Bidoun Review of Sons of Gebelawi

Abnaa al Gebelawi (Children of Gebelawi), By Ibrahim Farghali, Cairo: Al Ain, 2009

In Ibrahim Farghali’s Abnaa al Gebelawi, all of the texts of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. This happens without explanation, reason, or ostensible cause: wherever they might be found – not only in libraries and bookshops but also on bookshelves and bedside bedside tables – novels by Mahfouz in their original Arabic are simply nowhere to be found. The authorities’ attempt to remedy the situation in the face of worldwide and (notably, if somewhat incredibly) popular uproar are juxtaposed with sightings of Mahfouz’s characters in a variety of locales, seldom having anything to do with the settings in which they actually appear in Mahfouz’s books.

With six – now seven – books to his name, Farghali (b. 1967) is among the most prolific novelists of his generation. In his devotion to the genre and his formal conservatism, he is perhaps the worthiest heir to Mahfouz (1911-2006), the Nobel prize winner most known for his mid-century tales of Cairo. Unlike Mahfouz, however, Farghali is firmly steeped in a magical realist tradition. Running through much of his prose are echoes of Jose Saramago’s nightmarish humour or shades of Italo Calvino’s fascination with the fantastical nature of fiction. He is taken by twins, telepathy and teleporting, and his firmly middle-class characters – otherwise utterly ordinary – have been known to reappear after they have died.

In Abnaa al Gebelawi – Farghali’s latest and greatest work – we face the prospect of a world without literature. The myriad voices in the book — for the young narrator cum author assumes many guises throughout these pages — express concern as to the fraught future of Arabic literature, about the erosion of the liberal and humane values that Mahfouz and his work represent, and (reflecting perhaps the essential fear of all true writers) about oblivion at large.

The events of the book are staged around a relatively uncomplex love affair involving the narrator and the eccentric daughter of a well-to-do family— occasion for Farghali to probe the psychology of class and sex in contemporary Egyptian society. Further in, however, the story breaks up and morphs into countless alternative and subordinate plot-lines, until it becomes clear (although it is never stated) that the whole of Abnaa al Gebelawi is but the barely coherent waste of a single pluralistic mind – the mind of a young writer concerned with the literary wasteland around him. The allegorical dimension remains predominant, and in this way recalls Awlad Haretnah (Children of Our Alley, 1959), the title of whose earlier English translation Farghali translates back verbatim for his own.

As it happens, Awlad Haretnah was the only book by Mahfouz to suffer censure from the religious establishment. In it the history of a popular residential quarter in Cairo stands in for the sum total of humanity’s spiritual experience. That quarter’s oldest, strongest and most benevolent resident – for many generations hidden away in his mansion – is called Gebelawi. Gebelawi has envoys or representatives, descendants or grandchildren, whose struggles to spread peace and justice make up episodes of the saga. Each is a retelling of the life of one of the prophets of Islam, starting with Adam and ending with the False Messiah. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all feature, but at the end a rumour spreads that Gebelawi himself has died. In Arab literary circles it is frequently claimed that if not for Awlad Haretnah, Mahfouz would not have received the Nobel Prize. But it proved too much for orthodox, let alone radical Muslims, for whom Mahfouz would become the enemy soon enough.

a letter from Mahfouz to Mohammad al Badawi

Radical Islam had claimed many lives since the 1980s when in 1994 Mahfouz barely survived being knifed to death outside his house in Cairo. The irony was that, of all the helpless octogenarians his bearded young assailants could have targeted for apostasy, he was probably the least secular. A typical Cairene of the pre-bin ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Laden era, the man had led an all but exemplary (for which read profoundly unadventurous) life. He did not seek revolution, he did not take great risks. He had no utopian or transcendental illusions. And perhaps it was thanks to this and this alone that he was able to invent and reinvent the novel, the youngest genre in the language, defining it for generations of writers down to Farghali.

Applying every novelistic model at his disposal, Mahfouz produced a phenomenal number of readable books: social chronicles, political critiques, philosophical manuals. None was too difficult or experimental to render it inaccessible to even the most common reader. None sought to undermine whatever pillar of the status quo it came in contact with. Notwithstanding the elaborately veiled, painstakingly respectful Ages-of-Man narrative in Awlad Haretnah – a Muslim treatise on the meaning of life if ever there was one – in Mahfouz’s books, the family, the creed, the government are never attacked for what they are or what they stand for, but only for their most striking deviations, omissions or excesses.

For a magic realist like Farghali, Mahfouz may not be the most obvious point of departure; the Nobel laureate is, after all, best known for devotion to the real even in his least realistic works, and one would have trouble imagining him so much as hinting at the paranormal or the fantastical. Yet in Abnaa al Gebelawi, the grand opera to Farghali’s various arias, Mahfouz is an embodiment of something not so different from the sense of sight. His books stand in for almost everything Farghali values: Literature, Thought, Freedom, Knowledge, even Love. The premise could not have been more powerful.

Sharh Diwan Zikri

شرح ديوان ذكري

Sharh Diwan Zikri

Reading novelist Mustafa Zikri’s new collection of essays, Youssef Rakha follows the example of several canonical works on the great 10th-century poet Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi, all titled Sharh Diwan Al-Mutanabbi or The Elucidation of the Diwan of Mutanabbi

Yawmiyyat (A diary)

At first, this sounds like a misnomer for the numbered pieces making up the latest book by the novelist and screenwriter Mustafa Zikri (b. 1966), Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’: Yawmiyyat (On Tiptoe: A Diary), published by Dar Al-Ain last month. Though initially circulated on Facebook as entries in an ongoing diary of some sort, the pieces comprising Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’ read less like the pages of a journal than the occasional work of a cultural columnist. Zikri’s stated formal ambition was to eschew if not actively attack the predominant, established genres, notably the novel-cum-novella that has been his preferred medium (in recent years, as he points out, the novel has increasingly become the alpha and the omega of literary endeavour in Arabic). He also wanted to relax the iron fist with which he maintains the “literary purity” of his work, guarding the gold of true art from possible intrusions by the lead of politics or society (both the metaphor and the subsequent quotes, unless otherwise stated, come from a recent interview by Mohammad Shoair).

Yet the more you think about Zikri’s work, while you read, the more sense the subtitle yawmiyyat makes. By the time you turn the last page you are convinced. This book offers precisely the kind of material you would expect to find in the diary of a writer like Zikri: fragmentary meditations on literature and film, ambiguous encounters only marginally connected with whatever real-life experiences they recount, philosophical formulations of no clear import. Entries are as carefully constructed, often as open to interpretation, as poems. And – most important of all: what sets Zikri apart from almost every other Arab writer, in fact – the texts are truly self-referential, with the movement of a passage tracing an expression or a word, not what that expression or word refers to. Narrative reduces to a sort of semantic aesthetics, the protagonist to an idea suggested by a particular turn of phrase. Ironically this tendency is clearer than ever now that Zikri is no longer consciously exercising control. Could anyone expect anything more tangible or intimate from the yawmiyyat of Mustafa Zikri?

***

I thought I was the kind of writer who, measured against his writings, lives a life of paucity at the level of the body and the soul. I think of Borges and Pesão and Dostoevsky… (1.)

While Zikri regards any link between literature and reality as a threat to the purity of his art, it is in fact references like this one – and the sweeping statements tending to go with them – that take away from his credibility. There is definitely room in the world of Arabic writing for quasi-postmodern theorising, however self-centred or contemplatively indulgent. But surely in the context of a novella like Hura’ Mataha Qoutiyyah (Drivel about a Gothic Labyrinth, 1997), it actually undermines “purity” far more than the hypothetical inclusion of social-political commentary, properly contextualised, when the narrator consciously compares himself to Borges: a celebrated genius from a decidedly different culture and one, it might be added, whose relevance to what that narrator is doing is at best obscure. The problem is not that Zikri may be a lesser writer than Dostoevsky. It is in the directed-ness, the apparent artificiality of the kind of westward looking elitism he endeavours to cultivate – the classicism of his ambition constantly in contradiction with his essentially deconstructionist approach. His slim volumes are invariably fragmentary; insanely reworked and polished, but inconclusive.

