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

Transformation of the Main Character in Modern Yemeni Prose m 165 n the question that formed among some Yemeni authors a new feeling, expressed in a new “postmodernist” manner of writing, which may be characterized by distanced cold irony, moral and ideological indifference, total parody. These features are most vivid in some writings of Wajdi al-Ahdal and Muhammad al-Gharbi Amran. Characters in their short stories and novels receive no moral evaluation from the author, all of them are neither positive, nor negative, they have no personal inner world, they are mere marionettes that usually act in a grotesque way, simply illustrating the grotesque character of Yemeni life. All the matters that used to be criticized in the previous literature now turn into mere parody, arousing in the reader not a kind of indignation or inspiration, but simply laugh with some note of humility. A kind of such “neutral” character, typical for Yemeni writings in our days, is well demonstrated in the following monolog, taken from Muhammad al-Gharbi Amran’s short story “The love criminal” 1 , whose main hero is a smuggler: “If I need to go from border provinces to Sanaa, I prefer to go in the daytime, when the soldiers at block-points can provide my security from bandits. This is very important, regarding the kind of my work. I carry consumption goods from one province to another. For example, I carry tobacco, coffee and alcohol drinks from the coast, from Mokha, automobile spares — across Shabwa and Marib deserts, medicines, fabrics and other goods — from the borders to the center. People like to buy illegal goods, because it’s difficult to get them from anywhere. I’m not the only one, involved in this business. A lot of people practice it. And all of us have official documents granting us support from the state security officials”. To conclude, I would like to suggest that the steady fading of the hope for a better future, that can be traced in the transformation of Yemeni literary characters from purposeful heroes into “neutral” marionettes may have been the herald of a coming social explosion of the kind we are witnessing today not only in Yemen, but in the Arab world on the whole. 1 In his collection “Circumcision of Bilqis” (Khitan Bilqis, 2002).