Chapter 2: Utopia

Translated by Phoebe Bay Carter.

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There is no denying that the tale I am telling you, or the novel, as you call it these days, shares a certain resemblance with the story it inspired, the one written by Franz Kafka over a century ago. That said, it is most certainly not an exact copy. But, like that story, I will pause here for a moment to recount a bit of our hero’s backstory before returning to the morning of the metamorphosis, what happened after that, and perhaps how it all came about.

Gregor Samsa was a traveling salesman. He was a young bachelor who, after sacrificing himself and his ambition for five years, decided to continue doing so for several more years in order to support his family (a mother, a father, and a little sister) when his father lost his business and began drowning in debt. The lad had no choice but to work a job he did not like to save his family from poverty. The strange thing was, his family had a cook and a maid despite their apparent poverty. I am not adding this to Kafka’s narration, he included this detail himself.

As for the hero of our story, he was married, worked as a teacher during the day and, on the days he returned from school not completely exhausted and dispirited, as a vegetable seller in the evening.

He had intended to graduate from the Faculty of Letters and Humanities as a renowned literary critic who would make the whole world toss out all the literary theories of old and embrace his own inimitable theory (which he had thus far only outlined). Alas, he was to abandon his dream, or at least defer it, after his first two years as a student at the Faculty and switch to the Teachers’ Institute from which he graduated a year later as a teacher with glum features and slumping shoulders.

He was 21 years old. During his year at the Teachers’ Institute, he worked various trades to cover his expenses. The modest scholarship he received from the Institute, along with his mother’s savings which she kept hidden from his father, were barely enough to keep the family alive after his father one day decided out of the blue to quit working, spread his prayer rug in the corner of the house, and spend his days begging his Lord’s forgiveness for all the years he had spent working as a bartender.

Before I forget: the Sunday before the Monday morning when our hero discovered his disfiguration, which would be the beginning of his discovery of his true family ties, he went out for a walk. He did not go to the market where he was supposed to earn his extra income working the vegetable cart. It was not that he was tired, or craving a vacation. He had not gone Saturday either, or Friday afternoon. The reason, quite simply, was that on Thursday afternoon, his cart had been taken from him. I will return to this detail later, of course, but first we are going to talk for a moment about the father. About the lord of the household who suddenly discovered that there was a Lord above him and promptly ceased lording over his household and turned instead to worshipping his newfound Lord.

If we left the task of describing the father up to his angry son, he would say he was skinny as a pencil, tall as a lamp post, stubborn as a mule, and violent as a landslide. As you can see, as much as this description clarifies the nature of the relationship between the son, who found himself suddenly bearing the full weight of his familial duties like Planet Earth upon his shoulders, and the father, who had changed all at once for reasons entirely unknown to his family and stopped caring for them without a second thought. Of course, there was no need for a second thought. Had he not fathered a son and fattened him up so that eventually he would grow up to work and support him? That was a son’s only role: to grow up and support his parents, then get married and have kids, feed them one way or another until they grew up to provide for him and have their own kids who would, in turn, provide for their parents. Anyhow. As I was saying, as much as this description clarifies the nature of the relationship between son and father, it also clarifies, in its conventionality and dull repetition, the extremely limited literary talents of this son who dreamed of becoming a literary critic. It is indeed quite lucky that he did not achieve this dream, for he would have ended up merely parroting flimsy opinions that would not have allowed literature to develop as I desire. As a result, I myself would not have been able to develop and grow, for I am only able to do so insofar as the tastes of readers develop and grow.

My God, I’ve begun to ramble like a child who has learned a new word and thus begins to use it in every sentence, whether the occasion calls for it or not. Forgive me my childish whims. Where were we? Right, we were talking about the father.

The father’s worst characteristic was without a doubt his stubbornness. You would see that this is quite natural, however, if you knew that he was descended from one of the rural tribes from the countryside beyond Al Hoceima. There they suckle on hard-headedness along with their milk. The curious thing is that for all the pride he took in his pure Berber heritage, untainted by the blood of the desert Bedouins, he also took immense pride in his family title, Al-Sharif (that is, “the honorable one”), passed down through the Prophet’s family tree. “Sharif” was his preferred name at the bar, and he refused his quality service to anyone who failed to respect his honorable place among the descendents of the Prophet.