They are also practically solipsistic – in their failure to engage with the world (a failure for which the attempt to substitute the world for Great Literature, i.e., in effect, modernism and art-house cinema, does not make up). Only on reading Zikri’s yawmiyyat, in which he condescends to discuss his likes and dislikes, to engage with the politics of culture or mention a fellow Egyptian writer like the dentist and best-selling author Alaa El-Aswany or his own former mentor Edwar El-Kharrat, do you begin to appreciate what kind of writer Zikri is. Others – most, I would say – openly seek context and connection, communication. He claims to seek the least contact possible, the smallest number of readers, the company of gods – like Kafka, like Kawabata – who according to him never mix with the rabble. The irony is that it is the rabble-like qualities of his standpoint as a Third World writer that form the substance of his work, informing even the way he interprets Great Literature. Hence the deconstructionism, hence the aversion to politics (a quality Zikri shares with his generation of literati, who are still reacting to the excessive politicisation of literature all through the 1960s and 1970s); hence also the preemptive despair of ever having a readership of his own beyond “the professional reader, the writer and the half-writer”. (It strikes me now that in his systematic self-assuredness, Zikri does recall Al-Mutanabbi, not only arguably the greatest Arab poet of all time but also, famously or notoriously, the most conceited.)

***

I have always been… subject to the signal to start working… which requires me to be completely devoted and constantly ready to receive [it] whenever it might come… (17.)

Few writers have dedicated as much attention or energy as Zikri to analysing the discontents of their creative process – the nature and magnitude of the emptiness just beneath the surface of their texts. Here as elsewhere in his writing – notably in his last work of fiction, Al-Rasa’il (The Messages, 2006) – Zikri spends time on what might be termed negative productivity: the writing that has not happened, or is yet to happen, but will perhaps never happen. He narrates and describes the state of being idle and homebound in anticipation of (and in deference to) literature.

As piece 34 in Ala Atraf Al-Asabi’ demonstrates, Zikri’s negative productivity makes perhaps the most convincing case for an existential perspective on the human condition in contemporary Arabic literature. Contrary to his own, noncommittal claims, it resonates far beyond what he recently described to the journalist Ola El-Saket as “those little things which the other writing,” the engaged, energetic writing that aims to change the world, “assumes to be of no consequence, the small details that recur every day and which some of us take for granted”. Zikri’s dilemma has universal relevance: “34. Preparing and arranging, creating an atmosphere, took me a long time, and though I was unemployed on the pretext of waiting for the appropriate moment, that waiting itself was fuelled only by a long time wasted, which I mostly described, with much effort and work, as an inappropriate moment, or at least an inappropriate moment on the way to becoming an appropriate moment.”

This kind of thinking generates much needed humour in an otherwise cerebral and dry book. It also goes to show that Zikri is not as solipsistic as he might seem. At least he is aware of the irony inherent to his own narcissism, and not too scared to apply it to himself. We write about what we know best, and all that Zikri knows is sitting in his home thinking about writing; that, along with whatever else his literary anxiety happens to latch onto, is what he will write about.

***

At the start of the film The Sacrifice by the director Andrie Tarkovsky, Alexander, the hero of the film, asks his son to help him plant a dead tree on the shore of a lake… (27.)

In piece 27 as in numerous other pieces, Zikri – who, working with the filmmaker Osama Fawzi, wrote two of the best Egyptian films of the 1990s – endeavours to rewrite world cinema. Not that the novel/novella format prevented him from indulging his love of film in the past – his 1998 novella is entitled, after Fassbinder’s celebrated film, Fear Eats the Soul – but the greater opportunities presented by an “absolutely flexible medium” like yawmiyyat gives him more scope for focusing on particular scenes or techniques – in Hitchcock, in the work of the French New Wave directors, in Tarantino, Bergman – not so much to discuss this or that aspect of a film or a director as simply to see a given cinematic moment from a new and one might say literary angle.

The influence of film on fiction is a huge topic beyond the scope of this Elucidation, but Zikri’s screenwriter’s insights and his intensely individualist taste act to highlight the way words on a page can recreate and totally alter a scene already lodged in the reader’s memory. These pieces seem to reverse the tendency, suggesting new writing that can influence the way we see film. It is as if Zikri, by reference to another medium, is actively showing his reader that the strength of literature is no longer about telling a story but rather about a particular way of seeing or engaging the senses, different from but just as effective as the more predominant audiovisual medium.

Later on in the book, in the course of his bitterly sarcastic critique of Aswany’s Yaqoubian Building (2002), piece 45, Zikri says almost as much: “Yet it is enough for the physician Alaa El-Aswany that a reader with no connection to the novel genre can easily read The Yaqoubian Building, relying on his experience of newspaper reading and oral tale-telling that everyone possesses by virtue of birth, community and homeland. It may seem to the reader that watching the novel through the medium of cinema does not deprive him of penetrating to whatever is deepest in Yaqoubian. Since the novel has irrevocably divorced the tradition of style, there is then no need for reading.”

***

While the pastime appeared to have to do with free time, it actually had to do with the meaning of life. (39.)

Zikri is ostensibly speaking of “the satellite and the computer and the telephone”, initially “promises of something else, more serious” which he approaches as pastimes “within the frontiers of the house”. But here as elsewhere in this remarkably diverse book, he is also intimating a holistic world view, an idea of human existence as a totality of experience only usually available through philosophy or poetry. It is in this sense perhaps that Zikri might be compared to Borges, despite the incomparably more articulate demeanour and learned background of the latter. Though unlike Zikri Borges has a healthy awareness of context, he remains one of a handful of modern writers the world over who communicate such a sense of the totality of existence with the utmost economy of means. In many of the pieces in this book, Zikri’s tight, profoundly thought out constructions evoke the connection between the short, quasi-narrative text and the prose poem – another thing Borges manages to do, even though the great Argentine, once again unlike Zikri, wrote poems which he presented as such.

The one major difference between Zikri and Borges – between Zikri and most writers of Borges’s – is the latter’s capacity for antagonising his readers, often by overwhelming with unnecessary references. Borges in particular was known to say that, unless one is writing a scholarly monograph or a work of science, a text should always be appealing enough for the reader not to have to exert any effort reading it. More Joycean than Borgesian in this respect, Zikri cares little for the enjoyment of the reader. In fact he sets out to antagonise “the reader with whom I have no connection”, the rabble representative for whom there is no room among the gods, or so he says. And yet in most instances – in spite of himself? – Zikri produces an eminently enjoyable text. Is this yet another intractable contradiction presented by his work?

***

And in this world in which all truths stand against each other on an equal footing, meaning becomes an adventure, an endless game of mix and match. (49.)

Nowhere else is Zikri’s idea of literature more eloquently expressed (literature being an inclusive term that also covers philosophy and film, the two subjects in which he earned degrees, as well as the life of the writer, the writer’s “style” or way of using words, and perhaps also the human condition). It is not as eccentric an idea as he makes it out to be. Romantic and postmodern in equal parts, the notion of writing as a sublime but ultimately meaningless game echoes in the widest variety of contexts, from Wittgenstein to Orientalism. The fact that Zikri refrains from formulating it, never saying more by way of justifying his chosen profession than that it is “a private pleasure”, is hardly surprising.

The disorienting combination of Third World postmodernism and puritanical Great Literature reflects the contradiction between Zikri’s thoroughly fragmentary, deconstructionist method and his all but classical outlook. Far from undermining the credibility of his work, it is perhaps this very contradiction, negative productivity – and the incumbent rejection of any possibility of popular recognition or “success” – that makes Zikri, all things considered, among the most important writers working in Arabic today.

