Across the Wasteland
I would feel just a bit presumptuous in my criticism of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s narrative output if I were to regard his short story collection Arak and his novel Cry in a Long Night, published previously, as only short stories, and not as poems, too. By this, I do not intend to frighten the reader or trap him into thinking that he has been deceived in his purchase – just as I do not wish to misrepresent these stories or to enter, by way of this confused and chaotic babble, into an academic study of the connections between the short story and the poem. What I mean, above all, is that these stories, which I will examine, are, in my view, not built upon event, character or dialogue so much as they are upon symbols and suggestions, which the author drops, with versatility