The father was skinny. The sort of skinny that is inevitably accompanied by an excessive nervousness. He did not smoke, and was smart enough not to drink alcohol so as not to blow all of his tips on drinks as many of his coworkers did. And so in a few short years, he became the owner of a spacious apartment downtown, a remnant of the days of Spanish colonialism. It overlooked Sour el Maagazine down onto Port Tangier (and on a clear day you could see all the way to the south coast of the Old Continent from the apartment window). But he was a miser. Or, if you want to be precise, he was not so much a miser as he was careful to spend his dirhams in the right place at the right time. The funny thing is, the one time he broke his own rule, he raked in tips like he’d never dreamed of.

That one time occurred on the evening of the eleventh of September of the first year after the completion of the second millennium.

The bargoers had begun arriving early, fleeing from strong gusts of wind that were blowing in clouds heavy with rain. At some point, a customer rushed in and excitedly asked to change the channel from the music station to Al-Jazeera. Heads spun and eyes fixed on the screen now broadcasting images of the towers as they turned into two chimneys belching flames and smoke before collapsing, as if a giant hand had descended upon them and flattened them to the ground. Once the surprise passed, the cheering commenced. Cries extolling God’s greatness rang out for the first time in the bar. Out of the corner of his eye, the father glimpsed two French customers slipping out. He smiled and announced that the next round was on him. The remaining customers applauded. Later, when the bar was full, he offered, in a moment of insanity he could not explain, another round of drinks at his personal expense. Everyone was celebrating. And everyone was analyzing the situation with the experience of those who had drunk international politics along with their mother’s milk. Al-Qaeda’s name was tossed about, but quickly discarded. Everyone doubted that an Islamic organization like al-Qaeda had the means to pull off an operation of this magnitude, efficacy, and speed. The kamikaze-style execution made many think of the Japanese Red Army. Others thought it was an inside job, aimed at changing some government policy or passing a new law. No one seriously considered the possibility that the operation was linked to a religious group which classified itself as an Islamic jihadist organization.

That evening was for celebrating the decisive blow dealt to America -- the arrogant aggressor had been asking for a little chastisement for a long time. Later, sadness for the innocent victims would come. In the following evenings, the bar would light up with discussions about the attacks. Some would believe that the victims were innocent, while others thought that all the infidels were enemies and needed to be killed wherever they may be. Some would say that those citizens were responsible for their government’s policies and were therefore complicit in all the tragedies that the United States of America had caused around the world. The father did not care about these discussions. He was still reveling in the handsome tips he had raked in that evening. The high-pitched arguments will be repeated among the customers five years later, when Saddam Hussein is hanged on the morning of Eid al-Adha, which will fall on the thirtieth of December that year. This time there will be no tips, because the argument between those who celebrate the execution and those who see Saddam as the hero the Arabs needed will devolve into punches and kicks, leaving the whole bar a wreck.

I will not dwell any longer on this digression from our central tale. I will only inform you that the father, as a result of his excessive nervousness and late nights at work, would not tolerate any murmur or movement in the house that would disturb his sleep during the day. All too often, the poor son would accidentally make some noise that bothered the father, who would emerge from his bedroom with puffy eyes and an iron-buckled leather belt. This he would crack through the air and swing at his son at will, leading the son to frequently skip school so that his classmates would not see the marks of the belt-whip on his face.

Now, let us return to our hero.

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Notes from the translator:

Dear reader,

Along with my translations, I will also from time to time include a note on some of the particular translational challenges, puzzles, or choices I faced. I welcome your responses and reflections on these, or other aspects of the chapter.

One delightfully difficult-to-translate aspect of the Arabic language that comes up in Chapter 2 are a set of words that refer to the utterance of specific phrases that invoke God. For example, the verb basmala (بَسمَل), which means to utter the formula بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَحْمَن الرَحِيْم (bismillah al-rahman al-rahim, “in the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful”); and the verb ḥawqala (حوقَلَ), which means to utter the phrase لا حَوْلَ ولا قُوَّةَ إلا بِالله (la hawla wala quwa ila billah, “there is no power or strength except God’s,” often said in moments of exasperation or times of distress); and the noun takbīr (تكبير), which refers to the exclamation of اَللهُ أَكْبَر (Allahu akbar, “God is great”), though it can also refer more generally to praise and exaltation.

