Can Arab Literature Foresee the Great Political and Social Changes in the Mediterranean?

4 June 2015. From 18:30 | Conference | Italian | IEMed, Barcelona

The Arab authors, through their translated novels, have tried to explain to the world what was happening in their countries, a reality often ignored and treated superficially from neighboring Europe. Some novels have been prophetic works, because they have managed to capture the Arab unrest and have predicted the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

Literature cannot be disassociated from political becoming. Especially in the Arab countries, Isabella Camera from Afflitto clarifies and assures that the signs were all there and that one only had to know how to read them. Surely, if they had bet more on the translation and diffusion of Arabic works, Europe would not have received the “springs” from the surprise.Isabella Camera reads the lines and between the lines of books under the premise that literature is capable of explaining the most complex contemporary history well. And in favor of literary power, she adds: “often, literature tells us what history books do not yet know.” Ultimately, literature is capable of anticipating its times, she says. In this sense, the concept of “self-fulfilling prophecy”, by sociologist Robert Merton, serves to justify the capacity of literature to project on paper the desires and fears of a society.