Osama Alomar, The Teeth of the Comb & Other Stories, Trans. by Osama Alomar and C. J. Collins, New Directions, 2017
Personified animals (snakes, wolves, sheep), natural things (a swamp, a lake, a rainbow, trees), mankind’s creations (trucks, swords, zeroes) are all characters in The Teeth of the Comb. They aspire, they plot, they hope, they destroy, they fail, they love. These wonderful small stories animate new realities and make us see our reality anew. Reading Alomar’s sly moral fables and sharp political allegories, the reader always sits up a little straighter, and a little wiser. Here is the title story:
Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of the class differences that exist between humans. They strived desperately to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below.
After a little while the comb’s owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found the comb in this state he threw it in the garbage.
Some of the teeth of the comb were envious of the class differences that exist between humans. They strived desperately to increase their height, and, when they succeeded, began to look with disdain on their colleagues below.
After a little while the comb’s owner felt a desire to comb his hair. But when he found the comb in this state he threw it in the garbage.
Osama Alomar, Fullblood Arabian, Trans. by C. J. Collins. New Directions, 2014
Eleven Stories in Conjunctions
Seven Pieces in The Ampersand Review
Osama Alomar, in his poetic fictions, embodies the wisdom of Kahlil Gibran filtered through the violent gray absurdity of Assad’s police state. Fullblood Arabian is the first English publication of Alomar’s strange, often humorously satirical allegories, where good and evil battle with indifference, avarice, and compassion in striking imagery and effervescent language.
I read in a book the following piece of wisdom: “He who remains silent in the face of injustice is a mute Satan.” I went out into the street and saw Satan everywhere.
Fireworks
Some powerful and influential people wanted to enjoy their day off. They gathered the poor and marginalized from the pavements of the earth and shot them off like fireworks. Their explosions illuminated the earth and sky.
This is that the author himself translated with C. J. Collins (whilst they sat side-by-side in Alomar’s Chicago taxicab between shifts, apparently—too vivid of a backstory not to share!). For me the stories’ distinctive flavour comes from Alomar’s masterful shifts of character perspective within extremely tight parameters. In one story, for example, a man picks up a seashell and puts it to his ear, marvelling at the beauty of the ocean-sounds within. “As for the seashell,” Alomar interjects, “she was writhing in pain, listening against her will to the torments and the struggles of the human soul.” The book is full of these moments which trip you up, swing bluntly from one psyche to another, rapidly decelerate time and play with scale, all of it exposing the delicate balance of our presumptions and allegiances; the small dictatorships that we foster second by second. - Emma Jacobs
Osama Alomar, a young Syrian writer who has been living here in the United States for the past five years, belongs at once to several different important literary traditions. Most immediately evident are two: that of the writer driven into exile from his own country and culture; and that of the writer of very short stories.
The plight of a writer who has an established reputation in his own country, and none at all here in his adopted country is a plight shared, of course, with immigrants of other professions, including, for instance, the Puerto Rican lawyer who leaves a thriving practice in his native country to manage a grocery store in Massachusetts; or the Jewish scholar or physician who flees Nazi Germany to work in a textile factory in New York. It involves a profoundly disturbing change of identity in his new world, and often in his own eyes. His identity in his new community is, in a sense, a necessary disguise; and he faces the challenge of holding his two identities in balance, adjusting himself to the new, keeping the old alive. Alomar left a culture in which his prize-winning fiction and poetry had been published in four collections to date, appeared regularly in literary journals, was shared out loud with appreciative others in convivial living-room gatherings. By contrast, his writing is known here only to a few. How fortunate, then, that with this first collection of stories in English he will begin to find an audience both in the U.S. and in the larger Anglophone culture.
