“The Quest for a Grammar: Arab Literature in English and the Time of Revolutions”

This article argues that Arab literature in English about the 2011 revolutions constitutes a distinctive literary engagement with a momentous historical moment. It looks in particular at the revolutions in Libya, Egypt, and Syria. Through close readings of Hisham Matar’s writings, in particular The Return (2016) and My Friends (2024), Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins (2017), Yasmine El Rashidi’s Chronicle of a Last Summer (2016), and Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home (2023/2025), it shows how these writers share similar concerns. First, they demonstrate the necessity to construct narrative time to account for events that are not totally in the past, and to articulate the present moment both to the historical past and to a future which did not materialize. Second, they seek a narrative form appropriate for these revolutionary events, through the practice of fiction and non-fiction, and through the quest for a narrative mode which conveys multiple and competing temporalities. Third, they are attentive to the precarious lives of those who fought in the revolutions and endured the consequences of the counter-revolutions. The article concludes that what unifies these works which address specific historical conditions is an assertion of the power of the literary imagination.