“Ya Khabiir” by Mohammad Abdul-Wali
And now, for something completely different.
I picked up a copy of The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction in a fit of ambitious self-improvement. “I will be cultured and culturally sensitive!” I thought. But for all my good intentions, the first story out of this collection bored and confused me silly: it’s 3 pages long, and it’s about a soldier and a lawyer walking from one town in Yemen to another town in Yemen. Nothing happens, except that the lawyer briefly thinks that the soldier is going to kill him. Then they pray.
One notable detail is that Abdul-Wali fled to Russia and took some literature courses there. You can see the Russian paranoia and dread-filled attention to detail when the lawyer imagines the sounds of a sequence of moves that lead to his death at the hand of the soldier’s gun.
Ah, well. I’ll give this collection another chance. Yahya Taher Abdullah, yer up!
—Pam
