"Muslim"

A Novel

Zahia Rahmani, Matthew Reeck

• Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781941920756
• eBook ISBN: 9781941920763
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Muslim: A Novel is a genre-bending, poetic reflection on what it means to be Muslim from one of France's leading writers. In this novel, the second in a trilogy, Rahmani's narrator contemplates the loss of her native language and her imprisonment and exile for being Muslim, woven together in an exploration of the political and personal relationship of language within the fraught history of Islam. Drawing inspiration from the oral histories of her native Berber language, the Koran, and French children's tales, Rahmani combines fiction and lyric essay in to tell an important story, both powerful and visionary, of identity, persecution, and violence.

I dedicate this text to three of the disappeared—to Mrs. Boulanger who taught me to read, to Mr. Dellys who taught me dignity, and to Anne-Marie Vuilletet who taught me why sometimes betrayal is necessary.

The Algerian-born academic and author ZAHIA RAHMANI is one of France’s leading art historians and writers of fiction, memoirs, and cultural criticism. She is the author of a literary trilogy dedicated to contemporary figures of so-called banished people: Moze (Sabine Wespieser Editions, 2003); “Muslim”: A Novel (Deep Vellum, 2019); and France, Story of Childhood (Sabine Wespieser Editions, 2006). The U.S. edition of France, Story of Childhood was published by Yale University Press in 2016. The French Ministry of Culture named her Chevalier of Arts and Letters and as a member of the College of Diversity. As an art historian, Rahmani is director of the research program on art and globalization at the French National Institute of the History of Art (INHA), an interdisciplinary program that focuses on contemporary art practices in a globalized world and links many networks in France and abroad. She is the founder and director of INHA’s ambitious Interactive Bibliographic Database on the globalization of art, its history, and its theoretical impact. Rahmani is a member of the Global Visual Cultures Academic Committee, and she also created the graduate research program at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, which she directed from 1999-2002. Her multiyear international research project at the INHA in Paris and Marseille culminated in Made in Algeria: Genealogy of a Territory, a book and current exhibition of colonial cartography, high and popular visual culture, and contemporary art at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM), located in Marseille.

MATT REECK is a poet and translator from the French, Urdu, Hindi, and Korean. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to India, and fellowships from the NEA, the PEN Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. He has translated from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto, Bombay Stories (Random House India, 2012; Vintage Classics UK & US, 2014); and Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, Mirages of the Mind (Vintage India, 2014; New Directions, 2015). His translations from the French include Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Class Warrior—Taoist Style (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s French Guiana—Memory Traces of the Penal Colony (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California Los Angeles.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• Act I: The Night of the Elephant
• Act II: The Little Poucet and the Magic Nut
• Act III: My Mother Tongue Refuses to Die
• Act IV: Dialogue with a Government Worker
• Act V: Desert Storm
• Dedication