Sunday Classics: Samira Azzam, Whose ‘Relative Obscurity Today Is a Grave Injustice’

All through Women in Translation Month (#WiTMonth), we’ve been profiling classic works by Arab women writers in translation:

Adania Shibli’s widely acclaimed Minor Detail appeared this May in Elisabeth Jaquette’s tightly controlled English translation. Shibli, when asked back to recommend an Arab woman writer back in 2015, said that, “a writer who influenced my life is Samira Azzam, especially her 1963 The Clock and the Man.'” She has said elsewhere that: “Actually [The Clock and the Man] contributed towards shaping my consciousness regarding the question of Palestine as no other text I have read in my life had done.”

Azzam has also been claimed as an influence by Palestinian novelist Huzama Habayeb.

Born in Acre in 1927, Azzam began working as a schoolteacher in the Greek Orthodox school in Acre at 16, according to a Jadaliyya profile. She held the job through 1945, when she began publishing in local newspapers under the alias “Coastal Girl.” She was forced to flee her home in 1948 and, after that, moved between Baghdad and Beirut.

As Joseph Farag writes in “Samira Azzam’s ‘Man and His Alarm Clock,’” it was in Beirut that Azzam would “emerge as one of the first and pre-eminent Palestinian literary voices in the wake of the Nakba of 1948.”

Azzam wrote prolifically, and the first of her six short-story collections was published in 1954.

In 1957, at the age of 30, Azzam moved to Baghdad. There, she wrote for the Iraqi newspaper Al-Shaab, where Badr el-Shakir el-Sayyab was one of the editors, and also for Iraqi and Kuwaiti radio. She also worked as a translator; she translated East Wind, West Wind and Pavilion of Women by Pearl Buck, Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis, Collected Short Stories by Somerset Maugham, Candida by Bernard Shaw, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Short Story in America 1900–1950 by Ray West, and Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, among others.

Azzam was also intensely concerned with Palestine. In May 1964, Azzam participated in the First Palestine National Congress, one of eight women to represent Palestine at that event. According to Kathyanne Pisell in “Samira Azzam: Author’s Works and Vision,” throughout the 1960s, Azzam was also drafting a novel titled Sinai Without Borders. She reportedly destroyed it after the June 1967 war.

She died of a heart attack in August 1967, just 40 years old.