زليخة

*

ناءت عانتها

لا لأن زوجها عنين

فالصبي الذي يهجع إلى حضنها

نصف ابن

الصبي الذي يناوش الكمال

في نموه

هشّم الخيال بوعد لذة

دونها الموت نفسه

ناءت

لأن عرقه المنساب

في سرتها

حِمل كالمصير

*

بشهوة كالأمومة

وهو نائم

تلعق القذى من عينه

كأن أنفاسه شعر مجعد

يمسده أنفها

وكعطشان غُلّقت شفتاه

حول صنبور مدور

تحلم بالعبّ

من شفتيه

عبد الهادي الجزار: عارية

Jeremy

Peep Show on “the orgy” (the guy seeing his girlfriend with another man): “This is just like watching a porn, except I can‘t see anything, I haven‘t got a hardon, and I feel like crying.”

يماني يتعلم الكلام

ديوان أحمد يماني الأخير (أماكن خاطئة) – أكثر من أي عمل سابق له – يعكس المسافات الجغرافية والزمنية واللغوية لشخص يعيش خارج بلده، الأمر الذي يثري عملية إعادة اختراع اللغة التي يمارسها منذ بداياته. لهذا، لأن اللغة في تجددها وتولدها شيء يفرح (وهو التعريف الوحيد الممكن للشعر) أتى الديوان هدية مبهجة رغم كآبة الجزء الأكبر من محتواه. أتى بالبريد الإلكتروني في أبو ظبي، قبل أن ينشر عن دار ميريت بأسابيع أو شهور. وأذكر أنني - وأنا أطبعه، في محل عملي هناك – كنت كمن ينتظر وليمة يعرف أنه سيمضي الليل كله يأكلها. رحت، قبل أن أسلم نفسي لحالة توقعت صواباً أن ترحمني من القحط العاطفي لحياة الخليج، أسترجع بداية معرفتي بهذا الشاعر المقيم في إسبانيا من سنين كثيرة.

كان قد خضني منزل أحمد طه، في اجتماع مجلة الجراد الوحيد الذي حضرته، قبل أن أغادر مصر في عمر السابعة عشر ولا أعود حتى سن الرشد. لا أذكر إن كنت التقيت به ليلتها. الذي أذكره هو أن قصيدة (شوارع الأبيض والأسود) ظلت، من وقتها تقريباً، أقوى تجسد للقيم الجمالية التي عبر عنها (جيل التسعينات) في مصر، في الجراد والكتابة الأخرى وغيرهما، أنقى تعبير عن فرضيات كنت أتفاعل معها بما يكفي للشعور بالألفة فعلاً، إلا أنني – في هذا العمر، قبل أن تلطشني الحياة – شعرت، بالأكثر، أنني ساذج ومدلل، وكدت أندهش من كوني تفاعلت مع نصوص هؤلاء الناس. والحق أنها كانت تعبر عني بشكل استشرافي، أو قل تضيف إلى وعيي أوجاعاً لم أكن قد جربتها، فتكمّله. المهم أنه، بداية من الاعتراف بمادية الواقع – إلقاء الأيديولوجيا في الزبالة، على الأقل – لغاية القطع الشجاع ليس مع تراث الأدب العربي ولكن مع أكثر من حالة لبس لم تحسمها حداثتنا المجهضة، بدا يماني النموذج الأنقى، الأكثر عفوية واقتراباً من الأرض، الأرك بأسمى معاني الركاكة.

يماني ليس عنده، مثل ياسر عبد اللطيف، هاجس الصياغة اللغوية؛ ولا يهتم اهتمام إيمان مرسال ببناء النص (وهما بالنسبة لي أهم شاعرين أخرجهما ذلك المحيط). يبدو أقرب إلى محمد شكري أو حتى بابلو نيرودا من زاوية أنه يعرّف عالمه بما يكتب، بالثقة الخارجة من الخبرة المباشرة، بلا حاجة إلى سياق: عندما يقول شجرة، مثلاً، لا يعود في الدنيا كلها سوى الشجرة التي يتحدث عنها، يتجدد معنى كلمة شجرة لدرجة الشعور بأن أحداً لم يقل شجرة أبداً قبل ذلك، فيفرح الواحد بالشعر.

أعتقد أننا لا نهتم بما يكفي بأحمد يماني.

زليخة-٢

وهما يتراكضان

باتجاه المخرج

المخرج الذي يقود إلى السجن

وهي تنزع قميصه عنوة

بالذات

هل كان صدرها يهتز؟

I, Sultan

زليخة

إلى سنان أنطون

كالعجين اللدن على طرف اللسان

يتذوق ذراعها

لأن الشبق

أحلى من التفاح

يسيل لعابه

على طعم الخمير

ولا يفتقد حلاوة السكر

الفلسطيني

كالعجين الواعد بخبز قراح

يتذوق لحظة

قبلما يهم بالفرار

اللحظة التي يعرف فيها

أنه سينقذ العالم

Cairo, culture, conquer

Letter on status

mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the halting-place of feeble and mighty… — Ibn Battuta (Gibb)

Cairo means ‘conqueror’; it is female. Every night she dreams of being herself, every morning she wakes up alienated. Pondering over the city’s fate I am reminded of canonical Arab and Arabized scholar-writers (examples I’m thinking of range from the 10th to the 15th century), for whom the words for ‘essay’ and ‘epistle’ — also ‘book’— were one and the same. The role of Cairo, a central destination on their frequently Maghreb-to-Mecca itinerary, strikes me as the kind of notion that might interest them. She seems the right subject for a letter, anyway: rather than the inevitably false claim to impartiality, the city elicits a subjectivity both particular and prescribed. An epistolary subjectivity: involuntary postmodernism. A letter is intimate and specific, and yet those writers were encyclopedists and synthesizers: generalists in the most efficacious sense. Aside from their occasionally confessional tone, their object was never private. They saw the world whole, and it was the wholeness of that vision, not the integrity of their texts, that excited them. They were spokesmen for the unity of reality, but they wrote rather like pen pals addressing their patrons, sometimes each other, never unduly concerned with standpoint, seldom self-consciously artistic. They conveyed knowledge geographically, which means that they spread it individually over a collective surface: the Arabic tongue, the Koranic rhetoric that underpinned it and an unyielding commitment to truth. It also means that, while they sustained a classificatory compulsion, their sense of detail remained paramount.
Rather than a temporal, linear arrangement, they assayed a spatial, non-sequential scattering: precisely the mode of progress I am proposing here—a medieval-style ‘letter’ on the status of the City (no longer so) Victorious.

*

For Arabs everywhere Cairo is geographically central—as much in the physical as in that wider, conceptual sense, posited in contrast to the historical, which is not only temporal and linear but makes a more persuasive case for the city’s name—yet since the 20th century, and I take this rightly or wrongly to be the principal historical framework of the present, her significance has derived largely from numbers. (I maintain the affectation of personifying Cairo as a woman; let it evoke a wrinkled whore!) Egypt is significantly smaller than its cartographic representation, due to both the positioning and the density of its human habitation, and within that smallness—since AD 639, at least—seethes the greater smallness of its unequivocal and tyrannical hub. (So much so that, in Arabic, all through post-Arab Conquest history, Egypt and Cairo have often been confused in the reference to masr (misr in standard Arabic), with the more predominant occurrences denoting the city.) Outside of Cairo, Egyptians complain of being marginalized, something that has come to be known in government-supported cultural circles as ‘the predicament of the provinces’; but in perpetuating the conviction that nothing happens anywhere else, in feeling deprived and seeking fortune in her ‘bounty’, it is the alleged victims who contribute more than anyone to the centralism and arrogance of the city.
In this connection it should be stressed that Cairo has been subject to an unrelenting process of de-urbanization since 1956, when the migratory waves began to converge on her following the greater freedom of movement imparted to the fellahin—in a spirit of both ‘nationalism’ (later, and more importantly, nonalignment-style ‘socialism’) and ‘nationalization’—abandoning agriculture, deserting civic fronts: the postcolonial fate which the Arab states, themselves colonial inventions, have one way or another shared with the rest of the so called Third World. It was in those times, paradoxically, that Cairo’s role as Arab capital was fervently emphasized. At one point, with the declaration of the United Arab Republic in 1958, the notion might even have sounded viable; for, of course, it is totally absurd to speak of a capital—however ‘cultural’ its designation, the concept of a capital city is political in essence—when the larger demographic entity in which it occupies a position of prominence is but a loose conglomerate of nations of dubious sovereignty, with very emphatic (and, for the vast majority, largely impenetrable) borders separating one from the other. (Note the ease, the sheer legitimacy with which an Israeli citizen passes into Egypt, compared to the Arab holder of Palestinian papers—for example.) Cairo looks down, muttering cliches about the Palestinians being selfish and unreliable.

*

Most will now claim that Arabness is a myth, shunning it in favor Islam or some other form of pragmatic globalism—whether dominant (like Bushism) or submissive (like Ladenism), so to speak—which will be invariably bound by the atavistic and universalist imperatives of the millennium’s incredibly narrow political spectrum. Certainly, some degree of fragility remains inherent to the concept in the light of political experience; the terms ‘pan-Arabism’ and ‘Arab unity’, at least, are always on the verge of implosion, as if by merely uttering them one is instantly replaying the Lebanese Civil War, recalling the 1967 War, underlining the Gulf nations’ wholesale defection to a mode of pan-Americanism.
Arabness as a cultural condition remains profoundly geographic—as opposed to historical—a trait complicated further by the fact that it is quite simply interesting, especially in the first decade of the millennium, for something to be called Arab. ‘Interesting’ implies, above all, plurality: it means more things to be Arab than it does to be communist, for example, or even modern.
One thing it does not mean is that the subject should consider Cairo her cultural capital. In fact inter-Arab chauvinism—Bedouin vs. Hadar, Mashreq vs. Maghreb, Umawite-Levantine vs. Abbasid-Gulfie: all are as much intellectual as psychological divides—may well be at the root of inter-Arab strife; and in this context the imperialist divide-and-rule volley can travel incredibly far, as has been demonstrated time and again over the decades. (Witness, once more by way of example, the recent history of Sunni-Shia strife in Iraq, the effect of the US ‘liberation’ of the country on the escalation of that strife, and the ideological—for which read, in effect, tribal—substance of its drive.) The fact that, through cinema, then radio and eventually television, Egypt had for a long time dominated the audiovisual media—it is this, and the country’s location, that explain the currency of Egyptian Arabic, compared to other dialects, in both Mashreq and Maghreb—has often made other urban Arabs (Beirutis, for example) deeply resentful of Cairo, eager to point up both contradictions and disappointments as they claim a position of leadership for their cities. Cairo shrugs, laughing shrilly as she thrusts forward her cleavage: she knows that no other girl on the market has been around for longer, none will ever have as many clients.