كتاب الطغرى: خريطة القاهرة

Sons of Mahfouz

Youssef Rakha quizzes out novelist Ibrahim Farghali on his greatest masterpiece to date

Finally, a true event in contemporary Arabic literature: Last month at the Diwan Bookshop, in Zamalek, Ibrahim Farghali (b. 1967) signed copies of his latest novel, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi (Sons of Al-Gabalawi), published by Dar Al-Ain this June, while he was on holiday from his job as a magazine editor in Kuwait. It may seem ironic to call this intimate gathering an event, particularly judged against the much greater media attention paid to much lesser books in the last ten years. Yet from a history-of-literature point of view, Abnaa Al-Gabalwi is probably the closest we have come to a fulfilment of the prophecy that a home-grown magic realist movement would emerge in the new millennium.

The many disparate and as yet shy strands of magic realism linking Farghali’s books with such writers as Mustafa Zikri – it was thought – would eventually cohere into a more readership-oriented, ambitious and articulate body of novels.

Such books would combine the realism and social commitment of the Sixties narrative tradition with the individualism and physicality of the Nineties (the latter thus far accommodated mainly by the prose poem). It would give substance to the notion of an “age of the novel”, espoused by critic Gabir Asfour at millennium’s end, and express a range of recent influences from Gabriel-Garcia Marquez and Jorge-Luis Borges to Umberto Eco to Jose Saramago – all of whom demonstrated how elements of the fantastical could be deployed to intensify reality and/or infuse the public realm with private experience.

Abnaa Al-Gabalwi – and, yes, the title is a translation back into Arabic of the title of the first English translation of Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haretna (1959), also known as Sons of Our Alley – seems to be that rare thing: a self-consciously self-conscious full-length Arabic novel, designed as much as anything to define the language’s most talked about genre and, crucially, conceived on as grand a scale as can be expected.

“Of course Saramago, for me, is the literary model,” Farghali says. “To write a long, big, subtly conveyed text through which to say everything. And with the highest degree of artistic excellency possible, to create a large idea that accommodates numerous smaller ideas, juxtaposes styles and discordant voices. My ambition is a text that could be read and enjoyed and reread and still enjoyed by an ordinary reader as well as a member of the literary elite. It’s an ambition like Dostoevsky’s and Saramago’s, and I hope I don’t sound vain when I say this. I think I had been practising since Ibtisamat Al-Qiddissin,” his 2006 novel, translated by Andy Smart and Nadia Fouad-Smart as The Smiles of the Saints, “to produce a text of this level.”

As a literary critic, Farghali has been the quickest to dismiss such middle-brow, best-selling “phenomena” as Alaa El-Aswany’s The Yaqoubian Building; and his principal argument against such books is that they pander to a growing but limited – and limiting – worldwide market, that “they are not novels at all, but illusions”.

Yet Farghali’s own ambition extends to sales figures too: a fact more evident perhaps in this book than in previous ones. “Aside from theorising or stating the obvious, aside from the conditions of narrative and imagination and construction and the depth of the characters, I think a text to which the term ‘novel’ is applicable must also be an ‘art object’, meaning that it must make sublime, competent and beautiful use of the language, it must use the language in its own specific way. To be called a novel, the text must absorb the narrative methods that have been employed throughout history, it must know its place in the history of narrative. It has to be contemporary, experimental and deep, and work towards abiding by the conditions of the modern as a general context that is influenced in turn by economic, social and historical factors. Only then,” Farghali says, “is a narrative text worthy of being called a novel.”

***

Irrespective of his 1989 Nobel prize – an unprecedented achievement in the Arab world, and one that somewhat overshadowed his already established career – the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) remains an inescapable reference point. His incredibly large body of work acted to define the Arabic novel (the youngest in the language, not having emerged until the turn of the 20th century, and Mahfouz’s preferred genre throughout his life); and in so doing the sheer magnitude of his achievement also seemingly killed it – in time for the so called death of the novel worldwide.

Trying out the widest range of models – Balzak, Dickens, Tolstoy, the historical novel format, the French existentialist novel, the grassroots folk epic – Mahfouz seemed to exhaust the possibilities of the genre. If not, he at least showed up its aesthetic and (more relevantly for the Arab scene) political limitations. He was criticised for being “petty bourgeois”, for standing in the way of social and economic transformation, in effect for importing the one genre that sided with things as they were, not as they should be.

Yet even if a contemporary novelist were to make a point of never reading any Mahfouz, that novelist’s work would still be judged both positively and negatively against Mahfouz’s corpus. Ironically, of course, of the many fiction writers who began their careers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Farghali is probably the most like Mahfouz. His comparatively prolific output – six books of fiction in less than a decade, with the first, Bittijah Al-Maaqi (Towards the irises), appearing in 1997 – recalls Mahfouz’s steady, one might even say plodding, approach to writing. It is driven at least as much by patient daily toil as bouts of inspiration and epiphanies.

“I read Mahfouz for the first time when I was 13 years old. I started with The Cairo Trilogy and decided to finish off his complete works – a feat I had actually accomplished by the time I was 17. He is probably the only writer whose every work I read, rereading many of his books over and over, especially The Trilogy and The Harafish,” Mahfouz’s 1977 epic, “and so he occupies a gigantic space in my consciousness. I started writing in his shadow. I wrote excellent ‘Mahfouzian’ short stories which I subsequently tore up in order to rid myself of his direct influence and discover my own specific voice, but I was never free of the marks he made on me. He taught me the importance of structure, and I followed in his footsteps as regards the geometry of the text, before I finally rebelled against him to create my own structure.”

Even though eschewing politics is typical of his entire generation, Farghali’s mode of (not) engaging with society and/or politics, or neutralising the unfolding of history, is less like the so called Nineties Generation’s than Mahfouz’s. While Zikri, for example, remains painstakingly solipsistic, aggressively rejecting any allusion to society as a whole, and religiously ridding his work of any non-literary purpose, Farghali – like Mahfouz – is keen to preserve geographic locations, time frames and character types; he observes society from afar, subtly registering the relevant dynamics, suggesting a world which, though magical, is never unfamiliar.

Farghali concedes that some of Mahfouz’s characters – Amina, the matriarch of The Trilogy, for example – annoyed and repelled him, “but I do not judge Mahfouz’s characters in this text of mine,” which includes very frequent extended quotations from the Nobel laureate, “but rather meet them as they are, and conduct dialogues with them”, literally pulling them out of a particular moment in a given novel. “

“I liked the idea of creating an illusory yet extremely realistic world,” Farghali explains, “like the one he created in The Harafish. None of the things the things this novel talks about – like the strongmen with their clubs, or the tekkes – ever really existed, but he records them as if they were reality. He creates an alternative reality, an artistic and philosophical reality.” This, then, is what Egypt’s latest offspring of Cervantes can take from Mahfouz:

“I learned to conduct my love life from his characters; the heroes of his novels inspired me intellectually and in terms of my actual behaviour; and he inspired me in terms of writing, his complete independence from cliques and political parties and cultural mafias – and ideology,” the greatest anathema of the Nineties. “He taught me that you are not a writer unless you have to be independent even of the cliches of your own generation.” Farghali certainly is. “Mahfouz had charisma, he had presence, he is the only Arab writer who had a novelistic project in any sustained sense. He was well known for his manner of talking, his jokes and disciples, and his films, long before Nobel was ever on the horizon.”

***

Imagine, then, what it would mean for such a novelist – any Arab novelist, really, but especially such a one as Farghali – if the world were to wake up one morning to discover that every last copy of every last book by Mahfouz in the Arabic original has simply, without a trace, vanished off the face of the earth. Mahfouz’s books disappear not only from bookshops and libraries but from private collections, from bookshelves and bedside tables, from every place where they could conceivably be found.

