«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Transformation of the Main Character in Modern Yemeni Prose m 163 n himself, who rejects corruption, inequality, poverty and uncivilized traditions. Especially this is true in the case of South Yemeni prose, which in some sense reflected Marxist ideology of that time and was keen to regard all existing social and cultural problems as remnants of the pre-revolutionary times, which were to be eliminated in the nearest future. Some hopeful and vigorous characters, rejecting old ways of life, can be found in short stories written by young South Yemeni authors, such as Maifa‘ Abd al-Rahman, Muhammad Saleh Haidara, Muhammad Omar Bahhah, Zuhra Rahmatullah. One may assume that in those decades Yemeni prose in both parts of the country was developing under the inspiring motto of the “revolutionary achievements”, and these achievements were really obvious for those writers, who remembered pre-revolutionary backwardness, like, for example, Zaid Dammaj, the author of the most famous Yemeni novel “The hostage” (al-Rahina, 1984). However, one can notice that thewriters’optimism in this periodwas steadily fading away, turning in the second half of the 1980s into vivid pessimism. Most of the mentioned above hopeful and vigorous characters were in fact fictitious, created within the modernist literary trend, which had been caught up by that time from Egyptian and Lebanese literature. Meanwhile within the realistic trend, which at that time became the mainstream in Yemeni prose, such characters were placed by the authors mostly in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary times, because no active social or political protest was any longer possible in the reality of the new Yemeni states. Most of the “modern” realistic personages who rejected bad things were in fact passive, simply suffering, and an explanation of this fact can be found in the short story “What is desirable” of North Yemeni writer Ahmad al-Mu‘allimi, whose personage says: “Probably you have heard, that in the years of colonialism a prominent revolutionary was sentenced to prison for a couple of months, and that aroused demonstrations of protest, unrests and strikes all over the place, as well as furious reaction from the press. And in the years of independence he stayed in prison for sixteen years, and no one said a word to defend him” 1 . Characteristically, the attitude to immigration in Yemeni prose of those decades also changes in a way. Those personages who return from emigration to Yemen find very soon that Yemen apparently doesn’t need them, that they cannot change anything in their country, that in Yemen they become victims of one kind of oppression or another, as it comes in Muhammad Abd al-Wali’s short stories “What is called nostalgia” and “The rogues” 2 . This change in Abd al-Wali’s attitude to immigration is not surprising, because the writer was twice sentenced to prison for his leftist views by the new North Yemeni government. In some of his other short stories the writer depicted life in prison, where many 1 In his collection “The loving wife” (al-Zawja al-‘ashiqa, 1989). 2 In his collection “What is called nostalgia” (Shay’ ismuhu al-hanin, 1972).