THE FORMATION AND ARTISTIC-AESTHETIC EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN SHORT-TEXT GENRE IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (1970–1990)

ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 241 THE FORMATION AND ARTISTIC-AESTHETIC EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN SHORT-TEXT GENRE IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (1970–1990) Ahmedova Shahlo Irgashbaevna Associate professor, Alfraganus University +99890 3167071 [email protected] ABSTRACT. The article analyzes the formation of the modern short story genre in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the literary style of the first generation of short story writers who worked between 1970 and 1990. It is noted that the independence of the state (1971), the development of the education and press system laid the foundation for the emergence of Emirati prose. The study highlights the directions of sentimentalism, realism and modernism using the work of writers such as Sheikha Mubarak Nahi, Abdullah Saqr Mirr, Ali Abdulaziz Sharkhan. In their works, such themes as labor migration, the destruction of traditional lifestyles, the inner suffering of the individual, and social changes under the influence of modernization occupy a central place. The gradual transition of writers from a realistic story to a modernist style is also scientifically substantiated. The results of the study show that UAE short story writing has been able to form its own mature national literary school and plays an important role in the overall development of Arabic prose. Key words: UAE literature, Emirati prose, first generation story writers, Muhammad Murr, Abdullah Saqr Mirr, Sheikha Mubarak Nahi, sentimentalism; realism, modernism, magical realism, Arabic literature; modern prose; literary evolution. The United Arab Emirates is one of the Arab countries that developed its own modern literature very late, in the 1970s, replacing medieval Arabic literature. However, among the early Emirati stories, most of which were based on the artistic principles of morality, edifying sentimentalism and romanticism, there are also stories that are examples of mature realism (in the work of Muhammad Murr) and even modernism (in the work of Abdullah Mirr). In the 1980s, when the realistic direction in Emirati literature steadily developed, most short story writers turned to the aesthetics of modernism. They abandoned the vividly expressed plot in their stories, focusing on the internal state of consciousness, which was reflected in a peculiarly subjective way. Some scholars (Miriam Juma Faraj, Suad Arimi, Hareb Zaheri, Salma Matar Seif) used the complex language of the story, saturated with metaphors and similes, and unique ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 242 lexical-syntactic constructions typical of Arab poetry. As a result, they created a unique style that Arab literary critics have called "poetic modernism". In addition, in some Emirati short stories of this period, elements of magical realism (in the works of Abu Hamid Ahmed Abdulhamid and Salma Matar Seif), absurd aesthetics (in the works of Zabiyyi Khamis) and postmodern parody (in the works of Salma Matar Seif) can be observed. The themes of the works of Emirati short stories encompass both the realities and problems of UAE society, as well as universal philosophical problems (in the works of Basema Yunus and Juma Feruz). Some key themes, namely, labor migration abroad and nostalgia for the traditional way of life left in the past, bring UAE fiction close to the literature of other Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, while at the same time making it unique in the context of modern Arab literature in general. The United Arab Emirates is one of the Arab countries where modern literature, that is, Western-style literature, emerged late, replacing medieval Arabic literature. Only on the eve of the Persian Gulf emirates gaining statehood (1971), some young Emiratis studying at Egyptian higher education institutions published their first works in Egyptian publications, typologically close to the genre of the story. In the early 1970s, a modern system of secondary and higher education began to take shape in the United Arab Emirates, their own publications developed, which contributed to the expansion of the circle of young writers and created the basis for the sustainable development of national journalism and literary prose. The “very young” UAE literature attracted the attention of Western Arab literary critics only at the beginning of the 21st century. Some examples of modern Emirati short stories and novels were studied in the articles of the Swiss researcher G. Ramsay. [1161-186 ] The Polish researcher B. Michalak-Pikulska presented a general overview of the development of the short story genre and poetry in the UAE [2]. However, she did not study all the short stories published in the 20th century, and despite the large number of citations, the reader cannot get a clear idea of the author's methodology from this source. A full overview of the development of the Emirati novel in the 20th century is presented in two articles in this series. One issue of the journal of modern Arabic literature "Banipal", published in Great Britain, was devoted to modern prose from the UAE. This issue of