*

Still, Egyptian chauvinism is arguably the worst of all; after the blatant fact of political segregation, it is the complacency and corruption of the Cairenes’ own sense of identity that forms the first obstacle in the way of the city actualizing her potential as Arab cultural median. (Nasser, the first truly Egyptian head of state and Egypt’s only true champion of Arabness, delivered his speeches in a combination of broken standard Arabic and dialect, breaking with a tradition that had maintained a level of linguistic proficiency in formal contexts in the wake of the 19th-century battle against the official imposition of Turkish on Egyptian—also, by general consensus, Arab—life, especially in the military, where Nasser was a corporal.) This chauvinism manifests in an infinity of registers, many of which have only the most contingent connection with other Arabs, some of which have to do with postcolonial self-hatred a la Frantz Fanon, and a few, a very few of which hark back to pre-Conquest times.
One of the latter, I believe, is conservatism, colored by both inflexibility and stasis. Much has been made of the rise of religiosity in Egypt in terms of both (potentially militant) political dissent and (middle-class) social attitudes. The truth is that, while their Wahhabi and consumerist registers may indeed be recent developments, ritual piety, sartorial modesty, ageism, nepotism and classism—the mainstays of Egyptian public life—are as old as the Pharaohs; they do not occur with the same incidence in other Arab states; and they have negative implications for the theory and practice of culture. It is possible to see 20th-century sociopolitical phenomena that have a bearing on cultural life as expressions of this ancient trait.
Nasser’s Soviet influence, for example, has made for a legacy of both police-state security and inefficient bureaucracy. This means that, among many implications for culture, outdoor gatherings are outlawed; it means that writers and artists are often also civil servants, with their loyalty to the establishment, the only available source of money and kudos, overruling the creative impulse. But outdoor gatherings are hardly sanctioned by city-dwellers themselves, unless they have to do with religion; and a place in the official hierarchy, to a far greater extent than artistic accomplishment outside the popular media, is the gauge by which the vast majority—including police personnel—will judge a person they do not know. It also means that, when a young blogger receives a prison sentence for speaking his mind about Islam, his parents are the first to support the move and disown him. State, religion and family suddenly put aside their differences and become one, alienating the individual beyond any hope: this is Egyptian. Together with xenophobia—a condition less of history per se than of cumulative lack of access to information—it makes for an unsafe and inhospitable cultural space. Cairo smiles sheepishly, concerned and slightly ashamed: she gathers her bundle of tatters, adjusts her makeup, and leaves…

*

There are now in Egypt three means to the production of culture: a nepotism-ridden ministry suffering all the symptoms of a formerly socialist dictatorship and inextricably linked with similarly afflicted government and pro-government bodies; a commercial sector prone not only to profit-making constraints but, more importantly, to censorial intervention from the official, the religious and the family establishment—as in the case of the blogger; and an ‘independent’ sector with roots in the NGO scene, frequently subject to the same patterns of conservatism as the other two. Of the three only the latter, however, is eager to maintain links with the rest of the Arab world. But there are indications of the meaning of Arabness in all of them, whether positive or negative. Rather than showing that Cairo is or isn’t cultural capital, two examples of these should give an idea of what is involved in saying that she is:
Ellimbi. Star comedian Mohammad Saad’s cult figure Ellimbi, who first appeared in his late peer Alaa Waleyeddin’s 2000 film vehicle Al-Nazir (Salaheddin) but found fuller expression in Saad’s subsequent, eponymous vehicle of 2002, is among the most eloquent metaphors for urban dispossession in recent Arab culture. Ellimbi is illiterate, a drunk-druggie and a thug—all of which, as well as reflecting socioeconomic deprivation, are occasions for comic interest and laughter: a powerful statement about the contemporary inner-city Arab living in a country of relative stability and struggling with unemployment and official oppression—but his most compelling attribute is the way he speaks. Together with Waleyeddin, Mohammad Heneidi, Ahmad Helmi and, to a lesser extent, Hani Ramzi, Saad is part of the cinematic phenomenon I have tentatively named ‘new-wave comedy’, which, though it remains a wholly commercial development and in the process perpetuates rather than questions sociopolitical norms, has evidenced a comic sensibility distinct from that of the previous generation of Egyptian comedians, like the superstar Adel Imam, whose verbal antics expressed emotional responses to meaningful dramatic situations. In new-wave comedy, by contrast, laughter derives directly from such verbal antics, which in reflecting the development of the vernacular—the latest slang, the influence of satellite TV, the results of urban-rural and inter-Arab interactions—capitalize, rather, on the breakdown of language as a the principal container of meaning.
In Ellimbi such breakdown reaches an apex; though Saad has made a sequel, Elli Bali Balak (2003) and attempted a series of variations since, nothing compares to the power of the original, suggesting that, in Ellibmi, Saad had already exhausted the possibilities of this late-in-the-day figure of fun. In Ellimbi’s mouth, all the major components of the vernacular, both standard and dialect—love poetry, including the lyrics of classic Om Kolthoum songs; everyday sayings, proverbs, idioms and turns of phrase; exclamations and interrogative constructions; the platitudes and comforts of an entire society—are semantically and phonetically distorted, mispronounced, misappropriated, muddled and confused to the point of being meaningless; the situation is understood, and the characters’ position within it, but never through the ordinary (normative) operation of language; and the result, though funny—largely because laughable—can be profoundly unsettling. It is as though, in Ellimbi, the linguistic frailty of Nasser’s speeches reaches its ultimate conclusion, reflecting a parallel process of disintegration that afflicted society in the half century separating the two popular figures (however incompatible they look at first glance): the suicide of the spoken word; the death of collective meaning insofar as it can be verbally communicated.
Amkenah. The flowering of the nineteen sixties, quickly cut short by 1967 and the return of both conservatism and unchecked capitalism under Sadat, gave way to a deep rift in reader-writer relations. Since then serious poetry and fiction have not had the benefit of a readership to speak of, partly because they were increasingly inaccessible, partly because fewer people were interested in books. It wasn’t until the mid nineteen nineties that a new current in prose poetry—subsequently igniting more novel(ette)s than diwans, but also informing a much wider range of scriveners from less self-consciously ‘professional’ novelists to journalists, diarists, humorists and political analysts—opened up the parameters of literature somewhat. In this regard nonfiction seems to promise rather more than ‘literature’ as it is currently understood by the vast majority of creative writers: fiction and poetry; and it is Amkenah (Places), the occasional magazine published from Alexandria since 1999, that demonstrates this. An initiative of Alaa Khaled — himself not only a nineties prose poet but, since he is based in Alexandria, technically also ‘a writer of the provinces’ —the magazine showcases the widest variety of nonfiction texts, sometimes interspersed with or accompanied by monochromatic photographs or archival extracts.
In so doing Amkenah has managed to become financially self-sufficient—a genuinely unprecedented feat; Khaled, refusing to align himself with the so called independent scene, the only funding option available to him, has had to produce the magazine from his own pocket, overseeing its Cairo sales in person. Amkenah—openly defiant of Cairo’s centralism, and thus a modest precursor to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—must be Cairo’s best-selling literary publication—paradoxically enough—which says an amazingly great deal for the appeal of nonfiction in Arabic. Nonfiction, arguably the most lasting consequence of the nineteen nineties’, as it were, breath of fresh air—seems to be freeing literature from the tentacles of obscurantism and ‘sophistication’, finally. It is a slow process, but it is ongoing and gathers advocates by the day. The influence of Amkenah has certainly been felt throughout the literary scene, and it is gradually reaching other Arab countries by way of Cairo…

*

Mixing her (non-alcoholic) cocktail, the old whore listens in silence. She is consumed by a passion of remembrance but will not divulge her grief. At the street corner she gazes at the billboard of Mohammad Saad’s latest film, ignoring a book stall where Amkenah is stacked to one side, dusty and obscured. It is sunset and she must find work: she sniffs after expensive eau de toilet; she listens hard for non-Egyptian cadences of speech. Then she crosses the streets in hurry, paying no attention to traffic lights, strutting her tired stuff.

this piece published two years ago in Magaz, the design magazine

منصورة عز الدين

من يعرف سر الفردوس

“ترجل أربعة رجال من العربة مرتدين عباءات سوداء فوق جلابيبهم الكشمير، وفتحوا الباب الخلفي. أخرجوا منه جسداً مغطى بملاءة بيضاء، وحملوه صاعدين السلالم.”

بتماسك يستحضر المشاهد الأقوى من ثلاثية “الأب الروحي” لفرانسيس فورد كوبولا، استثمرت منصورة عز الدين – منذ “متاهة مريم” (2004) – تراثها العائلي في إعادة اختراع العالم: فجرت علاقة بنت الريف بالمدينة بعيداً عن أي فرضيات مستهلكة حول “الأقاليم” أو “المرأة”. وبإلغاز لا يستتبع ضعفاً في التركيز، عرّت كل شيء – الجنون، الموت، الأنوثة – دون أن تكشف سراً واحداً من أسرار نصوص أشبه “باللاڤا لامپ”، ذلك الفانوس البيضاوي الذي يسخر الكهرباء، لا للإنارة، بل للتلاعب بالضوء الملون.

هذه هي “كتابة السر”، كما سماها الناقد محمد بدوي إثر قراءة قصص كتابها الأول، “ضوء مهتز”.

واليوم، على خلفية الأقدار المتقلبة لصناعة الطوب وما استتبعته من تجريف الأرض الزراعية في دلتا الثمانينيات، يتسع مجال التداعي من منامات قاهرية مستجدة إلى ذاكرة كاتبة محبطة لطفولتها في العزبة والبندر، من جرائم القتل الحلمية إلى الفجيعة الواقعة وفقدان البراءة وعفاريت الأحباب الغائبين: في “وراء الفردوس” تتبلور قدرة منصورة عز الدين على بناء شخصيات حية ورسم الخطوط العريضة لمجتمع متمايز، مقترحة معاني غير تنويرية للوعي التاريخي وأسطورة القرين.

وبرغم المبالغة في الانضباط الأسلوبي (على حساب خصوصية صوت الراوية، أحياناً)، برغم التعدد المربك (أحياناً أيضاً) للشخصيات والحواديت، وبرغم أن تجاوُر مختلف المآرب الأدبية لا يبلغ دائماً غاية الامتزاج العضوي، تنتج منصورة عز الدين كتابة محبوكة، عميقة، سائغة، خالية ليس فقط من شوائب الذات (النسوية) وإنما كذلك من تهويمات المحيط (الريفي). بلا تعقيد مجهد أو ادعاءات “علمية”، تتجاوز “وراء الفردوس” القرية “الإدريسية” وإنسان “الأيام السبعة”، “حكاية” حنان الشيخ ومثلية صبا الحرز.

تتجاوز حتى الهوية الوطنية والجنسية، وتهمش بطلتيها حاملتي تلك الهوية، لتجوب فضاءات – مثل كاتبتها – تكشف دون أن تبوح.

