… It just must be admitted that, where the predominant (post-Christian) civilization is racist, murderous and hypocritical, so too are the quasi-civilizations that purport to do battle with it, including the post-Ottoman Arab state…
(c) Youssef Rakha
ما أطول “الزراعي”
دون أن نصوم (في العشر الأواخر) تركنا طنطا عبر شارع البورصة
قلنا منطقة تجارية أكيد فاضية—نصف ساعة زحف وسط أكداس المتسوقين
عرق البروليتاريا يمطرنا والسيارة تخرم عجين اللحمة واللحى والقماش
وعيون المتخمين لِتَوّهِم تطالعنا بكراهية الرعاع لنبلاء الباستيل
ظلمات ترشيد الكهرباء ونحن خندق محفور في المدافن نصرةً لإخوتنا في غزة
دعك من أن غزة الآن أبعد من أنتاركتيكا والإخوة نفسهم يسبون الدين
من هنا حتى قويسنا بهائم الأسفلت بالكاد تتفادى الحفاة والحمير وهكذا
؎
على هذه الأرض – جارية الأرض – لا شيء يستحق الحياة
أم العائشين أم الميتين تصدّرين القفا للصفع أملاً في لقمة طرية
وسواء أتغير لفظه أو استمر ضمن الذل المستحب يظل اسمك مسبة
؎
تخوم قليوب تبشر بالوصول لم يعلمنا أحد بأي عَطَلَة في السكة
كان قتلة المتظاهرين – الأهالي – سدوا الطريق مرة أخرى احتجاجاً
وبينما نلتحق بصف الهاربين إلى المدقات الجانبية حيث الفجاج والحجارة
تذكرتُ كيف قلبنا الدنيا بالرقاد على التراب ولأنهم يقتلوننا صدقنا أننا نضحي
لغاية ما تحقق مطلبنا العبيط رجعنا بيوتنا ليحلّوا محلنا هم نفسهم
وهكذا مكّنا العصابة الأولى من تسليم البضاعة للعصابة الثانية حين متنا
بلا كبير جهد تغوطنا اللحظة اعتلينا النخلة وأغوتنا العينان الخلابتان ولكن
؎
كيف لعينيك أن تكونا غابتي نخيل وهما على هذا القدر من البجاحة
وكل عام لا يعشب الثرى ولا نجوع ما مر عام وجعنا بما يكفي لنسعى
نحن الغربان تشبع والجراد يعوي على تطلعات ستبقى أسطورية
؎
كانت المدقات مشرشرة بالحفر والمياه مركبات صناعية معطلة في العتمة
موكب مناوري الهايواي مثل ثعبان خرافي طالع نازل فوق جرف
ورغم وجود متفرجين من أهل المصانع على الجانبين فكرتُ أننا في مجاهل
هذا الذي نخوض فيه ببطء فيل كليم هو ما أزحنا عنه الحجر يوم ثرنا
خندق نبلنا محفوف بالأهالي رعاع حاقدون ومحتجون قتلة ولا باستيل
هل كانت الشعوب تثور دائماً قبل أن تتوفر لها الخدمات الأساسية
بلا طريق لا يعترضه المحرومون من الكهرباء هل نعمل ثورة أم نمثّل فالآن
؎
احترق المسرح من أركانه للمرة الألف لكنكم أنتم يا حبيبي الممثلون
لم تكن فلسطين لكم لأنكم أولاد قحبة من قبل أن تفقدوها
لم تصلحوا لشيء إلا التجول بين صفوف المتفرجين لتنادوا: كاكولا-بيبس
؎
الرحلة تستغرق ساعة خمس ساعات حتى يلوح “المحور” مخضّباً بالمشاة
وكأنه عذاب القبر نعيش من أول وجديد عاماً ونصف أو عامين من إحباطاتنا
فقدنا الأمل ليس في الثورة فقط ولكن في المستقبل أيضاً في النشطاء السياسيين
ولا عزاء للمدفونين حولنا لراشفي الشاي على شط هذه البركة للعميان بفعل فاعل
لا عزاء لنا نحن أيضاً يوم نقتل أو نُحتَجَز ها هنا في المجاري الرطبة نستنبح
حتى الغضب يتفثأ حيث حر الليل وأخبار انهيار محدّق في الركن الخلفي للدماغ
كل التفاصيل التي يناقشها الأصدقاء تغدو ذباباً يئز ويغبّش البربريز فعلاً
؎
الناس في بلادي جارحون ولكن كعقارب غير سامة ليس عندهم غناء
حشرات منزلية في مطابخ الإنسان يعملون أي شيء من أجل قبضتي نقود
وطيبون في التسول أغبياء في إيمانهم بأن القَدَر فقط وساخة القرون
God’s Books: Interview with the Vampire
Mohab Nasr, Ya rabb, a’tina kutuban linaqra’ (Please, God, give us books to read), Cairo: Al Ain, 2012
“Any pretence of having specific reasons to stop writing poetry at one point or to return to it at another will be a fabrication,” says Mohab Nasr (b. 1962). “All I can say for sure is that I was surrounded by friends who used up my energy in conversations, which gave me a sense of reassurance of a certain kind, the extent of whose hazardousness it took a long time to realise.”
Thus the seemingly eternal vicious circle, perhaps even more pronounced outside Cairo, the underground literary centre of operations—in Alexandria, where, after a stint in said centre in the mid-1990s that cost him his government schoolteaching post, Nasr was living again:
To write, you have to have a reader; but, being a serious poet in late 20th-century Egypt, your reader can only be a fellow writer; you might as well just talk with them at the cafe—and, beyond an inevitably skewed sense of personal fulfillment, what on earth in the end could be the point of that?
Prompted by his short-lived marriage to the feminist-Marxist activist, aspiring theorist and Student Movement icon Arwa Saleh (1951-1997), Nasr’s experience of Cairo had been more depressing than instructive. But, like the bite that makes a man immortal, freezes him in the age at which it happened and binds him to a routine of bloodsucking, spending the day in a tomb and surfacing only in the nighttime, the experience marked him; some 14 years later, when unprecedented protests broke out while he lived and worked as a cultural journalist in Kuwait, it would prove obliquely regenerative.
Cairo gave Nasr a direct taste of the wannabe aesthetician’s pretensions and the wannabe autocrat’s mean-spiritedness so rife among Generation of the Seventies activists and writers; it made him aware of the potentially fatal fragility of the Arab Intellectual—a creature as mythical and parasitic as a vampire, and perhaps ultimately as irrelevant to consensual reality, since its emergence in Muhammad Ali Pasha’s times.
It was in 1997 that Nasr’s first book of poems, Ann yassriq ta’irun ‘aynayk (or “For a bird to steal your eyes”), was published in a small edition in Alexandria: the year during which his divorcee, Saleh, finally killed herself.
They had not been in contact for months and he felt no guilt about the incident; he felt he had done all he could to be supportive, and anyway what drove her to suicide as he saw it, the inevitably failed attempt at literally embodying moral-political principles, had nothing to do with him. But the horror of what happened left him unsure not only about moral and political but also emotional and aesthetic issues.
Following the event, he started working on a long and involved text he still refers to as The Fragments, in which—without the arguably necessary theoretical equipment, as he readily admits—he tried to work out the meaning of life in the context of his experience. But, realising the result was too abstract to lead anywhere, he gave up.
The process was to be echoed far more recently—and perhaps also more meaningfully—in the wake of 25 January, 2011, when Nasr began responding to a Facebook comment by an old Muslim Brotherhood-sympathetic coworker who asked, “What if the Brotherhood comes to power?” It was as if the question unplugged a cache of latent energy:
“Instead of writing a few lines to him I found myself reviewing with him the entire history of the concept of the state and the decisive point separating two histories before and after the emergence of modernity and capital. I dealt with the rise of the notion of identity as more of a slogan than a truth; with the way the scaffolding of society had been taken apart; and with the resulting absence of society. It ended up as an incredibly long Facebook ‘note’, and I repeated the experiment with several other topics after that.”