the journal included critical studies and translations of fragments of novels and short stories. [3] Earlier, short stories by some Emirati writers had been published in English translation. [4] As for Arab and especially Emirati critics and literary scholars, their interest in contemporary UAE prose has been reflected in the publication of a large number of monographic and collective studies devoted to this prose (especially on the short story ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 243 genre [5]) and in the publication of bibliographical publications. [6] In addition, literary creation in the UAE has received significant support from state and public organizations: in 1984, the UAE Writers' Union was founded. Since 1985, a large conference of authoritative writers has been organized on average once every four years. In 1990, the Ghanima Ghubash Prize [7] was established for the best short story of the year. Speaking about the work of Emirati prose writers who began writing stories in the 1970s and 1980s, Ali Muhammad Rashid, a researcher of Emirati fiction, calls them the "first generation" of Emirati short story writers [6:22]. The stories of most of these writers were included in the collective collections “We All Love the Sea” (Kullyuna Nuhib al-Bahr, 1986) and “The Song of the Coast, the Howl of the Desert” (Nashid alSahil, Safir al-Barr, 2001). These collections were published by the UAE Writers’ Union. According to researcher Rashid Abu Shuair, the first work published in the UAE that fully met the criteria of the short story genre was the story “Departure” (1970) by Sheikha Mubarak Nahiy (born in 1952 in Sharjah), a teacher and philologist by profession [7:12]. The writer’s first collection was also titled “Departure” (ar-Rahil, 1992). It included stories published in emirate publishing houses. Overly sentimental in tone, the main theme of most of Sheikha Nakhini's stories was the girls' hopes and dreams for happiness in their personal lives, which caused deep sadness. The heroine of the story "Leaving" wants to marry a neighbor's young man, this young man also loves the girl, but the girl's parents do not consent to their marriage, and the young man decides to leave. The heroine of the story "Lights of Illusion" loves her uncle's son, and according to her relatives, he should be her husband, he goes to study abroad and starts a family there. The heroine of the story "The Day Has Come" is waiting for her beloved to return from abroad, and despite the fact that people say that he has already married there, a letter from him becomes a reason for the girl's hopes and dreams to come true without reading the letter. The heroine of the story "The Road to Nowhere" suffers from the oppression of her stepmother in her youth, and then she and her father, who want to get rid of her as soon as possible, Together with her stepmother, she marries off to a mentally ill old man, and her suffering continues. The man in the story “Fingers on the Wires” has long since left his family, and when he hears his grown-up daughter’s voice on the phone, he is overcome with tender feelings, and decides to return. The heroine of the story “Besieged” suffers from the behavior of her husband, who is constantly cheating and drinking. But when the woman receives news that her husband is in a serious condition in the hospital, she shouts, “... no, no, it can’t be, we haven’t even started living yet.” [8:48] ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 244 The stories written by Sheikha Nahiy in the first half of the 1980s and 1990s were included in her second collection, “Northern Winds” (Riyah ash-Shimal, 1999). It is easy to notice a change in the author's style in them: now the description of the inner state of the characters, their feelings and experiences, and sometimes the stream of consciousness in the context of an incomprehensible or completely incomprehensible plot come to the fore. The story is told in a special, “poetic” language, which is distinguished by its own lexical and syntactic features. For example, the first lines of the story “Shards of the Soul”: “He threw himself into the arms of a powerless moment, his insides screamed, screamed, abandoned all the movements that distracted him from reason, his eyes were fixed on the silent wall, he ran without stopping into infinity. His feet were sinking into the fiery abyss, when the hands of a strong wind appeared, he began to run for salvation. When the devil’s hands approached his beautiful white neck to grab his dirty fingers, a scream was heard from his soul, which disappeared into the vast depths of the dark night, slowly crawling under the weight of reality immersed in non-existence” [9: 63]. Some of the stories in the collection are more realistic in their plot and action, such as the story "The Walls Have Ears," in which a prisoner talks to a prison guard who hates his job, or the story "The Disturbance," in which a day in the life of an emir who is forced to support his family alone after the death of his father. In addition, the story "The North Winds" depicts the sorrows and suffering of an Aden family during the siege of Aden by the North Yemeni army in 1994. Rashid Abu Shuaira notes that at about the same time as Sheikha Nahi, Abdullah Saqr Mir (born in Dubai in 1952) also began writing stories. Abdullah