Constructing the historical narrative of oppressed people that rise and dictators who are toppled has often involved recollecting the fictional narratives and memoirs portraying the social and political complexities that fueled such transformations and re-visiting the writers who imaginatively and intellectually contributed to the public sphere that engendered these transformed worlds. In this respect, the Arab uprisings afford us an excellent example of the relationship between the creative power of revolutionary people and the revolutionary power of creative artists, especially writers. For example, Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, whose prison novel This Blinding Absence of Light poignantly reveals the oppressive dynamics of the Arab dictatorship and the resilient spirit of its people, describes this relationship between the poet’s and people’s imaginative powers in his L’étincelle: Révoltes dans les pays arabes,

To introduce the subject of how the intertwined revolutionary literatures and political geographies in the Arab world ‘anticipated’ the 2011 uprisings requires before all a definition of terms and parameters. In a re-visiting and response to Richard Jacquemond’s seminal reading of modern Egyptian literature as ‘conscience of the nation’ and more precisely to quotes from novelist Bahaa Taher and Islamist critic Hilmi Muhammad Al-Qa’ud, Caroline Rooney (introducing a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing on ‘Egyptian Literary Culture and Egyptian Modernity’) astutely argues that: ‘the writer or intellectual is seen not merely to represent an already given state of affairs, as Jacquemond’s term “mimetic realism” would imply. Rather, it is striking to note that the writer or intellectual is presented as a seer able to realize through anticipation both the pitfalls and the progressive opportunities of history as it unfolds’ (2011a, p. 370).¹ She adds that ‘the responsibility of writers and intellectuals is given as more prospective than it is retrospective’ (pp. 370–71) and substantiates this argument through interviews she previously conducted with Bahaa Taher and Rehab Bassam in which they, in various ways, foretold the revolution. ‘Anticipating’ includes several intertwined dynamics including foreseeing, speaking or writing in expectation or foreknowledge of a future event, but most interestingly in the context of literature, imagining or envisioning an event or a transformation that has social or political significance. Focusing on the latter meaning, this study explores the fluid visions that emerged from imaginative literary engagements with political and social realities in Arab countries rather than fixed, straightforward predictions that no literary text is plausibly expected to offer. Within this framework, literatures produced in response to authoritarian regimes can be said to be revolutionary not for directly initiating uprisings or reflecting the specific political agendas of their initiators (this is certainly important given the dissonance between much of the aspirations of Arab writers at the moment and the policies of mainly Islamist parties that have taken over), but rather for daring to offer visions of transformed political geographies. These visions thus mediate defiance towards censorship and intimidation through their participation in the intellectual spaces that underpin transformative possibilities. In this respect, the writer of revolutionary literatures becomes a public intellectual who diagnoses and challenges states of oppression and silence. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said argues that the intellectual assumes a role that:

In an interview with The Kenyon Review on Literature and the Arab Uprisings, Jadaliyya co-editor and Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon re-contextualizes Said’s influential argument with respect to the intellectual’s role and the dangers that face it in the Arab world:

In his magisterial work Conscience of the Nation: Writers, State, and Society in Modern Egypt, Richard Jacquemond engages deeply with the role of the Egyptian writer in relation to the politics of the state and the dynamics of society across a century of literary production and historical transformations. Commenting on Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley, Jacquemond writes: ‘the writer possesses a rare capacity in society, the ability to write, and this allows him to put together the fragmentary versions of events produced by other intellectuals, which are distorted by “whims and prejudices”, in order to give a true and authoritative version of history’ (2008, p. 4). Jacquemond reads the Egyptian ‘republic of letters’ as one that can be defined ‘literally’. He explains that:

The image of pan-Arab tyranny and the pan-Arab voice of the intellectual resisting it in the post-independence era is brilliantly captured by the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani who writes in ‘A Very Secret Report ... from (Smother Land)’ (published in Arabic as ‘Taqrir sirri jiddan ... min bilad (qam’istan)’):