The other tradition to which Alomar most obviously belongs—in this case by choice—is that of the very short story. But this tradition is complicated, for within this genre, we have different traditions and different types. While Alomar is working within his own particular cultural heritage, he is of course also sharing in a wider international legacy of the very short story or prose poem, the more contemporary part of which spans more than a century at least: from the prose poems of Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century, to those of Francis Ponge and other French poets of the twentieth; the lyrical and nostalgic real-life stories of the early twentieth-century Viennese Peter Altenberg and the quirky numbered “handbook” instructions of the Bohemian / Czech Dadaist and pacifist Walter Serner; the Austrian Thomas Bernhard’s grim and syntactically complex paragraph-long stories in The Voice Imitator; the self-denigrating, anti-climactic, quarrelsome tales of the Soviet Daniil Kharms; the lyrical autobiographical sequence of the Spanish Luis Cernuda; and the pointed philosophical narratives of the contemporary Dutch writer A. L. Snijders (whose term, zkv or zeer korte verhaal—very short story— means exactly the same thing as Alomar’s al-qisa al-qasira jiddan); to mention only a few.
And then, there are the literary traditions in which the very short story shares, and Alomar’s work with it, including moral tales, fairy tales, works of magical realism, coming-of-age novels, and so forth ad infinitum. I read, for instance, Alomar’s “Conversation of the Breezes” and I hear, suddenly, an echo of the voice of the swallow in Oscar Wilde’s very moving late nineteenth-century tale, “The Happy Prince.” I read his “Sea Journey,” in which a weary office worker dreams of delirious adventures in the waves and wakes to find he is late for work, and I am reminded not only of Kafka but also of the great early twentieth-century Dutch writer Nescio, both of whom so vividly evoke the man of imagination stuck within the rigid entrenched bureaucracy of the madly irksome office routine. Again I think of Nescio’s classic, Amsterdam Stories, with its interrelated stories of three pals growing up together, and also of a long early section of the multi-volume My Struggle, by the contemporary Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, when I read Alomar’s “Dividing Line,” one of the rare longer stories in the book and a succinct and crystalline tale of adolescent exuberance, heedlessness, rebellion, and epiphany. And—to return to the short form—Alomar’s insidious and powerful tale, “The Hammer and the Nail,” deploying personification with such utter ease and inevitability, reminds me of the terrifying absurdist domestic fables of the contemporary American poet Russell Edson, while the eccentricity and anguish underlying the occasional simple friendly tale reminds me of the weird and powerful work of the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, one of whose main forms was also the short story.
Although my frame of reference may be international, it is not particularly Syrian, which is of course my own loss. I have turned to Alomar’s translator, C. J. Collins, to learn what, in Alomar’s Syrian or Arabic heritage, have been the sources of his inspiration, particularly in the short form, and he has given me some interesting insights into the history of the form in the Middle East, both recent and older: there was an explosion of this form of writing in Syria in the 1990s; it became popular in magazines and newspapers as an expression of frustration at Syria’s bureaucracy and corruption and lack of freedom of expression. In an economically depressed time, too, there was a demand for the densest, briefest, most compressed of stories—a longer literary work was in fact a luxury—and these were shared and circulated freely and spontaneously, like personal anecdotes.
One of the best-known contemporary practitioners of the Arabic-language short story is the Syrian Zakaria Tamer, now in his eighties—many of his story collections have been translated into English and are available here. Going back another fifty years, there is the Lebanese literary and political rebel Khalil Gibran, with his formally innovative spiritual stories or prose poems, hugely popular in the American counter-culture of the sixties and an important influence on Alomar (Gibran himself being profoundly influenced by the earlier cosmopolitan Syrian prose poet Francis Marrash, who died in 1873). But the very short form has its roots in various Arabic literary traditions that go back to the Middle Ages and before, one important example being the mammoth story compilation One Thousand and One Nights (whose multi-cultural origins lie in the tenth century or arguably even earlier) and fable traditions like the Panchatantra, a third-century Indian set of linked animal tales imported into Arabic in the eighth century as the Kalila wa Dimna.
The personification of animal characters in the Kalila wa Dimna, for instance, finds its direct descendent in the naturalness and conviction with which Alomar personifies many of his protagonists, whether they be natural elements—the ocean, a lake, fire and water, breezes, clouds—or everyday objects such as a wistful and ambitious drop of oil, that cruel hammer and that gullible nail, a proud bag of garbage—or, yet again, abstractions such as freedom and time, allowing us to move easily into the alternate reality created in so many of these stories, whose forms range from moral fable to political fable to political allegory, to myth, to realistic moral tale, even to undisguised political statement, as in the title story “Fullblood Arabian” with its crushing final sentence.
