From Najwa Bin Shatwan’s ‘Tree of Soap’
For June 2026, our Monthly Newsletter for Publishing Professionals (this month, curated by Masoud Masoud) will focus on Libya’s publishing scene: publishers, prizes, festivals, and how authors make things work in an unstable living, working, reading, and publishing environment. Thus, this month, we will be particularly featuring excerpts from Libyan works.
Not Your Regular Thursday
From Tree of Soap
By Najwa Bin Shatwan
Translated by Nassim G. Barakat
Libyan writer Najwa Binshatwan’s latest novel, شجرة الصابون (Tree of Soap, Dar Arab 2026) unfolds with her signature sarcastic-surrealism. In this world, the State encourages citizens to express themselves, ensures their participation, and provides them everything necessary to practice democracy. Nothing is forced, exactly; it’s just that absence is unwelcome and silence requires explanation. Amidst this general concern for freedom, small things begin to go awry: language, meaning, and the distance between action and conviction.
This excerpt takes us right into a protest.
A man, stunned by my reluctance to cheer during the protest, urged me to put some grit into my chanting instead of just mouthing the words.
“Chant! Chant! You’re not allowed to be quiet at these things. You’re not at a funeral!”
I quickly slipped away from the man, suspecting he might be an informant. I drifted deeper into the crowd, raising both hands and moving my lips as though I really were chanting. My plan worked. I never saw the man again, and the rest of the day passed without issue.
At the end of the protest, they handed us our daily allowance of soap bars to wash away the day’s sweat, our allotment doubled during the hotter months. By collecting our bars, we proved we had attended rather than abstained. Naturally, this did not deter those who came solely for the free soap, rather than for true democracy.
The State-issued soap was said to be entirely natural, nothing artificial, extracted from the bark of trees that grew in black ponds and swamps under brutal conditions. According to State experts, this soap was not just completely healthy and able to remove physical filth, but also capable of removing psychological grime. Once it touched your body, they claimed, it cleansed the soul from within. The international press celebrated this unique feature as yet another miracle of the agricultural revolution, comparable to the miracles of the industrial revolution that had brought us reversible clothes.
In the world of protests and unusual rewards, Thursdays refused to behave like ordinary days. Soap had become the strange measure of participation, a bureaucratic amulet suspended between order and chaos.
After, I prepared myself for the appointment with the histopathologist. He was to examine our domestic parrot to determine whether we were a match. I had no choice but to pick this parrot as a donor, since we had failed to find a more suitable match. It was hardly surprising that the two of us were compatible. We came from the same background, had inherited many of the same fragments of memory, and shared several traits. Also, we had been unable to find a suitable dead donor.
The parrot was napping when I reached into his cage and dragged him out. I wrapped duct tape around his beak, stuffed him in a cardboard box, and headed out.
At the doctor’s office, I sat in the waiting room until my turn came. Every now and then, I checked on the parrot through the small air holes in the box. He remained exactly as I had left him, laser focused on one of the holes, trying to get a look outside.
During his checkup on the examination table, the doctor discovered a cyst on the parrot’s neck. He feared it might be the beginning of a tumor, so he performed a biopsy on a sample and sent it to the lab for examination. The results came back quickly and were reassuring.
“No need to be afraid,” the doctor said. “It’s only a swelling of the swear gland. It should be drained and cleansed with a shot of 5mL of HP.”
The parrot was busy picking peanuts up off the table and had to be subjected to a forced enema so that the contents of his gland would be expelled at once.
“Take your hands off me, dirtbag!” the parrot shouted.
I ran and ducked beneath the table as his swear gland burst open, drenching the doctor in fluid while continuing to drain like an open hose, gradually shrinking as it emptied. Only then did the parrot calm down.
The doctor assured me that everything was fine now, and that I could undergo the procedure as soon as possible, before the cyst filled again.
I scheduled an early appointment for my operation at the hospital reception desk and headed out. On my way home, I helped a man who had fallen into a hole and injured his head with the sign he had been carrying.
I tore a strip from the sign’s fabric with my teeth and wrapped it around his wound until the ambulance came to take him away. This man was so patriotic that he worried about the integrity of the sign more than about his own bleeding head. When he saw me sinking my teeth in the fabric, he warned me not to damage the sensitive and meaningful words printed on it.
Eager as I was to help him, however, I accidentally ripped the words “Free People” and several letters from “Democracy” beneath the last light of the fading sun.
After I opened my mouth several times without managing to say anything, the man seemed to conclude that I was ill, and he spoke on my behalf.
Eventually, the protest’s sun took its toll on the both of us. He thanked me without asking for my address, phone number, social media accounts, or my shoe size, as is customary when meeting someone.
As for me, I made certain assumptions about the man that would have rendered him an idiot, if he had not already become one, after the blow he sustained down in the hole and whatever damage it had done to his mind.
Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist, born in Ajdabiya, Libya, in 1970. She was the first Libyan author to be shortlisted, in 2017, for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, for her novel The Slave Yards (2016). She has written four other novels: The Horses’ Hair (2007), Orange Content (2008), Concerto Qurina Eduardo (2022), which was also shortlisted for the IPAF, and Tree of Soap (2026). She was chosen as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 40 by the Beirut39 project (2009-2010) organized by the Hay Festival, and her story ‘The Pool and the Piano’ was included in the Beirut39 anthology. In 2018, Binshatwan won a Banipal fellowship for creative writing. In 2019, her short story collection Serendipity (2019) was longlisted for the Almultaqa Short Story Prize, and her collection Catalogue of a Private Life (2018) won the English Pen Translates Award. In 2023, she was awarded the John Fante Career Prize for her literary works. You can read more about why her work should be available more widely in translation at the LEILA website.
Nassim G. Barakat is a translator, conference interpreter, and editor working between Arabic, English, and French, with professional knowledge of Spanish and Russian. He has more than thirteen years of experience providing linguistic services to international organizations, media institutions, NGOs, and UN bodies across Europe, the Middle East, and Canada. Alongside his work in legal, political, and cultural translation, he has translated books and major publications into Arabic, including works in behavioral economics, reports by the Small Arms Survey, and publications for UNESCO and other international organizations. Barakat holds a BA in Living Languages and Translation and an MA in Conference Interpretation from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK, Lebanon). He is a member of several professional associations, including the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL, UK), the Arabic Language Youth Council (ALYC, UAE), and the Canadian Association of Legal Translators (CALT).