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Fadi Zaghmout: إبرة وكشتبان (The Man of Middling Height)
In his introduction, Zaghmout reminds us that Arab societies heavily favour men. Men enjoy “at the expense of women, who have had their freedoms restricted and bodily rights stripped away.. He points out that Arabic has two words for man, one for the biological man and the other for the social being. These words are not interchangeable. Men and women are divided by their biological sex. But what if, instead of sex, some other criterion was used. As we can see from the title, the one he suggests is height. This book posits a society where shorts dominate talls. Shorts eat more so they grow stronger and, like males in our world, tend to be more aggressive. We will see several examples of this during the book. Marriage and sex still very much take place because this is the world shorts can have multiple parties of sex and indeed as we shall see this is also very much the case.
Talls are weaker as they eat less and of course they need more food to grow. The convention is therefore that talls marry shorts. Just as in the Arab world today homosexuality is very much frowned upon, in this world talls do not marry talls and shorts do not marry shorts, with dire punishment for any transgression.
Our unnamed narrator, a female dressmaker, hears a knock at her door late at night. The man is called Tallan and appears to be a to be a tall. She tells us straight away that she will fall in love with this man even though it might, as we shall see be inappropriate. However, Tallan has a problem which we can see from the title of the book. There are people of middling height of which he is one and they have had to choose which category they fit in which is not always straightforward. As we shall see, he sometimes disguises himself as one, sometimes as the other, a very risky procedure.
We see a few inappropriate behaviours, at least by the standards of this society, in that he is out late at night which he should never do because there is the risk ofbeing attacked by smalls and possibly even raped and there is a curfew for talls. He offers her his hand which again is socially inappropriate. He said he had come late at night so as’s not to be seen by the neighbours. We learn that he came from a distinguished family known for their good looks. We also learn more about the talls and the shorts such astalls are more sensitive to sunlight, so it was easier for them to do these morning errands, unlike shorts, who are most active at night.
He wants some clothes made for a wedding he is to attend and has been unable to get them done by anyone else because he is a tall on his own and therefore they do not want his business. He is nominally a tall, but as the title tells us he is in fact of middling height. She tells him that she has spent her life making clothes for smalls and another for people of his height, but she is prepared to give it a go because she is clearly very much attracted to him.
She has an assistant, Rocky, who has two spouses. one male, one female, and who is highly critical of his visit. The narrator herself had had a girlfriend, but they broke up. The two women are close even even though in many ways they are different. Rocky is very very controlling of her spouses and frequently use violence against them. As we shall see, she sometimes goes too far and causes injury, with Ray,her female spouse, being the main victim. Ray goes back to her family more than once because of violent behaviour.
The basic plot is straightforward. The narrator wishes to marry Tallan and Rocky does not approve. At one point Tallan seems to have disappeared. She goes looking for him at the place where she thinks he lives but does not find him. However. She does find a strange café where various people seem to mix and not following the conventional rules about clothing or appearance. She had recently engaged a tall called Miles and she sees him there and he tells her about this place. It attracts people who do not follow the conventions and we learn Miles a tall, is in love with Willow, also a tall.
Soon after this event, Miles tells our narrator that he has a big problem. Willow is pregnant. Premarital sex is very much frowned upon in this society and premarital sex between two people of the same height is completely unacceptable. They face imprisonment by the authorities and possibly death from their own families. Between them, the narrator and Miles concoct way out but perhaps not surprisingly things go terribly wrong and chaos ensues, with Rocky being in the middle of the problem.
For the reader, the interesting point is the issue of the talls and the smalls. Zaghmout does not just make an exact equivalent between the society divided by biological sex and society divided by height. He makes it somewhat more complicated than that. One interesting variety is that the narrator wonders whether a society divided by something other than height is possible and she comes up with,, guess what?,a society divided by biological sex and she mentions what it might look like. The question is in this society is it the males or the females who dominate?
We also learn about Clara whom the narrator was at school with and who was taken away from the school because she was clearly going to be a tall and had to follow various rules such as not being allowed to associate with smalls unless they were family, she had to watch her diet and not get obese, as was only smalls could be obese and she had to speak in a soft tone which reminds us of the prescription of the Taliban on Afghani women that prevails at this time.
Zaghmout clearly has fun mocking the system of discrimination, which as it deals with height, looks odd to us but of course we are well aware of the discrimination against women, particularly in Arab society. Zaghmout had written and blogged on the subject of gender discrimination and clearly with this novel is critical of what happens both in terms of gender discrimination but also, to a lesser degreed of discrimination against homosexuality.
Publishing history
First published in 2021 by Dar al-Ahliyyah, Amman
First English translation in 2025 by Syracuse University Press
Translated by Wasan Abdelhaq