This, basically, is the premise of Abnaa Al-Gabalwi, which nonetheless incorporates numerous other frameworks, notably the appearance of flesh-and-blood reincarnations of some of Mahfouz’s characters both in and outside their original settings, the government’s efforts to do what it can to have the books back – some people apparently know the texts by heart, others attempt to reconstruct them with the help of their knowledge of Mahfouz’s work from translations – and the very complex, gradual intermingling of the fictional world and the world to which it supposedly refers. There are not only characters but narrators, character narrators, doubles, triples, even quadruples. Subplots take on lives of their own, and there are multiple scenarios with a range of possible resolutions.

The fictional acrobatics are of such intensity they frequently if no doubt intentionally disrupt what suspension of disbelief the reader has managed to maintain, but they also undermine the book’s popular appeal and seem to have no purpose beyond themselves.

“The fictional acrobatics are an end in themselves” Farghali insists, “not a means to something else. You could put it down to taste. I like complexity in a novel. More than one time frame, more than one character, more than one voice. My wish is to alter my voice till it becomes a multiplicity of voices in the manner of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pesão, although of course there is a huge difference and I am still a student compared to him. I managed that somewhat in previous works, I created parallel time frames, but in general I totally incline towards this kind of layering. I like The God of Small Things, for example, for that same reason.”

As in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter night’s a traveller (which is made up of novel openings), by the time you have turned the last page, you have read not a novel as such but a range of possible novels. More than any one character or story-line, you retain a sense of what an Arabic novel is, or what Farghali thinks it might be. More importantly, perhaps, you appreciate the disappearance of Mahfouz’s work as a metaphor for the general social-political malaise the book selectively and somewhat fitfully depicts: corruption, purposelessness, physical and mental repression, and the existential loss not only of the private but of the public self all come to mind. Mahfouz’s books stand in for Egypt and all it means.

“I think I am simultaneously preoccupied, as usual, with two projects,” Farghali outlines his usual plan. “I am not sure which of them my demons will take me to. I haven’t been able to gauge the response to Abnaa Al-Gabalwi yet, but I certainly feel that, in writing it, I have realised one of my greatest ambitions.”

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?”

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.

The Good Turk, two years ago

Orhan Pamuk wih Carol Becker

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Portrait of Orhan Pamuk. Pencil on paper by Phong Bui

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On the occasion of the Columbia Alumni Association Forum, September 22, ’07, organized by Columbia University at La Bourse, historic site of the Paris Stock Exchange, Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts, spoke with Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist and Professor of Middle East and Asian Languages and Culture and the Arts at Columbia, about his life and work.

Carol Becker: I’d like to start by talking with you as a literary critic. It seems to me that there is an incredible sense of optimism in the way you write about other writers. In other words, through the works of European novelists, especially Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and Joyce, you have gained your own insights about Europe and inevitably your love and devotion to the novel. In the essay from “In Kars and Frankfurt,” you wrote that “Mallarmé spoke the truth when he said, ‘Everything in the world exists to be put into a book.’ Without a doubt, the sort of book best equipped to absorb everything in the world is the novel.” Similarly, in The Black Book, you have this wonderful phrase, “The world is a book.” And in your marvelous introduction to Tristram Shandy, you talk about the novelist’s ability to bring paradise into the present. Would you talk about the nature of the novel, and why you think it’s capable of such vitality?

Pamuk: As we know, much to our despair, it’s such a common cliché among the journalists; they always call me and say, “I am doing a piece in the arts page for a magazine, and the novel is dead. What do you think?” Most of the time when I was writing the essays that you just mentioned, part of me would get quite angry over these comments. I sometimes, with self-irony, would also say that I am a humble servant of this great art. The novel, beginning in the 18th century, began to take over all the previous literary forms. In fact, we can even say it was the early form of globalization. The world, in so many ways, is so culturally globalized that our ways of seeing it are very similar to the post-Renaissance, let’s say from the invention of perspective in Italian and Dutch painting to the invention of photography and thereafter; we still see the world in a similar manner. We are likewise all globalized in our literary imagination, in the forms that we use, and I would say the literary globalization of the world had been completed years ago, when nobody was talking about globalization. With this, I imply that the art of the novel is well and kicking and that everyone from all over the world has access to and is using it. It is now a common heritage of humanity. It has what I would call an intense elasticity in that it can absorb national problems and represent national dramas, so that you can use and impose your particular understanding of this form into your corner of the world, or discuss your national debate, whatever it is, such that it will hold the nation together, because it is a text that everyone can argue with. Let me give you an example: I wrote Snow, a political novel, thinking everybody would be angry, and, yes, everyone was angry; but everyone was also reading, discussing and talking about it. I think the art of the novel, as a form, is one of the great arts humanity has developed that has continuity, that changes and survives. Over the last twenty years, we have witnessed a return to the 18th century Diderot kind of novel, which is a form that combines essays and novels together. Actually, I consider myself a sort of a representative of that “encyclopedic” novel. In other words, you can put anything into novels; novels are encyclopedias. Mallarmé’s words to that effect say that in the end, everything in the world, for the imaginative novelist or imaginative literary person, is in fact made to end up in a book. That’s how I see the world as well, because I am a novelist, and I care about the informative, encyclopedic quality of the novel.

Becker: You use a Stendhal quote from his The Charterhouse of Parma as the epigram for Snow. “Politics in the literary work are a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, a crude affair though one impossible to ignore. We are about to speak of very ugly matters.” It’s a great place to begin a political novel. Can you talk about why you think politics ruins the novel and why it is so difficult to create a really successful political novel?

Pamuk: There are so many problems with the political novel.

Becker: Of course, and yet you wrote one.

Pamuk: I wrote one, right, but I don’t think it is a great genre that produces masterpieces. It’s rather a limited genre, despite the fact that Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Stendhal and a few others produced the best examples of it. Still, it’s troubled by some inner contradictions. By that I mean when a novelist or an artist has heartfelt political agendas about prior political tension in some corner of the world where there is a highly dramatized and unstable political situation, he or she tends to interiorize these problems and desires to express them on a political level. But once the author commits himself or herself to those problems, he or she is not a good novelist, because they takes sides. They can’t identify with everyone. They often have clear-cut good guys and bad guys, white guys and black guys, and so on. Once someone is morally committed to a political stance, it is almost impossible, or it is very problematic, to produce a satisfying, aesthetically convincing and “beautiful,” so to speak, novel. However, a few have managed to do that. Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, sometimes translated as The Demons, is a great political novel in this sense. On the one hand, Dostoyevsky had in him the quality of believing angrily, with energy, in a social cause, getting angry about everyone; he had a nasty side to his spirit. He also had the unique ability, even in his anger, to identify with the bad guys. So it’s hard to be politically motivated and committed and write a novel that will not be damaged by the natural consequences of moral commitment, that is, inability to understand the “bad guy.” That is the fragile moment of the political novel. Although there have been a few classics, I think it can never be a major genre.

Becker: What I found so insightful was the notion that a writer or a novelist can break through what you define as “the confines of the self” by entering into the otherness of characters. And it would seem at this moment, when otherness is such a difficult issue in the world, that globally there would be a major reason to be a novelist. That was what I meant when I said there’s an incredible sense of optimism in the way you write, and you managed to express it in Snow.

Pamuk: Thank you.

Becker: This is especially true with the character Blue, whom you made so attractive. But what really was interesting to me was not just that you were able to represent a radical Islamist, as you call him, as a sympathetic character but that you were able to enter into the philosophical argument that a person like him would pursue. How did you do that?

