“Was he Ramzi?” A short story by Samira Azzam

Abstract

Samira Azzam (Samīra ʿAzzām; 1927-1967) was widely recognized by her contemporaries as an accomplished author, and her work has been described as “one of the most mature experiments in the short story” among Arab writers of the 1950s. During her short life Azzam published four short story collections, the last of which – al-Sāʿa wal-insān (1963; The Clock and the Man) –was exceptionally well received. Two additional short story collections were published posthumously, and while Azzam had begun work on a novel it remained incomplete at the time of her early and sudden death. Despite the enthusiastic reception of her work as it came out, as the years passed Azzam’s books all but disappeared from print. Her work received relatively little attention, with only a few exceptions, leaving a regrettable gap in the landscape of Palestinian, Arabic literature, and indeed Postcolonial literary study. It is difficult to say precisely why Azzam’s stories have been so ignored, given their quality and the ubiquitous sense of their value expressed by the critics of her day. Some put it down to the rise of interest in the novel, and a shift away from the short story. Others have attributed her neglect to Arab readers’ expectations of more explicitly political literature after the 1967 war. This neglect, thankfully, has been begun to see some remedy. The publication of the translated volumeOut of TIme (trans. Ranya Abdelrahman), which brings together stories from across Azzam’s collections, joins Joseph Farag’s critical discussion of her in Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile, reminding the field ofAzzam’s brilliance and making her work available to English readers. The following story, “Hal kāna Ramzī?” (1963; “Was he Ramzi?”) appears here for the first time in English. A deceptively simple, many-layered story, it exemplifies Azzam’s insightful writing. Set in a close-knit, unnamed, coastal community where neighbors are keenly aware of one another’s business (much like Acre, where Azzam was born and raised), the story describes the long-lasting effects of a child going missing. With her trademark “impressionistic” characterization, Azzam convincingly inhabits the psyche of the missing child’s friend, Samih, who, as an adult, narrates a traumatic event of the loss, which he experienced as a young boy. The disappearance of Samih’s friend, the titular Ramzi, the narrator relates, turned him into an introvert whose soul was weighed down by fear. While most of the narrative focuses on the disappearance of Ramzi and its immediate aftermath, the story also looks through a wider reflective lens at the impact of childhood trauma on someone’s life. Azzam