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A UNIQUELY CREATIVE SHORT STORY WRITER style. I met up with him more than once at the Amman headquarters of the Jordanian daily Al-Akhbar, a paper he wrote for, though not for long. I tirelessly read everything of Tamer’s I could lay my hands on. I read the collections Spring in the Ashes, The Thunder, Damascus Fire, The Tigers on the Tenth Day, and everything else that came after them, with a voracious passion. I learned how his short story style developed and broadened, yet preserved the core of “The Neighing of the White Horse”. The extraordinary diversity of his expressivity drew on fantasy, marvel and imagination to excoriate the tyranny and injustice done to human beings and the domestication of ordinary citizens themselves. Tamer defended, too, the right of women to equality. In the story “Tigers on the tenth day”, the tiger is starved to the point of utter degradation, a symbol of the citizen tamed into submission, the city a tyrant’s cage. In “Randa”, from Damascus Fire, a man kills his sister on the grounds of defending her honour, with Randa becoming a symbol of innocence destroyed by the ever-deepening oppression of women. Anyone who reads Tamer’s tales, though they may have been written decades ago – never mind the stories and articles that he writes now – will very clearly get a powerful sense of how much they speak to our own age, a time in the Arab world filled with religious extremism and doctrinal intolerance. They explore and express the corrupting power the dictatorial regimes we live under have over their citizens, and the marginalisation, poverty and exploitation, the oppression and degradation they mete out. Zakaria Tamer is eminent among the short story writers of the Arab world, indeed the whole world. He stands in the front rank of pioneers in the form, alongside Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allen Poe, Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, Jorge Luis Borges, Yusuf Idris, Julio Cortázar, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver. So here’s to Zakaria Tamer, with the utmost affection, admiration and respect. Translated by John Peate 90 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015
page 93
THE SHORT STORIES OF ZAKARIA TAMER FADHIL AL-AZZAWI Sitting in a café and cursing the dictators Idon’t remember when or where I met Zakaria Tamer for the first time. It may have been in Baghdad or Damascus some time in the latter half of the 1960s. But I know for sure he was always present in our literary circles in Baghdad with his brilliant texts. Although he was a little bit older than most of the writers of my generation, we would consider him one of us. With a writer like Zakaria Tamer, you don’t need to read more than even one of his short stories to feel you have already discovered a genuine writer. Perhaps what raised our attention in him and his work was his simple and clear language. It is a language full of poetry, concrete, direct, and free from rhetorical ornament, but also a language that hides more than it reveals, a language that is able to guide you to another level of reality, where there are no boundaries between imagination and mythology, between fiction and daily life, and that has an inspiring structure that makes his story or his tale sound like a poem. The authenticity of form in Zakaria Tamer’s fiction is also reflected in the themes and contents of his stories. His vision is nearly always critical and modern. He criticizes not only passive social phenomena but also the terroristic aspects of the regime in his own country and in the wider Arab world. Many of his short stories focus on the uncertain psychological relationship between the executioner and his victim. The irony of his tone and his way in forming his world are his tools for bringing down the false gods and debunk- BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015 91

A UNIQUELY CREATIVE SHORT STORY WRITER

style. I met up with him more than once at the Amman headquarters of the Jordanian daily Al-Akhbar, a paper he wrote for, though not for long.

I tirelessly read everything of Tamer’s I could lay my hands on. I read the collections Spring in the Ashes, The Thunder, Damascus Fire, The Tigers on the Tenth Day, and everything else that came after them, with a voracious passion. I learned how his short story style developed and broadened, yet preserved the core of “The Neighing of the White Horse”. The extraordinary diversity of his expressivity drew on fantasy, marvel and imagination to excoriate the tyranny and injustice done to human beings and the domestication of ordinary citizens themselves. Tamer defended, too, the right of women to equality. In the story “Tigers on the tenth day”, the tiger is starved to the point of utter degradation, a symbol of the citizen tamed into submission, the city a tyrant’s cage. In “Randa”, from Damascus Fire, a man kills his sister on the grounds of defending her honour, with Randa becoming a symbol of innocence destroyed by the ever-deepening oppression of women.

Anyone who reads Tamer’s tales, though they may have been written decades ago – never mind the stories and articles that he writes now – will very clearly get a powerful sense of how much they speak to our own age, a time in the Arab world filled with religious extremism and doctrinal intolerance. They explore and express the corrupting power the dictatorial regimes we live under have over their citizens, and the marginalisation, poverty and exploitation, the oppression and degradation they mete out.

Zakaria Tamer is eminent among the short story writers of the Arab world, indeed the whole world. He stands in the front rank of pioneers in the form, alongside Anton Chekhov, Edgar Allen Poe, Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, Jorge Luis Borges, Yusuf Idris, Julio Cortázar, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver.

So here’s to Zakaria Tamer, with the utmost affection, admiration and respect.

Translated by John Peate

90 BANIPAL 53 – SUMMER 2015

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