Nasr had himself been a Muslim Brother once, however briefly, as an Arabic student at Alexandria University’s Faculty of Arts (he graduated in 1984); and it was not as if, by the time his Fragments took on such concrete form—for which he thanks the revolution—he had made no discoveries.
“When the writer creates an image to be attached to, they stand directly behind that image and lionise it as a ‘conviction’—a mask: when you remove it the writer goes away with it, vapourises. The real writer places their image at a distance, knowing that any image is a moment out of something fluid, a portion of existence in flux; and when they place it between the covers of a book, they are also placing it between two brackets of doubt…”
***
As is nearly always the case with poetry, it is next to impossible to say anything about the present book, apart from: “If you know Arabic, read it!” Mohab Nasr defines the poem very tentatively as a text that says something it never actually makes explicit, linking it to the cliche of knowing that someone is lonely when you notice how compulsively they chatter. After a hiatus that lasted over a decade, poems came back to Nasr like a reunion with a long lost friend, once he was out of Egypt. There was a sense of vertigo, he says: he was less confident than simply, shyly joyful; and he would send his texts to a select number of fellow writers to make sure they really were poems. The revolution, which would set off a parallel process of nonfiction writing, made his emotions raw and intense. Finally history was opening its door, he says, even if only monsters and dwarfs came through. It is interesting to note that, unlike much Generation of the Nineties poems to which it is linked, the present book makes absolutely no concessions to sensationalism: besides the fact that—prose as they remain—they are written to be read out loud, Nasr’s poems achieve the Nineties objectives of concentrating on immediate (physical) reality, drawing on day-to-day life and avoiding rhetoric precisely by avoiding direct and formulaic approaches to the New Poem. The language and images are extremely familiar, easy and recognisable; but they are just as extremely hard won.
***
“The life of an image in a book is the death of that image in reality. It is being free of the image’s limitations, of the illusion that an image however satisfying actually represents life.”
Thus the seemingly eternal life cycle of genuine or meaningful (literary) discourse, as opposed to the discourse of the Poet (the Arab Intellectual) who, precisely by placing himself above and beyond, manages effortlessly to be nonexistent as well—the echo of an echo of a lie:
To write, you have to have been a reader; you read what books life throws at you, but you also read the books of life itself—the people, the places, the things, the relations—as honestly, as sceptically, as unpretentiously as you can; then, when you tell someone else about what you have read, you contribute to an exchange that will somehow at some time actually shape a collective consciousness, a social state of being, life.
By 1999 Mohab Nasr will have met his present wife, the young short-story writer and fellow Arabic teacher Jehan Abdel-Azeez, with whom he settled down in Kuwait in 2007, three years after they were married. By then there had been a year of employment in Libya, and a difficult year of unemployment.
Kuwait seemed to open up a new space through both the slave-driven routine of having to produce a newspaper page every day and distance from Egyptian intellectual life, where the problem has less to do with a scene that puts pressure on or unsettles you than it does with one in which “the battle is lost from the beginning, even with yourself, because it is completely spurious”; he had felt he could only respond to that scene by letting it choke on its own lies.
“In the same way as writing in itself creates delusions, so too do opinions laid down easily during informal gatherings among writers,” he says in response to my questions, typing into his laptop in a seaside cafe back in Alexandria, a city he now visits only for holidays:
“They create delusions of belonging to a common, mutually comprehensible language… There is an extremely subtle difference between the writer creating images of consciousness as an interactive and critical medium and the writer creating those images with the intention of being attached to them as a person, of using them as a shield against society,” a tool for upward mobility, a sense of individual distinction, a lucrative link with the—political—powers that be, “not a way of relating to human beings at large.”
Prompted by this belief in a common ground, a multiparty dialogue, a welfare that eschews elitism without being populist, with Nasser Farghali, Hemeida Abdalla and the late Abdel-Azim Nagui, Nasr founded a literary group, Al Arbi’a'iyoun (or the Wednesdayers)—three issues of their eponymous journal were published in the early 1990s—and was later among the founders of the much longer-lived and by now well-known non-fiction journal, Amkenah, edited by Alaa Khalid.
In both cases his tendency towards excessive abstraction seems to have got in the way of a greater or longer-lived contribution on his part, but it was the increasingly dog-eat-dog conditions of life that drove people away from each other and dissipated the collective momentum (Amkenah charges ahead thanks to Khalid’s individual dedication).
Nasr’s nonfiction, an open-ended form of critique that can be seen as both amateur sociology-philosophy and political commentary-journalism, reveals a moralist eager to transcend morality, an aesthete well aware of the absurdity of art for art’s sake and an aspiring scholar with neither the patience nor the dispassion for scholarship; it reveals, in short, exactly the kind of man of letters whose scarcity has robbed the scene of vitality for decades, reducing the Role of the Intellectual to yet another empty slogan.
“I always suffered from this idea of abstraction as a writer, and even though I still believe in abstraction I feel it is necessary for live examples of the abstract concepts to be always present. This is what the revolution has done, or let’s call it the dissolution that facilitated such unprecedented human boiling over: the essential questions—even if they are extreme or naive or fallacious—have risen to the surface, come out (if temporarily), broken free of the hegemony of a cultural sphere that is dead and in shameful conspiracy with itself.”
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
***
Please, God, give us books to read
by Mohab Nasr
Somehow
I was a teacher;
somehow
I considered that natural.
For this reason I began to bow
to words I did not say;
and to communicate my respects to my children.
I tried to make them understand that it was absolutely necessary
for someone to read,
to review with his parents—
while he hurls his shoe under the bed—
how exhausting and beautiful respect is:
that they have no future without words.
You yourself, Dad,
are bowed over the newspaper
as if a cloud is passing over you;
and when I call out to you,
I see your temple
stamped with melancholy,
as if it was raining specifically for your sake.
Read, Dad,
and call my mother too to read.
Let the cloud pass over all of us.
Please, God,
give us books to read:
books that smell of glue,
their pages like knives;
books
that cough out dust in our faces
so that we realise our life is a cemetery;
books
whose covers bear a dedication from the respected author
to the retired bureau director;
books
cleanshaven in preparation for being slapped
and others that howl
in the margins
at people who, like us, loved
and, like us, became teachers;
books in the form of Aloha shirts
at the Reading Festival;
books on whose giant trunks we can urinate
to unburden ourselves as we go on walking.
***
Aw, aw…
because we too are books, God,
flailing blind in our bed of love—
aw, aw—
because we are squeezed in on Your bookshelf
looking on Your miracles:
angels on the wall,
losing gamblers tearing up their bonds;
the despair of hands that strike
and hands that sleep, hurt, on the same pages.
Aw, aw…
Then someone screams: What goes on there?
***
The desks of the bosses arranged in the form of the Complete Works,
snakes and bears,
crosses and wall magazines,
disgust and rotting bread,
the sound of a distant latch:
Why did You unfasten it, God?
***
Lost with ideas on wheels,
lost at home
and on the streets,
unseen to You or ourselves,
alone before our bosses
who are also alone,
alone with the sound of a distant latch:
Why did You unfasten it, God?
***
Translation © Youssef Rakha
Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
*
I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.
