Sonia Nimr,
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands. Trans. Marcia Lynx Qualey. Interlink Books, 2020. $15.00 (paperback)
We do not allow our characters rest. They are called upon to entertain us by darting to and fro, falling in love, living out our political agendas and often leading impossible lives we will never live. But I like that Sonia Nimr’s Qamar, the protagonist of Nimr’s
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, rests while she’s reading, in full view of us readers. Qamar is a bibliophile, and when exhausted by the adventurous demands of her life, be it piracy or racing across continents looking for someone lost, she turns to books for a breath of fresh air, reading for days on end. At one point, she even opens her own bookshop, something of a family legacy. After everything she’s been through, I like seeing her stop to rest with something she’s not had the time for. Something that she loves.
In early 2011, as she watched the removal of the graffiti that had been scrawled around Tahrir Square in the heady days of the popular uprising, followed by a “cleansing” of that space of revolt, Dina Heshmat realized she was witnessing the deliberate rewriting of history, a deletion of the people’s spontaneous discourse, to be replaced by a more elitist narrative.
Guided by this awareness, Heshmat sets out, in
Egypt 1919: The Revolution in Literature and Film, (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) to re-examine the Egyptian revolution of the previous century, looking into the country’s archives to find unpublished novels and out-of-print articles that reflect the people’s mood during what she argues was the early 20th century’s equivalent of Egypt’s Arab Spring: a popular uprising against an oppressive regime by society’s poorest and most downtrodden classes, that was later claimed by the nationalist bourgeoisie.
A story that begins in a glass jar in Tangier finds its roots in Palestine where twin girls, Shams and Qamar, are born. Their lives begin as strangely as their futures take shape, in a village that has been cursed, no less, by the girls’ father. Surrounded by the books that their mother has inherited as the daughter of a bookshop owner, Qamar and Shams have no friends to play with but the pages in their library. Through the books, they live adventures, but none that can prepare Qamar for the life she is about to have.
To escape the bleak accursed life and the heavy patriarchy that clouds the village, Qamar decides on adventure as she heads for Jerusalem, then Gaza, and from there to Egypt. From highway robbers to princesses in grand palaces to pirates that sail over the seas, Qamar’s life takes many twists and turns in this four-part adventure. Nimr’s novel is fast-paced and exhilarating as Qamar’s stories, much like Shahrazad’s, keep her alive and ready for each day to co