Saqr Mir's collection of short stories, "The Cards" (al-Khasaba, 1975), a poet and a skilled footballer, was the first collection of short stories published by a UAE author [10; 12]. Its first edition did not reach readers due to censorship; it was republished again in 1999. The censorship obstacles were not unexpected for the author, apparently, he considered himself a "literary rebel". This is evidenced by the epigraphs he chose for the collection. All the stories in the collection are written in the spirit of the aesthetics of "dark" modernism. This trend had already spread to some Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, by this time. But it was still aesthetically different for the new prose of the UAE [11:135-142,200:217]. The short stories of the collection are mostly allegorical, surrealistic, and absurd images that are difficult to interpret in a single sense, evoking in readers a feeling of pessimism, helplessness, and alienation. It can be assumed that the man who tried to get on a crowded bus with a briefcase full of ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 245 books and ended up dying under the wheels in front of the cruel and indifferent passengers represents the fate of Arab intellectuals. (The story “Spiritualization among the Experiences of a Dying World”). The scene of a woman being raped by a group of men, depicted with pornographic elements, may also be a peculiar allegory of the condition of women in Muslim society (“The Seance”). The idea that the author does not accept the existing traditional state of things is indirectly confirmed by the appearance in several stories of some kind of beards as a "dark, evil force", a widespread symbol of traditionalism in Arabic literature. Al-Mirr's modernist efforts at this early stage of the development of the Emirati story did not cause widespread imitation. Most of the writers who began their work had a realistic and sentimental romantic view of the environment and reality, that is, a point of view, and rarely resorted to the aesthetics of modernism. Ali Abdulaziz Sharkhan (born in 1950 in Ras al-Khaimah) is one of these writers. He is a skilled philologist, educated in Great Britain, and later held high positions in the UAE higher education system. His stories in the collection "Sadness" (al-Shaka, 1977) are diverse in ideological and artistic terms. Some are written in a romantic style, others in a realistic and sentimental spirit, and still others in the spirit of modernism. In addition, the writer's use of the local dialect was a distinctive feature, especially in dialogues and internal monologues, in order to give the story a unique national flavor. As the name of the collection suggests, the main theme of the stories is human suffering, which is conditioned by the cruel living conditions of the emirates in the pre-oil era, or by the problems associated with the transition to a new way of life in the oil era. The difficult life of sailors, fishermen, exporters and agricultural workers in the pre-oil era is devoted to such stories as "Goodbye, my beloved!", "Bottomless Deep", "Suffering", "Joy after Death", "Abu Abboud". These stories give us an idea that Ali Abdulaziz Sharkhan was familiar with the ideas of class exploitation that were widespread in Egypt at that time, and these stories were written in Egypt. The story “A Tear on the Sidewalk” is the first to address the issue of migrant workers. Migrant workers’ hopes and dreams of improving their financial situation in the UAE are dashed. The stories “The Tragedy of Dreams and Reality” and “Thoughts on Lost Time,” written in modernist aesthetics, show the feelings of loneliness, alienation, and helplessness that arise due to the complexity and difficulty of human adaptation to the changing conditions of life in the UAE. The heroic-romantic story “Who Loved the Old Wall” tells the story of the heroism of a simple sailor who takes revenge on his family for the death of a sailor and the English sailors who caused the destruction of his village. The action in the story, apparently, takes place in the first quarter of the 19th ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 246 century, when the British fleet launched military campaigns against the pirates of the Persian Gulf. Abdurid Hassan Sajwani (born in 1957 in Sharjah), a philologist by training and an employee of the UAE Ministry of Education, devoted his stories to the period before the oil era in the Emirates and to his own life. By the early 2000s, he had published three collections: “Those Times” (Zalika-z-zaman, 1978), “The Girl’s Mistake” (Zallat al-Azhara, 1981), and “The Renunciation” (ar-Rafd, 1992). The first collection, which was small in size, dealt with the life of the United Arab Emirates before the oil era. The author himself writes about this: “To all new generations who want to know about the past, full of hardship and sorrow, glorious and heroic, and to those who lived in the past, overcoming these difficulties, to all those who suffered and were unhappy at that time” [12 24]. In an overly sentimental style, aimed at evoking a sense of shared suffering and compassion in the library, the author describes the primitive economic life of the ancient emirates. In this life, people died from diseases, hunger and various injuries. The work of those who