- John Berger
Youssef Rakha
Theorem
Here is a suitably exotic Sufi folk tale from the Nile Delta:
The imam of the Friday prayers bumps into a little old dervish at the entrance to the mosque. The dervish, evidently with no intention of joining the others in prayer, is tapping the ground with a stick, again and again intoning, “God can create the world in the shell of a hazelnut.” Enraged as much by idle talk as impious behavior, the imam beats up the dervish; then he rushes into the mosque baths to perform his ablutions in time. But no sooner does he step into the water than he finds himself in the middle of a great lake in some faraway land; touching his wet body, the imam realizes he has been transformed into a woman. The woman is rescued by a fisherman who happens upon her in the water and takes her in; and when his wife dies, the fisherman marries the strange woman from the lake. First she gives birth to a boy, then another boy, then a girl. One day she goes out to do the washing in the same lake, and as soon as she steps into the water, she finds herself in a mosque bath, in a country she seems to remember: she has been transformed back into the imam, who has just enough time to finish his ablutions before starting the prayers. On his way out of the mosque the imam passes the little old dervish, who has not performed his prayers, tapping the ground with a stick and intoning, “God can create the world in the shell of a hazelnut.” The imam rushes up to him and bends down to kiss his hand, shouting, “Truth, truth! You speak the truth!” And winking at him, the dervish says, “You had to give birth to two boys and a girl before you could believe it, didn’t you.”
The point of this story is to illustrate faith in the mystery of God’s omnipotence. But in a way it also says a lot about politics, language, and context: the relation of the observant to the enlightened, the cynical to the visionary, and appearance to substance.
In contemporary Egypt — and, more broadly, the contemporary Arab cultural sphere — the imam and the dervish stand, respectively, for power- and knowledge-based literary endeavors. The contrast between the two figures recalls the difference between writing as a means to some political end and writing as an end in itself: an exercise in transcending the political. While the imam’s rigid and down-to-earth, strictly rational orientation makes him seem right and relevant, the dervish’s subtle, unorthodox and imaginative approach to worship leaves him powerless, lacking the social support he needs to be taken seriously. Yet in the grander scheme of things — once you step out of that tiny point in space-time that forms these particular Friday prayers — it is the dervish who turns out to be more knowledgeable. It is he who has something to say about God’s omnipotence, not the imam who by observing God’s commandments to the letter — going so far as to oppose the nonobservant dervish — reduces that omnipotence to a ritual.
This is just one of the ways in which the imam-dervish duality may serve as a model of the convergence of politics and literature in contemporary Egypt — which takes on new relevance in the light of the Arab Spring. Once you substitute faith with writing, and the mystery of God’s omnipotence with “knowledge of the Arab world,” it becomes clear that the story of the imam and the dervish might show how politically driven interest in the Arabic novel appears to be commending dervish-like Arab authors while what it is actually saying is that, if not for their anthropological use to an imam-like Western reader, such Arab authors must automatically be relegated to obscurity.
Only the vulgarly politicized imams of contemporary literature seem to have a chance in the West — and they can tell the West nothing it does not already know.
Two assumptions are made every time the topic comes up: that Western readers will turn only to a novel tagged “Arabic” for “information” about “an unknown culture”; and that the only possible recommendation of a novel so tagged will be the tag itself. You begin to wonder if the effective ban on the entry of Arabic literary works into the Western (and, de facto, world) canon — in place since the “discovery” of modern Arabic writing during the first half of the twentieth century — might after all originate in the same place as the impulse to keep Third World immigrants out of the West and to endorse the majority of those who are already there as by and large peripheral to the world of ideas.
In an article on the Arabic novel published in the New Yorker in January 2010, “Found in Translation,” Claudia Roth Pierpont cites the West’s “long history of indifference,” raising the concern that a reversal of this tendency may prove to be “a corrupting force.” In that case, the alleged translation boom will result in westerners ending up with mere copies of Arab images they have already selected (the consequence of commercializing Aboriginal art in Australia is what comes to mind).
Pierpont concludes that this is unlikely to happen because “the Arabic novelist stands, almost by definition — as a thinker, a conduit of intellectual life — in opposition to the retrogressive forces in the modern Arab state.” And while this is almost never technically true — even though many of them do take a nominally oppositional stance, Egyptian novelists from Yusuf Idris (1927–1991) to Tareq Imam (b. 1977) have been employed and/or lionized by cultural arms of the regime itself, arguably the most retrogressive force of all — the statement does strike a sympathetic chord.
Surely the sensibility of writers anywhere will be at odds with conservatism and duress, which even after the so-called revolution of January 25 proves to be more stifling in Egypt than in the West. But while Cairo may indeed reflect a society “in extremis,” to use Pierpont’s phrase, its writers “routinely constrained or assailed,” what Pierpont seems not to realize is that it is also a place where an urban minority has written and read vernacularly inflected Arabic continuously for some ten centuries: a place in which, until the 1980s, the highly evolved writing regularly produced has remained untouched by the prospect of translation into English.
Reading “only versions of what we want to hear” is precisely what Pierpont has been doing; in this she seems no different from the majority of Western readers of Arabic literature outside the academic arena. But the “corrupting force” that placed Pierpont in that position is far more complex than she might imagine, the privilege of the “larger markets” provided by translation into English making up only a tiny fraction of its composition.
. . .
Read the rest of this piece by purchasing the Summer 12 issue of The Kenyon Review.
“We never used to have sectarian tension”
Posted on October 20, 2011
That being, of course, a lie. And lies, however well meaning, just may be the crux of the problem.
Had a truly secular state ever emerged in Egypt, perhaps it would have made sense to blame Copts for their sectarianism. As it is, surely Coptic sectarianism is part of the struggle for an effective concept of citizenship? As I wondered whether the Maspero protest of 9 Oct might be the “third revolution” promised but not forthcoming since March, I tweeted, “They are shooting at the Copts.” I remember this because coworkers who immediately saw the tweet – they presumably do not follow the same people – berated me lightheartedly for spreading unconfirmed (mis)information. What their notebooks and iPhones as well as security personnel in the building were telling them was that it was a mob of Copts who were wreaking chaos and, inexplicably armed, firing at the Central Security and Military Police personnel who were attempting to control them. Lying through their teeth, pro-Supreme Council of the Armed Forces news personnel from this building and elsewhere reported Armed Forces casualties.
As a Muslim-born Cairo-dweller, I feel this is an occasion to say how I grew up in an atmosphere of sectarianism partly justified by its being – understandably, since they were the minority – even more intense among Christians. It was normal to be told by a quasi-religious acquaintance about a third party, for example, “True, he’s Christian – but he’s actually a good man!” Unlike the average Copt, who will just be careful who they are speaking to, saying little if anything on the topic to an interlocutor they deem unsympathetic, an educated urban Muslim will reflexively, categorically deny the existence of a sectarian problem in Egypt, citing religious, patriotic or pragmatic arguments to say that, in effect, the position of the Copts in Egyptian society could not possibly be better than it already is.
With the rise of Islamism since the Nineties this has taken on variously sinister motifs: identifying salib (Arabic for “cross”) with salibi (Crusader), for example, an adherent of fanatical dogma may suggest that, simply by virtue of who they are, Egyptian Christians are in fact the enemy. In this way the historically pro-Muslim Conquest Copts – and Copt simply means “Egyptian”, as opposed to the equally Christian Greek rulers of the land – are turned into allies of “the Jews and the Americans” (as in those responsible for the existence of Israel and their Roman-like, Muslim-hating patrons). But even among “moderate” Muslims, arguments for “national unity” – a concept which, though an essential part of its rhetoric, the regime established by coup d’etat in July 1952 has systematically rendered meaningless by excluding and discriminating against Copts, encouraging both Coptic deference and Muslim complacency – fail to take into account centuries of inequality including occasional persecution.
***
Of homogeneity and bakshish
Posted on October 15, 2011
Long before a “revolution” could have been anticipated, people – especially urban Arabs – noticed something about Cairo. In a roundabout way, the title of a book of poems by the Lebanese globe-trotter Suzanne Alaywan, All Roads Lead to Salah Salem (a reference to one major road linking northern and southern ends of the megalopolis) accurately expresses that sentiment: Of all the world’s cities, Cairo seems to have the capacity to absorb people into its folds, to make them – in appearance and attitude if not in thinking or values – like other people already established inside it; it has the capacity, brutishly but somehow peaceably, to iron out difference.
