Female images on historical background: victory of Omani writer Jokha al-Harti in The Man Booker International Prize - 2019

Abstract

The article is devoted to the development of literature and, in general, the verbal culture of Oman from the early Middle Ages to the present day. For both objective and subjective reasons, the Omani national literature has not yet become an object of research by domestic specialists. However, the strengthening of all-round relations, including cultural, between our countries and the recognition of contemporary Omani writers by the international literary community necessitates such a study. The goal of the article was to highlight the main features that were inherent in the verbal work of Oman for centuries and for a long time constituted its originality, before Omani writers began to rapidly adopt the main creative tendencies of Europe. For this, as the most famous material, the work of the founder of the school of Omani poetry, the poet of the early XX century, Abu Muslim al-Bahlyani, was analyzed. Also the attempt to outline the rapid changes that have taken place in the literary environment of Oman over the past half century, and to answer the question of what caused the interest in the literature of the Gulf today was made. As part of the work was considered the novel Celestial Bodies by Jokha al-Harti, who received an international prize in 2019 and who today presents the women's prose of Oman, which simply did not exist in the recent past. The main conclusions that researchers come to are that Omani literature for a long time practically did not experience changes in its hermetic environment and acquired distinctive features, even if we talk only about the framework of the Arab world. And then, with the beginning of the Omani Renaissance, it made a sharp leap forward and began to be of interest due to the combination of contemporary artistic techniques and national colour, as in the work of Jokha al-Harti, whose last novel has been translated into two dozen languages.