Al-Tanki, in the Footsteps of an Iraqi Woman (ARABIC)
Published at 16 26,,, 22 2022
Casa Árabe and Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo are presenting Alia Mamduh's most recent work on Wednesday 1 June in Madrid.
The event will feature the author of the book, Alia Mamduh, who will be accompanied by her translator and prologue writer, Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán, professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
This bewildering symphony of disparate narrative voices draws us into the search for Afaf, the Iraqi painter whose traces are lost in Paris.
The Iraqi writer who has lived in France for decades has long been experimenting with the Arabic language, trying to generate a peculiar way of expressing her life experience as an exiled Arab woman who returns again and again, paradoxically, to her native country. Writing about the violence, dictatorships and invasions that forced her to leave; about the marginalisation that women continue to suffer in the cities and towns of Iraq in the shadow of the omnipotent power exercised by the man, the father, the elder brother or the great military, civil and religious leader; or about the repression of basic freedoms, starting with freedom of expression and ending with sexual freedom. All this comes to the surface from the very first page of this detailed account of an Iraqi family and the street where its members live, in spite of a Baghdad that languidly declines... (from the presentation by Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán)
Al-Tanki's publishing novel is complemented by the reissue of Alia Mamduh's previous novel, Naphthalene, also published by Ediciones del Oriente y el Mediterráneo in 2000, in which her play of subtlety, acidity and linguistic distortion both confuses and uncovers the tragic experience of millions of Iraqis forced to leave their homeland.
