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Al-Tanki: In search of an Iraqi woman

June 01, 20227:00 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:00 p.m. Free entry until the event’s capacity is reached.
In Arabic and Spanish, with simultaneous translation.

Casa Árabe and Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo are presenting the most recent work by Alia Mamduh in Madrid on Wednesday, June 1.

The event will be featuring the book’s author, Alia Mamduh, who will be accompanied by her translator and the writer of the book’s foreword, Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán, a professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

You can watch the event live in Spanish and Arabic on our YouTube channel.

This bewildering symphony of wide-ranging narrative voices draws us into the search for Afaf, an Iraqi painter who vanishes without a trace in Paris. The author is an Iraqi writer who has been living in France for decades, long experimenting with the Arabic language in an attempt to create her own peculiar way of expressing her life experience as an exiled Arab woman who paradoxically returns to her native country over and over again. Writing about the violence, dictatorships and invasions that forced her to leave; about the marginalization that women continue to endure in Iraq’s cities and towns, always in the shadow of the almighty power exercised by men, fathers, older brothers and great military, civil and religious leaders; and also about the repression of basic freedoms, beginning with the freedom of expression and ending with sexual freedom. This all blossoms as of the first page in this detailed story about an Iraqi family and the street where its members live their lives, in spite of a languishing, crumbling Baghdad... (from the introduction by Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán) The newly published book Al-Tanki is being complemented with a further edition of Alia Mamduh’s previous novel Naftalina (Mothballs), also published by Ediciones del Oriente y el Mediterráneo in the year 2000. Therein one can already observe the way in which she employs subtlety, sharpness and linguistic distortion to both confound and reveal the tragic experience lived by millions of Iraqis forced to leave their homeland.
Al-Tanki: In search of an Iraqi woman