Cities of Salt by Abdul Rahman Munif
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Short Essay - The Post Colonial Arabic Novel “Cities of Salt”
Cities of Salt has often been read as at once an elegy for a disfigured space and society, and a chronicle of its transformation. How does Munif represent the encounter with and effects of global capital and its arrival? How are tradition, traditional social ties on the one hand, and the encounter with the foreign other represented? What are the limitations and potential problems of attempting to write such a work? Elaborate! Abdelrahman Munif, a Jordanian born Saudi novelist, wrote a novel called ‘Cities of Salt’. It is a monumental novel that tells the story of the discovery of oil. Encountering the vicious arrival of the global, political and economic modernity to an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom is the main point of Munif in this novel. Munif described the migration of the villagers as their traditional lands are destroyed, and their way of living is thrown into disarray by the foreigners – Americans, through invasion of modern technology, cultural gaps, and a whole new bunch of the local economy. He has exercised an unconventional format in novel by declining a clear protagonist or even its mixture. Leading characters of the novel in its first dozen chapters are gone by the final third of the book, despite the formation of main characters. The valley that is destroyed in the beginning and later the town of Harran that goes from a backwater to booming oil valley or town. Where the novel’s all fiction