The poet was not at cross purpose with the fact. I tend to think she, like others within and without, saw it as inevitable but positive, a possible answer to otherwise intractable inter-issue dilemmas which liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, could only solve with the help of economic and institutional hardware not available to the Arab or the third world. The more or less forced homogeneity of course has its roots in a culture of compromise and hypocrisy, in people’s willingness to lie about how they feel in order to benefit from other people, whose difference – in looks, tongue, dress code, income level – offers further justification for practically robbing them.
Yet, as the aftermath of events has demonstrated, there is more to that proverbial Rome of the mind than simple untruth. Decades of corruption were also decades of voluntary repression, in which excessive panhandling just might have been a sublimation of mugging, and pay-for-your-difference an ameliorated form of the marauding mob. The difference-eliminating software is after all as evident in Arab nationalism as it is in political Islam, and perhaps even Mubarak’s client government sought to accommodate the interests of global liberalism only insofar as the world order, up to and including Saudi Arabia (which as far as I am concerned is a greater threat to Egypt than Israel) could provide that government with the required alms.
That is over now, despite the military and its supporters, backed by said world order, doing all they can – hitting below as well as above the belt, even idiotically risking sectarian war in the process – to reinstate the beggar-mentality status quo. Egyptians should be thankful for the “revolution” not because it proved successful or achieved its goal, but because it will make elimination of difference by begging increasingly impossible. People can no longer pretend to be safe from their compatriots, the myth of “national unity” is no longer viable, not all those who are different can pay.
Whether they like it or not, the Other will assert themselves at last, bringing forth even through catastrophe all the many beautiful Egypts that have been squeaking for dear life.
***
Side effects of Revolution
Posted on October 6, 2011
I have developed an addiction since February:
Laptop in lap, voluntarily bedridden, I watch old episodes of al Ittijah al Mu’akiss (or, as translated by the relevant talk show’s self-possessed impresario, my fellow Hull University alumnus Faisal Al Qassim: Opposite Direction).
Dozens of them from before the Arab Spring are freely available on YouTube – the Nakba, Hezbollah, torture, hijab, George W, Iraq, Iran, Sudan – many as relevant to Tahrir Square as anything. Sidling into bed of an evening, high on Revolution, I would select a topic that suited my mood, listen with mounting suspense to Faisal’s retro rhetorical intro, and lick my lips over the promised discursive violence, not to say deranged bawling. That, at least, is how it started.
All very civilised and edifying. Each head-butting match has a compelling topic, a thought-out script and, seemingly, the right pair of contestants ready to express two sides of an issue. Ah, objectivity! Yet as with so much else on Al Jazeera, something somehow remains askew.
I do not mean the channel’s populist bias, the systematic and directionless manner in which it incites viewers (often to embrace political Islam), nor the unspeakable hypocrisy it sustains by doing so while it remains an organ of the Qatar government.
I do not mean Faisal’s brand of impartiality, which is to argue each case with vehemence irrespective of whether he might actually be spreading misinformation, never taking into account the implications of a given argument for the larger picture. It is okay, for example, to present Saddam Hussein as the wronged hero of Arab glory and call him the Martyr, so long as you are pointing up dependency, corruption and sectarianism in the current Iraqi regime; you only get to describe Saddam as he was if you happen to be bestowing blessings upon Iraq’s US Army-controlled experiment with democracy…
Yet what I mean is something, slightly, else: the obscene polarisation, the rhetorical opportunism, the insolent lies; the ultimate vapidity of a good 40 out of each 45 minutes, which forms the substance of my addiction. If al Ittijah al Mu’akiss is what it means to be politically engaged, I must say that political engagement is not a good thing. Just below the surface, it is very uncivilised and profoundly delusional. And it is a condition of which I have not been cured since I went out to chant slogans and endure tear gas.
It wrings my heart to think that, in six months, Tahrir Square has turned into something not all that different from al Ittijah al Mu’akiss.
Before he grew familiar with the way to school
the sickly child grew familiar with
the doctor’s place:
the pharmacy below the clinic
with its brown closets
and a young attendant wearing fashions that date back two decades
wrapping the bottles in paper printed with the logo,
which she reeled off a large roll with a metal core,
and noting the times of the doses in clear writing.
On distant mornings
you and your mother would go down to her to buy the medicine.
Why, then, did the pharmacy shift places
in the night,
sliding at least four buildings across?
There is a restaurant at the street corner
whose glass facade which the steam misted over
shows appetising, low-priced food;
it seems very close, over at the curve.
Night after night you will put off having dinner there
and go along with what it takes to stay up and be tired;
the day you make up your mind,
with a strike,
some diabolical hand will have lifted the whole place
off the map of existence.
And in the dark quarter of your knowledge of the city
beyond the street with which you thought the world ended when you were small
is an old traffic post and the ghost of an elderly policeman at the crossroads
with sleepy lights on a night moist with dew.
There stands a forgotten variety theatre
where the numbers are performed on a narrow stage
flanked by two tiers of seats on which the onlookers have gathered.
You are an onlooker and a backstage hand,
your viewpoint flits between the two places
from pointers to clamorous lives
and promises of sustained indulgence
to where safety
fares better than regret
which is as light as beer foam.
Translation of the title poem of Yasser Abdellatif’s last book © Youssef Rakha
Slumdog Bookfair
Trekking through what looks more like a refugee camp than a cultural venue, Youssef Rakha goes on a wild goose chase to Tunisia
Founded in 1969, the last year of Nasser’s life and reign, the Cairo International Book Fair is perhaps the largest book-centred event in the Arab world. Year after year under Sadat and then Mubarak, the event kept expanding, promising but not fulfilling its promise to turn Cairo into a city of bibliophiles. Partly because it is organised not by independent publishers but by Culture Ministry bureaucrats (the General Egyptian Book Organisation or GEBO is only a publisher insofar as it indiscriminately prints and stores huge amounts of material), partly because it caters to a far broader audience base than the population’s true core of committed readers, the Cairo Book Fair seldom focused on literature as such.
There are two sides to the Cairo Book Fair as far as intellectual activity is concerned: a formal, luxuriously furnished space for the main programme, presided over by government officials and established, more or less right-wing figures; and the slum-like, more informal setting occupied by several concurrent programmes catering to the penniless and left-wing intellectual majority. Apart from bigger sales for some (especially non-Egyptian) Arabic book publishers in various wings of the fair grounds, however, neither side has ever been directly book related; in a country and a region with phenomenal illiteracy rates and only the most whimsical conception of how books, once printed, might actually be used, things like the logistics of selecting books for publication, marketing and selling them were, for 42 years, summarily disregarded. And after missing a round in 2011, this year’s Book Fair is no exception. Not that one expected a significant shift of perspective or any palpable improvements under the political circumstances, but divested of its the first, official side (neither the prime minister nor Field Marshal Tantawi turned up for the opening), the present fair – the 43rd – does prove remarkably different.
As has been the case with many institutional activities after 25 January, one has the feeling that the revolution – rather than actually reforming institutions – has simply exposed their failures. While the family-outing atmosphere at the fair grounds persists, evidence of luxury and high-profile presence has been eradicated. There are fewer visitors and fewer occupied buildings, while the tent pitched on paved ground and (especially) on the sand instills a sense of being, not so much in a cultural venue as in a sprawling and ill equipped refugee camp.
