When the great Egyptian writer-activist-translator Radwa Ashour was a young PhD student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst — living far from friends, family, and Cairo’s hot-loud embrace — she must have been taking notes for what eventually became her first book-length contribution to the rihla genre, called Al-Rihla, or The Journey:
Hartman writes in her afterword:
Passages where her text reads differently from what we are used to reading today, particularly in relation to race and identity, reflect how different politics and political moments a ect our expression, and vice versa.
In any case, Ashour is beautifully steadfast in her international solidarity.
Interestingly — and notably different than the choices Samah Selim made when translating the nonfiction of another seminal Egyptian writer, Arwa Salih — Hartman eschews explanatory footnotes, except one explaining a quoted verse from the Qur’an. Indeed, footnotes are not perhaps not as necessary, as the US reader, at least, already finds themselves on familiar ground, although I for one had to read up on the teen guru of the Divine Light Movement to see if Radwa was having me on. (She wasn’t.)
Ursula and I also discussed The Journey in Episode 18, our final podcast before the six-week summer break, in the context of other Egyptians writing in Arabic, for Arab audiences, about the US. Among them: Tawfiq al-Hakim, Sayyid Qutb, Yusuf Idris, Alaa al-Aswany, Sonallah Ibrahim, Bahaa Abdelmeguid. Ashour’s narrative stands out among them as being deeply interested in the US, particularly African-American history and literature, not just as a metaphor for something, but in and of itself.
Anyhow, this is all by way of saying I have a review-essay about the book on Qantara.