How the ‘Arab Booker’ Prize Opened Doors for the Region’s Novelists

posted on: May 18, 2015

Karen Leigh
The Wall Street Journal

The revolution that consumed Tunisia in 2011 ignited the Arab Spring. It also helped revive the Arab novel.

After Tunisian ruler Zine El Abedine Ben Ali was deposed, Shukri Mabkhout, an academic and the president of Tunisia’s Manouba University, was inspired to write his first book.

The notion of a country in transition – the scene of a popular uprising that triggered protests in countries across the region – gave way to his desire to novelize Tunisia’s political history for a local, modern audience.

The result is “The Italian,” which follows a young man navigating an increasingly tense Tunisia in 1987, the year the country’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, made way for the Ben Ali regime.

On May 6, it won the International Prize for Arab Fiction, sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority and the London-based Booker Prize Foundation. The prize is commonly referred to as the “Arab Booker,” and honors the best writers in the Middle East.

The week after his victory, Mabkhout talked with Speakeasy from Tunis. An edited transcript.

How did the Tunisian revolution inspire “The Italian?”

The situation the country was in after the revolution was what inspired me to write such a book.

The idea came to me during the period when Islamists were in power in Tunis. With the rise of extremist groups there was a sense of fear amongst Tunisians that we may go backward. I wanted to explore the reasons behind those concerns, why a revolution would have brought them back. Even during [Ben Ali’s] dictatorship there were many brave novels written that broke the silence.

What is the role of Arab literature right now, with so many countries in the region at war, and others in transition?

Novels have traditionally been related to something urban, to the city, or to the telling of a person’s individual story. This is new to Arab literature. That’s because the development of cities and an individual, modern style of life is new to the Arab world.

What made “The Italian” special is that I have lived two transitions in my life [Ben Ali coming to power in 1987, and then the 2011 revolution.] So this book goes through two eras in Tunisia.

You can’t compare it to Russian or American literature, because the Arab novel is still something new that came with the modernization of Arab civilization. And it’s a civilization that’s becoming more open to universal and human values.

My novel shows the Arab community what led to the Arab Spring and the Tunisian revolution, what created this momentum that led to the boiling point that have birth to it, and to “The Italian” after. That was my goal as a Tunisian writer.

What do prizes like the “Arab Booker” mean for regional literature?

“It brings the Arab novel international exposure that was missing. The problem with the Arab novel has been publishing and distribution outside of this region. It will allow [us] to surpass the boundaries that were blocking Arab literature from the world.”

Radhouane Addala contributed reporting from Tunis.