On the eve of 2000, Colombian novelist Héctor Abad Faciolince (b. 1958) travelled to Egypt, where he spent two months and began composing a fictional travelogue Oriente empieza en El Cairo (The Orient Begins in Cairo, 2002). Oriente empieza en El Cairo focuses on a Colombian traveller’s voyage en Orient in the twenty-first century. Abad models a tour of the ‘Orient’ (read Egypt) on the nineteenth-century travel literature of French Orientalists Gustave Flaubert and Gérard de Nerval. Like his fellow Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, he explores interactions between Latin America and the Arab world and represents the Orient, albeit more directly.

Abad’s Oriente empieza en El Cairo travels to another continent in the global South. Other Latin American writers have drawn on the routes of migration from the Arab world to Latin America in the nineteenth century. Thus, there is a sizeable literature that explores the effects of Arab migration and settlement in Latin America. García Márquez’s novels, from La mala hora (In Evil Hour, 1962) to Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), have obliquely drawn on the history of Arab migration to Latin America. In his famous novel Crónica de una muerte anunciada, García Márquez draws upon the effects of Arab migration to Colombia and the Orientalist imagery characteristic of Latin American Orientalism. Crónica de una muerte anunciada centres on an Arab character in 1950s Colombia and, in his masterwork Cien años de soledad, Arabs form part of the mythical town of Macondo.

Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Oriente empieza en El Cairo belong to a growing body of Latin American literature that focuses on interrelations between the Arab world and Latin America. García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada and Abad’s Oriente empieza en El Cairo explore two transcontinental encounters by focusing on Arab immigrants in Colombia and a Colombian traveller in Egypt. The Colombian traveller’s Orient, however, is steeped in another legacy. Abad’s Oriente empieza en El Cairo explores the Arab Latin American nexus through Orientalism and 1960s Third Worldism in the twenty-first century.