Michelle Hartman

	Photo: Claudio Calligaris

Michelle Hartman is temporarily stumped. Until now in our interview and despite her professed tiredness, her rapid-fire answers left this reporter's pen busily scratching to keep up to her enthusiasm for her subject -- modern Arabic literature.

One would think the question that stopped the rush of words would have been an easy one: What Arabic author would you recommend?

"Oh. That's hard. I don't want to just say my favourite of the week," she said and paused.

"There are the works of Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize -- there's his Palace Walk trilogy and his translation of 1,001 Nights, but those are books that people will stumble upon themselves."

Finally she settles on The Open Door by a writer called Latifa Al-Zayyat.

"It's a long work that's a woman's coming of age story and political history novel all rolled into one. It's very well translated."

It fits well with Hartman's teaching and research areas. Modern Arabic literature is generally marked with the "Mahda" or Arabic Renaissance that happened in the late 19th century. Hartman said that as with Western literature, the breadth of topics covered is nearly unlimited -- and that flies in the face of most people's expectations, especially in Hartman's research area of women writers.

"I think that it's extremely diverse, and covers every topic you can think of. People always ask me questions, and I find they always have a specific idea of what Arabic literature is about. So they're surprised when I start talking about women writers that are talking about women's prisons, and sexuality and all sorts of topics that they assume won't be covered because of stereotypes about the Arab world."

Hartman arrived at McGill's Institute for Islamic Studies this past semester from Hofstra University in New York. Prior to that she had studied at Oxford and Damascus. Her love of Arabic literature came from a serendipitous course choice during her undergraduate degree at Columbia.

"I decided to take a course on Islam. That professor sparked an interest in Arabic -- he made it sound like a challenge. I thought I'll try it for a semester," she said.

Her undergraduate was in French literature, but Arabic grabbed her enough that she ended up doing her undergraduate dissertation in French literature on a Lebanese poet.

The road from Damascus to McGill is more direct than one would suppose.

"I was interested in the city of Montreal because it's a cosmopolitan and interesting place. Especially for someone who works in Arabic literature because there is a large Arab population here," she said.

"The Institute for Islamic Studies has a reputation for bringing together scholarship, teaching and students from a variety of backgrounds. So it was very appealing to come to such a vibrant place to work."

So what makes Arabic literature different from say, English literature? The centrality of the Koran in Islamic culture is a touchstone for all, adding layers to a given text.

"The Arabic language of the Koran is so important to Arabic speakers and is a text that people are very familiar with whether they are very educated or not. The language evokes a long history and many different ideas just through using certain words or expressions," explained Hartman.

Hartman's research projects are fairly eclectic. One focuses on Arabic word use in texts in other languages.

"It's getting beyond adding words for local colour to make things more exotic," she explained.

"Very often they challenge you as a reader to think about what these words are doing and how they're operating in the text."

Hartman will be giving a talk at the McGill Centre for Teaching and Research on Women on links between African American and Arab American poets.

Hartman says that students who take her literature class will be getting something absolutely unique.

"They won't find other classes like my classes. They will be absolutely surprised by the information I give them -- it won't be what they expect at all. If people are interested in getting beyond stereotypes of the Arab and Muslim worlds, I really work hard to give a more grounded understanding of the cultures and literatures than they would get through popular media."

Mark Reynolds