, a memory and a collective identity that seems to carry away hearts and passions. It also aims to awaken consciences and open the debate on the history of the Guéliz of yesterday and today, open to the future. 

Passionate about haiku, the poet Noureddine Dirar gathered, translated and presented this anthology of Japanese haikus. The subtitle of this work, Rahâba al-khatwâ fî dayq al-makân, “Ample steps in a small space”, underlines the author's interest in the short form and fragment. However, Noureddine Dirar insists on the originality of the Moroccan haiku movement, not necessarily modelled on the Japanese historical model, and open to all kinds of experimentation. 

Sido Lansari's The Last Paradises is the fictional portrait of Sami, whose story is told as “almost true” by the author. In Casablanca, he dreams only of dances and Egyptian stars in the barber shop where he works. Until the day he meets Daniel, a lover who introduces him to a revolutionary homosexual Paris. By mixing archival images and silver photographs, Sido Lansari draws an intimate portrait of a young man, from childhood to exile, where he discovers he comes from the “last homosexual paradises”, as they would say in the West. Because the history of art participates in the construction of identity in our societies and because through books, traces of our history endure, Kulte Éditions wishes to carry out a work of archiving thought and forms that enhances content and aesthetics.

It was necessary to settle an ethical and literary debt to Ángel Vásquez and Tangier. This special issue of the Nejma magazine is dedicated to the figure of this Tangier writer and his work La Vida perra de Juanita Narboni, in which he describes the crossroads of languages and traditions. This publication is the result of a long journey. Ángel Vásquez's amateur reader will find essential and exhaustive material in it: memories of his friends, an analysis of his stories and his first novels, the echo of his work and his Planeta Prize in the press, his publications in Tangian newspapers, as well as interviews and testimonies. An entire chapter is devoted to this masterpiece of universal literature, La Vida perra by Juanita Narboni. In the end, the reader is faced with a recovery of Ángel Vásquez's memory, masterfully coordinated by Sonia García Soubriet. 

In Desacrated Holiness, the novelist Khadija Elguejda revisits the fascinating story of the poetess Mririda N'Aït Atik, who lived in the High Atlas Mountains in the 1940s and whose poems were collected and translated by her lover René Euloge (Les Chants de la Tassaout). Mririda N'Aït Atik sang about love, the suffering of women and the drama of colonisation. Her disappearance remains mysterious. Desacrated Holiness is published, in tifinagh fonts, by the association Tirra, created in 2009 by writers and university professors of Agadir and the first Moroccan publishing house specialised in Amazigh books, since it has published more than 200 titles, literature, translations, children's books... 

In a vibrant plea for Morocco to become a secular state, Abderrahim Berrada begins by clarifying the concept of secularism, a radical separation of the religious from the political. Along the way, he speaks out against the authoritarian approach of secularism, which transforms the civil model into a new religion. The author then moves on to the application of the secular idea to the Moroccan terrain and more precisely at the levels of the state, personal status, fundamental freedoms and living together. From the beginning to the end of his essay, he insists on two things: democracy is inconceivable without liberties and therefore without secularism, the latter being the matrix of many of them; secularism cannot be dependent on any “reform” of Islam, since the two domains are separated by definition. 

Translated from Arabic by Siham Bouhlal

Hamid, barely sixteen years old, sells newspapers at the port. His mother decides to get him married because now that he brings back a few dirhams, he is a man. He is entitled to fruits, a shelter and a wife. But the street is his only school. With Life attempt, Mohamed Zafzaf's second novel published in 1985, Siham Bouhlal inaugurates a cycle of translations dedicated to this major author of Moroccan Arabic-speaking literature. It thus safeguards one of the most fertile imaginaries, often unknown to French-speaking readers. Sensitive to Zafzaf's style, she resonates the muffled rumours and deafening noises of a forgotten society. A book of topicality because, not long ago, the inclusion of Life attempt in school curricula had raised protests from those who judged the book “immoral”. 