يوسف رخا

Maryam and the Minotaur

Last week at the headquarters of her new Cairo publishers, Dar Al-Ain, Mansoura Ezzeddin read from and signed copies of her second novel, Wara’ Al-Firdaws (Beyond Paradise), a sort of psychological thriller and Bildungsroman rolled into one. Comparing the new book to Maryam’s Maze, her 2004 novel, translated by Paul Starkey, Youssef Rakha spoke to Ezzeddin about her work, her life and the overlap between the two
Though she published only three books in nearly a decade, Mansoura Ezzeddin (b. 22 March 1976) has maintained a high profile on the literary scene since she graduated from Cairo University in 1998. She is the books editor at the most popular cultural weekly in the country, Akhbar Al-Adab, where she got a job in the same year. By 2001, though already married to a fellow young writer whom she also met there, her first book, a collection of short stories titled Daw’ Muhtazz (Trembling Light), was published to acclaim from a battalion of former teachers, mentors and admirers, including well-known figures like critic Mohammad Badawi, novelist Gamal El-Ghitani (the editor of Akhbar Al-Adab), even the late philosopher Mahmoud Amin El-Alim. In the next two years Ezzeddin would go through both pregnancy-birth and the death and dying of her mother, experiences she would lugubriously internalise and eventually, from 2002 to 2009, transform. Working every day, however little the time left her after both job and small family are paid their dues, she draws up character sketches, composes dream studies, and occasionally develops a text into a short story – which she might subsequently use as a chapter in a novel.
Correspondences are frequent and at least once, in the course of writing Maryam’s Maze, Ezzeddin had all but given up on resolving one particular complication when she realised that one of her early short stories provided her with exactly the narrative development she needed; she simply had to insert that short story unaltered for the novel, apparently unrelated, to flow exactly as she had envisaged it. Correspondences could also occur between literature and life, in equally unexpected ways. Ezzeddin recounts that, during her mother’s last days at the hospital, the woman “to whom I owe absolutely everything” often asked about her writing. “The idea of me writing pleased her,” and so, despite the mayhem that consciously prevented her from doing it, at the hospital she would take out her old notes and exercises and pretend to be working on those texts that had made her mother proud of her when they appeared in well-known newspapers and magazines. “After a while I realised that these short stories were actually developing into Maryam.” The slim volume, which makes up in intensity for what it lacks in extent, concerns a young woman, her close friend or double, and the large house of a provincial patriarch which, following the young woman’s move to Cairo, appears to her as a Labyrinth, its large and deeply intermingled cast of occupants – ghosts, dream figures, real people? – constituting a sort of Minotaur of the mind. And so there seems to be yet a third level of correspondence: paradoxically, while she consciously rejected myth, justifying Maryam’s visions with recourse to psychology, Ezzeddin was in fact producing a grassroots version of one of the world’s best celebrated myths, and feminising its hero.
Whatever else you say about it – and Wara’ Al-Firdaws could conceivably make you say something different – Ezzeddin’s writing emerges out of a place both mysterious and dark. For seven years now, while advancing her journalistic career and creating a home life sufficiently different from her family background for her to be at peace with, Ezzeddin has also been working through “existential questions, anxiety, discomfort, fear” – personality traits, she says, that have been with her at least since the unexpected, seemingly absurd death of her father when she was aged nine (which also explains her reading Camus and other adult books at an extremely early age). “They are basically to do with the idea of death,” these questions, “the idea of dissolution, breakdown. Not breakdown in the psychological sense, but the idea of this human constitution being on the verge of ceasing, at any moment. Termination,” she muses. “The whole thing coming to an abrupt end. A somewhat strange imagination,” she interrupts herself to chuckle. And it is at this point, no matter how much I object that her imagination is actually in no way strange, that Ezzeddin and her work finally come together for me. I have known her for many years and she has never struck me as capable of anything more disturbing than a whimper. Of all the fiction writers and poets who emerged in the 1990s, she comes across as perhaps the most psychologically balanced – quiet, hardworking, focussed. There is a kind of no-nonsense conservatism about her, a kind of respectability. This might explain the fact that, from an early age until eight years ago, she wore hijab – a fact she seldom mentions, and then only to say that it was an outward shift to do with her pilgrim’s progress from the countryside to the city, not with the substance of her relationship to God.
This, on the one hand; and on the other hand, her work: Never mind that the very premise of the Maze is a dream in which the protagonist seems to be knifed to death by her Doppelganger: a weird rite in which the latter dies equally graphically. In Wara’ Al-Firdaws a similar duo, Salma and Gamila, play out a puzzling relationship implying anything from schizophrenia in one or both of them to lesbianism; frighteningly rather than bafflingly, the precise nature of their connection is never stated. Aside from the two of them, however, there is at least one gory death, a series of encounters with the ghost of the dead man (notably sexual encounters with his as yet young attractive wife), and beatings. Despite her attempt to depict a whole world, her conscious marginalisation of Salma and Gamila, the sense of mystery, of the paranormal, of unaccountable powers interfering with irrational drives, is still there. Ezzeddin tells me that Badawi, whose lectures she attended at the time, coined a term for her earliest short stories: “writing the secret” (kitabat al-sirr). Each text seems to be a secret, a clockwork mini information system that, however multifarious, remains self-contained. Ezzeddin mentions, in this context, her debt to the horror film and her interest in the therapeutic effect of writing (Salma, who edits short stories for publication in a newspaper, starts writing a novel on the advice of her psychiatrist); she identifies imagination with fear. This is not everyday, realistic fear, which – in line with the impression Ezzeddin gives of herself – seems to be well under control. The fear that is at odds with Ezzeddin’s poise, which nonetheless comes through with amazing intensity in her books, is something far more primal. In her mind, she explains, fear of the dark (the childhood experience par excellence) takes on the deepest metaphysical dimensions. “You’d be surprised,” she says, “how basic my fears are.”

Set against the backdrop of the shifting fortunes of the brick making industry in the Delta in the mid-1980s – perhaps the first mention in contemporary Arabic literature of the otherwise oft-cited phenomenon of tagrif, which eroded agricultural land before the shift to concrete – Wara’ Al-Firdaws draws a much sharper distinction between the two settings informing Ezzeddin’s experience. First, there is the tiny village where, in the absence of basic public amenities, Ezzeddin enjoyed a nonetheless unusually prosperous upbringing as the spoilt but remarkably successful school child at the heart of an extended family so large and close knit, so conservative and so rich that her husband, on first being introduced to it, could not help comparing it to the mob in The Godfather. Secondly, there is Cairo, the infinitely larger place to which Ezzeddin’s passage – a hitherto unthinkable breach of tradition facilitated by her mother – gradually allows for a clear perspective on “just how strange and unusual this experience of the countryside really was”. The book began as an account of her mother’s life, a fictionalised biography not unlike Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayati Sharh Yatoul (My Life, A Long Story) – whose publication in 2005 discouraged Ezzeddin from doing the same thing again – so she quickly gave up on this side of what she was already envisaging as a larger, intergenerational variation on Maryam, one that replaced the paranormal with “the mythology of the setting” and in which the central (dual) character had less of a role to play. “As always,” Ezzeddin says with conviction, “the work imposed its own logic.”

Partly because it contains more comedy and juxtaposes a greater number of stylistic registers, partly because it has a more definite social-historical reference point, Wara’ Al-Firdaws has already been hailed as more accessible than Maryam. Aside from widening the scope of her work without making concessions to the market, however, Ezzeddin had no intention of compromising her notion of what writing actually involves: a process of imagining, primarily out of that primal fear of sudden dissolution, people and places that resemble the world rather than referring to it per se. Here as in Maryam, consequently, almost every character in the book is imagined. “If people back in the village read Wara’ Al-Firdaws,” she insists, “no one would recognise anyone.” The process seems integral to Ezzeddin’s way of dealing with a suffocating environment, which has been very different from straightforward rebellion or insurgency, and reflects her view of herself not as woman writer but as a writer who happens to be a woman. She behaves like a virus, she says, working from the inside; she instils herself in the host – “the mafia” of her extended family – precisely in order to transcend it. And though outwardly her own life has been more or less conservative, she is careful to point out that she instituted a nuclear family (usrah), not an extended family or tribe (‘a’ilah). Like few writers of her generation, rebellion and transcendence have been matters of the mind; and she still dislikes any predetermined idea, however positive, being imposed on what she does: the Woman, the Body, the Provinces are all candidates; she rejects them all. At the most obvious level it is madness that she is really interested in, (in)sanity, “but it is not as if I studied psychology or apply it in any systematic way”. Even the Novel does not bind Ezzeddin.

It is something of a cliché by now to speak, borrowing critic Gaber Asfour’s expression, of the Age of the Novel, which has driven many an excellent short story writer and poet to switch genres. Having published Wara’ Al-Firdaws, by contrast, Ezzeddin is in the process of putting together a new collection of short stories. It is a form she loves, she says, a form both difficult and rewarding, and never separate from or in contradiction to the literary project her two novels have pursued. She has no doubt that her readership will engage with her stories just as enthusiastically, and though she would be hard pressed to identify the constituency of that readership, unlike many contemporary young writers, she distances herself totally from the discourses and debates of sales, popularity and what makes for a successful book. “People accuse serious writers of obscurity,” she says, “of looking down on readers. But who is to say that readers are less intelligent or less complicated than the writers? Who is to say that it is making assumptions about how much readers can understand that means looking down on them?”

أهزوجة السلطان

أنت أشباح الفتوة الهاربة كالجراء من حريق أرجواني على ضفة البوسفور، يزعق ضميرك المنهك. وفي الشروق الملبد تعزيك المدائن بوميض آخر الدراويش، حيث تنبش القباب المتراكمة إبرها في مخدة السماء ويأكل الفقهاء عمائمهم كالفطائر. فهل تتشبث بغطاء رأسك في وجه الغيم الإنگليزي وهل بلمعة نياشينك تراهن على فجر عهد زاخر بالمناخات؟ في مزقة فرماناتك أجرام كالتنانير، وعلى رأس جدك شاهد بني، ما عاد شارة للتقى. الآن تنطبق العباءة التي قبلتها – أو أخوك – وأنت تتمتم «مثنوي معنوي مولوي، هست قرآن بازان پهلوي» ثم تطفو فوق سهل الإستبس جناحين تفضهما مراراً على سواحل القارات، فيما تنبش فئران يديك بأجولة المتاع عن أرز يصلح للسرادقات، أو شموع تترجم إلى ذهب طلياني. أنت أب ميت أو حبيس يمسد شعر أبنائه الغائبين، وخلف زجاج عويناتك المطاطي دموع مجمدة كالرماد. من يشحذ رماح أحلامك الآتية أو يصدّر هباتك عبر العصور؟ من سواي يصدق أنك أنت، أن مسخاً يُتأتئ قرينك، أو يجاور رفاقك عبر المطارات بحثاً عن أيقونة بلا وجوه؟ لسلالتك طبل كذروة الجماع، واسمك ثريد اللالئ في صحن كالبحر وسط مائدة العالمين. لكنني أراك عجوزاً في سفينة معطلة، تتطلع إلى بلادك النائية.

