Middle Eastern Literatures journal publishes article from Comp Lit PhD student, Dima Nasser

By Sydney Johnson, Communications & Office Assistant

PhD. student Dima Nasser has been published in the journal "Middle Eastern Literatures", in a special issue titled "On the Margins of Shi'r: Rethinking Histories of Poetic Modernism in the Twentieth-Century Arab World".

The issue, named after the publication of Shi‘r (Poetry) magazine by Yusuf al-Khal in 1957, widely known and recognized for its massive influence on the development of modern Arabic poetry, seeks to supplement the magazine’s history and centrality with works “of other figures, magazines, and discussions that moved Arabic poetics away from classical prosody towards what has been called the modernizing of poetic verse.”

Coincidentally, the call for submissions was announced for this special issue while Nasser was working on her dissertation. Their goals were perfectly aligned: shed light on marginal figures. Nasser sent in an abstract on Laure Ghorayeb, a self-taught Lebanese poet, cultural journalist, and visual artist, whose work she had been drawn to since the days she was living and working in Beirut before joining Brown to pursue a PhD. Dima writes:

I first encountered her work through the eyes of Maha Sultan, a well known art critic, and when I was asked to translate an essay Maha wrote about Laure for an artist book on her (see attached photo), I fell deeper into her miniature worlds of black and white glyphs, signs and letters which she drew with ink, and from then on, I followed her work closely. I was so curious about the ways in which she compacted sociopolitical, autobiographical, and linguistic concerns into a single miniature, of which she's probably drawn hundreds. She had already been on the visual art scene in Beirut and around the world for over fifty years. So it struck me that very little is known about her in academic and scholarly circles although her inter-semiotic project, in other words her work with forms that fall in between what is strictly pictorial and strictly linguistic, was arguably one of the aspects of cultural modernism in Beirut in the mid–twentieth century, that made it so exciting. I decided she had to become a part of my dissertation, even against the advice of some who claim that to speak about Beiruti modernism, you have to speak only of its (*predominantly male*) giants. And indeed, she did become part of a chapter.

Ghorayeb's illustration titled "Dix ans déjà" or "Ten Years Already" from her Civil War Collection

Once the abstract was accepted by the journal Middle Eastern Literatures, Nasser worked for many months– travelling to research in Beirut at institutions Ghorayeb collaborated with– to complete the 7,000 word research paper focused on specific works of Laure's. During this period, very unfortunately, Ghorayeb had taken ill. Alongside the genocide on Gaza, and with the violence trickling into neighboring Lebanon, it became impossible to visit her. In the wake of her passing in 2023, Nasser “was luckily able to interview one of Laure's very talented children, Mazen Kerbaj, who had worked with her on a number of occasions and was handling her archive... I was very, very lucky to be able to speak with Laure on the phone in 2022, towards the very end of her life. I only wish I had discovered her work earlier so that I might have been able to spend more time getting to know her under better political circumstances.”

The piece was published on the MEL website in August 2024. The remaining articles in the special issue are forthcoming. Read the abstract here: “Known for her black-and-white miniatures embedded with Arabic writing, Laure Ghorayeb is a fascinating if understudied figure of Beirut’s cultural modernism. Her work occupied a liminal position between French and Arabic and intersected literature and visual art. This article argues that it is precisely this marginality, manifested in Ghorayeb’s multifaceted cultural identity, that allowed her to move deftly across mediums, practices, languages, and genres, resulting in a uniquely inter-semiotic oeuvre. Close reading selections from her collections of p The Cover the Book: "Laure Ghorayeb: Black on White oems, Noir … les bleus (Black … the Blues), 1960 and prose, Iklīl shawk ḥawla qadamayhi (A Crown of Thorns Around His Feet), 1965, in relation to her civil war drawings Témoignages (Testimonies), 1985, this article reveals an inter-semiotic exchange on the page. It offers an interdisciplinary rereading of the modern cultural history of Beirut, revealing an interplay between literature and visual art, which allowed Ghorayeb to maneuver between aesthetic experimentation and political engagement at a time when nationalist and ideological divisions were being sown.”