Pamuk: Well, at the heart of this great art of the novel that we’re talking about lies the human capacity to identify with what we call “the other.” The “other” is an academic word we use for people who are not like us; to talk about those who are not like us has been the problem of the last twenty years. So much has been written about “others” academically, but not in the form of the novel. I strongly feel that the art of the novel is based on the human capacity, though it’s a limited capacity, to be able to identify with “the other.” Only human beings can do this. It requires imagination, a sort of morality, a self-imposed goal of understanding this person who is different from us, which is a rarity. Once you begin to do that, you also imply or define a frame of understanding of a group, because a group is made of people sometimes like us and sometimes unlike us, and once you begin to identify yourself with those who are not like you, you inevitably begin to enlarge both your frame of mind and the frame of the group, you begin to see things differently. This is what Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, the great masters of this art, have managed to develop; this human capacity, which I strongly believe is inherent in all human beings, such that all nations use it as their basis of communication. Now you’re asking me, “How did you do that?” I don’t know. The personal side of me doesn’t want to explain it at all. Of course I have read a lot to understand the inner workings of the political Islamists, the rebels. But then I should also warn you that I have political Islamites in my part of the world, and they had so many affinities, say thirty years ago, with radical Marxists. Among the old fashioned Marxists and political Islamists there is a continuity and repeated pattern of anti-Westernism, of parochialism and all sorts of conspiracy theories in place of logical thinking, especially nationalism disguised as anti-imperialism. Varieties of these thoughts and sentiments are shared by the Marxists and Islamists in many ways.

Becker: In your new book, Other Colors: Selected Essays and A Story, published last September, there is an essay called “On My Name is Red,” which is a reflection on My Name is Red, one of your most popular novels. You wrote, “As I was finishing the book, it seemed to me that the mystery plot, the detective story, was forced, that my heart wasn’t in it, but it was too late to make changes. I had worried that no one would be interested in my lovely miniaturists, unless I found some device to draw the reader in….” It’s as if you were being apologetic for the structure of the novel. I thought that was a humbling gesture. To shift the subject a bit, I know that your first love was painting, at least from the age of seven to twenty-two, and you also have an essay in this volume describing why you didn’t become an architect. Why did you become a writer as opposed to a painter or an architect?

Pamuk: First of all, the idea of wanting to become a painter, between the ages of seven and twenty-two, was encouraged by my family. I came from a family of civil engineers where my parents would say of my other siblings, “this one will go to the same school as his grandfather, the other the same school as his father and his uncle, but this one”—meaning me—“will be an architect,” which is a bit of an artsy engineer, or at least that’s what they thought at the time. Then I dropped out of school suddenly and began writing novels and stopped painting. Now, when people ask how I managed to establish myself as a Turkish novelist in my thirties, or why I gave up painting and architecture, I look at them like a deer in headlights because I don’t have one single answer for them. In fact, if you read Istanbul, my memoir, it explains everything in detail about that turn in my life.
Secondly, I had learned at an early age that painting requires self-imposed discipline and solitude, which is in many ways quite identical to writing and suits my temperament. But now, as I get older, I return back to my childhood by writing more about the visual arts. Actually, I’m teaching a course with Andreas Huyssen which is a sort of survey of the history of the relationship between words and images in humanities, exploring essential points about the differences and shared problems of painting and literature. I hope that students will come to the realization in the end that when we entertain a thought in our minds it becomes an image, which can then be translated into pictures or written words. That is, our minds work in such a way that what we call thoughts or ideas are made up of a combination of words and pictures. I also feel the need to bring up the history of Islamic art, which is so heavily embedded in the idea that the Koran prohibits the use of images, yet the Ottoman sultans didn’t care about that. They made paintings inside books, finding all kinds of excuses to do so. That in itself is an interesting subject.

Becker: It’s especially interesting because increasingly with young art students who want to manifest ideas and work between forms, it’s a question of the appropriate form or inventing forms, which is a different matter altogether. They seem to be more and more interested in what form will best suit their ideas, concepts, or missions. In the future, with an increased availability of media and technology of all forms early on in the progression of an artist’s education—film, video, animation, computer-generated images and so on—we are going to see more of this overlap of form.

Pamuk: I do have sympathy for that kind of representation, but I still believe young artists should not neglect the classical idea of craftsmanship. The hand should be trained before the mind, especially in painting. In the last hundred years or so, the idea of uniqueness and individuality is becoming more and more emphasized, so much so that we tend to think less of past art. Actually, the old masters were less self-centered than we are now. The idea that is, as in conceptual art, a water bottle sitting on the table can be put in a frame and shown as art.

Becker: Not necessarily even with a frame.

Pamuk: Yes, it’s too seductive and appealing to those who can execute such conceptual ideas which qualify them as artists. But what about the art that requires the hand to deal with color, pigments, and all the complex issues that come with them? We can think of a person who wants to express himself and whether he or she should study painting or literature. He or she can do it all, but there are limits to time and acquiring craftsmanship.

Becker: In Istanbul, which I read with such delight because it reminded me so much of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses: it reveals the process of how someone becomes a writer. For me, the book is about the ways in which an imagination is challenged for an entire childhood, and at the very end declares, “This imagination will be a writer.” It’s an amazing Proustian moment. The book ends with your decision to become a writer. But of course the writer has written everything we have read so far. What did you learn while writing that book?

Pamuk: Well, my anxiety was not in learning something in particular, but in putting together all my memories in the shape of a book. I ended up learning more about the process of going back to my history. To some extent, writing an autobiography is deleting or editing out 95 percent of your life, and it’s such a painful process. I have so many wonderful anecdotes of, let’s say, my primary school, which I share with everyone, but if I write all of them, I’d have to write another ten volumes.

Becker: The Nobel speech “My Father’s Suitcase,” included in the recent book, is a beautiful tribute to your father. His temperament was such that you say, “He was too comfortable in his skin, too assured about the future ever to be gripped by the essential passions of literary creativity.” He would say to you, “Life is not something to be earned, but to be enjoyed.” In some sense, this is your explanation for why he did not pursue the sort of literary career that you have, even though he wrote. You present him as someone who didn’t seem to have the hunger or disquietude necessary to give his life over to writing. Then also you present the wonderful notion that we don’t really want to know the interior lives of our parents, that our own narcissism precludes our desire to understand them as anything other than our parents. Could you talk a bit more about your father?

Pamuk: Well, on the one hand, my father’s father was a very rich man, and that made life easier for him. He came from a secular Westernized family who had enjoyed the first two or three decades of the Modern Turkish Republic. They strongly believed in Turkish Nationalism and Turkish Occidentalism, that is Westernization, which they thought of as a path towards civilization. That said, my father being the son of a very rich family, I strongly felt that he did not want to endure or live through the hardship of a literary life during the late ’40s to mid-’50s, when that life would have been very tough, and it was considered a rich man’s fancy to be a writer. On the other hand he was an intelligent person who enjoyed books and had literary friends. He would also, behind their back but in a charming manner, mock them for only addressing a Turkish readership. Listening to my father—even at an early age—I had the impression that an author should address not the national concerns, but all humanity. When he was bored with us at home, he would often travel to Paris, stay in hotel rooms, and fill pages and pages of notebooks, which he gave me just before he died. I remember him saying to me and my brother, with a laugh, “Well you guys have to work hard. I was privileged but there’s no money left, children. Too bad.” But he did this in such a graceful, kind manner that you liked the man for even saying it. He had an immense and excellent library and cared about Jean-Paul Sartre instead of Pashas and Saints in Turkey. It inspires me to think similarly, that I should take a modern writer as a secular saint, one I’ve decided I want to be like. My father had tremendous confidence in my brother and I, which we took for granted. I would draw a line and he would say, “Oh, this is genius!” Not because he really believed I was a genius, as I sometimes thought. He believed in himself so much that he thought only a genius’s son could do such a thing. But he gave me the self-confidence that I needed.

Becker: You have written about writers who were physically on the so-called “periphery,” like Borges, but who were in fact central in terms of their contribution. I would add Neruda or García Márquez to that group. Can you elaborate on the meaning of such categories?