Posters

مساء الخير-١

مانهاتن

«الذين يستحبون الموت على الكفر…» – أسامة بن لادن

«وعمرَّ الله موضع خروجها من آدم بالاشتياق إليها، فحن إليها حنينه إلى نفسه لأنها جزء منه، وحنت إليه لأنه موطنها الذي صدرت عنه» – ابن عربي

«فلم تهوني ما لم تكن في فانيا» – ابن الفارض

ذات يوم، اضطررت للكف عن الحشيش.

كان لي قرابة العام مفجوع في أبي، زاد استهلاكي خلالها بصورة كبيرة. عندي موسوعة مصوّرة عن النبات الذي أحبه، عرفت منها أن أحد أسمائه في الهند «مسكّن الفجيعة». خمس سنين منذ انتظمت على التدخين، وكل يوم أكتشف له مزايا جديدة. عيبه الوحيد أنه يقصيني. لم أعد أنتبه لحديث الآخرين. بعد وفاة أبي، خصوصاً، حدست أني أتعامل مع الناس في مساحة ضيقة وبعيدة. الجنس نفسه خلا من المشاركة، ما كان يزيده إمتاعاً مجرداً من المعنويات.

أهتم بجسد فتاتي الأمريكية ربما أكثر من ذي قبل، لكن كمن يضغط أزرار ماكينة تنتج البلل واللدونة. شهقاتها كأنها كركرة محرك السيارة وعصف الهواء وأنت تسرع على طريق خاوية: وشائج التحكم في متعة القيادة. وحين تعقب المضاجعات سگاير ألفّها لي وحدي (فتاتي لا تدخن)، كنت أستشعر هوة مروعة أسفل السطح الذي جمع جسدينا. فأعاجل بجعلها تتأوه من جديد. كأننا في صندوق مختوم بعبارة «قابل للكسر». لا أدعه يتعطل لحظة عن الاهتزاز. إذا بكت وقالت إن كثرة المضاجعة أنهكتها، سأغادر إلى حيث يمكن أن أستمني دون أن أشعر بشيء.

فقط لا أنسى أن هذا يحدث في اليوم التالي على ابتلاع أقراص الإكستاسي (ليس وحدي، ولكن بلا فتاتي)، شرط أن يكون الحشيش جيداً وهي في مزاج شهواني. الإكستاسي من شأنها أن تشحذ حاسة اللمس وتدرأ الوهن إلى ما بعد زوال الحبور. لكن مع مرور الساعات، يحل بالجسد خواء كأنه تجويف خلفّه انخلاع ضلع ضروري.

حينئذ أوقن بفقدانها: الشرخ أوسع من أن يُرأب دونما أعود أدراجي عبر أنبوب أنسحب خلاله منذ خمس سنين. هذا الخواء سيستتبع حشيشاً أكثر، والإفراط في الحشيش يؤجج الشوق للإكستاسي. بعد وفاة أبي، حدست أن الحال مع فتاتي مثال على علاقتي بالعالم. وجع التعميم. ما عاد بوسعي إنكار أنني في سيارة لا أسيطر على سرعتها. لهذا، لأنني أوغلت حتى فقدت النطق، لأن المتعة الخرافية ما عادت تعوضني عن الناس، كان لابد أن أكف. واليوم، بعدما زالت الأقراص وتبخر كل قنب العالم، بعدما صارت الأمريكية تلك تهويمة تقلها أجيال من الذكريات، يحلو لي ادعاء أن انقطاعي عن الكيوف حدث بإرادتي.

فقط فجيعتي في مسكّن الفجيعة لا تترك شكاً أني اضطررت، جبراً وبأقسى سبيل محتمل، للكف عن الحشيش.

فتاتي المسكينة.

لو لم تقترن بضاضتها بمشهد أبي المتخشب ليلة الوفاة! وحده الإمتاع المجرد يدوزن الشهور السابقة على أيلول ٢٠٠١، أيلول نهاية العالم. يومذاك، قبل أن أعلم بشيء، سأفيق على طائرتين مارقتين تخترقان أعلى توأم معماري في دماغي، عاصمة الوعي.

يبدو أنهما تنفخان من جنباته مناطد الدخان الأسود المحفوفة أواسطها بالنار، غير أن البرجين والبناء الصغير الذي يتوسطهما تتفجر كلها من الداخل، تنطبق على نفسها في تكوين يشير إلى هدم منظم بالثيرمايت («نقبه على شونة» الشيخ أسامة).

مشهد الطائرتين ليس سوى تمهيد سينمائي لانهيار سيكلفني، بموازاة الأحداث، أكثر من حرب على الإرهاب. لقد رأيت الشعب العائش في رأسي يفنى. الناس بحجم حبات السمسم تقفز إلى حتفها المحقق من فرجات النوافذ. والمادة الرمادية قبالة جمجمة السماء من أسفل كأطلال البرجين التوأمين تبتلع أجسادهم (وكنت كالأجهزة السرية تماماً، أدبر للقتل الجماعي وأدعي اللاوعي، أبحث عن شياطيني المذنبة في ضمائر الآخرين). قبل أن أعلم بشيء، كان اللهب يتشبث بالثياب، والأسطح ترتج وتتصدع. السماء تنشق عن سواد مؤجل منذ مصرع الرجل الكبير. لم أُرهَب في حياتي بمثل هذه الحدة. الأحباب المقيمون عندي لا أكاد أتعرف عليهم من فرط ما شوههم الهدد. سألاحق المجرمين. (المجرمون الوهميون في كهوف الجبال البعيدة.) مثل هولاگو سآتي على بغداد. السمسم كله إن لم يكن معي فهو علي. كان يجب أن أنتبه لما يصير للشعب في غيابي. أعتني به. أحبه…

كل الأفق هلع وتراب.

حتى العراف الزنجي الراقد في قورتي منذ فطنت لضرورة المراجعة، هو الآخر فط جزعاً يروم الهروب. لعلني سمعته يتنحنح بصوت ما عدت أطيق غلاظته، أو تشوفت قبحه عن قرب لأول مرة منذ زمن طويل. زعق في وجهي بأنه ممتن لنجاته وعلى الفور شرع يتنبأ: تتوالى القذائف على أفغانستان ويُشنق صدام حسين وتُحرم النبات الذي تحبه. تركته يلوذ بالدنيا الواسعة من مخرج مائي أسفل عيني. لكنني مثل عجوز يلعن مُنجّم صباه الذي كاد ينساه، بعدما يتأكد من صدق تكهناته، سأعرف في الشهور التالية أن العراف كان على حق. وبنزق وجبروت المحافظين الجدد، أقاطع الأمريكية وتاجر الحشيش الصعيدي الذي أخلص لي طوال مدة ارتباطنا، رفاق الإكستاسي وبائعي البانقو. سأمر حذاء سراديب الغورية كآثم لا تسعفه قدماه على ارتياد محفل الاقتراف.

وعلى خطى هانم تتخفف من مصاغها، أتبرع بقطع ممتازة وأقراص غالية، مسحوق كأنه ذهب مطحون في الأكياس، وعبوات صغيرة مصفوفة بعناية: ثروة من الكيميائيات. سأرد الحقوق لأصحابها – مايستتبعخلافاتومآرب–ودونما أخبر أحداً بأمري، أقفّل الحسابات.

كمن يبتر ذراعه مكابراً بعدم حاجته إليه، سأختار كومة زبالة على وشك الزوال بالقرب من رصيف بعيد، أدفن في أطلالها علبة جميلة من خشب الصندل العطر منشأها فاس، كنت أحفظ في تلافيفها كل عدتي ومتاعي: الكيوف وورق البفرة وماكينة لف السگاير وقطع الكرتون والأكياس. بحركة واحدة هادئة في ذيل مشوار تافه، سأودع خمس سنين من عمري قبراً أقرب من مكان ما رأيت أبي ملفوفاً في القماش الأبيض. لكنه، عكس جبانة البلدة النائية، لا يمكن الرجوع إلى زيارته.

عشية الحادي عشر من أيلول، كانت القاهرة تشمت على استحياء في نائبة مانهاتن، عاصمة الدنيا.

وبدا لي أن التاريخ مجرد تمثيل باذخ لوعيي. حين أنظر إلى مفاتن فتاتي، أرى أبي ممدداً في جلبابه يلفه صمت وتصلب لم يبق معهما شك –لن يجيبني إذا وجهت له الكلام.

اليوم، رغم ارتباط الحشيش بالشبق، أجتهد لأتذكر من هذه الفترة أي شهوة. لا شيء سوى الانضباطعلى قضاء وطر بالغ الجفاف. جسم لا تولّد ألفته الأمان. وعاء خوف، بلا مودة. وبين العمل اليومي المسموم و«القعدات» التي ما عدت أنتظرها لأمارس طقوس التدخين (كما ينبغي) وسط حلقة أنس تبرر ترف البطء والسكون، يلهيني تلاحق المضاجعات عن هوة أنبأني عراف زنجي بحجم حبة السمسم أني أتهاوى إلى أعماقها في القريب العاجل. هواء عابر أنبوب الغياب، هكذا سمعته يتمتم من مضجعه الآسن في قورتي. أن أرقد من جديد على البوابة. بدأت رحلة الرجوع في الأنبوب.

وإن تعاطيته بمنطق الفناء، الجنس ليس غاية في حد ذاته… يومذاك لم تكن قد تراكمت في جوفي ذخيرة الروائح والتقاطعات. لم يكتملمعجم التنهدات وصرخات النشوى، أو يُتقَن تأثير تعديلات الوضع والحركة على إيقاع الزفير. تقديري الاستثنائي لسحبة القدم وميلي للألم المقنن كلاهما في موضع الاستشراف (أمارسهما من بعد كمن يسترد إرثاً مسروقاً أو يبصر محيطه بوجد بعد انجلاء الدخان). فبدا، بحسب الذاكرة الخائنة، أن كل خطوة أقطعها فتح جديد لجيوش دولة الحياة. لماذا إذن، في الاستعادة، لا يخالجني حسالمغامرةأوالاكتشاف؟

أجتهد لأسترجع جسد الأمريكية التي شهدت خبرتي الأولى بانتهاء عمر (لم يكن الموت قبل أبي سوى إعفاء عادة ما يكون محموداً من مسئولية اللقاء بالآخرين). خارج المخاطرة المعطوفة على ابتياع الكيف، لا شيء سوى زهوة السيطرة على جسد لا أحسه لي إلا في حدود ما أسيطر عليه. ولا تعبير عن هوية. جسد منزوع الروح، يتأود لأصابعي المدربة حديثاً كسيارة أقودها على طريق خاوية فأنتشي بكركرة المحرك وعصف الهواء. ومن المضاجعة تحت التأثير حتى الإياب التدريجي إلى حيث عادت اللذة مناسَبة للمعرفة بالوحدانية، تترامى كثبان المعاناة.

بين أيام الحشيش والآن، كل الأجساد فاترة وبعيدة.

وحده حاضري الجنسي يحضرني، مع صغيرتي التي أحبها، حيث بهجة توحّد البدن والدماغ. لأنني، في زهو أعيدت صياغته، أتملك روحها. بتطبيقها على صدري أسترد ضلعاً ضرورياً فقدته حين جئت الحياة. اليوم، بعيداً عن الذكرى الملتبسة، أستحضر اللحظة المعجزة حين رأيت جسد صغيرتي التي أحبها. عراء كالقرنفل. لحظة تتمثل ببهاء باهر.

