The American University in Cairo Press has released it catalog of Spring 2005 publications. Among the works published are five Arabic novels in English translation. One of the novels is “Anubis: A Desert Novel” by Ibrahim Al-Koni.
Born in Libya in 1948, Ibrahim Al-Koni is a Tuareg who writes in Arabic. After working for Libyan newspapers, he went to Moscow where he studied comparative literature at the Gorky Institute; while there he also worked as a journalist. His journalistic work also took him to Warsaw in Poland where he edited a Polish-language magazine which published translations of short stories from Arabic. Al-Koni has published more than fifty works in Arabic and has been translated into French, German, Japanese and now English. In 1996 he received the Libyan State Prize for Literature; he has also won awards in Switzerland where he has lived since 1993. His novel “The Lost Oasis” won a prize from the Franco-Arab Friendship Committee in 2002. The well-known French Arabist, Jean-Perre Peroncel-Hugoz praised the French translation which he felt moved Arabic literature out of its “oriental rut.”
“Anubis: A Desert Novel” was first published in Arabic in 2002. The desert theme reminds us that the author, a Tuareg, spent his childhood in the desert. The Tuareg are actually pastoral nomads who speak Tamasheq, a Berber language written in an ancient alphabet known as Tifinagh which is related to ancient Egyptian. The novel is based on a Tuareg folk legend of a Tuareg youth who travels into the desert searching for the father he hardly remembers.
Al-Koni explains, “My seeking the origins of the legend would fill another, even longer than this novel, if I ever decide to write it. I heard bits of the legend from the mouths of old women in the desert during my childhood. I heard other bits from old men when I was an adolescent. What I heard from the old men and women heightened my curiosity; this legend evolved over time as oral storytellers transformed it and as the spirit of each age shaped it. In other words, the true nature of the original was changed. This is always the case when stories are transmitted orally by different groups who, because of circumstances, are allies at one time and enemies at another.”
In the novel’s first pages, we learn of the young hero’s quest: “I had set forth in search of a father whom I had seen only as a ghostly apparition when he entered our residence as stealthily as a thief, to flee from it just as stealthily, shortly before dawn.” When he asks his mother why his father disappeared, he is told: “We are only truly convinced by what we see but only believe in what we don’t see.” Thus begins a long and strenuous journey full of adventure, hardship and trial. The lyrical description of the desert slowly yields to a dense web of metaphysical and philosophical reflections.
Ibrahim Al-Koni himself concludes, “Anubis’ journey is nothing other than man’s journey through the desert that people call ‘the world.’ Anubis’ tribulations in searching for the answer to his riddle are mankind’s tribulations in search of our riddle’s answer. The tribe of Anubis is actually, the human tribe, which has yet to discover its secret truth, although we have searched for it since primeval times.”
