“Was he Ramzi?” A short story by Samira Azzam

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Notes

1 Ashour et al., Arab Women Writers, 7. See also: al-Malāʾika, “al-Qiṣaṣ,” 4-5; and ʿAbbās, “al-Nitāj al-jadīd: wa-qiṣaṣ ukhrā,” 35-37. Not every contemporary review of Azzam's writing was glowing, of course. Beirut at the time had a lively culture of literary debate and the pages of al-Adab and other journals were full of commentary by writers – including Azzam herself – on each other's work, discussing technical aspects of their writing craft as well as the expected role of fiction in society.

2 Piselli, “Samira Azzam,” 94, 106.

3 al-Īd min al-nāfidha al-gharbiyya (1971; Eid from the Western Window) and Aṣdāʾ (1997; Echoes).

4 Azzam had been working on a novel, Sinai Without Borders, but destroyed it after the 1967 war. See Marcia Lynx Qualey’s introduction in Azzam, Out of Time: Short Stories, vi–vii.

5 In English, there are the articles of Kathyanne Piselli and Yasir Suleiman, and the notable work of Joseph Farag. In Arabic there are articles by Faiṣal Darrāj, Yūsūf al-Ḥiṭṭīnī and Walīd Abū Bakr. Until recently, only about a dozen English translations of Azzam’s stories had been published in various journals and anthologies. The recent publication of Out of Time: Short Stories, which collects some of Azzam’s best work in a translated volume (Trans Ranya Abdelrahman) marks a turning point in attention to her work.

6 Azzam, Out of Time: Short Stories, vii.

7 Khalifa, “SamīraʿAzzām,” 3; Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 27.

8 ‘Azzam, Samira, “Hal Kān Ramzī [Was He Ramzi?]” in al-Sāʾah wa-l- Insān [The Man and His Alarm Clock], 1st edition. Beirut: National Enterprise for Printing and Publishing, pp. 53-61.

9 Piselli, “Samira Azzam,” 96.

10 Darrāj, “SamīraʿAzzām,” 136. Tellingly, the name “Ramzī” means "symbolic".

11 al-Malāʾika, “al-Qiṣaṣ,” 4.

12 Piselli, “Samira Azzam,” 94.

13 Jayyusi, Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, 26; Khalīfa, “SamīraʿAzzām,” 3.

14 Darrāj, “The Palestinian Short Story.”

15 The general term used in Arabic to designate any one of several nomadic communities in the Sham region. The word is generally derogative.