Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Introduction: Cultural Exchange between Latin America and the Arab World
- 1 Transcontinental Literature: Gabriel García Márquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince
- 2 The African Shore: Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Morocco
- 3 Children of Scheherazade: Gabriel García Márquez in Arabic
- 4 Che Guevara’s Diaries, Miguel Littín’s Adventures: Latin American Iconography in Arabic Literature
- 5 Dreams of Jorge Luis Borges, Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes: Arabic and World Literature
- Epilogue: The Legacy of Transcontinental Ties
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Che Guevara’s Diaries, Miguel Littín’s Adventures: Latin American Iconography in Arabic Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Introduction: Cultural Exchange between Latin America and the Arab World
- 1 Transcontinental Literature: Gabriel García Márquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince
- 2 The African Shore: Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Alberto Ruy Sánchez in Morocco
- 3 Children of Scheherazade: Gabriel García Márquez in Arabic
- 4 Che Guevara’s Diaries, Miguel Littín’s Adventures: Latin American Iconography in Arabic Literature
- 5 Dreams of Jorge Luis Borges, Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes: Arabic and World Literature
- Epilogue: The Legacy of Transcontinental Ties
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Guevara was a romantic figure who has become one of the great political icons of the three continents.
Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical IntroductionGuevara is dead
Guevara is dead
The latest news on the radio
in the churches
in the mosques
in the alleys
in the streets
and in the cafés and in the bars
Guevara is dead
The chord of chitchat and comments has stretched out.
Ahmad Fuad Negm, ‘Jivāra māt’ (‘Guevara Is Dead’)In Al-Riḥla: Ayyām ṭāliba miṣriyya fī Amrīka (The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, 1983), Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour (Raḍwa ‘Ashūr) (1946–2014) recalls the 1973 massacre of 5,000 detainees in the Chilean national stadium after Pinochet’s military coup against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. In the 1970s, Ashour was in her mid-twenties, a young PhD student of African American literature at the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. When the widow of Allende recounted the details of the massacre in a small church at Yale University, Radwa was in the audience: ‘I cheered along with the crowd for a government of national unity and “el pueblo unido jamás sera vencido / the people united will never be defeated”’ (90–1; 110, emphasis in original). In Al-Riḥla, she buys two records by singer-guitarist Victor Jara and her Puerto Rican friend translates the lyrics. One of the records features on the cover the famous poem about the 5,000 prisoners in Santiago stadium that he wrote before they cut off his hands and killed him. Although Ashour writes about her study abroad (1973–75) in her memoir, the 1970s are framed within African, Arab and Latin American solidarity in the waning days of pan-Africanism and Third Worldism. Ashour’s memoir retains the ethos of the 1960s and links Arab, African and Latin American struggles.
Arab writers drew on Latin American literature and political iconography on many occasions, reviving links at historically remote moments. They did so within the frame of two important encounters: on the one hand, Latin American literature had a wide circulation in the Arab world; on the other hand, a generation of leftist Arab writers engaged with Third World movements.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Latin American and Arab LiteratureTranscontinental Exchanges, pp. 114 - 134Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022