The range of forms within this collection is matched by the versatility with which Alomar shifts tone, subject matter, and even structure from one story to the next. While some of the tales are explicitly angry or bitter, others are ironically detached, and still others make their point with a piece of sly wit, one of these being “The Pride of the Garbage,” in which a bag loaded with garbage, in its vainglory, is satisfied only if it is placed on the very top of the heap of bags bound for the dump. Formally, some stories proceed straight to the final shock or stunning image, as in “The Drop,” with its beautiful closing opposition of earth and sky. In others, the focus shifts smoothly, subtly, and naturally throughout the story, so that, to our surprise, the subject turns out to be something quite other than what we expected.
Such is the case in “Expired Eyes,” where the firm grounding of the plot in a realistic situation (a man enters his apartment after a day at work) allows us to accept its fantastical, perhaps futuristic ending (the man goes to his doctor to acquire a set of new eyes): here, realism is skillfully deployed, along with a reverberating emotional truth, in the service of fantasy. In Alomar’s stories, however, fantasy never devolves into mere whimsy. His magical imaginative creations are, every one, inspired by his deeply felt philosophical, moral, and political convictions, giving these tales a heartfelt urgency.
“Tongue Tie,” one of the simplest, neatest, and hardest-hitting, in its humorous restraint, ably illustrates this and can be quoted in full, being also one of the briefest:
Before leaving for work I tied my tongue into a great tie. My colleagues congratulated me on my elegance. They praised me to our boss, who expressed admiration and ordered all employees to follow my example! - Lydia Davis
CHICAGO — In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company.
Up to a dozen hours a day, six days a week, Mr. Alomar cruises the northwest suburbs around O’Hare Airport in his bright blue cab, dictionaries and a volume of Khalil Gibran piled beside him. When parked in line waiting for a fare to appear, he pulls out a notebook and tries to write.
“Driving a cab is hard work and very hard psychologically, because it takes me away from writing,” Mr. Alomar, who turns 46 on Saturday, said in an interview here recently at a coffee shop and in his cab. “It is a kind of spiritual exile to go with my physical exile. But I have to be strong. I have to be patient.”
On Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Alomar, whose first book to be translated into English, “Fullblood Arabian,” was recently published by New Directions, will take a brief respite from that grueling routine to attend the PEN World Voices literary festival in New York. He is scheduled to take part in two panels: “Creativity and Craft in Asylum,” on Saturday, and a Sunday afternoon conversation with the American writer Lydia Davis, who has emerged as his biggest champion, and the Icelandic writer Sjon.
Mr. Alomar’s super-short stories “are very imaginative and vivid and exhilarating,” said Ms. Davis, whose own work often occupies a terrain similar to Mr. Alomar’s in terms of length and tone. “Some are dark and angry, while others are funny. They are compact stylistically, wasting no words, and they go quickly from one moment to the next and on to the end. So they have density, but also are sort of explosive, with an aftershock, because they seem to tell one story at the same time they are telling another.”
Mr. Alomar sees himself as an heir of a literary form, now called al-qissa al-qasira jiddan, or very short story, that in the Arab world dates back more than a millennium and contains elements of poetry, philosophy, folk tale and allegory. “Fullblood Arabian” was, in fact, issued as part of a poetry series that includes work by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Hilda Doolittle, and the stories in the book run no longer than three pages, with the shortest being only one sentence.
Certainly, many of Mr. Alomar’s stories make use of ambiguities, especially in relation to the political scene. Here, in its entirety, is “Tongue-Tie,” the title piece of one of his three collections published in Arabic: “Before leaving for work I tied my tongue into a great tie. My colleagues congratulated me on my elegance. They praised me to our boss, who expressed admiration and ordered all employees to follow my example.”
C. J. Collins, Mr. Alomar’s translator, remembers meeting the writer for the first time in Damascus in 2007. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had eased some restrictions on private gatherings, and Mr. Alomar was a regular at salons that had then sprung up, where invited speakers would address political, cultural and social topics, but steer clear of directly criticizing the dictatorship.
“In the discussions that would come afterward, Osama’s stories would come up spontaneously as a way of driving home an intellectual point in a poetic fashion,” Mr. Collins recalled, adding, “In the States, it is putting literature down to call it utilitarian, but for me it was quite striking to see his work put to this really concrete use.”