Apart from Saraya 19 and a building dedicated to Saudi books (it is a well known fact that most Arab books, even those by Saudi authors, are banned in Saudi Arabia, which publishes little in its own right), there are no buildings in sight. Even the toilets, labelled with printouts indicating who was allowed to use them, consist of makeshift trucks stationed near the parking lot, through which you entered the fair as if you had arrived at a long abandoned ranch project with only a fraction of the necessary construction completed. Half-torn signs fluttered endlessly…
This feeling is no doubt intensified no less by the nature of the fair grounds, which have always been in a permanent state of unfinished construction but are more so now – to the extent that even the poster pyramid meant to celebrate the revolution has its scaffolding half exposed – as by the wind-swept dust from the neighbouring construction site of the Metro. Only Saraya 19, which brings together non-Egyptian publishers including a ludicrously modest display of Tunisian books, Tunisia being the guest of honour of the book fair, bears any resemblance to a display space.
Haphazard as ever, the activities go on in dust-drenched tents: on Monday, at the Cultural Café, the liberal-turned-pro-Muslim-Brotherhood young activist Alaa Abdelfattah spoke to a handful of people about ways to avoid and/or expose massacres of protestors by SCAF. As in previous years at the Cultural Café, people walked in and out at leisure – mobile phone galore. Elsewhere the annual overdose of ridiculously bad vernacular poetry was being recited. A bearded man held a brand-new Quran in one hand and a shawerma sandwich in the other…
***
At some point while walking past the tents, regaled by Friday prayer sermons from invisible amplifiers, I got it into my head that, since it is the guest of honour, Tunisia must have a separate display elsewhere on the fair grounds. I went to the information kiosk where I was told, gruffly enough, to walk to the end of the adjoining street and then take a left. All the way along young salesmen stopped me, aggressively hawking laptops and electronic dictionaries: at least 10 of them within the space of 15 minutes. (Again, what this has to do with books is beyond me.) But it wasn’t until I was out of breath, my face caked with dust, that I realised: the man in the information kiosk was actually directing me to Saraya 19, exactly where I was before. Apart from a mawkish gateway in the middle of nowhere which, bearing the sign of the Book Fair, indicated that Tunisia was the guest of honour, there were only the tips of tents fluttering from afar.
photo: Youssef Rakha
I begin the ascent at 4p.m. After leaving my personal details at the Tourist Police Office and convincing the officer that no, thank you very much, but I do not need a Bedouin guide, I set off on the dusty road to St. Katherine’s monastery. The monastery lies at the foot of a winding path that leads after a two to three hour strenuous walk and hike to the summit of Mt. Sinai, or Moses as the locals call it. A strange mood has taken hold of me the past hour or so; a vague paranoia, a slightly heightened self-awareness. Perhaps it is the alienation of passing through a dozen checkpoints on my way here from Cairo, or the Army conscript and Police detective who requested a hike and whom I had taken on board at a checkpoint a hundred kilometres before St. Katherine’s. Maybe it is my botched sleep the past couple of nights, or the unsettling bizarreness of returning to Egypt while most of my family are elsewhere for the first time in my life. I don’t know, but I feel ill at ease. So it is with a sense of relief that I leave the Monastery behind and take the first steps to the summit. I really want to be alone. To tell you the truth this is the reason I am here. I have compulsively and hurriedly left our home in Cairo and drove 500 kilometres into the middle of the Sinai Mountains because I need to be alone. Since arriving to Cairo on the 24th of December, I have been avoiding answering the phone or talking to anyone unless it is absolutely necessary. I am starved of my own company; I am hungry for loneliness.
This is not the first time I climb Mt. Sinai, it will be the third. The first time, now to me, may very well have been in another life. The year was 1992 and I had gone on a school-trip hiking with two good friends. I recall the exhaustion on the way up, the freezing cold at the summit (it was November) and, on return to Cairo, my mother’s smile and hug as she received me at home, our dog jumping on my bed and greeting me. But I recall not much else, not much that has escaped idealisation anyways: I was sixteen, and I was the kind of sixteen year old who was stuck, more-or-less, in the latent stage; everything was right and in its place, which is another way for saying that nothing much happened. This time feels different.
I proceed along the path to the summit. I notice that I am the only one going up at this time of day; I encounter many tourists and pilgrims heading down, some of them establish eye-contact complementing it with a slight nod of recognition or a curt ‘hi’. The sun is going to set just before 6p.m., and it’s already after 4; no chance of catching the sunset then. That’s fine; I am not here to watch pretty sunsets, I am here to be alone. To be honest I am pleased that I am the only one going up the mountain. The way up is more tiring that I thought it would be; I am not sure why but this slightly unsettles me. Some of the Bedouin guides I meet along the way greet me in English, and whether they do or not I throw at them a bold ‘salamu-3aliko’ which, given the expressions that form on their faces, they did not expect. They probably instinctively do not think I am Egyptian. I am already familiar with this from Dakhla. I, of course, am not blonde or fair, and my eyes are not blue, what they pick on rather is class, body-language and context: the unusualness of going for a trip like this on my own. As I was to learn a couple of hours later from one of the Bedouins who sells drinks near the summit: there is no Egyptian individual tourism here, you must be here for work, aren’t you? The explanation here is simple: act beyond people’s conception of what you are and where you belong and you will invite speculation first about your motives and, if you fail to convince, about your sanity.
I am, in fact, so accustomed to this experience that I have come to expect it. It is a class-based issue, but one that also betrays a lack of desire and, perhaps, ability or imagination to relate – everyone would experience it if they place themselves in vulnerable situations, something I willingly and regularly do out of my complete volition. I do it not because I am a masochist but because I do not see how one can keep one’s moral compass pointing in the right direction without exposing oneself to oneself and to others. It is a particular calling of mine you can say. But just this trip, this hike, that moment in my life I want to be spared this experience. I really just want to be away, and this includes being away from mutual identity-intention-motive deductions with men who are unable to broaden their horizons sufficiently to see nothing unusual in what I am doing.
It’s well after 5 and with every minute the light diminishes further. I negotiate a hairpin curve in the path while hollering playfully at the nearest mountain-side and waiting for my echo. I expect a dramatic time-lag then an eerie hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello but, instead, I receive a muffled and barely recognizable single rendition of my voice. A few metres away I notice a brick shed with a colourful blanket shielding the entrance; one of many sheds along the path selling tea and water to exhausted climbers. I am about to pass it as I did many others along the way – I didn’t want to suppress my momentum – when a young man peering through the entrance of the shed calls at me offering some rest and tea. I oblige.
My father works at the Monastery, he says while switching on a small gas-stove to boil water, we are from Suez, and I joined him to make some money of my own. I am uncharacteristically disinterested. Sometimes I wonder whether the year I spent in Dakhla writing my ethnography had not only depleted my anthropological interest, but also my interest in others. Back then in 2009 I thought I was killing two birds with one stone: immersing myself in an Egyptian working-class, traditional-conservative community – something I had wanted to do properly for years – while researching the subject of my fascination: insanity. Dakhla with its many villages and distinctive isolation was the perfect setting. At the end of my time there I was truly exhausted; I had had enough of maintaining a morally and socially acceptable persona in the midst of people who were friendly and helpful, yes, but intrinsically paranoid and limited in imagination, their world so narrow it suffocated me. This young man, who by all means is pleasant and interesting in his own right, and the Bedouin guides I have so far encountered remind me too much of Dakhla. They force me into a mode of relating and being that I no longer feel the need to maintain, at least not in this era of my life, and certainly not right now.
The water is boiling. He serves me strong, sweet tea (which he subsequently refuses to be paid for) and offers me a cigarette which I accept despite having quit smoking four months before. Are you Christian, he asks. No, I say, and a long silence ensues. I fix my gaze on the mountains outside the shed, and I notice off the corner of my eyes that he is glancing at me. I want to leave.
