Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama is a book that must be on every library shelf. It is translated into Arabic by two professional translators, Heba Naguib Maghrabi and Iman Abdel-Ghani Negm.
Obama describes persuasively the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and guides the reader with great insight straight to the most serious questions of identity, class, and race. He begins the story in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. After that sudden death he goes to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
It is a rare politician who can actually write—and write movingly and magnificently. Obama tells the story of the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father whom he never knew. He went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life.
The book is issued and published in the Arab region by al-Kalima Publishing House, Abu Dhabi.
On political reform
While Western nations succeeded in founding well-established systems to democratically run their countries, Arabs resorted to a ‘magical solution’ akin to the benevolent despot to justify their failure on the same front. Al-Mustabbid al-Adel (The Just Tyrant) is the latest book issued by the Supreme Council of Culture. In it Mohamed Afifi presents a study on Arab leadership in the 20th century with a historical background, disclosing the reality of political reform in the Arab region. The essence of the study is one question: what is the origin of that legend which never led to any actual reform? To answer the question, Afifi depends on the series of articles written by the intellectual Ahmed Lutfi al-Sayed during the pre-1952 Revolution years and published under the title The Nation’s Rights, in which Sayed denies any possible affinity between justice and tyranny.
Afifi is professor of history at Cairo University and is currently nominated for the State Excellence Award.
Digging up the truth
The American University in Cairo has recently published a story set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, Boyout Khalf al-Ashgar (Houses behind the Trees) by Mohamed al-Bisatie. It illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret, and where people’s pasts haunt their present. When Mossad catches the butcher’s son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mossad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mossad’s ill-planned schemes are choked by a hard veil of history that includes his wife’s sexual past, the miserable lives of his family members and the absence of loyalty of his friends and enemies on the same level. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mossad’s wrath or to help Mossad track him down and confront his fate.
Feminine experience
Woman is not only that sweet smooth obedient creature, but can also be as defiant and bold as ever. Al-Tagriba al-Unthawiya (The Feminine Experience) includes stories and quotes that women write about themselves. Some write about liberty and modernism, expressing their inconsistent feelings—especially as teenagers. Others write about their love affairs and how they see men. The stories are compiled and introduced by the prominent novelist Sonaallah Ibrahim and published by Dar al-Thaqafa al-Gadida.
Unjustified hatred
Under the title of Islamophobia Nahdet Misr has published Saïd Lawedni’s new book which deals with the baseless fear of Islam all over the world, especially in the United States and Europe, even though statistics affirm that 63 Europeans daily convert to Islam. The writer discusses the unjustified hatred of Muslims and Arabs.
Volcano blasted
Writing on the global economic crisis, Jihan Gamal analyses in her new book Burkan al-Azma al-Alamiya…Ila Mata? (The Volcanic International Crisis…Until When? the reasons behind that crisis, and compares between the current downturn and the 1929 market crash. Gamal tackles, in detail, the effect of the crisis on all Egyptian sectors, outlining the strong points that officials can make use of to get through the crisis safely. The book is published by the author.