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NY Times, May 3 2014
Taking Fares, and Writing in Between
Osama Alomar Pursues His Literary Ambitions in Exile
By LARRY ROHTER
CHICAGO — In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a
growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment
obliquely on political and social issues. But here, where he has lived
in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45
at the Horizon Taxi Cab company.
Up to a dozen hours a day, six days a week, Mr. Alomar cruises the
northwest suburbs around O’Hare Airport in his bright blue cab,
dictionaries and a volume of Khalil Gibran piled beside him. When parked
in line waiting for a fare to appear, he pulls out a notebook and tries
to write.
“Driving a cab is hard work and very hard psychologically, because it
takes me away from writing,” Mr. Alomar, who turns 46 on Saturday, said
in an interview here recently at a coffee shop and in his cab. “It is a
kind of spiritual exile to go with my physical exile. But I have to be
strong. I have to be patient.”
On Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Alomar, whose first book to be translated
into English, “Fullblood Arabian,” was recently published by New
Directions, will take a brief respite from that grueling routine to
attend the PEN World Voices literary festival in New York. He is
scheduled to take part in two panels: “Creativity and Craft in Asylum,”
on Saturday, and a Sunday afternoon conversation with the American
writer Lydia Davis, who has emerged as his biggest champion, and the
Icelandic writer Sjon.
Mr. Alomar’s super-short stories “are very imaginative and vivid and
exhilarating,” said Ms. Davis, whose own work often occupies a terrain
similar to Mr. Alomar’s in terms of length and tone. “Some are dark and
angry, while others are funny. They are compact stylistically, wasting
no words, and they go quickly from one moment to the next and on to the
end. So they have density, but also are sort of explosive, with an
aftershock, because they seem to tell one story at the same time they
are telling another.”
Mr. Alomar sees himself as an heir of a literary form, now called
al-qissa al-qasira jiddan, or very short story, that in the Arab world
dates back more than a millennium and contains elements of poetry,
philosophy, folk tale and allegory. “Fullblood Arabian” was, in fact,
issued as part of a poetry series that includes work by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti and Hilda Doolittle, and the stories in the book run no
longer than three pages, with the shortest being only one sentence.
Muhsin al-Musawi, a Columbia University professor and literary critic
who is also the editor of The Journal of Arabic Literature, described
the genre Mr. Alomar has embraced as “similar to the riddle or puzzle,”
but requiring “a high level of prose.” As such, he added, “it offers a
way out of many restrictions and constraints without being very explicit.”
Certainly, many of Mr. Alomar’s stories make use of ambiguities,
especially in relation to the political scene. Here, in its entirety, is
“Tongue-Tie,” the title piece of one of his three collections published
in Arabic: “Before leaving for work I tied my tongue into a great tie.
My colleagues congratulated me on my elegance. They praised me to our
boss, who expressed admiration and ordered all employees to follow my
example.”
C. J. Collins, Mr. Alomar’s translator, remembers meeting the writer for
the first time in Damascus in 2007. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad,
had eased some restrictions on private gatherings, and Mr. Alomar was a
regular at salons that had then sprung up, where invited speakers would
address political, cultural and social topics, but steer clear of
directly criticizing the dictatorship.
“In the discussions that would come afterward, Osama’s stories would
come up spontaneously as a way of driving home an intellectual point in
a poetic fashion,” Mr. Collins recalled, adding, “In the States, it is
putting literature down to call it utilitarian, but for me it was quite
striking to see his work put to this really concrete use.”
Mr. Alomar was born in 1968 in Damascus, where his father was a
philosophy professor and his mother an elementary school teacher. He
read widely from his parents’ library, studied Arabic literature in
college and sang and played guitar in a pop band. When the BBC’s Arabic
service broadcast a poem he had submitted, he became convinced that he
had a future as a writer.
Thanks in part to that upbringing, “I’m very interested in social and
political movements,” he said. “Especially in my own country, but in the
Middle East in general. As a secular person, I believe in democracy and
individual freedom. There is a lot of persecution and