There’s a lot to consider when it comes to translating these words and phrases. First of all, a whole dissertation could be (and probably has been) written just on the implications of different translations of “Allah.” Do you translate it as God, implying that “God” and “Allah” are but different words for one being? Do you write “Allah” in English? And then do you italicize it, as is common practice when including foreign words in an English text, perhaps to emphasize the impossibility of conveying in English the particular nuance of this word – to imply that there is a difference between Allah and God, a difference in how these two entities are understood and related to in their respective sociolinguistic and religious communities? Or, you write “Allah” but don’t italicize it, in acknowledgment of the fact that this word is not foreign to an Anglophone context, and that Islam is not foreign to English… (though, of course, Allah being the Arabic word for God, it is used by Arabic speakers of different faiths). Anyway. This is not a dissertation I intend to write, though it is something I think about. So let me move on to the next piece of the puzzle.

Arabic is full of these phrases that invoke God/Allah. In addition to those above, a couple of other ubiquitous phrases are alhamdulillah (Thank God) and in sha’ allah, sometimes shortened to inshallah (God willing). These phrases are such a common and integral part of Arabic, that any Arabic translator is going to have to grapple time and again with how to best translate them in a given context. The challenge is not with finding literal equivalents for the phrases, but with the different connotations and assumptions around utterances of God’s name in English vs. Arabic, and how they are used in casual conversation. In English, it is quite common for someone to exclaim “Oh my God!” without it connoting any great religiosity (and perhaps even connoting the opposite). “Thank God,” also, has its place in casual, secular speech. But this place is not quite the same as the place of “alhamdulillah” in Arabic conversation where, for example, it is a common part of a response to “How are you?”

The most common, neutral response in Arabic would be something like, tamaam, alhamdulillah; that is, “good, thank God.” But in English, this gives the impression that the speaker has narrowly and miraculously escaped some disaster! And if an English speaker were to use “God willing” as often as it is used in Arabic, she would be read immediately as deeply religious in a way that wouldn’t be assumed by the usage of inshallah. Especially in the case of some of the longer phrases like “there is no power or strength except God’s,” they can feel quite unwieldy in English, and give off much too somber and grandiose a tone than would be appropriate for a “hawqala” uttered with an exasperated sigh by a frazzled parent.

In general, however, I like to maintain these phrases in fairly literal translation. They sound a bit stilted at first to readers unfamiliar with Arabic, but over the course of a novel, I think even a reader encountering these speech habits for the first time will become accustomed to them and they will cease to feel so out of place in English. However, as with everything, I don’t have a hard and fast rule on this matter and go case by case. So, let’s look at a case from this chapter, taken from the scene in which Jawad’s father is working as a bartender on September 11, 2001. When the customers see the towers fall on the TV screen, the narrator tells us:

 صدحت في الحانة لأول مرة أصوات التكبيرات.

which I translated as “Cries extolling God’s greatness rang out for the first time in the bar.” Here, we have that tricky word takbīr (here in its plural form, takbīrāt, which you’ll recall can mean an utterance of the phrase “God is great,” or Allahu akbar.) Unlike the very quotidian usage of the phrases I discussed above, the important thing here is the exceptionality of the utterance of this phrase in this particular setting: only an exceptional event could elicit such a response in the bargoers, leading them to introduce an explicitly religious sensibility into an adamantly secular space.

In translating this sentence, I considered “For the first time in that bar, shouts of ‘Allahu akbar!’ were heard.” Or, “For the first time in that bar, shouts of ‘God is great!’ were heard.”

“Allahu akbar” seems like a viable option, because it is a phrase that has gained a certain currency with Anglophone readers and would most likely be recognized. It has gained this currency, however, largely as an extremist battle cry, which is quite distinct from its formal usage in Muslim prayer and the call to prayer, and in informal expression regardless of faith in moments of joy, distress, and amazement. Condensed in these couple of paragraphs is, in fact, precisely this collision between different ways of relating to faith, global politics, and the specific event of September 11th that are at play, writ small, in the different usages of this phrase. So, I think there is something to be said for highlighting the way in which the bargoers unwittingly echo the extremist battle cry before they realize that “the operation was linked to a religious group which classified itself as an Islamic jihadist organization” and before “the sadness for the innocent victims” sinks in.   

However, I opted for “Cries extolling God’s greatness” because it feels more open to encompassing the different emotions at play in this scene and the implied phrase, and because it feels closer to the way the Arabic suggests a specific utterance without stating it explicitly.

How would you translate this sentence?