Sinno – Review of Olszok, The Libyan Novel Beyond Allegory: Human–Animal Encounters and Mutual Vulnerability in the Libyan Novel Nadine A. Sinno Review of: Charis Olszok, The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulnerability. Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. xi + 308 pp. £24.99 (pb); £75.00 (hb) Nadine A. Sinno is Associate Professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech,Blacksburg, VA, USA. Email: nadine7@vt.edu Book Review mailto:nadine7@vt.edu In The Libyan Novel: Humans, Animals and the Poetics of Vulner- ability, Charis Olszok provides an innovative exploration of the Libyan novel, situating her analysis within an integrative theo- retical framework that successfully leverages critical concepts from animal studies, ecocriticism, postmodernism, and postcolo- nialism, all the while elucidating Libya’s sociopolitical realities and the ways they have shaped the poetics of modern Libyan fiction. Employing the concept of “creaturely vulnerability”, which empha- sizes the shared precariousness of all species, she investigates hu- man-animal encounters and persuasively argues that in the Lib- yan novel, animals often feature “both as symbols of paradigmatic human political exclusion, and as embodiments of an existence beyond political demarcations” (18). As such, her nuanced analy- sis eschews any reductionist readings of the animal characters in the Libyan novel as sole ideological ciphers, mere national allego- ries, or purely literal beings. Olszok’s study encompasses an am- bitious corpus of novels by renowned and lesser-known authors, male and female, writing from inside Libya and the diaspora in Ar- abic, French, and English, spanning from the 1960s generation un- til 2011. The authors include but are not limited to al-Ṣādiq al-Nay- hūm, Aḥmad Ibrāhīm al-Faqīh, Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī, ʿAbdallāh al-Ghazāl, Manṣūr Būshnāf, Muḥammad al-Aṣfar, Razzan Naʿim al-Maghrabi, Aḥmad Yūsuf ʿAqīla, Aḥmad al-Faytūrī, Najwā Bin Shatwān, Kamal Ben Hamida and Hisham Matar. Throughout her study, Olszok em- phasizes the Libyan novel’s deep rootedness in the Qurʾan, popu- lar folklore, and Sufi traditions — particularly as they reiterate the interconnection and mutual vulnerability of all human and nonhu- man makhlūqāt [creatures]. By doing so, she elucidates the ways in which the novels engage in intertextual dialogue with other rel- evant texts and traditions, ensuring that her interpretation remains properly contextualized. Employing a postcolonial, ecocritical lens, the first chapter in Part I, “Survival”, highlights the “hybrid aesthetics” in al-Nayhum’s Min Makka ila Huna (1970, From Mecca to Here), al-Faqīh’s Fiʾran bila Juhur (2000; Homeless Rats, 2011) and al-Kūnī’s Nazif al-Hajar (1989; The Bleeding of the Stone, 2002), focusing on the authors’ juxtapositions Copyright © 2022 Nadine A. Sinno This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 275–280. Doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10900 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10900 Sinno, Review of Olszok | 277 Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of realist narratives with fables and their depictions of individual and communal crises. In all three novels, Olszok demonstrates, animal characters allegorize the precarious lives of marginalized populations and societal and ecological violence, while also assert- ing their own sentience, vulnerability and, ultimately, equal right to pursue rizq [sustenance] and survival. Examining a handful of other novels by the same authors, Chapter 2 shifts to a more polit- ical emphasis. In this chapter, Olszok diligently excavates the pri- mordial imagery and discourses that permeate her selected novels, showing how they construct the past as “confusion and transgres- sion, rooted in a trajectory of exile and loss”, thereby illustrating the predicament of the “outcast intellectual” (66). Importantly, Olszok draws nuanced connections between the select Libyan novels and other non-Western and Western texts including, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ ’s Kalīla wa-Dimna, The Thousand and One Nights, pre-Islamic poetry, Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North, George Orwell’s Ani- mal Farm and Franz Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy”, in addition to Biblical and Qurʾanic narratives. Titled “Signs and Cityscapes”, Part II focuses on the significance of animals and statues in the Libyan novel, demonstrating how they often signify historical (or future) trauma and violence, Sufi dis- courses, buried political messages, melancholic landscapes and ominous environmental degradation within and beyond Libya. In Chapter 3, Olszok provides exquisite close readings of al-Kūnī’s al- Tibr (1989; Gold Dust, 2008) and al-Ghazāl’s al-Tabut (2004, The Cof- fin) and al-Khawf abqani Hayyan (2008, Fear Kept Me Breathing). One of the chapter’s many strengths is Olszok’s attentive treatment of the camels that appear in al-Tibr and al-Tabut. She demonstrates how despite the variations in the camels’ statuses, and their pres- ences and absences in the narratives, both novels echo “the trans- gression and disintegration embodied by the Qurʾanic nāqa [female camel]”, as manifested through “deep-seated social and environ- mental imbalance” (99). Crucially, in both novels, the journeys un- dertaken by the male protagonists conclude “not with wealth, do- minion and ideal masculinity, but failure, lack and death.” Therefore, the Sufi journey “turns to vulnerability, as the self is opened to the 278 | Sinno, Review of Olszok Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) universe