Pamuk: I lived practically all my life, except the last two or three years, in Istanbul. That is to say, especially in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, we were living in the provinces. The center of the world is somewhere else. Even though we identify with and follow Westernization, we are not a part of it. That gives you a heavy sense of living on the sides, not at the center. V. S. Naipaul, though I may not agree with his politics, is a good observer of this kind of situation—what was academically called the post-colonial situation—although it doesn’t quite apply to Turkey, as Turkey was never a western colony. We Turks have never been victims of “imperialism.” That makes the Turkish situation somewhat unique. But then being on the margins inspires you to go to the center. The cultural consequences of this kind of sentiment are an important part of my work. When a new book of mine is reviewed positively by international press, especially in the first books, I had the impression that, say, my love scenes were considered to be about “Turkish love,” while I thought I was writing about love in general. It seemed that when I wrote about love it was about Turkish love. When Proust wrote about love he wrote about love in general. All my life I fought against the impulse to impose my story, to make others accept my story; not to pigeon-hole me to an ethnic or national identity, but to accept my humanity as a part of a whole humanity, to accept my story as humankind’s story.

Becker: I’d like to ask you about the issue of freedom of expression. There is always the assumption that when artists and writers speak out politically, exposing the lies or the contradictions within their own society, that they are somehow anti-American or anti-Turkish, while in fact if you are truly attempting to call attention to what is happening in your country, if you care enough to really do this, you are being the most patriotic. I remember being on picket lines during the anti-war movement during the ‘60s and people would yell out at me, “Go back to Russia!” I would think, “Go back to Russia? I don’t come from Russia, I come from this country and I’m trying to make a statement about this country.” You talk quite elegantly about notions of the novelist’s desire, ability, compulsion, and obligation to record the secret “shames” of his or her society, even though others want and need to keep them hidden while feeling betrayed when they are made visible. I’ve seen this in the United States, especially with the war in Iraq, and in South Africa. In fact, when J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace came out, even though it was an accurate representation of part of the reality of the new South Africa, it was received by many in the ANC government with negative criticism and accusations, which I know was very painful for him. You must have gone through the same experience.

Pamuk: Well, firstly, political hardships have taught me not to pay attention to rhetorical figures or rhetorical maneuvering of political enemies. If they insult you on something, you shouldn’t go back and say “That’s not the fact.” We should not pay much attention to it. My mind is not concerned with the lies ultra right-wingers tell about me in Turkey. Secondly, in a semi-repressed society like South Africa, once you talk about things the establishment doesn’t want you to talk about, they will use their power to misrepresent you. You cannot fight back. Even if you fight back, it’s hard to convince the majority of the people that the accusations are untrue. You call them the establishment because they have the media, they have the army, and so on. This is not only in Turkey, it’s everywhere. The definition of being critical is to say something to the establishment and to say something against the media. It has its costs. My point is that sometimes the political situation is so repressive that little things you say get grossly enlarged and distorted by the time they come back to you. Either you have to take a step back or wait for them to pass away. I did not really look for the political troubles I was forced into but I felt that they fell into my lap so to speak. I never sought them out. I see myself as a person who is writing in solitude all the time. I know that politics is a matter of community, of friends getting together, talking, drinking, living, thinking together, especially in my part of the world, but at the same time, the art of the novel implies that you become another person, someone who doesn’t join the community so willingly.

Becker: You mention this in The Implied Author. All the work you have done has become so politicized that you’ve been thrust into the political arena, even though you’d rather lock yourself in your room and write. And yet, in your own terms, your involuntary political involvement has helped you to grow up, at the expense of a certain childishness. How difficult was that realization?

Pamuk: These are my words, but I’m not happy growing up.

Becker: This I understand.

Pamuk: I make it clear when I say creative thinking requires a sort of irresponsibility. By that I mean the seriousness and responsibility that society demands, which you impose on yourself and others, will vanish once you find yourself in a political situation. However, creativity also requires the kind of freedom of a child who does not consider the political consequences or any other consequences of his playfulness. In fact, new ideas come to us when we pay attention to this playful aspect, which is in some ways contradictory to politics.

Becker: Do you have a sense of who your readers are in Turkey?

Pamuk: My readers inside of Turkey and outside of Turkey are always the same, that of women and students who like to read novels, and “intellectuals” who want to be updated on the scene, about the recent creative writing. But that may be less true outside of Turkey. Ninety-five percent of men over 35 don’t read novels in my part of the world. It’s true in other places as well. I have seen so many resentful attitudes that say “I could have written novels, too. But there are more serious things to do in life.” Or they say, “Mr. Pamuk, I don’t like your political comments, but I respect you as a serious writer. Can you autograph this book for my wife?” But then students, or people who care about creativity and different ideas, about representing a nation and its problems, all the things that make a good intellectual student enthusiastic—all these people read my novels. Including woman readers à la Madame Bovary. But this is not a Turkish situation. It’s a global situation.

Becker: Would you comment on the geographic distribution of the novel? Are there literary cultures without novels? And if so, why?

Pamuk: Franco Moretti, who was a Columbia professor, now at Stanford unfortunately, wrote extensively about the geographic mapping of the novel. He paid so much attention to the geography, in fact, that I think he sometimes lost the point. But as I said before, anyone who reads books in translation in any corner of the world is similar to those who want to write them. We cannot make a generalization about the art of the novel. It is definitely a global art. The unity of humanity and the world is based on the fact that everyone still wants to write novels.

Becker: Could you read something that would represent your voice as a writer? (Hands him a marked passage from his new book, Other Colors).

Pamuk: (To the audience) This is a fragment from my Nobel Prize acceptance speech, entitled “My Father’s Suitcase”: (Pamuk reads.)
As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? Here’s an answer: I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—just as in a dream—I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

BIDOUN REVIEW OF AZAZEEL

Syriac book, late fifth century

Azazeel, Beezlebub, Youssef Zeidan, Cairo: Dar Al Shurouk, April 2009 (seventh edition)

Last month, at a symposium in Kuwait, I bumped into the Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon, head of the jury of the first round of the Abu Dhabi-based International Prize for Arabic Fiction (better known as the Arabic Booker because it is administered by the Booker Foundation). While bitterly complaining of lack of alcohol, which is illegal in Kuwait, Shimon told me the story of his visit to Wadi An Natroun, the site of some of the world’s oldest monasteries in Egypt, and how he argued with the monks there for still holding a grudge against a man who died over 1500 years ago. I asked him who he meant.

Of course I knew that, like the late poet Sargon Boulus, Shimon was born Syriac Christian; what I did not know was that, while the Coptic Christians of Egypt (along with all other Eastern Orthodox denominations) reject the teachings of Nestorius (AD 386-451) – the Archbishop of Constantinople, about whom the contemporary Archbishop of Alexandria, Cyril I wrote the Twelve Anathemas – Assyrians belonging to the Oriental Orthodox rite of Syria, Iraq and Turkey are Nestorian. It did not seem to matter what the ecumenical dispute was about – not that Shimon, a secular who has spent practically all of his adult life outside the Middle East, would have been able to explain it to me had I asked. It just struck me how he was able to give something so weird and arcane the necessary relevance, talking about a recent experience.

Did the Virgin give birth to God, a human being, both, or something in between? All Nestorius had done when he was declared a heretic at the Council of Ephesus in AD 451 – his would-be supporters, notably the Archbishop of Antioch, John I, were tricked into arriving too late – was reject the term Theotokos (Mother of God) in favour of Christotokos (Mother of Christ). The question sounds absurdly disproportionate to the amount of bloodshed it caused, especially considering that the Virgin’s conception was, anyway, immaculate. But in his novel Azazeel, or Beezlebub – just like Shimon in Kuwait – the head of the Alexandria Library Manuscripts Department, an Islamic studies scholar, Youssef Zeidan manages to communicate a sense of how relevant such issues can still be, and how horrific their consequences.

While reading Azazeel, I spoke to a devoutly Coptic work-mate about Nestorius. “But of course he’s a heretic,” my work-mate said, as if he had had coffee with the Archbishop only yesterday. “He denies that Marium is the Mother of God!” In a slightly lower voice, my work-mate continued, “You know it was a follower of Nestorius who taught Muhammad.” Muhammad? “Yes, your Muhammad. And that’s why Muslims share in the heresy that Jesus was not divine,” he hissed; it occurred to me that he must be thinking, “So the greater heresy, the ecumenical disaster that is Islam is all Nestorius’s fault.”