أستثمرها في التأكد من أنه، خلاف الرهبة والفجيعة والإمتاع، لايزال في الدنيا سطح يمكن أن يجمع جسدي بآخر. أسفله صلب. ومعمار دماغي الرابض فوقه غير مهدد بهجمة إرهابية. أنفاسي أنفاسها. عضلة قلبي تضخ الدم في أوعيتها. أقول «أنتِ لي»، دونمايأسرنيسلطانالتحكم في جسد لا يهمني من حضوره سوى تعدين المتعة المتاحة. ثقلي فوق لحمها الخفيف كالأسود على الأبيض في صورة فوتوغرافية تتبدى معالمها أمام عيني. جيلاتين الفضة. وحين تجاور ذَكَري يدها الصغيرة كسمكة شبار تتراقص على الشاطئ، تغدو ذاكرة متحركة يحدوها تطور التفاصيل.

اليوم حياتي كلها شوق مشروط بالفراق. أموت كي لا يبرحأنفي أريج جلد الصغيرة!

بعد أن كففت عن الحشيش، أصبح تحميض الأفلام التي أصورها ضمن ضروب العلاج. أن أجعل لي آية. في وحدة الموجوداتالتيأرتد إليها مثل حيوان زاحف يتسلق الهرم الكبير،كأننيالربوالنبي معاً. وعلى درب تتدرج إنارته، هكذا، تجلت المحسوسات لوعيي الضامر في غياب مثيرها السحري. قبل بضعة أيام كان كل شيء فاتناً وكثيفاً، والآن لا شيء سوى فزع وغياب. انكسرت عيني. تعلمت أن أهجع إلى مساحة ضيقة غائصة في سوائل التظهير والتثبيت، رفقة مكبر متهالك أطبع عليه نتاج الأفلام التي حمضتها، نور أحمر ضعيف يدثرني.

وتتالت محسوسات أُشرف على نقلها من واقع بالكاد أحتمله إلى الضوء الثابت على ورق سميك. فضة زائلة. بتؤدة جنونية، آبت الشهوة إلى جسدي. كنت أتخبط، مع صف من النساء اللائي عرفتهن في هذه الفترة، أستكشف سبباً آخر للذة. الطاقة فيّ، لكن لا جبر في متعتهن، ولا آخر للشعور بالكسر. مرة بعد مرة أزايلهن إلى نفس الصورة. لعلني أستجمع الخبرة المبتغاة. بعد عمر آخر، لأُرضي الصغيرة. لعل الانهيار ضروري ليفوح أريجها.

ليس سوى حور عين، للشهداء. ولأن هذا ما صار معي، عملياً، بالتزامن مع أحداث أيلول الأمريكية: حين اضطررت للكف عن الحشيش استشهدت (أو انتصرت، ما الفرق؟) لم أتجاوز انهيار الأبراج الثلاثة فحسب، بل سارعت بوقف إطلاق النار في حروبي الجائرة على الإرهاب. سامحت أكثر من مجاهد بحجم حبة سمسم لمّا اكتشفت أنهم – حتى هم – يعملون لصالح المخابرات المركزية. وتحول شكل خريطة مانهاتن المألوف منذ أيلول ٢٠٠١ من شارة عذاب واقتتال إلى لواء انطلاق صادق.

أن أعترف، وقت أكون تعيساً، بحقيقة تعاستي.

مع الوقت، وأنا لأول مرة أحترم فجيعتي في أبي، وأتخذ من الطقوس المحيطة بالحشيش دون الحشيش نفسه سوقاً لتجارتي الجديدة، كأنني أُبعث عبر جهنم الانهيار والتوق الأخرق – مدة وجيزة تستبقها الرحمة – إلى فردوس لا تعتمد لذّاته على غير وعيي. وفرحت أن وعيي بريء براءة صغيرتي التي سألتقيها. كولد يتعلم المشي في غياب أبيه، كنت أعيد اكتشاف طعم السكر ولسعة البرد، طرب الموسيقى والنغم العفوي الذي تعزفه أصوات السيارات في المساء، ملمس الماء على الرأس ودفعة الحماس التي تجلبها القهوة. كل شيء جديد ومخيف، لكنه بديع على نحو دائم يجعله أقرب إلى الجنة بما لا يقاس. وأنا كل بضعة أشهر يهيأ لي الصعود إلى روضة أعلى.

أحسب فردوسي جزيرة أشبه بمانهاتن نيويورك، لكن رياضه درجات مثل طوابق توأم معماري سامق. وأنا ساكنها المنتقل من دور إلى الدور الذي فوقه، من انتصار تدمغه نهاية علاقة إلى انتصار لا يخلف شعوراً بالانخلاع، لأن شيئاً لم يعدني بالتئام في البداية، وإن كنت أخاطبهن دون نية بنفس اللغة. قبل شهور كنت تحت الأرض حيث المعدن المشتعل السائل (دليل استخدام الثيرمايت).

الآن رياضي الفردوسية مصفوفة عمودياً، لا أشعر بمسئولية كبيرة تجاهها. والأجساد الوافدة رغد جزائي. بضع لحظات فقط أحملها في رأسي، نادراً ما يتكرر فيها جسد سواي:

- فتحة الساقين التي تبرز فرج واحدة خرجت منها لتوي ونحن راقدان «خلف خلاف» حين لهاثها طلباً للمزيد: «أنا هأفطس».

- الانحناءة الفجائية لأخرى ضخمة تناولني مؤخرتها ونحن واقفان بثيابنا، ونفاد صبر مجرفتي آيس كريم الفانيليا بالفريز العملاقتين المنفلتتين من جينزها الأزرق نحو عانتي.

- خنوع وجه ثالثة خمرية إذ تجلس فوقي، تستمتع بتسول ذروتها وهي على وشك الحدوث؛ لا تنفق حتى أصفع وجهها فعلاً على سبيل الإيذان باللذة.

- أو شهقة رابعة حين أجعل ركبتها عند ثديها وثقل جلستي الجانبية يثبّت ساقها الأخرى مفرودة…

عرفت أنه، من غير النبات الذي أحبه، ما كان شيء ليبقيني مع الأمريكية التي ارتبطت بها قرابة خمس سنين. لكنها – وحدها – عرفت جسدي عشية الكارثة. ولولا اختلاط صورة فرجها بالفروج التي تومض لحظياً في ذاكرتي على امتداد فترة النقاهة، ما بعد انفصالنا، ربما ما كان الحادي عشر من أيلول ليستدعي جزيرة مانهاتن بمثل هذا الوضوح على هيئة فرج:

فرج كوني عملاق، استوعب طاقة الحشيش وطاقتي دونما يحقق شيئاً سوى إعلامي بضرورة الالتئام. (وطوال هذه السنين، أنا لم أر منهاتن.) أن تأتي صغيرة أحبها ترد لي ضلعي الضائع. أو تَعِد برده. سليماً. فلا تغيب. أو لا يكون غيابها بهذه البساطة.

أكتب لك أنتِ، حتى تعرفي.

ولكي لا يقول قراء السوء إني أحتفل بفتوحاتي. أي فتوحات تترك قائدها مفرّغاً ويتيماً؟ (النصر هزيمة اليائس، لكن ثمة من تستثيرهم ألوانه كأقاصيص أبضاي كاذب. يظنون سجل الألم مباهاة. هم أقرفوني. لا سبيل إلى حمايتك سوى افتراض أنهم ليسوا هناك.) أكتب – أقول – لطفولة عينيك، فرحة عينيك، حب الحياة وحب الحب في انطفاءتهما على نوم محكوم بالعناق. وللعناق ذاته، أكتب. ذلك التشبث الذي يصالحنى على الوحدانية. للهاثك وضحكاتك وانفلات جسمك (بغير غنج)، ثم غنجك الذي يشبه أريجك والبذاءات المهموسة كالبرق بخجل عنيف (لحظة وتسكتين، كأنك لم تنطقي الكلمة). أكتب لشَعر لا يُرى في بقاع غير متوقعة بامتداد جغرافيا يطمئنني ارتيادها من الطراوة إلى التماسك (وبالعكس)، أستشعره كمارد يؤوب للشجر. لانثناءة غير متوقعة وقلق قابل للاحتواء، أو لجنس هو غاية في حد ذاته… أكتب – يعني – للأمل المتحقق حيياً في مغادرة مانهاتن: الكف – من بعد الحشيش – عن السياحة بارتفاع توأم معماري لم تُسكِنني رياض فردوسه المصفوفة عمودياً في ذاكرة مدينة لم أزرها، وإن تزامنت مع خروجي من جهنم الرابضة أسفله، ما بعد انهيار أبراج دماغي.

لا شيء بعد الاستشهاد سوى الفناء. أكتب لك لأنك – هكذا – فنائي.

عشية موت أبي، كأنني كنت أعلم، صاحبت الأمريكية إلى بيتها حيث يمكن أن أطفئ شعلة خافتة جداً قبل أن تأتي المخابرة الهاتفية. كنا انتهينا لتونا من عشاء رسمي. خلعنا الملابس الضاغطة وبسرعة أدركنا ضرورتها كأنما بالسحر – بروتينية أيضاً – قبلتها وولجتها واهتززنا. ما كدنا نعتدل حتى رن هاتفي المحمول وسمعت صوت أمي، كما توقعته تماماً، أن تعال. بلا تفسير.

وما كان ثمة مجال لمجادلة جارنا الذي لحقني في غرفة أبوي، حيث وجدته في الجلباب الدرداري على ظهره إثر دخولي المتأني. أغلقت الباب، ممتناً لسكون البيت الذي فرضته أمي على الحضور: لا نحيب ولا صراخ. ما كان ثمة مجال لطرد الجار . إخباره أن لا شأن له. مناولته لكمة تعبر عن شعوري. في هذه اللحظة دون غيرها، أي خروج عن المألوف من جانب ولد المتوفي يصير ردة فعل عاطفية تستدعي تدخلاً من شأنه أن يزيدني غيظاً. لا أظنني تدبرت الأمر كما أحكيه اليوم، لكنني حدست بشروط اللحظة. وفي امتناني، كنت حريصاً على الوقار. أغلب الموجودين يوافقون جارنا الرأي، على كل حال: في الغرفة الآن ملائكة لا يصح إزعاجهم. لا أذكر صوت القرآن ولا وتعبيرات الوجوه. فقط وقفتي الممتعضة بعدما فتحوا الباب علينا، أنا وإياه، أنا وهو، أنهو… ولم أكن قد غنمت بغير دقيقة أو دقيقتين.

