Tag Archives: insanity

The four avatars of Hassan Blasim

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REFUGEE: A man leaves, embarks on a journey, endures inhumane difficulties in search of a humane haven. There is a war going on where he comes from; it’s not safe even to walk to the vegetable souk. Abducted by one armed group, an ambulance driver he knows is forced to make a fake confession on video for the benefit of satellite news channels, then sold to another armed group—and so on. The wit prevents surrealism from devolving into the absurd. The narrative intensity recalls Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, the humour Dario Fo. For months or years the ambulance driver makes conflicting statements, impersonating every kind of fighter, serving opposite sides of the conflict—until he is released with a sac of severed heads like the one he had in the ambulance when they first stopped him. Meanwhile cars are exploding, gunmen terrorise whole neighbourhoods, houses are shelled without warning. But the man who leaves is driven by something deeper than the criteria listed on refugee-status application forms in Scandinavia. He senses that, where he lives—and not because of suicide bombers or torture—he has been robbed of something key, deprived of a self he might have had, his life denied meaning. It may be that this man is a sincere intellectual critical of his country’s backwardness. Having survived the brainwash, the Cause no longer convinces him. Nor does Identity, Imperialism, Orientalism and other defecations of history’s Arab-Muslim posterior. He feels the weight of his own absurdity. But it equally may be that this is a man of Religion or of the Regime, a dork or a douche bag that thrives on duress, seeing trouble only when his material life cracks under absurdities he has never acknowledged. He too wants out now. He wants to go places or, having been places, to go somewhere. As the ambulance driver tells the psychiatrist at the asylum to which immigration has sent him, pleadingly: he wants to sleep. And so, a refugee in Hassan Blasim’s short stories might be one of 35 illegal immigrants abandoned to the pitch-black interior of their Berlin-bound truck after the driver flees without bothering to unbar the door, only to be ravaged by a werewolf from among them. Yet he might also be a soldier who has never left Iraq: someone who is a refugee neither subjectively nor objectively but by virtue of being in the army under Saddam. It doesn’t even matter whether he knows he is a refugee. In “The Virgin and the Soldier”, the hero survives by cutting three fingers off the hand of the seamstress with whom he is trapped in a storage room—with tailor shears. They both work in a military clothing factory, and they go to that room because it is their only possible meeting place. They are deep in their illicit embrace when they realise they’ve been locked in, with a pile of uniform rejects for a mattress. Now it’s been three days without food or water and the soldier must have something to eat. In the end he never deflowers his seamstress.

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WRITER: So refugees are people who, confined and deprived, end up devouring each other; they may even turn into wolves for the purpose. This is how Blasim redefines the word. Like every seriously strong metaphor, cannibalism is classic stuff, as profound as it is unoriginal. Only a true writer can get away with using it so effortlessly. A writer: someone who in another context is himself a refugee, but whose role just now is to tell a refugee’s tale, or a soldier’s. Or a werewolf’s. Blasim contains everything from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” to Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. A writer is so called not because he has a contribution to make to national consciousness, a presence in the media or a role to play in society—most of the time there is in fact no society—but because he remoulds reality into something enjoyable. He redefines words. He also comments on what History he experiences, of course, but only obliquely, without emotion and to inconclusive ends. So a true writer is automatically overshadowed by a fake brand of eponymous creature: “They claim they are builders who will rebuild what the war lay waste to, cultured politicians and economists, doctors, surgeons and interpreters of catastrophes, destroyers of the idols of religion and superstitions.” Not so Khaled Al Hamrani, 57, author of three collections of short stories published at his expense, tenacious bard of his neighbourhood’s totally insignificant souk, and hero of “The Story Souk”. “You can make the woman fishmonger at the market a spaceship lost in the cosmos, or turn aubergines into a lesson in philosophy; the important thing is to observe for a long time, like someone contemplating suicide from a balcony,” Hamrani tells the local newspaper in an interview. “It’s also important to own an unpretentious imagination that is nonetheless sly and dead serious, and to have the soul of a dying ascetic. This souk that I write about is to me a wide ocean, in which I am only a bubble that is undoubtedly there but not clearly visible.” Hamrani dreams of a mysterious set of numbers, he remembers particular horrors of the war. Eventually he tricks the reader into believing that he has died in a bombing at the souk while buying his son new shoes, one of which he holds onto as he breathes his last, when in fact he is making it up. It is Hamrani who has been writing “The Story Souk”, not Blasim. But, to see the world in a blood-washed shoe? A man who has never travelled, who has no interest in leaving his hometown or writing about anything other than its souk, no literary ambition beyond getting his stories down on paper: in his sheer ordinariness Hamrani ironically comes across as History’s witness, someone who realises that it wouldn’t matter if he died. “They mourn the nonexistent readers,” the narrator says of those builders and surgeons, those bastards. “They’ve also found that writers of previous times are the ones who let the readers go, whereas for hundreds of years there’ve been in the country no readers in the broad sense of the word. There’ve been only hungry people, murderers, illiterates, soldiers, villagers, people who pray, people who get lost and wronged people.”

