If we set out to apply a simile to literature, to what should we liken it?

As for me, I believe that literature is exactly like dress.

Dress is subject to the developments of the age and the demands of life, and so must literature be subject to development, ever renewed and ever springing forward.

Literature is not, as the "ancients" understand it, the explication of the Mu'allaqat, the digging for the tent-peg and the traces of the camel's footprints, and for Abla and Hind... or the study of al-Shanfara and the standing of his odes in Arabic poetry. Then carousing with Abu Nuwas in his dark, stifling hut.

It is not the pouring forth of the torments of a soul burning in the fires of love — the love of woman only — in tightly packed words, fanciful at one moment and dry at another.

Rather, literature is life. The life we live, with its colors and its movements, its pus and its splendor. Its foulness and its purity. With all the realism that is in it, and all the truths.

For this reason, when life develops, literature develops. And then writers must renew themselves in their turn — that is, put on a new "literary dress" in its style, its ideas, and its aims.

And the writers of yesterday stand up in objection, because they will never admit that the literary garment that hangs down over their figures is a worn-out garment, on which the years have left the traces of colonialism, wars, fanaticism, and feudalism... the garment of the literature of a quarter century gone by.

That time has passed, and the features of our life have changed; but literature has stayed rigid, stubborn — its masters do not want it to change in its turn, as though it were an ornament the writer owns and carries with him from palace to palace and from hermitage to hermitage. Until his wanderings set him down on the mountaintop, looking down from its height upon the course of the people's life.

And we cried out, "Literature is in an ordeal," because it has drawn away from going deep into the understanding of the ancients' production and from following the artistic methods they invented.

Because our literary journals have set themselves to refining the human soul, not the literary faculty alone; to reforming reality, not to cultivating the perceptions.

And because at last there have been born those who feel this deficiency of which our literature today complains, and the importance of the direction it is taking. So we have called these "the little newborns."

The problem, then, is "the problem of the writers," not the problem of literature — or, to put it more clearly, it is the problem of "dress in literature." The problem of the old and its clinging to life, and of the birth of the new with its ferment and its search for nourishment and light...

I do not know how the image of my grandmother presented itself before me as I was speaking of literature — the image of my grandmother as a young girl, wearing loose, dark clothes, coiling her long hair on the top of her head, shod in closed shoes with heels of middling height... And my grandmother has lived to this day. She has lived alongside us, her grandchildren. And I wondered at first how she could look at me with vexation and mockery. She would always stare at my clothes. I wear modern cuts, with their colors and their movements, after having bobbed my hair. I used deliberately to study my grandmother's mind, taking care to appear before her on purpose in every modern fashion I follow; she would stare long and mutter vague words I could not hear, then grow vexed and restless, and with evident nervousness explain to me the benefits of the "dress" she herself follows, pointing out the secrets of beauty in it; then she would attack "our own" new fashions and press me to tear up my clothes and destroy them and give up following their principles. Then she would feel my hair, asking God's forgiveness, taking refuge from the devils that had transformed me into a male.

And I would try in vain, in my turn, to show her that the life of the rising generation today is other than it was yesterday, and that we are compelled to follow these fashions by force of our being compelled to work, to speed, to continuous movement. My grandmother taught me many lessons, once I had succeeded in penetrating into her soul and had seen what stirs in the soul of the old — the fear, the