“The tone, the words, the images in the collection seem to be regulated only by excess. Crazy ambition to reinvent everything. Poetry would only be that, the refusal to admit fixity without giving up traces. A poetry of becoming. A way, a style of being where everything becomes possible”, wrote Jacques Alessandra about Full-scale war (followed by) Flights, the shine. In this collection, the questioning is radical. The poems transfigure into the present the immense thirst for the future that is characteristic of any creator ready to destroy the world in which he lives in order to better rebuild it. A “baptism of arsonists” in a way where "Life and its denial are already converging". In fact, a manifesto where reasons and derailments that pushed Rachid Khaless to become a writer intersect. 

The new Moroccan music scene, which emerged in the mid-1990s, is now fully part of the country's cultural landscape. Rappers, slammers, reggaemen, creators of metal music and other artists (graffiti, break dance...), have initiated an authentic urban movement that mixes genres and write a multicultural Morocco. Jil Lklam, the generation of words, tells the story of its evolution, from the underground to the public scene, with a particular focus on the lyrics of the songs, emblematic of a youth that “speaks out and raises taboo subjects, cool music, hard lyrics”. With eloquence, humour, sensitivity, anger, poetry, this creative and rebellious youth expresses, in its multilingual lyrics, darija, amazighe, mixed with French, English or Spanish, its desire for dignity, freedom, future, as the love of its country. 

Copublished with Senso Unico publisher (Morocco). 

“The singularity of Islam [is to be the] only entity that rubbed shoulders simultaneously with the borders of Western Europe, Byzantium, China and India. This shared diversity gave the Arabic language the privilege of being in contact with the domains covered by Latin, Greek, Chinese, and Sanskrit, in addition to the integrated domains that made possible the knowledge deposited in the Persian, Syriac, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Demotic languages. Islam has welded these disparate traditions together, unified and reinvigorated them.” 

In Islam, la part de l'universel, republished here in its original French version and an unpublished translation into Arabic by Mohammed Zernine, Abdelwahab Meddeb recalls the humanist dimension of this civilisation and its considerable contribution to fields such as architecture, science and mysticism. 

Following the death of Hamid Ziani, a modest fisherman from El Hoceima, his widow Louisa and his four daughters, Sonia, Chadia, Chaima and Safa witness the looting of their house by the family of the deceased. For all of them, mourning is both a hard blow that confronts them with misery and a liberation. But they have to face a society shaped by and for men, which does not hesitate to break the one who goes out of the assigned rank. In this polyphonic novel, against a backdrop of social criticism, Karima Ahdad interweaves the voices of endearing characters in their daily struggle to survive and assert themselves against patriarchy and ambient conservatism. With the tenacity of the prickly pear tree, which survives, endures in an arid land, with its thorns as its only weapons. 

September 2015, twenty years after the end of the war that tore Bosnia-Herzegovina apart, a mass grave is discovered in a village with the remains of seven people. In a pocket, a watch whose hands indicate 00:00, and notes in Arabic. Vahid Sepahic, professor of history at the University of Sarajevo, is in charge of analysing them. A story of devastating confessions, which pushes the anonymous narrator to leave Marseille for Rabat and then Ain Leuh, in the Middle Atlas Mountains, and to try, at the height of the war in Bosnia, to save little Nur Kostovic... An existential quest of self, on the truth of man and the meaning of love in the face of hatred. 

“Most of the time, the person you're looking for lives next door.” This collection with a emphasis on paradox brings together ten tales, more like ten readings, in which Abdelfattah Kilito plunges into The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer, Don Quixote, Dante, Diderot, Balzac, Borges, and of course into the heart of the Arabian Nights. And from this journey, he brings out the parallels, the motifs, the echo and resonance effects, the memories that make literature a huge palimpsest. Each time it is a question of a quest or an expectation, a journey, and the revelation that what one was looking for was at home, or even in oneself. Reading thus becomes a fascinating investigation. 

