The first generation of short-story writers in the UAE (1970-90s). Part 1

Abstract

The United Arab Emirates are one of those Arabic countries where national literature of modern type — which replaced Arabic medieval adab — came into existence as late as in the 1970s. Nevertheless, among the earliest Emirati short-stories, most of which were based on the principles of moralizing sentimentalism and romanticism, one could find samples of mature realism (in Muḥammad al-Murr’s writings) and even of modernism (in Abdullah al-Mirrī’s writings). In the 1980s along with the steady development of the realistic trend in Emirati fiction, many writers turned to the aesthetics of modernism by abandoning in their works the idea of objective reality, as well as clear plots, and concentrating instead on “internal” states of the mind, in which the objective reality is odd, subjectively transformed. Moreover, some writers (Miryam Jumʻa Faraj, Suʻād al-ʻArīmī, Ḥārib al-Ẓāhirī, Salmā Maṭar Ṣayf) used a complicated language of narration, full of similes and metaphors typical for Arabic poetry, as well as ornate lexical-syntactical constructions, reproducing thus a specific style, which was named by scholars of Arabic literature “poetic modernism”. Besides, in some Emirati short-stories of that time, one can find features of magic realism (in ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd Aḥmad ʻAbd al-Ḥamīd’s and Salmā Maṭar Ṣayf’s works), absurdism (in Ẓabiyya Khamīs’s works) and post-modernist parody (in Salmā Maṭar Ṣayf’s works). The themes of Emirati short-stories embrace Emirati local realities and problems, as well as general human and philosophic subjects (in particular, in Bāsima Yūnis’s and Jumʻa al-Fayrūz’s writings).

Keywords:

the United Arab Emirates, Arabic literature, Arabic prose