through physical suffering, and land and creatures are an- imated through shared melancholy and fear” (100). In its focus on the intersection of war and violence, human–animal companion- ship and mystical signs, the chapter reiterates Olszok’s thesis on creaturely vulnerability as it relates to timeless spiritual Sufi dis- courses, as well as precarious material conditions, including polit- ical instability and the plundering of earthly resources, in modern Libya and the rest of the world. Chapter 4 shifts its focus to the struggle and devastation of the Lib- yan city — often demonized by al-Qadhafi — as represented in Būsh- nāf’s al-ʿIlka (2008; Chewing Gum, 2014), al-Aṣfar’s Sharmula (2008, Sharmoula Salad) and Naʿim al-Maghrabi’s Nisaʾ al-Rih (2010, Women of the Wind). The chapter explores Būshnāf’s employment of the chewing gum and human-turned-statue to explore difficult themes including economic and sociopolitical ruin, mindless consumption, censorship, and haunting stories of subjective and systemic vio- lence in Libya. In addition, it examines al-Aṣfar’s deployment of the trope of the sharmūla, a local salad that evokes “unbounded hos- pitality” (149) and the mournful gazelle whose tours become “pep- pered with recent and historical suffering” (147) to explore both the oppression of the state and the potential “lines of flight”. The chap- ter concludes with an examination of Nisaʾ al-Rih, which depicts women’s struggles against both patriarchy and political oppres- sion. While the theme of creaturely vulnerability (and solidarity) re- mains central to Olszok’s analysis, the novel does stand out from the other novels analysed by virtue of its largely human-centered plot and poetics. Examining novels in Arabic, English, and French, Part III, “Children of the Land”, primarily focuses on childhood as an articulation of creaturely vulnerability, demonstrating the precariousness of tran- sitioning from childhood to adulthood and the bumping up of child- hood wonder against harsh material realities, societal pragmatism, and traumatic histories — that often do not bode well for the fu- ture of the land and its residents. In Chapter 5, for example, Olszok demonstrates how Aḥmad Yūsuf ʿAqila’s al-Jirab: Hikayat Najʿ (2006, Sinno, Review of Olszok | 279 Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) A Sack of Village Tales) and Aḥmad al-Faytūrī’s Sarib (2000, A Long Story) depict human–animal encounters, including life-changing in- cidents such as the slaughter of the protagonists’ beloved goat and gazelle respectively, as means of depicting profound creaturely in- terconnection, as well as the precarity of impending adulthood. In the same chapter, Olszok provides a textual analysis of Najwā Bin Shatwān’s Wabr al-Ahsina (2006, The Horse’s Hair), showing how this novel, which portrays the shared suffering of mother and daughter and casts doubt on the desirability of life, further illustrates Libya’s harsh sociopolitical conditions and the sense of “primordial pes- simism” (190) that underlie the Libyan novel. While Olszok’s analy- sis of this novel is certainly persuasive, the creaturely vulnerability manifested in this novel tends to center on the struggles of human or pre-human creatures (e.g. the fictionalized Adam and Eve and the unborn child), more so than those of nonhuman animals. Chapter 6 provides a study of Kamal Ben Hamida’s French-language novel, La compagnie des Tripolitaines (2011; Under the Tripoli Sky, 2013), and Hisham Matar’s English-language novel, In the Country of Men (2006), reiterating the centrality of creaturely vulnerability, while also addressing the challenges of “linguistic exile” and the “burden of representation” (201) with which Libyan authors in the diaspora must contend. Similar to the aforementioned Arabic Lib- yan coming-of-age novels, Ben Hamida’s and Matar’s narratives, as Olszok successfully demonstrates, articulate children’s harmo- nious connections with the natural world, as well as their subse- quent dejection as they encounter present and past, personal and national, traumas that inevitably taint and transform their child- hood while elucidating their families’ and nation’s difficult memo- ries and histories. The Libyan Novel is theoretically grounded, original, and passion- ate — Olszok’s care for the novels she writes about, the environment, and Libya comes through in her writing. The book is as thought-pro- voking as it is heart-wrenching in its intimate and honest depiction of the Libyan people’s suffering, human–animal companionship, and environmental degradation, as represented in modern Libyan 280 | Sinno, Review of Olszok Humanimalia 13.1 (2022) fiction. This is the first English-language monograph that examines the Libyan novel and that embraces an ecocritical, animal-studies approach to interpreting Arabic literature. The author’s compara- tive perspective ascertains the Libyan novel’s polyphonous, mul- ti-layered engagement with numerous texts and worldviews across times, cultures and geographies. Olszok’s timely engagement with the increasing precariousness of country and cosmos will resonate with readers and provide a valuable source for future studies on Ar- abic literature, postcolonial ecocriticism, and animal studies. Cru- cially, The Libyan Novel affirms that despite the scarcity of English translations and relative lack of English-language scholarly studies of modern Libyan fiction, the Libyan novel undoubtedly enriches Arabic and world literature. Olszok’s book promises to diversify and invigorate theoretical fields such as postcolonialism and ecocriti- cism — making it even more worthy of further critical attention.