It’s completely dark outside now. I am only fifteen minutes away from the 750 steps that lead to the summit. I am still the only one going up. Many of the tourists and pilgrims are wearing powerful LED head-lights. A short scream bursts into the silence; a woman had tripped and fell. She is helped up and quickly joins the rest of the lights heading down the side of the mountain. I arrive at the base of the 750 steps; steep, roughly hewn rocks piled on top of each other and taking you up the final 300metres to the peak of Mt. Sinai. Every step is crucial; a small hand held torch shows me where to place my foot, and my walking stick gives me much needed balance. A half-crescent provides some light, and occasionally I can see the steps right on the edge of an abyss with a small wooden warning sign: DANGER. This, is exciting. I proceed further up the mountain, my knees now slightly aching. By 6.30p.m. I am 50 steps below the summit and I find four shacks, or ‘cafeterias’. Light escapes through a narrow gap in the wooden door to a shack that has the number four painted on the front. I walk towards the shack and step inside.
I am immediately enveloped by the warmth of a fire at the far end of the shack. Four men are seated around the flame, their shoes and sandals scattered near the entrance. A faint whiff of burned wood and feet lingers in the air. Clearly excited by the sudden presence of a Cairene in their midst, they immediately welcome me around the fire and offer me a tea. The more talkative and worldly of the four Bedouins dominates the conversation, at times eyeing me suspiciously. I can sense he does not believe I am here just to climb the mountain; he’s never seen an Egyptian coming here on his own he argues. The other three men recede to the fringes of the conversation, the one on my right – an older man with a seriously weathered face – reduced to emitting occasional grunts which I surmised where in approval of whatever was being said at the time, contradictions and all. It is too cold to sleep on the peak, one of them finally says, sleep here in the shack with us. I feel nervous at this otherwise kind suggestion: the idea of forsaking the loneliness that I have come here to seek distresses me. I want to sleep under the stars, I reply with a confidence that surprises even me. A few awkward moments of silence are finally broken by a grunt of understanding that seals the conversation. Half an hour has passed and I am becoming impatient. The eloquent Bedouin then suddenly asks me what I think of the political situation in Egypt. The third stage of the elections – which includes South Sinai – starts tomorrow. I try to avoid talking politics, after all I know exactly what they think and why: they all will vote for the Muslim Brotherhood or El-Nour, they think we should never have a Christian president (look at France, will they ever have a Muslim president?), and of course Mohammed El-Barad3i (whom I think is the only man in Egypt who has the rare combination of integrity and experience) is an ‘agent’. Against my better judgement, I launch a brief attack on the Salafi El-Nour party and to my surprise I find that we temporarily share a sliver of the most superficial agreement: in so far as El-Nour will hamper tourism (the source of the Bedouin’s livelihood) they are against it. Covering women (another potential El-Nour edict) is something they do not object to: making the veil compulsory can only be a good thing, one of them orates. On that note I excuse myself. They offer me two rental blankets and a thin mattress which I lug the remaining fifty steps to the peak of the mountain. Its only 7p.m. and the cold is biting.
I am on the peak of Mt. Sinai. I walk around taking in the view; rows of jagged peaks stretch into the distance. I am the only one here, the prize for coming up at an unusual time. The crescent is still in the middle of the sky, and the constellations do not require a searching gaze: they present themselves as if someone has highlighted them just for me. It is freezing cold: three layers (one of which is bona fide Lambs’ Wool) and a particularly heavy coat do not seem to be able to keep the chilling winds out. I refrain from contemplating my surroundings and decide to settle in a corner ‘under the stars’, make use of the blankets, warm-up, and have something to eat. Within a few minutes I begin to experience the first effects of my self-imposed isolation on the peak of Mt. Sinai. As I nibble through a sandwich I have prepared this morning, I reflexively reach into my pocket for my mobile phone. Half-way through I remember that I have left it in the car: loneliness cannot be complete with this bane of a gadget on your person. I pull my rucksack towards me and have a sip of Guava juice and as I replace the carton the first of a succession of intense pangs of fear hit me. It is an undefined, object-less fear: I am not afraid of being the only one here, or of the height or the cold. What am I afraid of? A powerful desire to leave the mountain takes hold of me, but dissipates as quickly as it forms. I calm down temporarily: there is nothing to be afraid of, I say to myself. There is nothing, indeed. Nothing. I am afraid of nothing. The thought of a target-less fear terrifies me even more. Off the corner of my eye I notice a dark object just about the height and width of a person standing near the beginning of the steps. I am convinced it is a person. I stare in its direction, searching for any signs of life but I detect none. I look away, shifting my gaze to the moon and stars, seeking some comfort in the objects of my childhood fascination. But the urge to look back towards the steps is stronger than my resolve; the dark object is still there. Lost in the confusion of uncertainty, treading on the line separating subjectivity from reality, I hear a man’s sharp voice: “It is too cold outside… are you Muslim?”
*
In April 2007 I went on a road-trip with my father; the first of only two trips we had taken together in our newly found friendship. I climbed Mt. Sinai on my own, not out of choice but to spare my father a hike his health would not have withstood. So he stayed behind in the town of St. Katherine and I set off at midnight together with tens of pilgrims to watch the sunrise. At the time my father had only just resigned from his position as Minister of Justice, and the recency of his resignation meant that he was still some ‘one’ in the eyes of the establishment, which by the unspoken laws of proxy required that his son cannot be allowed to climb the mountain on his own and had to be accompanied by an army cadet as guard and escort. I was not really alone, nor was I seeking loneliness. Then, it was different or, perhaps, now it is different. My father died twelve weeks ago. The eloquent Bedouin was right: what am I doing here? This is not the first time I venture on a road-trip alone. But before the motive was clear: I wanted to be away from real and imagined and, in any case, increasingly subtle familial and paternal constraint. And I wanted to explore, away from the suffocation of life on the Island. Driving hundreds of kilometres into the wilderness of my favourite spot on Earth – Sinai – was always the obvious, uncontroversial choice. But my father is gone, and I can no longer fall back on the tired and clichéd narrative of escape, of ‘finding myself’. I am alone. I am here to confirm it, to confirm to myself that he really is dead. I am seeking loneliness and avoiding people because I want to see for myself what my father’s death really means away from the noise and distraction of life and the forced social engagement that characterises the way we deal with death. But what I am looking for, what do I want to find?
“Are you Muslim?” the voice repeats. Instinctively, I pull the blankets further up my face and answer back without thinking: yes I am. A man appears from a hidden cove, he is wrapped in a blanket and clearly has been sleeping: “I’ll unlock the mosque for you then, and you can sleep inside, you won’t be able to tolerate these winds.” He vanishes behind a small brick building that is the mosque and I can hear the sound of a gradually building stream that crescendos to a peak then begins to decline to a trickle and stops. He is human. He returns back to the cove and I do not see him again. Within a few minutes the cold bypasses my fortifications and reaches my skin; he was right. If I stay here, I think to myself, I might die of hypothermia. I wrap up the blankets and the mattress and head to the mosque. This mosque, I was told, was built four centuries ago. It stands a few metres from a much older Chapel that, unlike the mosque, is mostly closed to pilgrims. The mosque is a humble affair: constructed of large grey bricks, it is very unassuming from the outside and inside is inlaid with a worn-out green carpet and its walls decorated with amateurishly painted Qur’anic verses. As I step inside I notice the warm scent of musk and sandal wood, a much better olfactory reception than I have been expecting. Contrasting with the relative light provided by the moon outside, here it is pitch black. After a brief struggle with a torch in one hand and blankets in another, I prepare the closest thing to a bed that I can muster and at 8p.m. I decide that I must try to get some sleep.
