The Ship

By Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

1969

One of the earliest books I remember seeing—in my mother’s library—is Jabra’s

translation into Arabic of Othello. Like Shakespeare’s tragedy, Jabra’s novel The Ship
depicts sexual jealousies, suicides, and East-West stereotypes. Unlike Shakespeare’s
Moor of Venice, however, the characters in The Ship love, remember, and die on board a
ship on a cruise form East (Beirut) to West (Marseille). Site of a doomed affair between
an Iraqi architect and his now married former lover, trigger of sad memories in a
Palestinian businessman of a dead friend and a lost homeland, and refuge of a political
prisoner who cannot forget his torture, the ship is above all a literary device that serves to
bring together a number of Arab intellectuals whose mundane lives seem well-established
on land but whose real lives remain unfinished. On the Mediterranean these lives
intersect and acquire form.

Narrated in various points of views, The Ship orchestrates past and present time
deftly and portrays a number of fascinating and willful women. It is not a perfect novel;
at times its diction and style feel too florid and lyrical. But in this our age, where current
and past literature from the Middle East in general and the Arab world in particular faces
the danger of a religious perfect storm—where Western pundits seem eager to flatten
Arab culture into religion—Jabra deserves to be read more widely. A novelist, poet,
literary essayist and painter, he was an aesthete who relished the richness of the Arabic
language and put it to remarkable use.

Author
Ala Alryyes is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale
University. He is the author of Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation.
His current project is entitled “War’s Knowledge.”