The poet T.S. Eliot famously described April as the “cruellest month”, but the writer Ray Bradbury may be nearer the truth. He named his collection of macabre short stories The October Country in reference to the month’s reputation for providing moments of horror and terror.
Bradbury’s perspective resonates with recent experience, not least in the Arab world. October has brought a run of disturbing, grim, and violent events over the past century and into the first two decades of this one. It has brought sudden change, unexpected transformation, and abrupt shifts—usually for the worst but sometimes for the better.
Al Majalla looks at some of the October events that have resonated around the world, and how they have been depicted in culture.
The October 1973 War
In Arab collective memory, echoes from 1973 still reverberate through the October War of that year and the victory over Israel that it brought. Arab writers' attempts to celebrate the achievements of October '73 through novels, short stories, plays, films, and poems often fell short, struggling to maintain the necessary distance to truly capture the essence of the historic moment.
This is a common challenge in literature shaped by urgent events: Politics tends to overshadow artistic expression. Notable examples of this blend of documentary and artistic exploration include Gamal Al-Ghitani's novel Al-Rifai, Hanna Mina's The Observation Post, Abd al-Salam al-Ujayli’s Crimson Petals of Tishreen, and Mubarak Rabi's Companionship of Arms and the Moon, all of which highlight the impact of that pivotal moment.
The sense of triumph in October 1973 was to be eclipsed just eight years later when, in the same month of 1981, the assassination of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat cast a dark shadow across the Arab World.
Bolshevik Revolution and Che Guevara
Another October even came in 1917 in Russia, with the Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin, the founding father of what became the Soviet Union. It profoundly influenced poetry, cinema, and literature both in Russia and the world. Works like Sergei Eisenstein’s film October: Ten Days That Shook the World and Anatoly Marienhof’s poem, also called October, stand as lasting tributes to its aesthetic and cultural impact.
October is also when the iconic Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, was executed in 1967 in Bolivia. His legacy found cinematic expression in The Hands of Che Guevara (2006) by Dutch filmmaker Peter de Kock and Che: Rise and Fall (2007) by Argentine director Eduardo Montes-Bradley.
Flight 571
In October 1972, Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in the Andes mountains of Mendoza, Argentina. After enduring 72 days in isolation at an altitude of 3,600 meters, only 16 survivors were found out of the 45 on board. In a desperate struggle for survival, they resorted to consuming the frozen bodies of those who had perished. Their eventual rescue was made possible by two survivors who bravely trekked through the mountains to find help.
The tragedy was immortalised in Piers Paul Read’s book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors and later adapted into films, including Survive! (1976) by Mexican director René Cardona and Society of the Snow (2023) by Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona.
Cuban Missile Crisis
In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis began, marking one of the most intense geopolitical confrontations in history, centred around Soviet nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba. This 13-day standoff brought the world perilously close to global war and inspired numerous films from both American-British and Russian perspectives, including Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz (1969), Thirteen Days (2000) directed by Roger Donaldson, and Cain XVIII (1963) by Russian filmmakers Nadezhda Kosheverova and Mikhail Shapiro, based on the play The Naked Kin by Evgeny Shvarts and Nikolai Erdman.
In a surprising twist, October 2015 brought reports of the ancient city of Sodom's discovery at Tal al-Hammam in Jordan, stirring historical imaginations.
Al-Aqsa Flood
Last year, 7 October brought Hamas’ operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when the militia breached the wall and fortifications separating the Gaza Strip from Israel and breached the country’s territory, attacking civilians and soldiers and taking hostages. The attack ignited another brutal Israel war on Gaza that still continues.
Several documentaries have already been released about October 7 and Israel's subsequent war on Gaza, and given the sheer magnitude of Palestinian suffering, we can expect many more in the future.