When I get to it at 3a.m., I find that I have been trapped in sleeper’s limbo, having spent the past seven hours turning incessantly in search of that elusive comfort spot and, later on, in the throes of confused images. I open my eyes and there is nothing but total darkness. Thoughts begin to populate my mind, recollections of the past few hours of tortured sleep. Did I actually attempt to masturbate when I first settled in under the blanket or was it just a dream? I begin to wonder if men have masturbated inside mosques before, and whether this is the most serious profanity one can perform. The idea intrigues me, and I seriously contemplate entering the unwritten book of history:
On December 30, 2011, Mohammed Abouelleil masturbated inside A Mosque built in the 11th Hijri Century (17th Century gregorian) on the peak of Mt. Sinai. He was the first man to do so and has rightfully reserved a place in basest Hell.
But I abstain; too messy.
I fold the blankets and decide I will spend the remaining hours of darkness outside. I am still the only person at the peak, apart, that is, from the Bedouin who vanished into the cove. I settle next to the chapel, wrap myself up as best as I could, and finish off the fruit that I have left. Only half an hour has passed and the cold has, again, found its way to my skin. I shift around and wrap the blankets snugly around my legs. By 4a.m. I can see quivering, flickering dots of light moving slowly in the darkness that envelops the side of the mountain; constellations of pilgrims making their way up to witness the sunrise. This means that I have, at the most, two hours before the end of my isolation. I feel that I am on a mission searching for something that I cannot define or conceptualise. And I feel that my mission is drawing to a close. I resign, my mind blank, to the silence and the cold, and descend into a state of semi-sleep…
I am woken up to the sound of foreign tongues. I can hear German, Spanish, and some East Asian language. There are at least one hundred people on the summit. They have all arrived together and their head-lights are still on. Just before 6.a.m. loud Spanish religious POP music bellows from what must be a portable CD or Tape player, and a large group of young Spaniards join in. The unmistakable rhythm of a mantra comes from a closed circle of East Asians, perhaps Malaysian or Indonesian. In the strong winds on the summit, a young man nearby struggles to find the right page in a Hebrew text. Right next to me a couple huddle together in a single sleeping bag. All are patiently awaiting the sunrise. The anticipation infects me and I find myself gazing East. Light breaks, and all have their cameras ready to capture the moment. The sunrise will be filtered through a hundred Japanese lenses to the retinas eagerly waiting on the other side. Ten minutes pass, twenty, and the sun remains hidden behind thick grey clouds. A few minutes later it begins to rain.
On my way down the mountain I take the other route, the Steps of Penance – 3000 rocks laid by a monk as atonement for a sin only three people know about. It continues to drizzle and the air is cold and crisp, astonishingly refreshing. Although no reason for this comes to my mind, I am unexpectedly euphoric and positive. I embrace the mood I am in. As I negotiate the uneven, sometimes dangerous, rocks I recall a warning given to me by a Bedouin who saw me embark on the beginning of the Steps of Penance an hour ago: be careful, he said, two months ago a Russian went down this route and lost his way; it took us a week to find him, dead. The image of a dead man lost in the midst of these ancient rocks keeps pinging in my mind. If I die here my father will not know about it. He will be spared the pain, devastation and guilt. If I die here my father will not care. If I laugh or cry, if I have another child or get married, if I kill someone or save ten, my father will not be around. I have come here hoping that loneliness will reveal something to me, and I am leaving realising that there is nothing to be revealed. If father is a commandment, I now have one less reason to do the right thing.
Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed 2011
Mohammad Rabie, Kawkab ‘Anbar, Cairo: Kotob Khan, 2010
BOOKSHOP: When a book signing ends up feeling like an engineers’ reunion, it makes you think not of structure but of paranoia. There is the architectural analogy, that is true (and in Arabic an architect is literally an “architectural engineer”). But by now it is something of a cliché: the stringing together of narrative is, anyway, nothing like the construction of buildings; character, dialogue and pacing, the poetry of scene and sentence, have little to do with design. Of course, engineers deal with electric circuits as well as building plans, pistons and pulleys, drills, computers, equations, frames and frameworks, all kinds of objects that can have metaphorical relevance to the writing process. But metaphors only go so far most of the time, and for many of us writing is a profession in its own right – in danger of being taken over! A month or so ago, a shortish novel longish by recent young-writer standards, Kawkab ‘Anbar (the name means “Amber Planet”), drew into the Kotob Khan Bookshop, where it emerged during a workshop with Yasser Abdel-Latif, what seemed like a range of people interested in new writing. The main speaker was a critic but apart from one dentist (the promising young poet Ahmad Nada), almost everyone turned out to be an engineer – civil, mechanical, hydraulic, electrical. For a moment it seemed as though a mafia of those lever-wielding un-poets were ambushing the literary sphere, infiltrating writerly circles all across the city, befriending with a view to replacing true writers and eventually, well – eliminating them. I would not stand for it! Thus I directed my malicious glances to the person at the centre of all this, the author of the book, Mohammad Rabie: born in 1978, a practising, yes – practising civil engineer since his graduation from university in 2001, to his friends he is actually known as Rabie, since there are too many Mohammads in this part of the world. For a moment Rabie did look like the don of some magic realist mafia. The beauty of paranoia is that it impounds reason. It was only a moment, but for its duration I was convinced there really was a mafia who gathered at construction sites to draw up plans of attack for literary world domination. I seemed to forget that Rabie was among the most personable people of his generation I had met, a writer with talent regardless of what else he does, totally innocuous.
I spend a lot of time in bookshops. I read the blurbs on the back covers, sometimes the introductions as well. I think hard before I buy. I hate crowded bookshops where I feel no sense of privacy. That’s why Kotob Khan is the perfect place for me. I also hate bookshops where attendants materialise the moment you walk in asking you what you want. It’s insolent. But as I say Kotob Khan was a perfect place to do this. Yasser Abdel-Latif did not interfere very much at all. Since the beginning he was careful about giving the participants just as much autonomy as they needed. Still, I think he managed to slip in ideas and sentences. There were parts he was largely dissatisfied with and I worked on those. What he insisted on was that there should be a dramatic line linking the events in the book, which is what I set out to do from the beginning. All of which was of course very helpful to me; and I think the fact that the participants thought alike and had a similar orientation was the main factor behind the success of the workshop. I think that any text with dramatic lines is a novel, but that is not why I set out to write one. The novel isn’t always the ideal format. The short story is another appropriate format. The novel is appropriate for multiple characters and many events. It is also a genre that suits chatter and gossip. The characters allow the writer to say all that they want indirectly, and there is space for imagination: to create cities and documents and languages, perhaps an alternative history. But the short story is extremely enjoyable for me. Concision and economy of means are two things I particularly enjoy; and the story is appropriate for describing a moment or a situation or a day in the life if its hero. The decision to write a novel is made after a few pages, perhaps before you start writing, but I think the time frame remains the principal factor. That is why this book is a novel, in the end, because that is the way the idea developed and the way I imagined it would spread over time. Sometimes I imagine a new form even more economical than the short story, through which to condense events that are spread out over long periods of time to the greatest extent possible. But all my attempts at achieving this form have been miserable.