ما كان ثمة مجال لإنكار أن ملائكة تجاور الجسد المتيبس دون أن أراها، أو أن وجودي إلى جواره مزعج. فنظرت إلى أبي أتساءل إن كان يجب أن أقبله أو أسلم عليه؟ نظرت ولم أفعل شيئاً. الجسم الملقى على السرير يشبهه في كل شيء، لاحظت. كل تفصيلة في وجهه وأطرافه، نظرة عينيه وتوزيع شعر الذقن على وجهه. سحبة ذراعه ولون أظافره. حتى بثور مرض السكر على ساقيه… غير أنه – وهذا ما أهدرت عليه أهم لحظة في تاريخي الشخصي – ليس هو. ليس في الجسم الملقى على السرير شيء من أبي إطلاقاً. كأنه تابوت من البلاستك اللاصق مفصل على الجسد ومنجز بعناية معجزة. أبي ليس في جوفه رغم كل شيء. ولعلني أردت أن أصرخ فعلاً: «ماذا فعلوا بك يا بابا؟ أين خبأوك؟ الملائكة أولاد الكلب أخذوك قبل أن أقول إلى اللقاء؟» فقط صاحبت الجار إلى الخارج كما أراد. وحين ارتد الباب من خلفي، كنت على يقين بأن الغرفة بكل ما فيها ومن فيها، ليس فيها أبي.

كان عندي قطعة زيرو/زيرو شقراء من أجود أنواع «الملكي» المغربي. لابد أنني أومأت لأكثر من وجه متطفل. قبلت أمي ببرود ونفذت إلى غرفتي. وكنت سعيداً بأن عندي الليلة حجة جيدة توفر علي البيات عند فتاتي. على الفور وجدت علبة جميلة من خشب الصندل العطر منشأها فاس. فتحتها وأخرجت ورقة بفرة أفرغت فيها ثلث سيگارة. قربت شعلة الولاعة من الحشيش ورحت أفركه بين إصبعي. وارتحت لما رأيت فتاته مثل «بروة» الكاوتشوك تسقط على التبغ بغزارة، تسقط وتسقط فوق دخان السيگارة في قلب ورقة البفرة. تركتها لحد ما غطته.

يوسف رخا، أبريل 2009 ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Insha’allah, Youssef Rakha

Where there’s a will…

When I still lived in Cairo, I went to apply for a visa to visit Uzbekistan, and ended up talking to the resident consul about religious culture in Egypt. Something was perplexing the Uzbek diplomat. “The other day,” he told me, “I phoned an official called Mohammad. And I said, ‘Is this Mr Mohammad?’ But the voice at the other end, instead of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘How can I help you’, replied, ‘Insha’allah’!”

God willing, I thought, giggling, my name is Youssef Rakha. “It is very strange. There are no insha’allahs about it. How could God will or not will that? It has already been willed. No one would dream of saying that in Uzbekistan.”

I was not about to disagree with the consul – and not only because I needed the visa. He had cited a particularly amusing variation on a common complaint of non-Egyptians. He was bemoaning the Insha’allah Syndrome. Even to a deeply religious mind, his incredulity would be easy to understand.

A conditional clause derived from a verse of the Quran to the effect that nothing happens until God wills it, insha’allah is traditionally an expression of hope or prayer: “Insha’allah, this year I will pass my exam.”

In a similar, practically secular framework, it has been used to reassure (“Insha’allah, your papers will go through”), to express determination (“Insha’allah, I will teach her a lesson”), resignation (“Insha’allah, by then, the political situation may have improved”) or simply for emphasis: “Tomorrow at eight, insha’allah.

Less seriously, the phrase is an exclamation of surprise (“Who might this be, insha’allah?”), disapproval (“So you will go on smoking until tomorrow, then, insha’allah?”), sarcastic negation (“Ah, insha’allah…” – meaning “Never”) or, as in the case of the Uzbek consul’s phone call, utter boredom on the part of Mr Mohammad.

All of which is not to mention the function Westerners pick on the most: the tendency to absolve oneself of responsibility, especially in cases – like being expected to answer a simple factual question – where acknowledging the responsibility is both straightforward and necessary. Like the English “Sorry” and “Thank you”, however, overuse has rendered the expression, used colloquially, less meaningful over time: just a diversion with little relevance beyond indicating that you no longer want to talk.

Not until the 1990s did anyone think about it, really. And they did so not in the context of American-inspired administrative reform or theological argument, but simply to register the rising influence of Salafi Islam, the most pronounced evidence of which was the gradual tendency to replace “Good morning” and “Good evening” – even, in some cases, the “Allo” with which people routinely answer the phone – with “Assalamu ‘alaykum”, now deemed the official, divinely stamped Muslim greeting. Likewise the Salafi inspired insha’allah: Salafis regard the expression as a necessary adjunct to every statement in the future tense, reflecting a literalist interpretation of the aforementioned Quranic verse: “Say not I will until [you say] God wills it.” When pressed, orthodox theologians will in fact point out that (a) the verse refers to what you should believe, not what you should say, and (b) even if you were to think it necessary – for reasons of barakah, or blessing – to say insha’allah, it is generally a better idea to say it in your heart rather than verbally flaunt it, since what is in the heart counts for more than what is on the tongue.

So much for religion.

From the secular point of view, Westerners who are eager to understand it should think about insha’allah not simply, in reductive and orientalist terms, as a way for those lazy and fanatical Ay-rabs to avoid the dictates of work and logic, but rather, more deeply, as a cultural trope. The tendency to absolve oneself of responsibility is certainly annoying, and in many cases the decision to say insha’allah is informed by nothing more high-minded than the drive to get rid of someone. But in the end such attitudes are but the side effects of a mentality that could conceivably act as a corrective to the obsessively materialist standpoint of Western culture. To a far greater extent than its Western counterpart, the Muslim world view recognises the limits of human endeavour and is less uptight about time. Things happen because you make them, when you make them, but there are factors beyond the individual’s control, and to assume that reason and exertion are all there is to accomplishment or efficiency is not only to overlook dimensions of life but to give in to vanity, too.

The Western critique of insha’allah has a point, but so does Muslim fatalism. Big questions like death, what happens after death and how life might be lived in preparation for death are, after all, unlikely to acquire scientific answers. No medicine or technology can prevent an unexpected heart attack from instantly taking a young person’s life, which does not mean that open-heart surgery should be made illegal. Yet the cliché that every scientific good brings about a proportional evil – once again, to be swallowed with a generous pinch of salt – seems true if not at the material level then at the level of spiritual fulfilment. Cryogenics, for example, seems like a terribly barren alternative to the ecstasy of a Sufi invocation ceremony – which shares the same ultimate objective of eternal life.

Among Egyptians in particular, the belief in fate, which long predates Islam, is so strong and so pervasive that no one ever dares to question it. When you say insha’allah, in this context, you are – at some deep, ancestral level – acknowledging the limits of your power and professing the patience to wait. It seems more modest, more sensible and generally better for mental health to understand that there is only so much you can do in a given situation, relegating the rest to a greater power. Of course the incumbent risks are considerable, and the theory should be applied with caution. Bad science, inertia and inefficiency can readily result from the belief that all is in the hands of a greater power. But even within the framework of the Muslim faith, theology makes a distinction between positive tawakkul (relying on God) and negative tawaakul (absolving yourself of responsibility on the pretext of such reliance). Nothing happens until God wills it, sure, but the individual will is equally essential; and giving your name on the phone is something you can quite safely keep God out of without incurring His wrath.

originally published in The National

يوم جليل في تاريخ الإنسانية

اليوم هو العيد القومي لدولة الفلبين الشقيقة، وقد حدث فيه (بترتيب السنوات):

»         سنة 1741 تنصيب ماريا تريزا إمبراطورة على المجر

»         سنة 1917 تنازل ملك اليونان قسطنطين عن العرش لابنه ألكسندر

»         سنة 1928 مولد الرئيس الأمريكي الأسبق جورج بوش

»         سنة 1974 زيارة الرئيس الأمريكي نيكسون للقاهرة

»         سنة 1976 مولد العبقري المصري يوسف رخا، وهو يتميز – كما نرى في الصورة أعلاه – بعينيه الحالمتين

»         سنة1980 الفيزيائي الفرنسي هنري بيكيريل يكتشف الإشعاعات الذرية لليورانيوم

»         سنة 1988 إعلان وثيقة حقوق الإنسان في ليبيا “الوثيقة الخضراء الكبرى لحقوق الإنسان في عصر الجاهلية”

Retroactive History: 622-2001

The Ally at the Gate: Muslims, Christians and Jews

An 11th-century Mozarab (i.e. Arabic-speaking Spaniard) Antiphonary folio from Léon Cathedral

