Egyptian Mansoura Ez-Eldin is the first writer featured. A novelist and short story writer, Ez-Eldin is represented by five short stories, all written in her enigmatic and dreamlike style. In the introduction, Banipal editor Margaret Obank quotes the writer, who admits to being “fascinated by the relation between dreams and reality” and who sees “dreams or nightmares as enriching the real”. This is evident in her stories, where an entire work such as ‘Flickering Light’ plays out like a dream from beginning to end. In ‘Conspiracy of Shadows’, one of my favourite stories in the book, dreams and reality intertwine, as do the past and present. The male narrator has a recurring waking vision of a man digging a grave under a mango tree, while a dead woman lies beside him. When the hole is finished, the woman is stripped, embraced and buried. The narrator has no idea what this dream means, but there seems to be a connection with a young woman who turns up at his workplace. This woman vanishes after a brief sexual encounter. It’s particularly on a second reading that the young woman’s existence becomes more tenuous. No one else in the office acknowledges her, and his colleagues give his strange looks when he asks about her. Is she real? And does the memory of his sinister father’s obsession with a tree point to his father being the killer? Or is it possible the narrator himself disposed of her without having any conscious memory of the event?

Ez-Eldin’s style is at times less magic realism than irrealism, where dreamlike actions and images are not fully explained, and characters are sketched in sparse but memorable prose. The metaphysical side of religion and Egyptian tales of goblins, fairies and ghosts provide inspiration to Ez-Eldin. In ‘Butrus: A Distant Hazy Face’, a teenage boy falls into the Nile and drowns. This is described in a wonderful line: “But the boy had dissolved in the water ‘like a grain of salt’…” In ‘A Red Gladiolus’ a woman stabs another in the chest, in what is remembered as a deeply intimate act. A blood stain on her arm reminds the narrator of a gladiolus, but in time comes to resemble the narrator’s face. Though this is a very dark work on the surface, there’s a similar ambiguity present, so that the identity of the victim is in question - is it in fact another version of the narrator’s self, or a relative, someone who resembles her?

The author is content to let readers make up their own minds, avoiding a more obvious and imposed meaning. This indicates both a willingness to take risks and a trust in the reader. Ala Hlehel is a young Palestinian writer whose beautifully told story, ‘My Husband is a Bus Driver’, first featured in a recent issue of Banipal magazine. The story is reprinted here and is an excellent example of Hlehel’s style, which is wonderfully simple and rooted in the day-to-day lives of Palestinians. The narrator of My Husband is a Bus Driver expects to go on long journeys with her husband after they’re married, and her sister hints at the erotic pleasures of the long back seat of the bus, but the marriage offers no travelling, only a disgust and then a detachment towards sex. Instead of travelling with her husband, he expects her to clean the bus of sweet wrappers, crisp packets, rubbish, vomit, and discarded condoms. She longed for a daughter who would go to university and become a doctor, but instead has five sons who look away when her husband slaps her for knocking over a pail of water. Her escape from the endless drudgery comes in the form of satellite television, soap operas in particular. Hlehel writes with humanity and warmth, and successfully portrays the disappointment of the narrator’s existence.

There are two other stories by Hlehel in the collection. In the first, ‘The Carpet’, a young man writes a letter to his ex-girlfriend, telling her how he sold the carpet she once bought him as a gift. This is a story rooted in the small tragedies and humiliations of everyday life. Meanwhile in War, a man’s daily routine in a Haifa coffee shop is broken by the outbreak of war. There’s shelling from a Hizbollah-run Lebanon, and people head for the air raid shelters. The man is supposed to be meeting his girlfriend and the story moves back and forth between the two. Far from being the usual kind of war story, this narrative deals with mundane aggravations and quarrels which still afflict the characters even in the midst of a missile attack. There’s a darkly comic thread running through to the end. Although the story is set in the future, the recent conflict in Lebanon makes the depicted events all the more immediate.

Joumana Haddad is the first of the two poets to feature in ‘Unbuttoning the Violin’. Her work is intimate, sensual, at times cerebral, and loaded with a subtle wit. ‘Adrenaline’, the first work, cleverly deconstructs love into its chemical and physical components: “The chemistry book says / when I saw you the first time / my nervous system / sent coded signals to my brain… My same oblong red book says: / if we are lovers / it is because of endorphin…” But it’s clear as the poem continues that the explanations of science are inadequate, and the final declaration returns love to its poetic and transcendent nature. The poem ‘Commandments’ meanwhile shows Haddad’s juxtaposition of unexpected imagery and words. ‘My Lover’ appears to be about a man, and is a beautifully executed prose poem, and yet its final lines reveal the lover to be poetry itself. My favourite of Haddad’s poems though are ‘Come’ and ‘I Have Not Committed Enough Errors’. ‘Come’ has a beautiful, lyrical quality, which is found in other poems such as ‘Your Homeland is This Burning Night’. ‘I Have Not Committed Enough Errors’ exhibits breathless fluidity and is a poem I’ve read again and again. There’s something Sphinx-like about Haddad’s work at times, as though she’s presenting us with a poetic riddle, and this can be seen in the likes of ‘Your Homeland is This Burning Night’ and ‘The Panther Hidden at the Base of Her Shoulders’.

The poetry of Syrian ‘Abed Ismael’ is very different from Haddad’s, existential and from time to time exhibiting anxiety about the current state of Syria. The first reference to the military appears in the very first poem ‘Statues’. In the second poem, ‘Where Does it Come From’ there is an existential scream of Munch-like proportions. ‘Mirrors of Damascus’ is the longest poem in Ismael’s collection, and while on the surface is a journey through Damascus, its popular sites, historical locations, famous citizens past and present, more menacing and problematic imagery constantly surfaces and resurfaces: “the rifles trained on our backs / and the telephone receivers hanging down on the pavements / as if a crime has just taken place”or “Then we go down with the rays of the helmet and the military statue / and the dawn carrying an axe under its arm….” Elsewhere in the poem, we have lines like: “Those are the emotions of seven o’clock / raining on the guards’ room of the broadcasting station / and on fear which rolls / like the helmet of the censor….” But then there are other very different poems like ‘Don’t Wake Him Up’, one of a number of beautiful and lyrical works which shows a wonderful use of imagery. “The violets have grown longer than his dreams, / and the mirrors, washed with rainbows, / roam freely in all his house.” This is a work that references poetry itself, as does It is ‘Painful, O Sky’. And I particularly enjoyed ‘A Mere Ghost’, and the lovely last lines of ‘Sorrow’. Ismael translated the final three poems himself, and their images flow so fluidly line to line like a river of words - particularly in ‘The Damascene Bird’.

In fact credit has to be given to all the translators: Paul Starkey, Nada Elzeer, Issa J Boullata, Marilyn Hacker, Anthony Calderbank, and poet Abed Ismael for doing such an excellent job in bringing these works into English.

Joumana Haddad, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Ala Hlehel, and Abed Ismael are four very different writers. With an introduction from Banipal editor Margaret Obank, and informative author and translator biographies, ‘Unbuttoning the Violin’ is a beautifully packaged little volume which comes modestly priced at £3.95.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.