Heads Ripe for Plucking

An Arab tyrant once infamously declared, âI see heads that are ripe for plucking.â Mahmoud Al-Wardaniâs novel turns the statement on its head, using it as a point of departure to delineate a whole history of Arab tyranny and oppression. In Heads Ripe for Plucking, an impaled head seeks solace in narrating to itself stories of others who have sustained a similar fate. Beheadings, both literal and metaphorical-torture, murder, decapitation, brainwashing, losing oneâs head-are the subject of the six stories that unfold over the three sections of this novel. The narrative takes us from the most archetypal beheading in Arabo-Islamic history, that of al-Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, via the torture of communists in Nasserâs detention camps, the meanderings of a Cairene teenager unwittingly caught in the âbread riotsâ of 1977, a crime passionnel in a family alienated by petrodollars, the remembering of a father killed in the 1991 Gulf War and recovery of his lost manuscript on the eve of the millennium, into a dystopic future where heads are periodically severed to undergo maintenance and reloading of programs. The novel garnered critical acclaim for its experimentation with language and form as much as for its excavation of alternative histories.