Mr. Alomar was born in 1968 in Damascus, where his father was a philosophy professor and his mother an elementary school teacher. He read widely from his parents’ library, studied Arabic literature in college and sang and played guitar in a pop band. When the BBC’s Arabic service broadcast a poem he had submitted, he became convinced that he had a future as a writer.
Thanks in part to that upbringing, “I’m very interested in social and political movements,” he said. “Especially in my own country, but in the Middle East in general. As a secular person, I believe in democracy and individual freedom. There is a lot of persecution and oppression.”
Asked about his literary influences, Mr. Alomar, who speaks accented but nearly fluent English, produced a diverse list. Gibran, the Lebanese poet who wrote “The Prophet” and lived for many years in the United States, is at the top, but Mr. Alomar also cited Aesop, Hemingway (not surprising for a writer who values terseness and brevity), the British novelist and philosopher Colin Wilson and Kafka.
Emulating Gibran, Mr. Alomar came to the United States in 2008 to join his mother and an older brother. From an apartment near O’Hare, he has watched on CNN and Al-Jazeera over the last three years as his country has disintegrated into civil war, and he finds it agonizing.
“At the beginning, I was optimistic, because the Syrian people had an awareness about their freedom,” he said. “Now I’m not, because we have a lot of obscurants, even in the opposition. To see this suffering, it breaks my heart every day.”
If his exile started voluntarily, it would be difficult to return to Damascus now, Mr. Alomar said, and not just because he is so publicly identified with opposition to the Assad dictatorship. This year, he said, an apartment he owns there was destroyed in a bombing, and he lost not only his library and Fender guitar and amp, but also many manuscripts, including a novel.
“I lost everything, but I have to be wise about this,” he said. “I have to live with it. I have anger, but I keep it inside me. You can take it two ways, and I want that this can be a positive experience.”
Like Gibran, Mr. Alomar now aspires to write in both Arabic and English: “My goal, my aim, is to become an American writer,” he said. Inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea,” he has begun a novel that he said will be written in the form of a journal kept by a fetus, even as he continues to write his short stories.
Yet the long hours behind the wheel trying to make his weekly nut limit his opportunities to write and to meet people other than passengers who know nothing of his story and aren’t necessarily interested in Syria’s conflagration.
“I feel isolated in my cab,” he said. “I like my life here, but to be honest with you, I am homesick, too. I have a lot of memories of every corner, of every stone in Damascus. But this is my new country, and I want to penetrate it.” -
THE FIRST, wistfully: “If only I were a fullblood Arabian horse!”
THE SECOND, disdainfully: “Would you wish to be an animal when God in his mercy has created you as a human who belongs to a great and ancient nation proud of its glorious history?”
THE FIRST: “Man, don’t you know that the value of a fullbood Arabian horse in this world is far greater than the value of a fullblood Arabian human?”
When the owner of the house picked up the bag of garbage and headed out to the street to throw it in the dumpster, the bag was overwhelmed with the fear that she would be put side by side with her companions. But when the man placed her on top of all the others, she became intoxicated with her greatness and looked down at them with disdain.
A drop of dried blood on the ground looked at the setting sun with an expression full of sadness. “Why do people look at that giant drop with happiness while they look at me with fear?” she asked in a weak voice. “We share the same roots!”
A reply came to her from somewhere unknown: “Because you are fixed to the surface of the earth and she is fixed to the sky.”
Climbing up the steps to his home one night after working late, he staggered back and forth from exhaustion, carrying paper bags filled with fruits and vegetables. After entering the apartment and putting down the bags, he opened the door to his bedroom and was shocked to see his wife making love with insane ardor to a friend of their son’s. She glanced up at him, deliberately flashing him looks of malicious gloating. He rubbed his eyes hard and opened them to see her humbly performing her prayers. He rubbed his eyes again, this time with furious intensity, and opened them to see her dancing completely naked in front of the window that faced the house of their young neighbor. He closed his eyes in horror, rubbing them with two hands like tornadoes. When he opened them again, his wife was there, inviting him to share breakfast in bed, her eyes brimming with love and tenderness.
