View of Bulaq quarter, Cairo. HAY, Robert, Esq. Illustrations of Cairo, London, Tilt and Bogue, 1840.

BULAQ: The Arab world in books

The latest episodes of BULAQ are available on the Sowt website. You can subscribe to the podcast using this RSS feed or on iTunes.

BULAQ is a podcast about contemporary writing from and about the Middle East and North Africa. It looks at the Arab region through the lens of literature and at literature through the lens of current events.

BULAQ is co-hosted by Ursula Lindsey and M Lynx Qualey. Its first season was produced by Issandr El Amrani. It is now co-produced with the Sowt network in Amman.

BULAQ is named after a neighborhood of Cairo that hosted the first active printing press in the region. Established in 1820, the Bulaq Press put out its first publication, an Italian-Arabic dictionary, in 1822.

MLQ is a book critic, editor, ghostwriter, and literary consultant with a focus on Arab and Arabic literatures, particularly as they intersect with translation. She runs the blog ArabLit.

Ursula is a journalist and book critic who writes about education, literature, and politics in the Arab world. She contributes to The New York Review of Books, The Nation, the New York Times, The Point and The Arabist blog.

Both Ursula and MLQ spent many years living in Cairo and in Rabat, Morocco. Today Ursula lives in Amman and the podcast is a long-distance conversation.

11: Stillborn in Egypt, Fractured in Palestine

We spend most of this episode talking about two books: the late Arwa Salih’s Stillborn, a memoir of and reckoning with her time as a leftist student militant in Egypt in the 1970s; and Rabai al-Madhoun’s novel Fractured Destinies -- about lives constrained, conflicted and divided in Palestine.

Show notes

Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn, tr. the brilliant Samah Salim and published by Seagull Books as part of their “Arab List,” curated by Hosam Aboul-ela.
Rabai al-Madhoun’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning Fractured Destinies (published in Arabic as called Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba), tr. Paul Starkey, and extends the universe of Walid al-Dahman who first appeared in IPAF-shortlisted The Lady from Tel Aviv, tr. Elliott Colla.
The claustrophobia was reminiscent of Mohammed Sabaaneh’s collection of political cartoons White and Black.
For books in a constellation around The Stillborn, we mentioned: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club, Naguib Mahfouz’s Adrift on the Nile, tr. Frances Liardet, Youssef Rakha’s Crocodiles, tr. Robin Moger, and Mohammed Rabie’s Otared, tr. Moger.