CYBERSPACE: Until March 2008, there was in fact another Mohammad Rabie who was not an engineer: the author of outrageous novels about sex and religion in contemporary Cairo which he Xeroxed and handed out by hand. That other Rabie died in a Camus-ian accident at the age of 33. This Rabie, by contrast, is actually a blogger; he started out on the internet – a consequence, perhaps, of his background being non-literary. But the existence of another novelist born in the same year with the exact same name seems if nothing else pertinent to the kind of writing the author of Kawkab ‘Anbar is interested in practising. Unlike his namesake, Rabie is less interested in the immediate affects of language as he is in its ability to create a sustainable world. Unlike so many Arab writers – the vast majority, in fact, from the Sixties until recently – he wants to tell a story. He wants to use his imagination, engage with a concept or an idea, breathe life into a calculated structure. He does not want to evoke, imply, explore the possibilities of language as such. He does not want to wax lyrical, much less rhetorical. He does not want to wax. His object is a tale, and the function of reality – language as well as people who emerge through its use – is to flesh out that tale. In this as much as his cyber presence as a blogger and a micro-blogger (many were saddened when Rabie, shortly after the aforementioned signing, deactivated his Facebook account), Rabie is representative of the closest thing to a generation or a movement since the prose poets of the Nineties: writers who might be called the Twothousanders but not only because they started publishing after 2000. People like Nael El-Toukhy, Ahmad Nagui and (to a lesser extent) Mohammad Kheir and Mohammad Abdelnaby also share something more profound. They are all internet-savvy, down-to-earth agents of subversion as interested in things as they are in people and as closely connected to pop culture, communications technology and the global media as they are to literary history. Kundera is their Balzak, Mahfouz their Greek tragedy. They are cynics and jokers and glorifiers of what they refer to (admittedly often with ignorance) as kitsch. By and large they eschew poetry; and until the Egyptian quasi-literary blogging craze fizzled out, many of them professed to eschew print publication. They may not always have as much access to non-Arabic culture as they claim or desire, but their position is truly postmodern in the sense that they own and disown many histories at once; they don’t have a problem revolving around the commodity as a mode of being; they don’t have a problem with commodification. In short, they live mentally in our times – and they try to do it unselfconsciously.
I think the appropriate literary climate is one that is free of groups, schools and especially this concept of generations. Anyway it is the critics’ job to classify, I cannot claim to belong to a particular generation myself. As for my link with technology, I write directly onto the computer, but the initial ideas I jot down by hand, on a piece of paper, in a pocket notebook – that doesn’t matter, but it has to be on paper. I read the news online, I think the internet is a more efficient medium for news and short articles. But it can be a disastrous medium as far as literature is concerned. Paper will live on for a long time yet. Now there are e-book readers and I don’t see a difference between them and books, they have the advantage of taking up less space and weight. But visually they are very like books and they don’t have the distractions of the computer especially when it is connected to the internet. On the whole the only reason you would resort to electronic publishing is if you are unable to publish on paper. But the internet is completely inappropriate for a novel. A short story, a poem may work on the internet but nothing longer. My blog was an experiment that lasted for a long time. I had wanted to write a large text and the blog was my training ground. I thought I would use to train until it was time to write that large text. I had no preconceptions about what would happen to the novel after it was published. I didn’t think much of sales but I wanted it to be translated into other languages – imagine the translator’s predicament when they work on a text that finds fault with the very act of translation! Otherwise I was worried about the responses to it but those have been mostly encouraging. A few months after I completed it I already feel the novel has wrenched itself away from me and acquired its own being. It’s like a child of mine who’s grown up and leads their own life. My presence online was very important, it worked as indirect publicity for the novel. Many were waiting for it after I announced several times that it would be coming out. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing, I was present on the net, frankly, because I was used to being there. But my friend Marwa Rakha eventually drew my attention to the fact that it was good publicity.
LIBRARY: Kawkab ‘Anbar is the story of the eponymous, little known library (named after its original owner’s wife), a public endowment in Abbassiya on the verge of being demolished to make way for a new underground Metro line. It is told by Shahir, the endowments official who is sent there on a month-long assignment to put together a report on the library – a perfunctory, routine procedure intended to facilitate the forgone conclusion of its demolition by establishing that, all things considered, there is no reason for it to remain standing. Shahir is a young intellectual who, aware of the Kafkaesque futility of his task, is nonetheless quickly caught up in the mystery and madness of what turns out to be a Borgesian space of astounding quirkiness, initially through the existential endeavour of giving his task the semblance of credibility by searching in the library for anything of value. since he is “an old reader”, as his boss describes him in the opening, he looks – a little too earnestly for comfort – among the library’s uncannily surprising collection, eclectic as it is obscure. A string of clues leads Shahir to the two impossible ideas at the centre of the story (impossible, I mean, in the Borgesian sense, although Rabie does not delve as deeply into philosophy). First, there is a book written in a private or a nonexistent language, Luij al Sayrafini’s Creatures, translations of which have nonetheless been produced. Secondly, there is a device or a machine – invented and installed here by the owner – which is capable of producing a perfect translation of any and every book, including even Sayrafini’s, into any and every language. Rabie’s point is that, while it is possible to imagine these two things, their existence would anyway be pointless if not downright evil. He does not say it in so many words, but translation is a form of multiplying knowledge, and as such it is essentially an abomination, like Borges’s mirror, a curse. The story is also told by Dr Sayed: an arguably unnecessary complication, this, since Shahir’s voice alone would have made the essentially plot-driven, murder mystery-like narrative easier to follow. Dr Sayed is an older scholar, a cryptologist from the age of Nasser whose presence justifies all kinds of forays back into the Sixties, with passages on the real-life culture minister Tharwat Okashah, for example: an encyclopedic intellectual enamoured of both translation and classification. He is an obsessive and venomous, Dr Sayed, a quaint old cynic who enjoys watching others suffer. He knows Kawkab Anbar’s secrets but does not reveal them to Shahir. His voice gives a grotesque impression of the characters Shahir must tamper with on the way: among others, the library director, an old bureaucratic rival of Shahir’s boss; and the elderly translator who for many years has been reproducing, at first by hand, his own copies of the strange tomes that live here …
I meant the idea of translation itself, it is not a metaphor for anything else. I imagine that a complete, perfect translation is nonexistent. It is not something that people disagree much about that translation is always faulty to some extent, or that some translations are injurious to the original text. I don’t mean to imply that the text is holy. I mean simply that the ideas in a given text, which are easily understood and habitual if not stereotypical in their own language, might come across as something completely different or offensive once they have been rendered in a different language. Cultural interaction will happen anyway, but I think it happens in a more effective way through interaction with the other language without the medium of translation. That is not of course to say that translation is unnecessary, but it can certainly misrepresent a culture, or it can give rise to a deformed cultural understanding and actually obstruct rather than enhance hybridity and intercultural awareness. In translation it is much easier to stumble. This is of course the central tenet that I wanted to play with in the novel. There was no particular reason to use two voices, although I would not have wanted an omniscient narrator. But it just happened that way. First it flowed in the voice of Shahir, for weeks I worked on it in that voice. But then the voice of Sayed arrived and it forced me to work it in and give up on Shahir temporarily. But it was not technically necessary, there are ways to introduce perspectives into the texts – you add discourses or digressions, even footnotes as in the case of Mohammad Mustagab. Perhaps it is simply that writing the characters in their own voices, in as many of them as you can, makes them more alive. I do not have a clearly defined project as such because my ideas are always changing. Some ideas dog me for a long time but then they evaporate and seem naïve. Other ideas do not evaporate, and they may be just as naïve and laughable but if you think long and hard enough about anything it makes that thing highly valuable to me. I was surprised when friends told me about influences they thought they could see in the book: Naguib Mahfouz, for example, and then Saramago in All the Names, Eco in The Name of the Rose. All three are among my favourite authors in fact so it makes me proud for people to liken my work to theirs. Mahfouz was well organised and very patient which are things that I lack and would benefit from a great deal. Eco has encyclopedic erudition that is obviously beyond me but his writing is also extremely professional and I doubt if I will ever attain that level. I would also mention Orhan Pamuk in My Name is Red, Haruki Murakami in Kafka on the Shore, Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children, Gamal El-Ghitani in Khutat Al-Ghitani and Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid in Virgo. It amazes me how much the Iraqi writer Ali Badr and I can think alike, which is why I try to read everything to find out if it’s been done before. For a while now I’ve been preoccupied with the idea of the historian: if the translator falsifies unwittingly, the historian does it on purpose, more or less and, well – just imagine the possible implications of that fact for fiction.
Review and interview by Youssef Rakha
ميدان التحرير – Tahrir Square
ماسبيرو – Maspero
