Narratives of Older Age

Abstract

Ageing in the Arab world remains to date an occluded topic. Overshadowed in government policy, media, and public opinion by often more pressing issues—unemployment, militancy, sectarianism, civil war, and revolution—ageing has been similarly elided in academic research, save for passing mentions in population statistics or the occasional case study. Therefore, despite United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reports estimating a quadrupling of older people in the Arab region by 2050, the current demographic domination of youth and the cross-sectional paucity in ageing studies and social policymaking augur a status quo that trivializes elderly matters, and the experience of growing older in general. Even as old age is prominent in Arabic fiction per se, Samira Aghacy’s monograph Ageing in the Modern Arabic Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) is the first book-length scholarly endeavor across the academic disciplines to study the subject in depth. In examining the ageing process across sixteen Arabic-language novels set in the Middle East, and penned by Arab authors, the book acknowledges older age as a strong literary presence, which counters the exhortation to self-abnegation that weaves the yarns of later life in most Arab countries...