Reading recent books on the history of the encounter between Islam and the West, both Christian and post-Christian, Youssef Rakha posits a single civilisation adjusting its constituent elements through the centuries
“My fellow Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arabs’ theologians and philosophers, not to refute them, but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets, or apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For everyone who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in their language than the Arabs themselves.”
Thus Paul Alvarus of Córdoba, writing in Latin in the mid-ninth century: a Jewish convert, Alvarus was nonetheless a zealot whose approach to creed and identity is evocative of Bin Laden. After the monk Eulogius, Alvarus was the principal chronicler of the Martyrs Movement which, from 851 to 859, involved both clergy and laypeople individually declaring Islam evil and Muhammad a false prophet, thereby incurring capital punishment on themselves. Had such statements not legally required death unless recanted – and the Martyrs delighted in refusing to recant them – the Ummayyids under Abdur Rahman II and Muhammad I, it is often said, would have happily spared the utterers. It is something of a post-9/11 cliché to point to Muslim Iberia as a hodgepodge of identities where Christians and Jews enjoyed almost as much freedom as Muslims: a model for the kind of medieval multiculturalism Stephen O’Shea, author of Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World (St Martin’s Press, 2006), calls convivencia. What is interesting in this quote – one of the most popular on the period – is the light it sheds on the Spanish Arabs’ comparative modernity.
In bewailing the decline of grassroots Visigothic tradition, among other proto-European manifestations of Christian identity, Alvarus ironically says more about the rival culture: among other things, that it is more advanced, more interesting, more appealing to the young regardless of ethnicity. That this culture happens to be Muslim and therefore by definition unholy merely facilitates his tirade. Dogma is apparently a prerequisite for the existence of any institution of thought; limiting or negative as it can be, dogma nonetheless remains simple. Where it fits and how it is brought to bear on social and political change, however, is complicated. As dialogue- rather than clash-of-civilisations historians never tire of pointing out, since the emergence of Islam at the threshold of Europe in the mid-seventh century, there have been just as many wars (and alliances) between Muslims and non-Muslims as there have been between Muslims and Muslims, or non-Muslims and non-Muslims. Conflict was seldom over creed or culture, though creed and culture were often used as pretexts for starting a conflict.
Much like “fundamentalist” Muslims today – to a far greater extent than defending the faith or even, necessarily, revolting against injustice – Alvarus was horrified of difference and change. It was the Arabs’ more sophisticated and decadent ways, not what they believed, that threatened him: magnificent architecture, effective medicine, and advanced philosophy-cum-science, not to mention powerful armies. He decried not the Quran’s denial of the divinity of Christ, for example, but the influence of the Baghdadi musician and dandy Ziryab, who not long after arriving in Al Andalus (much like Western pop icons today) was already dictating taste across cultures, not only in music and dress but, even more frighteningly, in language and literature as well. Once again, this is not so different from the way present-day extremists on the Muslim side of the supposed divide regard Western tastes in art and attire, not to mention the fear, far more widespread in the Muslim world, of Western morality and science. Eulogius was one of the last Martyrs and Alvarus duly wrote him a hagiography, but he did not die for Jesus, justice, or even the glory of Rome – Alvarus died for insularity.
In a seemingly unprecedented departure from so called Orientalist norms, non-academic history books written in English have for a decade now sought not simply to “understand”, reconcile with or tolerate Islam. Instead, they are finally claiming it as part of their own heritage; one shudders to think what it actually took for Westerners to pay enough attention to Islam to rethink it: 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo… how many more Palestinians dead? Yet worked through backwards, Islam re-emerges not as a threat to Western civilisation but as a worthy contestant (rival or ally), necessary for the ongoing process of generating it. These historians’ interest in Islam is in many ways diametrically opposed to the interest that “enlightened” Muslims have taken in Europe since the 19th century. Rationalists like Sheikh Mohammad Abduh or Ali Pasha Mubarak were driven by a linear view of progress and impressed by the technological and humane achievements of the West; they saw the Enlightenment as a universal legacy to be adopted and emulated. This involved the humbling admission that the West was now clearly at the forefront of modernity (to some minds, a concession to imperialism), but it also involved the assumption that Muslims and Westerners were made of the same substance, separated not so much by some essential or irrevocable breach as by variable political, economic and social circumstances, capable of being in harmony.
The Arab-Muslim contribution to the earliest pangs of Enlightenment, notably through the transmission back into Europe of ancient Greek learning from Baghdad via Al Andalus, is widely acknowledged anyway. By reassessing the past directly and specifically in light of a seemingly more troubled present, this new genre of retroactive history has only served to emphasise it. Books like The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilisation by Jonathan Lyons (Bloomsbury, 2008), Aladdin’s Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World by John Freely (Knopf, 2009), or The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In by Hugh Kennedy (Da Capo Press, 2007) all detail aspects of how Arabs, Arabised Persians, Berbers and later Turks frequently had the scientific or humane edge over eastern and/or Catholic Christendom. But only David Levering Lewis, author of God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (W W Norton & Co, 2008), clearly argues that, if not for the existence of Muslim Spain, the many disparate proto-European cultural elements then in existence would never have merged into the West as a cultural entity or a seemingly whole civilisation – an astounding admission.
Sea of Faith beautifully portrays many of the major the interactions that took place between Islam and the West in the last 1,500 years starting with the Companion Khalid Ibnul Walid’s triumph over the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in 636. But its author, in common with almost all the others, falls short of Levering’s lucidity – or the promise God’s Crucible seems to hold. O’Shea clearly has no wish to emphasise conflict or difference, in the end, but Sea of Faith presents the Mediterranean not as the alchemical crucible in which the substance of the modern world was brewing over the centuries, consuming offerings from Muslims, Christians, and Jews, but as a sort of arena pitting two sets of players against each other – which periodically metamorphoses from stadium to battlefront and back again. As Zachary Karabell writes in People of the Book: The Forgotten History of Islam and the West (John Murray, 2007), war in the middle Ages was a far more physical, acceptable, everyday presence – and holy war aka Jihad was regarded as the best kind. That is why almost every armed conflict was touted as holy war, even when it pitted Sunnis against Sunnis or Catholics against Catholics.
But O’Shea does not sufficiently separate these two facts from what he terms “confessional competition” – the them-against-us assumption of some essential difference, however understated, subtly conveyed or cloaked in erudition and high morals – a quality that tends to confine his perspective to the religious dimension of the interchange and thereby limit it largely to conflict: Ideas, practises, even people like Leo Africanus (also known as Hassan Al Wazzan) could move fluidly between faiths; but however much they agreed or indeed coalesced culturally or politically, neither Muslims nor Christians could accept one faith without giving up the other. O’Shea’s outline of the conflict is extremely useful in itself, but it does not significantly undermine the perennial notion (espoused in very different contexts and in very different ways by Sayyid Qutb, Samuel Huntington and, well, Paul Alvarus) that there exists, eternally or fundamentally separated on the opposite shores of some Mediterranean of the mind, a Them and an Us; and that the one must seek to eliminate the other if it is to thrive or prosper.
Likewise Andrew Wheatcroft: his two books – Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Random House, 2004) and The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe (Basic Books, 2009) – are constructed around the respective themes of enmity and fear. Each demonstrates everything the author would need to establish that all three religions belong to the same universe of thought, however dogmatic or racial a form they take, and that their adherents – whether debating the finer points of their respective theologies, engaging each other in profitable commerce, or roaring a blood-spattered “Infidel” – have on the whole had more in common than not. Yet in both cases – once again, with the best of intentions, no doubt – Wheatcroft sustains the age-old mental construction that places Muslims and Christians on the opposite sides of some impenetrable rampart. Sad but perhaps inevitable that, in such potentially explosive times, the emphasis should be on the mental space where a large-scale, media-oriented, appropriately globalised explosion can still occur, not on the possibility of transcending the baser human drive to be at the other’s throat.
Of all Alvarus’s possible heirs, Karabell is perhaps the most renegade – in the sense that he is the least like that fundamentalist Christian ancestor of the retrograde historians’ – though Karabell too fails to conceive of Islam and the West as a single civilisation adjusting its constituent elements through the centuries. But somehow, in his unique formulation of a Muslim-Western comity, this shortcoming does not seem to matter. Karabell is also the author of Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation (Vintage, 2008) as well as the compelling book Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (Knopf, 2003); but it is in People of the Book that he combines universal compassion with the down-to-earth urgency required by the times: “In a world where technology will make it easier for the angry few to do great harm, the perpetuation of a model of conflict is dangerous. Remembering that each of the three traditions carries the seeds of peace will not by itself heal the world… But if these stories” of conflict and alliance, especially of alliance “are integrated into our sense of the past and the present, it will be more difficult to treat religion as destiny.”

Sidon

Gezirah

Sweet Home Cairo

Five Fish

Empty Feeling: The Vagaries of the Sixties

In the 1960s and 1970s, the writing of of Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed el Bisatie asserted the importance of the country’s working classes. Corbis

The Egyptian writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s cast a long shadow over decades of Arabic fiction. Youssef Rakha considers the vexed legacy of a generation.

Hunger: A Modern Arabic Novel
Mohamed el Bisatie, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
American University in Cairo Press
Dh90

In July 2007, I met the novelist Gamal al Ghitani in Cairo to discuss the Egyptian State Merit Award, which he had just received (too late, he felt). We agreed that the group of writers known in Egypt as the Generation of the Sixties – a politically engaged, predominantly working-class group of poetically-inclined writers who made their names in the late 1960s and early 1970s – remain the principle reference point for much contemporary Arabic literature. Al Ghitani said that the Sixties’ achievement comprises only two kinds of writing. “One draws on the news and other immediate manifestations of history to take realism to its logical conclusion; it is represented by Sonallah Ibrahim. The other, which is inspired by old books and uses the old storytelling to comment on the present, is my own.”

It seemed unnecessary to disagree at the time, but I thought to myself that there was a third Sixties contingent, one typified by Ibrahim Aslan and Mohamed el Bisatie. Their work is even more typical of “the movement” than either Ibrahim’s brand of hyper-realism or al Ghitani’s heritage-orientated approach. It embodies all the qualities that come to mind when you think of the Generation of the Sixties: it focuses on collective rather than individual experience. It works through evocation and insinuation, is often almost too subtle to understand, and prioritises style over storytelling. It asserts the importance of the lower-middle and working classes, which were more visible under the Nasser regime than they had ever been before.

What sets Aslan and el Bisatie – the former a postman-turned-editor, the latter (like Naguib Mahfouz) a lifelong civil servant – apart from their generational cohort is their almost exclusive emphasis on the experience of marginalised groups, rather than all of society or the ebb and flow of history. Their short stories – always short, sometimes rambling – are Faulkneresque in their focus on small communities and their vernaculars. Aslan has the Nile-side Cairo slum of Kitkat, el Bisatie an unnamed small town overlooking Lake Manzalah in the north-eastern Nile Delta. Like Ibrahim, both authors engage broad themes like sex, religion and politics, but only indirectly, only to the extent that they play out in the lives of the disinherited, and generally in a more personal register. Like al Ghitani, they situate their narratives in an explicitly historical context, but only on behalf of the small, poor communities in question.

In addition to his numerous short stories, Aslan has only produced two novels – Malik al Hazin (Heron, 1983) and Asafir al Nil (Nile Sparrows, 2000). Recently, in an unprecedented move for a Sixties Generation writer, he has branched out into literary non-fiction. El Bisatie, on the other hand, has spent the last three decades steadily producing short novels of starkly uneven quality. To a greater extent than Aslan, he has failed to remedy the shortcoming inherent in much of the new writing celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s: a lack of strong characters or gripping storylines. The power of language to convey an intimately observed environment – particularly one where common people live – was thought to be enough for literature. But it rarely is; now that the Sixties’ political points are no longer fresh, their style frequently seems stale as well.

“Hunger” is the idiomatic translation of both Al Ju’ and Ju’: the definite and indefinite forms of the word, respectively. El Bisatie’s choice of the latter as the title of his latest book (since published as Hunger by the American University in Cairo press) reflects a particular humility of the Sixties: the belief that, when the title of a book is a one-word abstraction, the definite article is too presumptuous to include. To call the book Al Ju’ (so goes this absurd argument, advanced by a whole range of Sixties critics) would imply that the author is laying exclusive claim to the concept of hunger (this is the rough opposite of how it works in English).

Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger – another recent book about poverty in the third world, one that recognises the age-old literary virtues of character and storyline – I was reminded of many such Sixties hang-ups (all of which Adiga transcends). They include a paradoxical combination of commitment to “the people” and a lack of concern for accessibility, a tendency to prioritise flashy language over storytelling, and commitment to the unwritten commandment “Thou shalt not make context clear or state the facts”. These qualities occasionally combined to produce an exquisite short story or novella (and are much less pronounced in al Ghitani and Ibrahim than in Aslan or el Bisatie), but they restricted the scope of much talent, alienated many readers and effected a huge drop in novel sales, which had reached a peak in the mid-1960s with the works of journalist-novelists like Ihsan abdul Quddous and Fathi Ghanem; contemporary Arabic literature has had serious trouble building a readership ever since.

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El Bisatie devised his technique of a collective narrative voice in two 1978 novellas, Al Maqha az Zujaji (The Glass Cafe) and Al Ayyam as Sa’bah (Hard Days): simple, sad evocations of the lives of geographically isolated town-dwellers. In these books, as in the bulk of el Bisatie’s subsequent work, the narration is either delivered by an amorphous “we” or by a rapidly shifting blend of individual voices – in both cases, it as if el Bisatie’s small town itself is telling its own tale.

