Catalogue of a Private Life E-Book

Najwa Bin Shatwan

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A collection of short stories by one of the Arab world's most accomplished and acclaimed writers.A grandmother who takes on a thief trying to seduce her daughters. A guard who fantasises about killing his general while locked in battle with a non-existent enemy. A film script about Libya's traffic problems improvised at a workshop. A woman's letter from her old school, which is now a makeshift refugee camp. A cow straying into a field, breaking an age-old truce between warring factions. The eight stories of Catalogue of a Private Life feel like oft-recounted folktales, where the ordinary has been softly twisted several degrees. Najwa Bin Shatwan navigates the tensions between loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret, and tenderness and cruelty to weave a portrait of family, war and nation against a stark backdrop of the completely absurd.

Leseprobe

The Author

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist, the first Libyan to ever be shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, in 2017.

She is the author of four novels: The Horses’ Hair, Orange Content, The Slave Yards and Roma Termini, in addition to several collections of short stories, plays and contributions to anthologies.

The Translator

Sawad Hussain is an award-winning Arabic-English literary translator. She has an MA in Arabic literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies and is currently one of the judges for the Palestine Book Awards.

Her translations for Dedalus are Catalogue of a Private Life by Najwa Bin Shatwan and Eddo’s Souls by Stella Gaitano (forthcoming in 2022).

Contents

The Author

The Translator

1 The Burglar in White Socks

2 Catalogue of a Private Life

3 Convention for the Protection of National Pestles

4 The Young Cow Crossed the Field

5 The Irresponsible Director

6 When Can We Go Home?

7 The Beetle is a Good Sport

8 Return Ticket

Dedalus Africa

Copyright

1

The Burglar in White Socks

One summer, in our village – which we considered a city, for it had stood for centuries – Baqrallah’s family caught a burglar. Back then, the family was made up of the father, the mother, the grandmother and the children. It was clear that the sole boy among them wouldn’t fall far from the tree, what with his father and grandmother dictating his upbringing, keeping him on the straight and narrow – in a house up to its nose in daughters, he would be the only one to carry on the family name.

The father, Baqrallah, was a severe sort of fellow who was always frowning – no one had ever seen him smile. His neighbours, those who felt the ripples of his frowning the most, said he had always been a sullen boy, quiet until provoked. The neighbours had come to understand his nature after their first clash, the repercussions of which spilled out into the neighbourhood for the next ten years. They avoided raising his ire after that.

It wasn’t just the neighbours who had plenty to say about Baqrallah. His own wife was forever declaring that the only woman he’d listen to was his mother. As the first driver in Ajdabiya – a distant planet of sorts – he had a reputation to uphold. Being a driver was testament to his manhood and his nerves of steel, given the acrobatics that our roads required. But what can you possibly know about our roads if you haven’t walked a day in our sandals? All the world’s surprises and accidents are to be found on our roads, to travel them is to enter a race that only ever ends on Judgement Day. A camel, an ambulance with faulty lights, a flock of sheep, a flooded wadi, potholes of all sizes, huge great lorries rubbing shoulders, pick-up trucks whose drivers have fallen asleep at the wheel, tin cans and empty cartons, plastic bags blown in from faraway lands, camels on the run from Sudan, desert safari hunting enthusiasts who fight off boredom by driving with one foot on the pedal and the other dangling out the window. These things, and many more, had forged Baqrallah’s personality over all the years he’d spent driving his Peugeot 504 to the sound of two radio stations: The People’s Great Republic Radio and The Voice of the Revolutionary Committee.

Baqrallah’s wife was used to his ‘take this, bring that’ – the only words he ever spoke to her. She was nothing more than a vessel for giving birth. There was no tenderness, no reconciliation; whenever he found her disobedient, he would beat her until her face and body bore his fistprints.

It didn’t help that she often brought up how surly he looked even when they were alone, or that he frowned even when he wasn’t angry, when he wasn’t spitting at the radio and cursing the revolutionary propaganda it spouted forth.

But if Baqrallah’s wife never tired of broadcasting her views to the neighbours, the neighbours kept their astonishment at his ability to sire such a litter while forever frowning to themselves. They hid whatever misgivings they had, happy to simply imagine the couple’s relationship. Everyone had a different tale to tell. Baqrallah and his wife were a plentiful source of stories and people were far more used to hearing someone or other gossiping about the frowning man and his wife than saying anything that had a grain of truth to it.

Baqrallah’s wife did her best to avoid angering him by keeping her counsel in his presence. He was a traditional man of the kind only very few remained on the face of the earth, reproducing here and there. But she was unlike a traditional woman on account of her silence, a strategy that resulted in more peace in their household than any law might have compelled. She no longer fought with him over anything, or for the sake of anything, not even over sending her daughters to school. This, Baqrallah had strictly forbidden. For if they learnt how to read and write, love letters would be next, and Baqrallah would make damn sure such wicked behaviour never happened, couldn’t happen, even when he wasn’t home. He had a one-track mind when it came to his daughters’ upbringing. They should get married quickly so as to become homemakers and mothers, even though society could hardly be said to have been suffering from a population shortage. It was Allah’s will, after all, for Baqrallah to keep having girls and for him to marry them off, just as those who died, died, and those who lived, lived, and the Voice of the Revolutionary Committee kept on playing spirited songs that lampooned the imagined enemy.

Baqrallah knew it was Allah’s will. There would always be an enemy, and the enemy might be anything – the path a man chose, or even one that he didn’t.

***

The burglar who had fallen through the skylight that evening had been casing the neighbour’s house, or so he said during Grandmother’s initial interrogation. (She had subjected him to the garden shears treatment and threatened to set her grandson on him with the kitchen stove lighter.)