The Hell of Metamorphosis: selected from Manṣūr Būshnāf’s al-Kalb al-dhahabī (2020; The Golden Dog) and translated by Charis Olszok

Abstract

Mansūr Būshnāf (b. 1954) is a Libyan novelist and playwright who began writing in the 1970s, after moving from his native Tarhuna to Tripoli. In the late 1970s, he was imprisoned along with numerous other intellectuals, perceived as a threat to the Gaddafi regime. This decade-long imprisonment, and the broader economic, intellectual, and political stagnation of the country during the same years, is the subject of his first novel, al-ʿIlka (2008; Chewing Gum, 2014), published in 2008. Al-ʿIlka features, at its heart, a young man, who remains motionless in a dilapidated public park for ten years, and a misplaced Italian-carved statue, evocative of longing, madness, and desire. “Chewing” as a leitmotif is a visceral representation of stasis, repetition (a central esthetics in Būshnāf’s writing), and the inability to speak openly and meaningfully. Al-Kalb al-dhahabī (2020) is Būshnāf’s second novel. After a further decade of silence and struggle, during which the author witnessed the fall of the Gaddafi regime, and Libya’s disintegration into bitter civil war, it was written in 2020, but yet to be published in its first Arabic edition (though Darf Publishers intend to bring it out this year). This struggle to write and to be heard, explored in equally spiritual and material terms, is a central theme of the novel, as it is of al-ʿIlka. Būshnāf’s authorial voice resonates from the margins, alluding to the real impediments to creativity within the country, and the difficulty of capturing its story on paper. He exults in a poetics of digression, repetition, and, baldly put, error and contradiction. His is a rough, local poetics, channeling the voice of the Libyan streets, with no time to edit, polish and redact, as he, and the country at large, move from prison to censorship to Civil War. Yet the novel also makes demands of its reader. Replete with intertextual references, it serves as what might be called a fictionally-framed comparative study of metamorphosis across literature and art, reflecting the author’s wide erudition, reportedly acquired through a fortuitous volume of art history snuck into his prison cell. As its title suggests, al-Kalb al-dhahabī draws on Apuleius’ Golden Ass (Asinus Aureus, c. 170), with Būshnāf emphasizing the Latin author’s North African origins, in the town of Madaurus. More broadly, the novel touches upon instances of literary transformation from Ovid to Kafka, and from the Sahara’s prehistoric rock art to the animal fables of Būshnāf’s Libyan forbear, al-S ādiq al-Nayhūm (1937–1994). Playing on the different Arabic terms for metamorphosis, tah awwul (transformation), and the Qurʾanic maskh