As a Western reader, one does not know what to expect when approaching Osama Alomar's Fullblood Arabian. Translated in 2014 from its original Arabic, many of the “very short stories” which appear to be a trademark of Mr. Alomar's writing style carry a consistent tone and thematic similarities across the language gap (Alomar 4). The stories also serve as a window, to tell the reader something about the experiences and worldview of Mr. Alomar, a Syrian writer in exile currently living at City of Asylum ("Osama Alomar").
Perhaps the most illustrative of these short stories is the first one which appears in Fullbood Arabian - “Satans,” which is a mere two sentences long and can thus be reproduced in its entirety here.
“I read in a book the following piece of wisdom: “He who remains silent in the face of injustice is a mute Satan.” I went out into the streets and saw Satans everywhere."
- Alomar 13
The connotations are fairly obvious – a simple observation of the systemic nature of “silence in the face of injustice.” While this observation is, presumably, informed by Mr. Alomar's experiences in Syria, like quite a few other short stories in Fullblood Arabian, it is easy to generalize the idea of uncomfortable silence in the face of injustice everywhere from Western liberal democracies to totalitarian regimes. To challenge a system one sees as unfair carries inherent risks – risks which are difficult to emotionally justify taking. Of note is that “Satans” conveys an observation, rather than a condemnation. Not present are open signs of anger or frustration, but rather a dry frankness punctuated with bouts of cynicism and perhaps very slight sardonicism.
Mr. Alomar, at least in my view, excels in particular at the shortest of his short stories. While the Shakespearean phrase “brevity is the soul of wit” has been mentioned to death over the centuries, it truly finds expression in Fullblood Arabian, where some of my favorite stories, which I also view as among the densest with the aforementioned observational tendencies, are a mere few sentences long, or sometimes even a single (albeit long, with much hyphenation and semicolons) phrase, as “The Union of Our Home.” This particular short story contrasts Syria's immense security state with the openness of the European Union's Shengen area, implying that the former is so obsessively paranoid that one must “submit to searches and surveillance and questioning whenever I wanted to cross the border of my brother's room." (Alomar 15)
My personal favorite of Mr. Alomar's stories, one which I had the pleasure of hearing for the first time spoken aloud during a live reading in January of 2019, is “The Pride of Garbage,” which reads as follows:
“When the owner of the house picked up the bag of garbage and headed out to the street to throw it in the dumpster, the bag was overwhelmed with the fear that she would be put side by side with her companions. But when the man placed her on top of all the others, she became intoxicated with her greatness and looked down at them with disdain.” (Alomar 27)
When listened to aloud for the first time, it appeared as if the second sentence was meant as a punchline, but notably was delivered in the same manner as “Satans” was written – absent of visible frustration and instead punctuated with what sounded like dry, bemused cynicism. It is tempting to read into this as one who studies politics in general and the Middle East in particular, to project one's own frustrations with the disparate authoritarian forces vying for power and influence while breathlessly denigrating one another in the process, both in Syria and in other states of the region. Whether this is the intended understanding that the reader is supposed to draw, perhaps of Assad being placed on top and looking down on the others who would take his place with disdain, is not made clear. In my view, though, that ambiguity itself is one of the greatest qualities of Mr. Alomar's stories – it creates a situation absent of strong emotions and gives the reader space to project their own feelings and experiences into the work.
To close, let us examine what I believe to be Mr. Alomar's finest short story, and the one for which the book is named - “Fullbood Arabian.”
“The First, Wistfully: “If only I were a fullblood Arabian horse!””
“The Second, disdainfully: “Would you wish to be an animal when God in his mercy has created you as a human who belongs to a great and ancient nation proud of its glorious history?””
“The First: “Man, don't you know that the value of a fullblood Arabian horse in this world is far greater than the value of a fullblood Arabian human?”” (Alomar 31)
This short story speaks for itself, and even after puzzling over it half a dozen times, I cannot quite discern if the frustration I feel from these three sentences is Mr. Alomar's, or my own. If it is the former, it certainly does not abandon the previous commitment to a dry wit which reads not dissimilar to how a neutral distilled grape spirit, the kind spiked into partially fermented wine to create brandy, tastes.
Osama Alomar's short stories, in summary, are composed primarily of dry, observational witticism and inject an astonishing amount of observational humor and character into stories no longer than a page and a half, and frequently as short as a mere couple of sentences. Despite the authoritarian and repressive regime he grew up in and lives in exile from being an obvious influence upon the work, the stories leave the reader a space to project their own experiences and emotions, and take from it what they will. Due to my own primary focus of study being authoritarianism in the Middle East, I found it impossible to decouple my own feelings on the subject from the themes which the work incited me, personally, to explore. In other words, the stories emotionally involved me and forced me to examine how I feel about the materials I study. This is reflective of Mr. Alomar's incredible skill as a writer of very short stories.
Sources:
Alomar, Osama. Fullblood Arabian. New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #10, 2014.
Osama Alomar. https://cityofasylum.org/portfolio/osama-alomar/