LIBYA

CATALOGUE OF A PRIVATE LIFE

by NAJWA BIN SHATWAN

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist who was born in Benghazi, to parents who could neither read nor write. She learnt to read herself and, as a child, gained access to books after befriending an author in Benghazi who allowed her to choose from his large, international, private library.

Bin Shatwan is the author of four novels, THE HORSES’ HAIR, ORANGE CONTENT, THE SLAVE YARDS, and ROMA TERMINI, in addition to several collections of short stories, including CATALOGUE OF A PRIVATE LIFE. The collection won an English Pen Translates award and led to this translation being published by Dedalus Africa. The author is also the first Libyan to ever be shortlisted for the International Prize of Arabic Fiction, in 2017.

The collection is short and sweet, and accessible—an easy weekend afternoon read—if you have time to lie in a sunny patch on your sofa and have someone bring you endless cups of tea. It was translated by Sawad Hussain, an award-winning Arabic-English literary translator, who, in an article I found in Arts&Culture, said that you can always count on Nadja Bin Shatwan’s for the absurd "to a laugh-out-loud degree". Although, he adds, "you will never be short of weigh-you-down sorrow," either. "And through it all she is critiquing society, stretching our expectations of ourselves, of each other."

These stories do twist the ordinary just enough for it to be curious and uncomfortable, in that you don’t know what might come next or where you’re being taken. The title story, Catalogue of a Private Life, introduces the reader to the unspoken thoughts of a bodyguard who is responsible for the safety of an Army General, who barely acknowledges the bodyguard’s existence.

“This bodyguard was vigilant. When the general walked, he walked, and when the general stopped, he stopped. Occasionally he would cough for a while, as there wasn’t much one could say to a general so preoccupied with things the guard could not see. Whenever the general sneezed, the guard would wheeze out a ‘Yarhamukum Allah’ and hasten to offer a tissue double quick.”

The circumstances of the General’s leadership are absurd. Although he has endless supplies and warehouses full of the best possible weapons and armaments, his army is virtually non-existent. “Where will the General find enough men for an army when half the population had died and the other half had fled?” He spends days studying a map of the territory he wishes to invade against an enemy who are in the same boat—depleted of men, yet overstocked with the best tanks and guns money can buy—and thus unable to fight one another. The bodyguard observes that there might actually be peace despite all the best efforts of the bloodthirsty leadership.

Another story tells of a cow reigniting a feud by wandering unattended into a neighbor’s field. Another of a grandmother who keeps a burglar captive after he falls through a skylight into their house, because her son is out of town and she and her daughter-in-law don’t want the shame of the neighbors seeing a strange man leaving their house which is full of women and girls. The stories are satirical and use absurd situations to expose and ridicule that which is already ridiculous in society—war, territory, women’s inequality.

I didn’t quite get to the “laugh-out-loud” degree the translator, Sawad Hussain, promised, but the collection was enjoyable. I am finding it so gratifying to experience different African cultures, described in humor and circumstances, and using language and storytelling unique to each place.

Hussain admits that translating Bin Shatwan’s work is not always easy. "But it has by far been the most rewarding in my career. Her star is already on the rise and I can't wait for more people to fall in love with the magician that she is."