Egyptian Novelist Radwa Ashour's "Specters" Translated by Barbara Romaine

posted on: Nov 23, 2010

Specters tells the story of two women born the same day—one is the author, Radwa Ashour, the other, Shagar, is a loosely autobiographical character in her novel. The narrative alternates fluidly between their childhoods, their work lives (one a professor of literature and the other of history), their married and unmarried lives, and their respective books. The novel’s structure pays tribute to the Arab qareen (double or companion, and sometimes demon) and the ancient Egyptian ka, the spirit born with an individual and accompanying him or her through life, and beyond.

This lively metafictional novel is a mix of genres: part autobiography, part history, part fiction. As the narrative moves back and forth between Radwa’s novel Specters and Shagar’s history Specters (about the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948), Ashour unites the projects of history and literature and blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political in one compellingly readable meditation on contemporary life in a fractured world.

Radwa Ashour, a highly acclaimed Egyptian writer, scholar, activist, and feminist, is the author of more than fifteen books of fiction, memoir, and criticism. Her novels Granada and Siraaj have been published in English. She is a recipient of the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature. She lives in Cairo, where she teaches literature at Ain Shams University. She is married to the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, and is the mother of the poet and political scientist Tamim al-Barghouti.

Barbara Romaine has been teaching and translating Arabic for nearly two decades, currently at Villanova University. Her other translations include Bahaa Taher’s novel Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery and Radwa Ashour’s Siraaj. She received an NEA fellowship to support the translation of Specters.