Suchergebnisse

Excerpt from a novel banned in most of the Arab world The novel whose opening chapter we print below was published in Beirut in the early 1980s. Its author, a Palestinian, worked as a migrant teacher in Saudi Arabia, and now lives in Damascus. Najran Below Zero is banned not only in Saudi Arabia, but in most Arab-speaking countries. The story is set amongst the population of Najran — an area of Saudi Arabia near the border with North Yemen. Many of the people there, as in other parts of Saudi Arabia, are Arab migrant workers, forced to cross the border by the overwhelming poverty of their own countries, and compelled to accept the most menial forms of livelihood in order to subsist in the inflation-ridden economy of Saudi Arabia. The novel demonstrates the variety of means by which such a population is silenced: not only overtly by the Saudi security agents — the execution of one of their victims is the focus of the opening chapter — but equally by hunger and the exploitation of foreign enterprise, by old loyalties and new enemies, by community and dislocation, survival and escape. In the story, Abu Shannan provides the central thread; he has recently been released from prison, and is then co-opted by the royalist allies in the border region. Stephen Hayden, 'Mr', with his ever-present camera, represents the Western interests which bolster the Saudi regime. The Najran area and its population is typical of Saudi Arabia, but it has particular features which are significant in Yahya Yakhlaf's novel. Najran became part of Saudi territory in 1934, after a long dispute between the Yemeni and Saudi Arabian governments. In 1962 a military coup abolished the Imamate and declared the Yemen a Republic. During the civil war which followed, Najran was a loyalist stronghold, where the Imam of Yemen's troops (drawn to a large extent from the Zaydi tribal confederation) were bolstered by the support of the Saudi regime, and indirectly by that of Western interests.