It is in the context of Zeidan being Muslim that Nestorianism should be nuanced. As he presents it, the claim was that, unlike that of God the Father, the divinity of Christ was not an intrinsic, everlasting attribute but something that happened to him after he was born and grew up to be a human being like any other. Zeidan uses Nestorius to suggest, for example, that in Egypt the Mother and Child was but an extension of the ancient tradition of Isis and Horus – a lesser break with paganism than Nestorius’s (or indeed Islam’s). Azazeel is unequivocally on the side of “the heretics” – how much does this reflect a bias for Muslim theology? Much, I think. With ruefully sectarian irony, while thinking it, I have been listening to Sheikh Mustafa Ismail’s beautiful recitation of a verse in the fourth chapter of the Quran, An Nisa (The Women) which, amazingly, says practically as much: “the Messiah, Isa son of Marium is only a messenger of Allah and His Word which He communicated to Marium and a spirit from Him…” So much for Islam.

Azazeel purports to be the Arabic translation, completed in April 2004 (some four years before the book was published) of seven rolls of parchment discovered ten years earlier in the vicinity of Aleppo, near the Turkish border – “on the ancient road linking Aleppo with Antioch,” the fictional Translator tells us. Written originally in late Aramaic (Syriac), the seven rolls making up the book’s seven chapters recount, in the first person, the life of a Coptic-speaking monk doctor from Upper Egypt named, even more confusingly, after the pagan woman philosopher Hipatia of Alexandria (AD 355-416), Hipa.

Hipa adopted this name in honour of the woman whom he met on his arrival in Alexandria, and whose lynching by the Christian mob – initiated by Cyril I – he later witnessed on the streets of “the Greatest City”. As a frustrated student of medicine at the Monastery of the Church of Saint Mark, Hipa is repelled by the dogmatism and violence of Cyril I, but he does not return to his homeland near present-day Akhmim where, as a child, he witnessed the equally barbaric lynching of his father, a pagan fisherman – a crime his mother incited in order to marry a Christian. Instead, Hipa travels, eventually reaching Jerusalem, where he settles down as a monk-physician, meets Nestorius, and on his advice moves not to Antioch, where Nestorius is a bishop at the time, but to the monastery north of Aleppo where – encouraged by Beezlebub, as the devil is called throughout, without explanation – he records his life story in the present text.

Zeidan carries out the task of mimicking manuscript editing brilliantly, and his message – that Beezlebub’s truest evil, far from heresy or even sin, is his capacity for getting people to excommunicate, massacre and otherwise do wicked things to each other in the conviction that they are doing good – comes through beautifully. And though extremely classical in language and style, the novel makes for an engaging and intelligent read. You are inclined to overlook the more obviously modern interpolations: when Octavia, the woman with whom Hipa sins on his arrival in Alexandria, calls Aristotle “backward” for his classification of women and slaves as below men, for example; or when Hipa, whose rationality chimes with Nestorius’s, begins to sound like an agent of the Enlightenment. But it is with the same sectarian irony, perhaps, that the book should be appreciated as a comment on contemporary political Islam and sectarian strife both within the Umma and between Muslims and Christians. In a beautifully roundabout way what Zeidan seems to be telling the West is, “Dogmatism and violence existed, you know, long before Islam came into being.”

Copyright: Bidoun Magazine

مِثلي مِثلك

لا تكاد تنتهي من رواية «الآخرون» (الساقي 2006)،تأليف شابة سعودية من منطقة القطيف الشيعية تنشر باسم صبا الحِرز ، حتى يعتريك نفور شديد من الخليج والخلايجة. نفور يربو على التقزز، ليس من مشاهد الجنس المثلي التي تخرجها الكاتبة بحساسية سينمائية (تحمل معها رقابتها الخاصة الموجهة)، ولكن من ضعف اعتراضها على مجتمع «ذكوري» من التناقض والغباء بحيث يصعب تصور العيش على هامشه، دعك من التماهي مع متنه كما في هذه الحالة، دون رغبة ولو طارئة في الهجرة أو الانتحار.

الرغبة التي لا تعبر عنها مطلقاً، ولا تدعك تشك لحظة في أنها – هي، هذه الشيطانة الصغيرة -الابنة البارة لهؤلاء الناس، وهذه الحياة.

ليست المسألة أخلاقية، أو هي أخلاقية بالمعنى الأعمق. والمقصود أن الكتابة الإيروسية، بما في ذلك ما يعرض للعلاقات المثلية (روايات جان جينيه، مثلاً) لم يسبق أن أصابتك بشعور مماثل؛ إن كانت ذائقتك تقدر المغامرة والتجاوز – في الحقيقة – لعل كتابة من هذا النوع، أكثر من غيرها، تستثير فيك نوازع الفرح والاحتفال.

غير أن الحرز هذه، من منطلق التوثيق لوعي خاص شديد الذاتية، لا يسعها إلا العرض لحالة عامة أشبه بالوباء – أوهكذا تبدو أثناء القراءة – تتقاعص عن الاشتباك ولو جزئياً مع مسبباتها العقائدية والتاريخية. فيتذكر القارئ أن التقليد الأدبي المفترض أنها تعمل في حيزه – وهو تقليد فرنسي إلى حد بعيد – يستلزم قيام مجتمع مفتوح بعض الشيء، متسامح بعض الشيء، عادي بعض الشيء.

بينما الحرز – في تجاوزها الظاهري – إنما تتأقلم مع مجتمع قفز من البداوة مباشرة إلى الاستهلاك، قفز على سجالات الحداثة بكل ما تحمله من تأثيرات وإجراءات من شأنها أن توفر على الناس بشاعة التطرف، وقفز حتى على التعريف الجنسي للذات.

كاتبة الآخرون (أو راويتها، فلا فرق كبيراً في مثل هذا النوع من الكتابة) تقبل شروطاً عبثية للعيش الجماعي تسمح بالحفلات الجنسية بين البنات، مثلاً، فيما تحرم على إحداهن – حد السيف – إجراء مخابرة هاتفية مع شاب، مهما بلغت براءتها؛ وتقصر الاتصال بين الجنسين على الإنترنت إلى أن يأتي الزواج – المبكر عادة – حيث تكتشف العروس أنها، بعد خبرتها باللذة المثلية، ما عادت تطيق أجساد الرجال… تقبلها، دون أن تشك لحظة في تماسك المنظومة الدينية التي يحدث كل هذا باسمها، وحجتها.

لا اعتراض على الجنة والنار، ولا اعتراض على عصمة الأئمة. الآن نصلي، وبعد قليل – قبل أن نمارس الجنس الافتراضي مع صديق عرفناه عن طريق «التشات» – سنمارس جنساً واقعياً مع زميلة صفنا، ثم نتوضأ – نحن وإياها – لأداء صلاة العشاء. إلى آخر هذا الخبل مما يحرق الدم دون أن يقيم حواراً حقيقياً، أو ينبئ بأي تغيير محتمل.

أدب الاعتراف عادة ما يؤجج مشاعر قوية، لكنها عادة ما تكون شخصية، ذاتية، مجالها الإنسان الفرد. إلا أن الحرز – ربما لأنها صادقة ومتمكنة من أدواتها – تحيل ردود الأفعال هذه على أماكن وجماعات.