pulled out the corpse from the sea was especially dangerous: in the story “Tears of the Past”, the hero’s leg was bitten off by a shark. In the story “Melting Hope”, the husband of the heroine fell into a similar situation. In the story “The Law of the Sea”, a diver who fell ill on a ship The captain of the ship orders him to be thrown overboard to prevent the other members of the crew from contracting the disease. The story "Thirst and Heat" is dedicated to the suffering of people in conditions without sources of drinking water. In the stories "In Bygone Times" and "A Well Full of Souls", the author tells about the heresies of that time. Most of the stories in the collection are devoted to moral and spiritual issues, which is evident even from their titles. These stories are a vivid expression of the author's enlightened thinking. Such thinking is characteristic of Egyptian, Syrian, and Lebanese writers who wrote in the last 30s of the 19th century, as well as Yemeni short story writers who wrote in the 1940s [13 50-55]. Like his predecessors, al-Sajwani praises hard work and diligence (“And prosperity came,” “And the candles were lit”), kindness and helpfulness (“A good heart,” “The fruits of goodness”), and criticizes harshness (“The cries of the oppressed”), deceit (“Just punishment”), pride (“Tears of regret”), frivolity (“Beauty and the lines of an angel”), marriage based on calculation rather than love (“The ashes of the heart,” “The sleep of peace”), etc. In the next two collections of the writer, a change in his authorial style is noticeable: the narration becomes more verbose, it is saturated with comparisons and metaphors, peculiar lexical-syntactic structures, which greatly complicates the perception of the logic of some stories. In relation, the stories of these two collections are devoted not to ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 247 the sad and sorrowful image of the Emirates in the pre-oil era, but, on the contrary, to the glorification of values and traditions that are fading into the past: that is, the strength of family and tribal ties, the value of agriculture and date palms, the romance of sea hunts are sung here. The hero of the story "Ruins" is a captain who is forgotten by his children, having placed him in a nursing home, and he spends his last days with memories of his past sea hunts. The heroine of the story "The Mother of Palms" is an old woman who, after the death of her husband, sells the date palm plantation to which she has devoted her entire life. When the foreign buyer of the land destroys the palm trees, the woman loses her health from grief. Now she lies paralyzed, and her neighbors discuss her life and what happened as a result. The changes in the lifestyle of the Emiratis in the new era are depicted negatively in these stories. The hero of the story "Stagnation" is a fish market trader who has not been able to sell anything for several days: people are abandoning fresh fish and switching to imported canned goods. The collapse of the market is also due to the addition of toxic substances to the waters of the Persian Gulf due to oil extraction. People are reluctant to eat fish caught in these waters. The old man in the story "Waiting" was allocated a new house by the UAE government, which was to replace the old one that was to be demolished according to the city's master plan. However, the old man's former neighbor and friend moved into this house and used bribes to register the house in his name. The old man repeatedly appealed to the government and society in search of justice. In the conditions of the collapse of the village community and the bureaucratization of government bodies, no one could help him. The hero of the story "Dream" returned to his homeland with his American wife, unable to successfully complete his studies in the United States. The wife could not live in poverty with her husband in the United Arab Emirates and decided to return to America. While taking his wife to the airport, the hero thinks about his youth, the difficult life of his farming parents, his past in the United States and his future life in the UAE. The young Emirati in the story "Stupidity" constantly travels abroad. He tells his parents that he is going to Kuwait to earn money, but in reality he is engaged in drug trafficking in Bangkok. Only when the police inform his parents of his death do his parents find out what his son has been up to. In conclusion, it can be said that the themes of the works of Emirati short story writers, while covering both the realities and problems of UAE society, also include universal philosophical issues. Some key themes, namely labor migration abroad and nostalgia for the traditional way of life that remains in the past, bring UAE short story writing ISSN: 2582-4686 SJIF 2021-3.261,SJIF 20222.889, 2024-6.875 ResearchBib IF: 9.948 / 2024 VOLUME-5, ISSUE-11 248 closer to the literatures of other Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, while at the same time giving it its own uniqueness in the context of modern Arab literature as a whole. REFERENCES: 1. Ramsay G. Confining the guest-laborers to the realm of the subaltern in modern literature from the Persian Gilf //Orientalia Suecana Vol. I.III. Uppsala University.2004.P.133-142T; Ramsay G. 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