He knew then that the allotted time of his eyes had expired. He visited the most famous eye doctor in the country to have two new ones implanted—specially ordered fresh from the factory. And from that day on, he saw his wife exactly as he desired. - www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/osama-alomars-very-short-tales
The Smiling People
Wadi’ al-Mantuf was arrested after having been caught in the act of looking at the leader’s picture without smiling. The secret police administered punches and kicks to him, as did most of the passersby. Even the children didn’t miss a chance to express their strong hatred for him, sticking out their tongues and spitting on him. He was then taken to the police station where he remained a long time under arrest. Finally he was brought to court. He was sentenced to smile at the leader’s image for life. To prevent the recurrence of such an embarrassing situation countless numbers of smiling masks were manufactured and distributed to the entire population, from nursing babies to the oldest people. Smiles became generalized and sadness fell into oblivion . . .and the tourist trade became bustling.The Sea Shell
He was walking by the sea shore, enjoying his yearly vacation, kicking the sand in happiness, meditating on the golden pearls embedded in the creases of the waves far out to sea beneath a sun held up by ecstatic joy. His foot hit up against something hard. He bent down and pulled easily it from the sand. It was a big shell. He put it to his ear and immediately stopped walking to enjoy the enchanted echo of the waves. He felt as if he was diving in the ocean, transported by the music of its astounding creatures. He wished to be part of that stunningly beautiful world. As for the sea shell, she was writhing in pain, listening against her will to the torments and the struggles of the human soul, the wailing of the tortured, the cries of mothers who had lost their children, the tears of orphans, the rivers of blood, the heart of humanity pierced by millions of spears, destruction and ruin everywhere.
The shell would have exploded in the man’s ear had he not lifted her high with a joyful movement and thrown her into the sea. She breathed deeply in relief, feeling incomparably happy. She dove excitedly into the depths . . .and he returned to his sea. - electricliterature.com/two-stories-by-osama-alomar/
Bag of the Nation
I took the big bag that I had inherited from my grandfather down from the attic. It was brightly colored like a storm of rainbows. I hoisted it onto my back and went out into the street. I closed my eyes and began to choose samples at random from everything that was inside: humans and stones and dust and flowers and wind and the past and the present and the future.
I carried the heavy bag on my back and set off on a far-ranging journey around the world, proudly carrying the overflowing wonders of my nation’s genius.
As soon as I arrived in the first of the many countries I had decided to visit I headed toward the public square and stood in the middle, shouting as loud as I could:
“Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Ladies and Gentlemen! I have come to you from a faraway country carrying roses and flowers . . . concepts and creativity . . . a history glorious with the colors of spring and a future desiring to stand humbly before my nation’s lofty gate.”
The magnetism of my shouting drew in all sorts of people from the arteries that opened onto the square until they became a thick crowd. Voices quickly rose: “Come on, stranger . . . show us what you have . . . show us the wonders and the creativity of your country.”
I took the heavy bag off my back, sweat pouring off me, and combed the crowd with a look full of confidence. I undid the mouth of the bag and opened it wide, but when I did, an atomic irony exploded from it, blowing me into the air, then dropping me to the ground. Everyone exploded in laughter. Some of them even fell on the ground clutching their stomachs. The women and the children looked at me with disgust. Many turned their heads away.
The surprise shook me like an earthquake . . . my spirit filled with fissures. One of the people from the crowd came toward me and gave me a small mirror, then turned and went away laughing. I looked in the mirror. The horror! My face had been terrifyingly disfigured. As for my country’s reputation, it had suffered degradations such as it would not recover from for tens if not hundreds of years.
“Oh my country . . . what did you do to me . . . what did I do to you?”
I cast my tearful gaze about the square that had emptied of even the breeze. I tried to get up slowly, propping myself up on my broken spirit, but I immediately fell back down. I repeated the effort many times. Finally I succeeded. My thighs trembled as if the shards of my self-confidence had joined together there. I looked at the charred bag of the nation. I looked at the effects of the explosion of atomic irony. Tears fell thickly from my eyes, trying to make their way through the peaks and crags of my ravaged face. I picked up the bag and threw it into the sea and wandered off not knowing where. - wordswithoutborders.org/article/bag-of-the-nation
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