Translated from French by Mokrane Chikhi

Piazza Vittorio is the only multi-ethnic district in the historic centre of Rome. In a building located in the square, a man is found murdered. At the same time, one of his neighbours, Amedeo, whose real name is Ahmed, disappears... These suspicious events loosen the tongues and each of the resident of the building will give their feeling, “their truth”, about the facts and the mysterious missing person. By situating the plot of her novel in Rome, Amara Lakhous delivers a tasty satire – half-polar, half Italian-style comedy – and boldly enters into the problem of the cohabitation of cultures and the fear of the Other. The translation into Tamazight of Amara Lakhous's novel, Clash of civilizations for a piazza elevator, originally written in Italian, was done via the French translation (Actes Sud, 2007). 

Pride, communion, sharing, dazzling, exemplarity: feelings intermingle during the first scenes. Little by little, what appeared as a family reunited by miracle takes the form of a collective that asserts and affirms itself. Through them, the whole of Algeria that expresses itself, in the whole of Algeria. The sociologist Rachid Sidi Boumedine goes back to the sources of Hirak and proposes cues to reading a powerful and peaceful movement whose joyful patriotism perfectly underlines the mechanisms of resilience and survival of a society faced with a clientelist system and its networks. It lays bare both the root causes for the claim and the hidden mysteries of what the Hirak denounces as “the System”, which uses every trick and threat to survive, changing its façade. 

Salalim Trolard is a novel of anticipation that reformulates, in a style full of irony, the political history of Algeria and, more generally, the history of the Arab world. The novel borders on the fantastic – playing with reality and simulating it: it imagines a country where the doors disappear, erasing the boundaries between inside and outside. The destinies of Djamal Hamidi and his ex-wife Olga, Mouh Boukhnouna, Ibrahim Bafoloulou, and others intersect in the Algerian capital (known as the “City-State”) against the backdrop of the impending apocalypse. This book, published with Dar El Mutawasit, was included in the first selection for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arab Booker Prize). 

The novel The fifty-year-old man plunges into history. It is the tragedy of an individual caught up in social orientations that do not correspond at all to his dreams or aspirations, and which awaken in him a nostalgia that links him to the past. The plot takes place on a boat, the Tariq ibn Ziyad, on a stormy day. During the eighteen-hour crossing from Algiers to Marseilles, many details from the life of the narrator and his family show the contradictions that nourished different opinions and ideologies in the Algeria of the 1970s. In the same way, a thousand years of the country's history appear. The narrator decides to travel to Grasse, in the south of France, in search of Amira Anouar, his first love. The book is nominated for the 2020 Mohamed Dib prize. 

Translated from Arabic by Mohamed Sehaba

This is the story of a “powerful woman”, Daouya, who, initiated by her grandmother Hanna Nouha, takes on the mission to save the world. Travelling between Oran, Damascus and Paris, witnessing the madness of Men, Daouya, always wrapped in her mysterious brown coat (what does she hide?), meets, through her peregrinations, women of different profiles, with chaotic backgrounds, all free and combative: from Oum El Kheir the street vendor to Nezha the journalist and writer, from Sapho the sex worker to Ibtissem the Syrian exile. One day, Daouya must face the great flood threatening to engulf the Earth ... This novel of anticipation, published in Arabic in 2015 and where reality mixes with fantasy, delivers a message of peace and love. It defends a utopia: that poetry, music, and art save Humanity, and reads like an ode to women and creation. 