It is a technically impressive mode of writing, one el Bisatie employed to brilliant effect as recently as 1994, in Sakhab al Buhairah (Clamour of the Lake), a prose poem-cum-foundation myth of life in the rural space between the lake and the sea in the governorate of Domyat. But none of the collective voice’s potential poetic power (often squandered by sloppiness and repetition) makes up for a lack of absorbing drama or vivid individual characters. This helps explain why Ju’ is such a slow and dreary read.

The book opens with a woman named Sakina sitting by the doorstep of her rough-and-tumble, mostly mud-brick family house, her headscarf in a bundle between her legs. Her perpetually unemployed husband, Zaghloul, uses a piece of straw to clean his teeth – his way of telling her that she had better borrow a reghif or two of bread from the neighbour who baked that morning. Inside the house, their sons (Zaher, 12, and Ragab, 10), barely awake, caress their tummies. Dialogue between husband and wife is intermingled with their respective internal monologues, all rendered in a language somewhere between dialect and standard Arabic. El Bisatie’s usual poetic intensity is replaced by a more true-to-life, mundane idiom that is neither absorbing nor (as the intention sometimes seems to be) comic.

From the start, it is hard not to recall far more powerful depictions of the subjective experience of hunger (in Mohammad Choukri or Knut Hamsen, for example). You race through the next few pages, hoping for some more compelling situation or scene. But having taken in that first image, it turns out you have taken in the whole book: paper-thin characters on the lookout for food, only food, and not thinking much at all.

Ju’ is built around four anecdotes recalled without any indication of when they occur or how (or if) they relate. First, Zaghloul takes to eavesdropping on a group of young men from the town who are studying at university in Cairo. Home for the holiday, they are meeting at the cafe around which Zaghloul hovers (hoping against hope for a free drink, perhaps?). “Oh Sakina,” he later recalls to his wife, “education is so sweet… Sitting on the mastaba by the wall, I hear them talking. And, oh, what talk! I understand bit, I don’t understand a bit… They say that one shouldn’t work everyday like a water buffalo tied to a water wheel, one has to have time to think. But, people, think about what? They did not say. I wanted to ask them but I was silent.”

The encounter, far from influencing Zaghloul one way or the other, acts only to dehumanise him for the reader, to solidify him as a caricature of the sub-proletariat. Likewise, in the second anecdote he blasphemes: “God in His glory created the world and the people and everything, and ordered them to worship Him. I say to myself, if He created all this, what does He need their worshipping for … If He in His glory wants them to worship him, why doesn’t He appear in whatever form He likes and say ‘I created you, worship Me!’ Then nobody will say no.” This is a silly caricature of shallow atheism – neither interesting in its own right nor useful in developing Zaghloul’s character, which remains opaque and stereotyped: the poor man with poor thoughts who invariably ends up being beaten by the imam.

The third anecdote involves Hagg Abdur Rahim – a man who “returned home from foreign countries” to the village with as much new money as new weight, which renders him immobile. Zaghloul works for Hagg Abdur for two months, bringing his family a rare stretch of financial stability. In the fourth – and perhaps the most interesting – anecdote, Sakina is similarly subcontracted as a servant by the two female teenage servants of Hagg Hashem, another affluent member of the community. When she moves into Hashem’s house, she brings along her husband and children, who feast on the household’s supplies. But once again, the protagonists reveal no individuality, enacting their destiny (acquiring what food they can) like shadow puppets, two-dimensional and skin deep.

Ju’ ends with Zaher being beaten up by the father of his relatively affluent friend Abdalla, who has been providing him with much-needed snacks. “His father,” who does not want him to mix with such rabble, “was a teacher at the primary school and he had not one but four galabeyas, he wore an undershirt and had three meals a day.” Zaghloul accepts a few meters of fabric as compensation, but when Abdalla’s father hands Zaher a galabeya to replace the one that was torn during the beating, Zaher throws the garment on the ground and walks away. In The White Tiger, Adiga has his poor man protagonist, Balram, rebel – and transform himself with a brutal murder. In Ju’, el Bisatie has Zaher make a feeble, hackneyed gesture, without the slightest indication of whether or how the rebellion will improve (or worsen) his lot. Perhaps a gesture of this type is in character for Zaher; we never know him well enough to say.

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Perhaps what al Ghitani was getting at (consciously or unconsciously) in our conversation was not that the Sixties produced only two kinds of writing but rather that only two kinds of writing have survived since. Aslan and el Bisatie’s mode, arguably the most characteristic of the Generation, is fast dying out, just like the predominantly deferential, ineffectual characters it depicts. Today, the Zaghlouls of Egyptian fiction are more like Adiga’s Balram: upwardly mobile heroes who at least try to change their lives. The heirs of the Generation of the Sixties (prose poets-turned-novelists some three decades younger, often referred to quite aptly as the Generation of the Nineties) have turned the principles of their forebears upside down. Writers like Mustafa Zikri and Ibrahim Farghali – however else you evaluate their achievement – have traded the collective for the individual, the musical swirl of the “we” for the developed narratives of the “I”. As a vehicle for conveying modern reality, el Bisatie’s collective voice sounds less and less convincing – like the echo of an echo, no longer beautiful twice removed. It is doubtful that the poetic style he perfected in Shakhab al Buhairah will live on much longer.

Early on, partly in response to the Sixties Generation’s obsession with “the people”, the Nineties writers avoided social and political engagement altogether, and edged away from the vernacular towards a dynamic, thoroughly contemporary standard Arabic designed for finding the magic in the quotidien. As a result, they are realists only insofar as they use everyday contemporary life as their starting point. They write about foreigners and rich people with fully developed and convincing personalities – and about ghosts, psychotic breaks, unrealistic and fantastical turns of events. Their styles borrow from across high and low culture. Most importantly, they show at least as much interest in plot and character development as style. They tell stories of love, death, hunger and the full range of specimens who experience them. In doing so, they offer the reader so much more than the Sixties version of reality which, through relentless, obstinate insistence on being true to the grassroots vernacular of its time (and nothing more), already appears unreal.

Azazeel: Disillusionment

The Quixote Code
Remembering Borges, Youssef Rakha courts sedition
He did not want to compose another Quixote – which is easy – but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original… – Jorge Luis Borges, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
As a literary exercise – or novel – to imagine a diary composed 1,500 years ago: what could be more challenging to a contemporary writer? Few would think to accomplish the task as literally as Pierre Menard, the author imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his first short story, who rewrites Cervantes’ Don Quixote, word for word, without ever reading it. An author about to produce a 1,500-year-old fictional diary would certainly affirm the kind of human connection that makes characters in books interesting regardless of when the books were written and when the characters lived, but they might also be curious as to how different the world was so long ago, and the ways in which its difference necessarily affected the people they deal with. In the fifth century, for example, the earth was still flat, there was no such thing as penicillin, demons (whether Christian or pagan) had far more physical presence, and slavery was the norm.
But for Youssef Zeidan, author of the year’s most talked-about Arabic novel, Azazeel (or Beezlebub: winner of the 2009 Arabic Booker, upsetter of the Coptic Orthodox Church and, in Arabic-translation-of-Syriac-diary format, resuscitator of the fifth-century Levant), none of these things or the myriad others that separate us from medieval times have any part to play in the action or in thought processes of the characters. Zeidan treats the time gap simply as a technical obstacle, which he overcomes through the device of impersonating the present-day translator, into modern Arabic, of a fictional manuscript. This works for a while – even though at many points, Zeidan’s modern world view seems to burst out of the veneer of the manuscript – but eventually you realise that there is little if any engagement with the otherness or mystery of the past. The author makes no attempt to demonstrate the difference in people’s experience of time, in their sense of authority, in their capacity for spiritual transcendence or thier greater tolerance for bloodshed, sectarian bias, or material hardship. It is almost as if Zeidan is writing generic fiction, the early Christian setting no more than one among many possible palettes to paint the same, atemporal picture.
Still, Azazeel makes a compelling read, which is more than can be said for most Arabic novels published today; then again, generic fiction is by definition compelling. What sets Azazeel apart, in addition to the convincing impression Zeidan gives of an edited manuscript in translation, is the historical accuracy of the major events he covers and the accessible way in which he charts, in outline, the Christological debate between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople, the latter condemned at the Council of Ephesus in AD 451. Not far into the book, however, Zeidan’s engagement with the universe he depicts begins to feel skin deep. Hipa, the protagonist, is less and less convincing – especially as regards his interactions with the Beezlebub of the title: an all-too-innocuous devil whose medieval identity, presumably different from that of the better known Satan or his Muslim cousin, Iblis, does not come through.
Hipa is a Coptic monk doctor who, on leaving Alexandria as it were in a huff, decides to take this name out of guilt over failing to stop (or indeed object to) the massacre by his fellow Christians of the Pagan philosopher Hipatia of Alexandria (AD 355-416), whom he admires – an event for which Zeidan blames Cyril I and which Hipa helplessly witnesses before he leaves the Alexandrine Church of Saint Mark monastery, travelling first to Jerusalem, where he meets an even less lifelike apparition of Cyril I’s archenemy, Nestorius and, on the advice of the latter, moves onto the minor monastery in which he composes this diary in his third language – after Coptic and Greek – north west of Aleppo on the way to Antioch. When you wind down and reflect after turning the last page, you feel Hipa might as well have been a present-day Muslim medical student at the Qasr El-Eini university hospital who, repelled by secular corruption and/or fundamentalist excess, decides (against the dictates of Islam) to live the life of a recluse treating men of religion at an out-of-the-way mosque clinic somewhere in northern Syria; so indistinct are the ancient dimensions of Hipa’s constitution, both material and mental – and so disinterested Zeidan in them.
It is in this context that you are tempted to ask why Zeidan, an Islamic studies scholar and a Muslim, apparently a believer, should choose to express his views on religious tolerance in the framework of the pre-Islamic past. The motivation behind Azazeel seems to have little to do with the world in which this precursor of Satan’s existed; and while the book testifies to immersion in texts and ideas of the period, it does not demonstrate a deep interest in the daily life of its people on the part of Zeidan (at least not to this reader). The motif of Christian brutality towards non-Christians – by far the most recurrent – can be read as a general statement on sectarianism (applicable, even, to Muslims); but why side so wholeheartedly with the one man the entire Eastern Orthodox world considers a heretic? Cyril I (a saint to Zeidan’s former friends at the Coptic Church of Mar Murqus, where Hipa supposedly lived so many centuries ago) may well have been capable of violence and dogmatism, but other than his being the underdog in the relentless march of history, there is no reason to believe that Nestorius, whether or not one agrees with his views, did not have it in him to commit the same crimes. The one line of thought that could justify Zeidan’s bias is the fact that the Muslim account of Jesus’ nature is significantly closer to the Nestorian.
Could it be that Zeidan is making a very roundabout statement about Islam’s theological difference with the Coptic Orthodox Church? Surely, then, in the Egyptian context, he is neither siding with the underdog nor – as the Booker jurors claimed he was – promoting tolerance. Perhaps the ultimate book of this learned and readable book is no greater than mud raking, after all.