I propose the term Shinasising to describe the distinctive way in which the late Omani writer Abdulaziz al Farsi brought the world of Shinas into his fiction. Shinas, in Al Batinah North Governorate, was Al Farsi’s birthplace and in his stories it became far more than a geographical setting. It shaped time, place, characters, events and language.
The term is deliberately local. In theory, similar expressions could be coined for writers whose fiction is deeply rooted in other Omani towns: a Nizwanisation of narrative, for example, or a Muscatisation. What matters is the process by which a place becomes so deeply embedded in a writer’s imagination that it acquires a distinctive literary identity.
Two questions are central here: how did Shinas and its people appear in Al Farsi’s fiction and what distinguishes his treatment of place and character from other local and Arab writing?
Across seven short-story collections published between 2003 and 2016, Al Farsi developed Shinas into a sustained narrative project. Even his first novel, The Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs (2007), which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008, carries clear echoes of Shinas although the town is not explicitly named.
One of the earliest signs of this attachment appears in the way Al Farsi signed his stories. Like many writers, he regularly recorded the place and date of composition at the end of each text. In his first collection, Wounds of the Ashtray (2003), several stories are signed “Shinas”, others “Muscat” and one “Shinas–Muscat”. These signatures are not merely documentary. They encourage the reader to look back at the story and reconsider its characters, atmosphere and implied geography.
As Al Farsi’s work developed, Shinas moved from the margins into the centre of the narrative. In later collections, especially At Last the Bear Awoke and The Grey Box, the town becomes an unmistakable fictional universe.
In Those Passing over Their Shards, Al Farsi even creates a playful myth of Shinas’s origins. History, he imagines, once carried all towns and villages in a sack, placing each where it belonged. Shinas accidentally fell from the sack and was forgotten. Fiction then becomes Al Farsi’s way of restoring this “forgotten” place to the centre.
His Shinas is built through recurring landmarks. Altaf’s restaurant, for instance, appears repeatedly as a meeting point where different characters gather, exchange gossip and generate stories. Mosques, schools, the market and the Shinas roundabout also recur, gradually forming a recognisable fictional map. Whether every detail corresponds exactly to reality is unimportant; through repeated use, Al Farsi makes these places real in the reader’s imagination.
Time itself also becomes “Shinasi”. The narrator sometimes refers to “the Shinas sunset” or dates an event in relation to a local fire. The device is humorous but significant. Shinas becomes a small unit through which the larger world is understood. At times it even seems to stand for Oman as a whole.
The characters are equally important. Al Farsi drew many of them from the social environment he knew, but fiction transforms them. A “Shinasi character” is therefore not simply a real person from Shinas. It is a literary creation shaped by Al Farsi’s language, humour and imagination.
These characters possess recognisable traits. They often create humour without deliberately telling jokes. They behave in ways that seem illogical yet remain entirely believable. They are curious, socially intrusive, quick-witted and sometimes wonderfully naïve. They know one another’s faults but continue to grant each other a place within the community.
Their humour is especially powerful because it grows naturally from everyday life. Al Farsi does not force comedy onto his characters; he allows their speech, exaggerations and misunderstandings to produce it.
Language plays a major role in this process. As Al Farsi’s style matured, his narrative prose became simpler and more direct, while dialogue increasingly relied on the spoken dialect of Shinas and Al Batinah North. In his later collections, pages of dialogue may unfold almost entirely in local speech. Dialect does more than add realism: it anchors the story firmly in its cultural and social setting.
Yet formal Arabic narration and colloquial dialogue coexist smoothly. The narrator’s literary language never clashes with the characters’ speech; instead, the two registers create the distinctive rhythm of Al Farsi’s fiction.
Al Farsi also experimented with the physical form of the page itself. In some stories, material normally placed in footnotes becomes essential to the narrative. Secondary characters receive entire stories in the margins and in one remarkable example, almost the whole story appears as a footnote beneath a tiny central text consisting of a single “dot”. Here, margin and centre exchange roles.
This technique reflects Al Farsi’s broader artistic vision. Just as he moved Shinas from geographical marginality to the centre of literature, he also allowed textual margins to become central spaces of storytelling.
Shinasising narrative can therefore be understood through three interconnected strategies: the signature of place, the movement of Shinas from margin to centre and the transformation of the margin itself into narrative space.
Through these techniques, Al Farsi created a fictional world that is deeply local yet widely recognisable. His Shinas is not merely a town reproduced in literature. It is a literary universe shaped by memory, humour, language and character — a place that acquired, through his writing, a life beyond geography.
Translated and adapted by Badr al Dhafari
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