Middle East/North African Lit discussion

I started reading The Belt yesterday.
I can't yet distinguish between fiction and autobiography. It's written in a straightforward style, recounting episodes from the author's childhood, interspersed by references to the sayings of an elder man named Hizam.

There is a certain nostalgia and regret expressed for the lost traditions of the village, when modernity began to encroach on the tribal/rural ways.
A school is established - I'm guessing this in taking place in the early/mid 1950's - with teachers sent from Jordan and Syria, and an Egyptian medic is brought in. The villagers, both young and old, find the customs (food preferences, attire, personal hygiene) of these "extraterrestrials" bewildering.

An endearing scene: The young boy asks his father to help him learn his prayers, and he holds out the government-issue school copy of the Quran. The father opens it but can't read a thing. So he goes to find his old copy, which he is able to "read" and recite, as he had learned by memorizing the verses according to the layout of the pages of his copy, rather than the actual printed words.

Thanks Okyrhoe for sharing , please tell us your opinion when you finish it :)

Overall it's a bittersweet coming-of-age story. I would like to think of it as a memoir rather than a fiction or a fictionalized memoir.
The story is emotionally intense; the narrator is sometimes torn between the desire to be truthful and the need to preserve personal/family/village "secrets".
He is relatively frank about detailing his naive misconceptions, his childhood crushes, and more interestingly, the confusion when thrust into a "modernity" for which his parents, and the entire village, are unable to prepare him for. Little things - such as personal hygiene "the village way" to the way the foreign teachers, nurses, doctors, etc. demand of him - to figuring out the conflicting mores in the transition from tribal customs to urban society.
The exposition is simple without being simplistic. The narrative voice is that of an adult who reminisces about his lost innocence and his lost family ties after emigrating to a foreign land. In hindsight though he realizes he possessed a curiosity that "naturally" pushed him away from the village and into the world beyond. And yet he looks back with fondness on those defining moments of his childhood - being caught in a lie by his elders, his circumcision, his sister's betrothal, learning to live on his own in town when he is sent to school, his first eid sacrifice as "man of the house", etc. Behind every action there is an awareness of the responsibility of belonging to the family, the tribe, the village, and that every word and action bears down on these bonds. At every moment he is judged according to this. So writing about the village, even many years later and in a distant land, carries with it a certain risk.
From the epilogue:
"I thought he (Hizam) would be surprised to hear that a publisher had paid me money for this book, but he already knew this because I had sent all the money home to my sisters. 'At least, I hope you didn't sell the village?' he asked, slightly worried. I assured him I had not. 'How can anyone sell their soul?'"

Thanks Okyrhoe , I think I will try to read it when I get back to (KSA) zone again :)

BTW , is (Hizam) = (Belt) a person ?

is (Hizam) = (Belt) a person ?"

Hizam is apparently a father figure & spiritual guide to the narrator/author. He may be the tribal elder who acts as the village historian and poet. The narrator/author is his protégé; he aware from a young age that he is destined to be a poet himself and to carry on Hizam's role.

My personal interpretation is that the author doesn't want to reveal the actual name of the village elder (and possibly a relative), so he gives him this symbolic name.

One of the book's main themes is gender. The boy is constantly aware of the expectation by the village society that he should act as a "man" (rather than a "boy"). From a young age he is preoccupied with the concept of wearing a knife, held up by the belt. Women wear belts, too, but they don't carry knives. At some point he mentions that widows "become men"; it's not clear to me, does it mean the widows now carry the knife of their deceased husband?
The knife (and by extension, the belt) represents manhood. The quality of the knife characterizes the man (wealth/prestige). When a group of boys are taken into town to be issued government identification cards, they are told they are still underage; that is, they are not quite men, despite the knives worn inside their belts - and this is perceived as a slight, or an insult.
In another scene, "Hizam" tells the boy he is not yet a man, for he takes the boy's knife from the belt, throws it against a stone, and the blade chips. The boy is mortified that his knife was not worthy, and that he wasn't able to defend and protect his manhood.

During the ritual of circumcision, performed around the age of ten and in the public square, the boy is guided by his maternal uncle*, during the ceremony and thereafter. Is this figure Hizam? I think so. It's not clearly stated, but I think it is meant to be understood.

* In instances like these the English "uncle" fails to convey the difference between "ammo" and "khalo" :-)

By the way, there is considerable information concerning the women in the narrator's childhood - sisters, mothers, neighbors, etc - and I found the book interesting to read about these women's roles and their behavior.

Okyrhoe , you realy made a tempting read !! it is not a big novel ...so we will see :)

it is very interesting how he picked (belt) - with all its symbolic meanings - as a metaphor name for his maternal uncle/spiritual guide/tribal elder !

what did you find as the most interesting issue about women's roles ?

Nile daughter wrote: "what did you find as the most interesting issue about women's roles"

I felt that the descriptions of the female characters in The Belt possessed positive qualities, and were a source of respect and power, quite different from the stereotypical characterizations that abound about Saudi women.* Of course, the story takes place in a time before the "royalty" came to rule the country & before the government established the monitoring of the population by the so-called religious police. There are several instances in the story where this is made clear: new government issue Korans for the students, the imam promoting new codes of conduct for the families. All of these things are "new" rather than "traditional" to the villagers.
The mother figure is a symbol of strength, the anchor of the family in many ways. Instead of being eager to marry off their daughters a.s.a.p., the whole family is saddened when the newly-wed girls leave with their husband to his home.
The young protagonist, as he reaches adolescence, is made aware of how he is to behave from now on, for he will be judged by the women in the village -- his birth mother, his full-sisters and his step-sisters, all his "second mothers" (that is, the women of the village who welcome him in their homes as is the custom after his circumcision) -- all these women evaluate his behavior according to certain expectations, and this is a source of anxiety to him.



* Even Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire I suspect is a somewhat biased text, when it comes to a deeper understanding of women & women's roles in the KSA.

Okyrhoe, This is a very clever remark..

Okyrhoe ,
Sorry for the late reply , I agree with NG , now you pushed me far , I will try to catch up with you reading it :)