Short stories
من القصص القومي
Not translated into English
Zaima al-Baruni · 1958
Synopsis
Stories drawn from the country's past, in which the chronicle of resistance and legendary material answer each other from one page to the next. The narrator dwells at length on clothing, customs and ceremonies, to the point where description often outweighs action, and she places in the foreground female figures whom nothing singled out in the history books.
Context
The texts were given one by one to the newspapers and journals of Tripoli from 1953; their author then signed herself “bint al-watan”, the daughter of the country. She herself described the difficulty she had in collecting them under one cover: neither the means nor the presses were there, and it took five years, a detour via Cairo and financing from her own pocket. The volume received almost no response, apart from an article in which a columnist hailed less the book than the existence of a woman's writing, a promise, in his view, of a great literary future.
Who it is for
In Arabic, never translated into French, and unobtainable outside Libyan collections. It is better to know that the kingdom had just been born, after the Italian occupation and then British trusteeship.
Prizes and reception
The first work of creative writing that a Libyan woman published in book form. Opinions remain divided on its success, but every literary history of the country opens with it.