While Arabic Exile Literature in Europe has for the most part foregrounded literary texts from more recent Arab diasporas, this final chapter highlights forced migration literature in the historical centres of Arabic literature in Europe, namely Paris and London, and their attendant national spaces. Although as a whole, the literary geography of Arabic forced migration literature decentres these metropoles, they continue to be home to important publishing houses, institutions, established Arab diasporas born of colonial histories, and prominent writers, all of which are contributing to the shifts in the politics and aesthetics of Arabic migration literature discussed in this book. This chapter revisits the questions raised in Chapter 1, which argued that the most urgent antihegemonic critiques in contemporary migration literature pertain to borders, citizenship and belonging, and shows how traditional literary centres in Europe participate in such an inquiry without necessarily being at the forefront of the aesthetic and political shifts that we see in contemporary Arabic literature of forced and precarious migration. There are similar trends in terms of the presence of speculative and defamiliarising modes of writing explored in the book, though they partake in a broad, highly connected, and varied Arabic-European literary space.

In the section on Paris, I briefly discuss representation of clandestine space in the 2006 novel La géographie du danger (The Geography of Danger) by Algerian writer Hamed Skif. Here, I put Skif’s writing and critical reception in dialogue with harraga literature as well as French beur writing and banlieue fiction, literature of urban peripheries. In contrast to these literary genres and spaces, many international writers in Paris are positioned as world writers contributing to their national literatures as well as a world literary heritage. Querying these distinctions of genre and literary consecration and their significance for contemporary Arabic exile literature, I turn to the prominent Paris-based authors Samar Yazbek and Hoda Barakat and their most recent novels, which both stage mobility and forced migration. The central character of Yazbek’s 2017 novel, Al-Mashaʾa (Planet of Clay), is a potent metaphor for the constraints and forced mobility created by the war in Syria. Although the adolescent narrator of Al-Mashaʾa never leaves her city, her telling of the war offers an incisive exploration of mobility, constraint and forced displacement. She is afflicted with a mysterious condition that causes her to walk ceaselessly unless fettered.