The first generation of short-story writers in the UAE (1970–1990s). Part 2

Abstract

The United Arab Emirates are one of those Arabic countries where national literature of modern type — which replaced Arabic medieval adab — came to 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 oddly, subjectively transformed. Moreover, some writers (Miryam Jum‘a Faraj, Su‘ād al-‘Arīmī, 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 ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Aḥmad ‘Abd 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 Jum‘a al-Fayrūz’s writings). Some key themes, such as the influx of foreign laborers and the nostalgia for the old patriarchal ways of life, link Emirati short-story with other Arabic literatures of the Gulf, while giving it a distinctive feature in the wider Arabic literary context.

Keywords:

the United Arab Emirates, Arabic literature, Arabic prose