Translated from Arabic by Lotfi Nia

From Makedra – a village close to Sidi Bel Abbès – to Algiers, in five chapters like so many mazes, the story of H'midou, the protagonist-narrator, and of H'mida, his journalist and writer alter-ego, intermingles monologues, poems, dreams, press clippings, childhood memories, fragments of texts on the Islamic history of Algeria and hypnotic incantations. Published in Arabic in 2000, Dédales is an imaginative novel which, between trance, terror and abundance of voices, tries to restore the madness and torment of the years of war and violence. A collage-novel, it reflects the author's theatrical experience and the diversity of his references: from The Arabian Nights to the Raï song, from sacred texts to contemporary Arabic poetry, via Beckett, Faulkner or Artaud. Lotfi Nia's translation, a major tour de force, multiplies tenfold the singularity of this remarkable text.  

From 1989 to 1995, Ammar Bouras worked as a photojournalist for the newspaper Alger républicain while studying at the Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts). With a silver camera, he photographed in black and white, especially in Algiers, the daily life of the “black decade”: demonstrations, marches, meetings, strikes, editorial conferences, funerals, but also sports events, fashion shows, dance classes, parties... A testimony of a book, a book of fear and grace.  

“The photo is in the negative, it's there. It's a moment of history”, says Ammar Bouras. Triggering the shutter to create an image – even a blurred one – means that you won't be perpetually paralysed by violence. It's a gesture of resistance. And the day we can look photography in the face is today”. 

This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Mohammed Dib (1920-2003), one of the major figures of Algerian literature.   

In this special issue, which is entirely dedicated to him, we do not claim to be exhaustive, nor do we aim to present a study or analysis, we only wish, through texts, often subjective and personal, to develop our relationship with some of the writer's titles and encapsulate the impressions left by their reading.   

Interviews with the writers Sofiane Hadjadj and Hubert Haddad, as well as with the visual artist Sofiane Zouggar, allowed us to measure the impact of Mohammed Dib on the artistic and cultural environment and to address current issues.  

For this new journal, the theme of the 1990s in Algerian literature naturally imposed itself, as it runs through many Algerian novels published in recent years. It was therefore important to study some of these novels and to meet their authors (H'mida Ayachi, Mohamed Sari and Adlène Meddi) in order to try to grasp the aftermath and impact of war on the Algerian literature we read today. In this same concern for the search for meaning and understanding in this moment in time, we propose reviews of books published outside our borders: the highly imaginative detective novel by In Koli Jean Bofane (DR Congo-Belgium), the modern tale by Mahi Binebine (Morocco) and non-fiction by Charles Akl (Egypt).  

In the dossier devoted to autofiction, we have brought together writers who have published texts in recent years in which they have invested themselves. This is the case of Nina Bouraoui who, from her first books to her last, recounts the significant events of her life; of Abdellah Taïa, who in his stories evokes his country, Morocco, his environment and his homosexuality; of Aïcha Kassoul, who uses the “I” to tell a fiction inspired by her own life; or of Mustapha Benfodil, who, in his last novel, creates a kind of literary double to which he lends a certain number of his personal texts. Also, as an illustration of the genre, we propose a text by Ghania Mouffok, unpublished in French, written in 2011.

To the brutal force of the policemen, their truncheons and handcuffs, she did not want to oppose any blows, scratches, slaps or spit. Just a song. A Bedouin song: Ya Khil Salem bachrawahtouli... Crouching in front of the policemen, her hair in battle, her shaggy face, her eyes black with spite, her arms outstretched towards the sky, the old woman had begun to chant the song as if there had been an urgency to spit out those words that had been buried in her throat for a long time. She sang; she sobbed; she sobbed; she sang. As soon as a stanza ended, she would take it up again, shout it again, chant it... Again and again... In the mouth of this elderly lady, it was no longer a song, but a supplication, a wild and poignant prayer addressed to who knows what god. Sometimes looking at the sky, sometimes looking at the morgue, she sang, sang, shouted, lost the thread of the narrative, got excited, found it again, then, without fearing the truncheons facing her, nor the people massed around her, she started again from the beginning, sometimes screaming, sometimes sobbing... Ya Khil Salem.. Ya Khil Salem...