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Cry my beloved poetry

Spring brought poetry from the inaugural round of the Dubai International Poetry Festival (4-10 March) to this week’s issue of Cairo’s most popular literary publication, Akhbar Al Adab, which dedicated its Bustan (Orchard) department to poetry criticism and poets’ testimonies: Youssef Rakha considers a maligned genre

In a video interview about Lost Highway, the American director David Lynch describes his ideal film as an abstract composition, a sort of audiovisual symphony. Then again, Lynch says that a film seldom works for the viewer without the benefit of a compelling narrative. In his own work he would rather do away with the narrative side of film-making, he says, but he endeavours to have enough story-line to keep people watching.
Lynch suggests there is a chasm between imagery and storytelling – which seems particularly relevant to contemporary Arabic writing in Egypt. Since the establishment critic Gabir Asfour made his millennial declaration that we are living in “the Age of the Novel” (zaman arruwayah), the idea of a contest between poets and novelists in which the latter are beating the former has sparked much ludicrous debate.
No reliable statistics have established that more novels are being sold now than a decade or two ago, or more novels than “diwans” of poems. But this is the prevailing belief; and the response of poets has ranged from publishing novels to holding a personal grudge against Asfour.
***
At the JW Marriott, Kuwait, attendance of the annual Alarabi Magazine Symposium (held on 2-4 March to mark the Kuwaiti institution’s 51st anniversary) was embarrassingly low until the final session – devoted to poetry. Prodded perhaps by embarrassment, perhaps by the presence at the podium of the south Lebanon poet Mohammad Ali Shamseddin – together with the Kuwaiti poets Saadiyah Mifrih and Salah Dabshah – previously m.i.a. invitees now nearly filled the hall.
Ironically it was Asfour of all people who replaced the co-ordinator of the session, the poet and patron of literature Abdulaziz Al-Babbatin, who could not make it to the seminar. Asfour was joined at the podium by another establishment critic, Salah Fadl – speaking in his capacity as head of the jury of the Abu Dhabi-based television programme Amir Ashshu’ara’ (Prince of Poets).
Amir Al-Shu’ara’ is the standard-Arabic edition of the pan-Arab Nabati (or Bedouin Colloquial) verse competition programme Sha’ir Al-Milyon (Millions’ Poet) – phenomenally popular in the Gulf – in which millions are awarded to the best poems written in free verse (ashshi’r alhorr, also known as shi’r attaf’ilah). Free verse breaks up and intermingles different metric schemes from ‘Aroud Al-Khalil (the compendium of metrical rules put together by Ibn Ahmad Al-Farahidi in the eighth century), partly or wholly doing away with rhyme. The taf’ilah – as this form’s rhythmic unit came to be called – may have emerged as early as the 1930s, but it did not achieve recognition until the 1960s.
Though some Sixties Generation poets wrote prose (Mohammad Al-Maghout and Sargon Boulos), the last generation of household-name poets (Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani) wrote free verse. After its heyday towards the end of the 1960s, free verse continued to appear, without making much of an impact, until the emergence in the 1990s of a new kind of prose poem showed up its anachronism more clearly than ever before.
***
Fadl did not cite the pre-eminance of the prose poem as a reason to reject the Age of the Novel, but he did point out that rejecting it is not unjustified. The prose poem remains the one original and definable form to have cohered and stood out since the 1990s, when said Age is supposed to have dawned. The novel, on the other hand, has fluctuated considerably, defined and redefined itself, and dithered at many crossroads without moving very far in any direction.
Whatever you think about this, ferocious exchanges will probably continue to take place. What is missing is a responsible discussion of what each genre actually constitutes.
The case for Arabic poetry in prose is resolved in practise; in recent memory hardly a single self-respecting talent has produced any verse. Yet it remains officially on the table, while “novel” – the youngest genre in the language, barely 100 years old, as opposed to the 1,400-year-old verse tradition – has become the catch-all term for almost any literary writing typeset in paragraphs rather than lines.
Memoir, autobiography, travel writing, sequence of short stories or essays, reportage, erotica, and of course extended poem: all are unthinkingly stamped NOVEL (by writers and publishers alike). In the absence of corrective classification, this makes Asfour’s epochal declaration redundant.
With the gradual emergence of popular non-fiction books like Khalid Al-Khamisi’s Taxi, classification is slowly improving. But the prose poem is still at best ignored. At worst it is subjected to a notoriously retarded attack by the poet Ahmad Abdelmo’ti Higazi, a didactic figure whose authority rests less on either enduring significance or sales figures than short-lived critical acclaim in the 1960s and a career in government institutions since.
***
Had Fadl mentioned the prose poem by name, however, he would have underlined the fact that, in restricting its scope to free verse, Amir Al-Shu’ara’ is in effect ignoring the most interesting poetry being written in Arabic today. Even within the Gulf, where verse traditions are more alive and tastes more conservative than elsewhere, only prose poets (Ibrahim Al-Mulla and Khalid Al-Budour in the UAE, for example) have achieved pan-Arab recognition.
Instead, Fadl stressed the role of TV – and, implicitly, of course, cash – in spreading the word about the Arabs’ trademark legacy at a time of relative decline. He did not touch on the absurdity inherent in quantifying “the success of the poem” compared to another poem. He did not deal with the implications of evaluating poetry through a system of points awarded by s.m.s., among other means. And he did not suggest that there may be better ways to financially serve poetry (which there are: the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which funds both programmes, still does not have a single publishing house to its name). Only Shamseddin, the most cogent speaker by far, made any reference to the difference between poetry and verse.
Perhaps inevitably, in the presence of Asfour, the proceedings centred on poetry during the Age of the Novel – whether or not, and how (if not through television) poetry can “extend” into an Age other than its own. But the to-and-fro between Fadl and Asfour failed to show how, while the prose poem is attacked or ignored, the novel which is not a novel acts to obscure the meaning of narrative. On the one hand there is the perception that novels may be selling because they tell stories; on the other, the fact that, whether or not they are selling, the books called novels are by and large un-story-like.
***
Egypt has an emergent, as yet vaguely articulated magic realist movement. Its authors – Hamdi Abugolail, Ibrahim Farghali, Mustafa Zikri, and, more recently, Tarek Imam, among others – are more or less atypically un-poetic. But aside from the new fictional realms intimated – or, rather, promised – by their work, the novel per se has contributed little to Arabic literature since the 1990s. Its function has been to transport the achievements of the prose poem to a place where they are safe from being attacked for making a clean break with the ‘Aroud. Higazi suffered censure for his pre-modern stand.
But someone has yet to attack the novel for identity theft.
In retrospect, notwithstanding the Age, extensions across or within, many have come to see free verse as an involuntary stopgap. It was the means for a verse-dominated culture to ease itself away from the ancient drum beats of the desert and the twinkle-twinkle cadences of a love song by Om Kulthoum – past the 1960s countless affirmations of and arguments with the aptly named ‘amoud (pillar) of traditional verse – and into an image-driven, down-to-earth music all its own.
Like many facets of Arab modernity, it seems, the free verse revolution was half-hearted and timorous. It could not be effective until the liberation of language and emotion that it implied was carried to its logical conclusion. But when eventually, at last, it came time for people to realise their poetic modernity in full, they ended up going on stage to an all but empty auditorium. Still, they performed anyway.
***
By the 1990s, in occasional publications like Al-Kitabah Al-Ukhrah and Al-Garad, incandescent talents like Iman Mersal and Ahmad Yamani were reinventing language. They de-ideologised discourse, de-nationalised human concerns, and acknowledged their (post) modern identity in genuine rather than authentic registers.
Accepting bare-headed status, they no longer wore the fez of free verse, much less the turban of the ‘Aroud. But it was hard to prove that, in taking these off, they had not slipped on Ataturk’s self-hating hat behind Higazi’s back. What can only be described as ancestor worship came in the way of Nineties Generation poets being immediately recognised or celebrated.
So did the insecurity of taf’ilah gurus suddenly realising that their role had not been quite as “historical” as they had thought, and that their insurgent energy may in fact have been reactionary.
Anyway, by then talented Sixties Generation writers like Ibrahim Aslan and Mohammad Al-Bisati – precisely by debasing narrative – had contributed to the loss of what little readership existed when they emerged on the scene. Themselves arguably frustrated prose poets, they excelled at short stories but caught the germ of obsessive novel disorder.
Now that the readership seems to be regrouping (around them as much as younger so called novelists), the Nineties prose poem – the only true agent of change – is the farthest from being a beneficiary of the good fortune.