Hurma is another book that I came across thanks to a review by Stu at Winston’s Dad, and it’s the first I’ve ever read by a Yemeni author. Wikipedia tells me that Yemen is a developing country, and the poorest country in the Middle East. It is isolated amongst its neighbours because it refused to support the First Gulf War to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. Governance and corruption have been major problems there for ages and a civil war in the 1990s was never really resolved – rebel forces took the country’s capital in 2015. Given this state of affairs, it seems amazing that there is a functioning publishing industry, but again Wikipedia comes to the rescue with a page about Ali Al-Muqri which tells me that his work is published in a magazine called Banipal, and that two of his books have been nominated for the Arab Booker Prize. (A prize apparently organised from London and funded by Emirates, with the aim of promoting good quality Arab literature).

Now, courtesy of the Brisbane Writers Festival Opening Address, there’s a been a brouhaha about writers appropriating the culture and experiences of others, and I do not want to get into that*. But this book (like The Patience Stone) is written by a male author purporting to be a woman under the veil. Written in a culture that oppresses women, this novella gives a voice to the silent and the invisible. Yes, it would be better if there were a flourishing Yemeni publishing industry that brought us both male and female authors who could write freely about taboo subjects, but from what I’ve been able to glean from Wikipedia, Ali Al-Muqri is lionised in the west because he has the courage to tackle taboos like sex, religion and war. So… while I wait for translations from the emerging women’s writing industry in Yemen, I’m reading Hurma…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/09/11/hurma-by-ali-al-muqri-translated-by-t-m-apli... ( )