Dreams of Jorge Luis Borges, Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes: Arabic and World Literature

Chapter 5 analyses intercultural exchange and international networks that open up new directions in Arabic literature in the twenty-first century by focusing on the relationship of the Iraqi writers Jabbar Yussin Hussin (Jabbār Yāsīn Ḥusayn) and Hassan Blasim (Ḥassan Blāsim) to Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges. This chapter examines Arabic short stories that directly engage with Fuentes and Borges: Hussin’s ‘Yawm Bwinus Ayris’ (‘The Day in Buenos Aires’, 2000) and Blasim’s ‘Kawābīs Kārlus Fwintis’ (‘The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes’, 2009). Blasim’s ‘Kawābīs Kārlus Fwintis’, a short story about migration, adopts a style that he calls ‘nightmare realism’. Hussin’s ‘Yawm Bwinus Ayris’ reworks Borges’s short story ‘La busca de Averroes’ (‘Averroes’s Search’, 1947). In his story, Ibn Rushd’s dream of Borges in Buenos Aires focuses on intercultural contact and a shared heritage of the Arab world, al-Andalus and Latin America. Blasim’s and Hussin’s rewritings recontextualise Latin American literature in the Arab world in the twenty-first century.