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SOLDIER: A stretch of wall splattered with the brains of a girl. The girl’s head was hit by the wing of a plane that was shot down in Kirkuk. Her body flew up into the sky and reportedly never came down. The kind of ancient image a true writer will bring to his ultra-realistic setting: he parades it like an animated rune. Writers dream and play tricks, bear testimony. But essentially they are persons who contemplate their deaths with equanimity. It’s what soldiers too must do if they are to live out their time before they become refugees or die. Contrary to the wishes of their superiors—Saddams, Qaeda commanders, Guardians of Iran’s Islamic Revolution—soldiers do not want to be in battle. And by the random rules of this book, everyone is a soldier of some kind: an instrument of power, an employee of reality. Everyone is here against their will. That is why, having lived his story, a soldier will apply for refugee status at the immigration offices of literature. In the title story, a madman imagines an alternative history of his town, in which the townspeople engage in full-blown war with the government to prevent the dismantling of a statue of two blond young men who brought the town good fortune long ago. Elsewhere people compete to tell their tales of atrocity through a dedicated radio channel: the more atrocious, the better. An Iraqi in the Netherlands is so determined to shed his past he calls himself Carlos Fuentes and stops speaking Arabic. Despite his astonishing success at becoming a Dutchman in waking life, Fuentes is tormented by nightmares in which he is Iraqi again. A military correspondent receives a series of ingenious novel manuscripts by post. Their writer is a young soldier who, as it turns out, has died in battle. The correspondent publishes the novels in his name, he is rich and famous. Yet the dead man just won’t stop sending him manuscripts, each as brilliant as the next—and he ends up burning himself in the furnace he sets up to get rid of the excess poetry. Still, there are subtler ways to die. “The Corpse Exhibition” is a pep talk to a novice artist of murder. The older agent of the Organisation explains how much he hates the horror-movie sensationalism of traditional methods. In contrast, he gives the example of an agent who turned the flesh and bone of the target into a concrete-like flagpole on a mound, with the fluttering flag made of the target’s skin. The agent completed his art work while the target—himself a failed agent—was conscious. It also transpires that agents are practically unable to ever leave the Organisation once they join, that the work of killing and publicly displaying the corpse is systematically funded and administered, that the Organisation moves from one part of the world to another, staying only for as long as conditions are unstable. Thus the fascist philosophy of lightening the world’s human burden combined with G J Ballard: art is art is macabre, apparently. At the start of the pep talk the agent unsheathes a knife that he keeps holding; by the end he will thrust it in the novice’s gut, saying, “You are trembling.”

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SHAPESHIFTER: A soldier, then, is someone who trembles, especially someone who trembles when he’s not supposed to; a soldier is a human being after all. But so, all things considered, is the alien Hassan Blasim (b. 1973), the Iraqi who lives in Finland, an Arab writer first published in translation—logically, when you think about it. Addressing his dead psychiatrist in Helsinki, one character says, “I am unable to write a story, but I am ready to be involved in the issue of literature to one end only: for the dignity of those on the brink of madness.” Quotable lines bob on the dense surf of the story: the psychiatrist’s fatal car accident; plans to include a live camel in the decor of an Iraqi restaurant; the rudimentary sci-fi saga unfolding in the mind of the hero. In “The Bad Habit of Undressing”, a chance conversation with a jobless drunk raises the question of sanity again. “Better to say ‘authentic’ than ‘mad’, for authenticity is talking to others in spite of the nightmare terror and pain.” And the tone of the drunk describing his habit of never wearing clothes in the house turns out to be as authentically desultory as it should be. Miraculously, a wolf appears in the hall of the drunk’s apartment; the man locks himself in the bathroom, but after 48 hours hiding, he decides to open the door and confront the wolf, naked or not. Pouncing on the beast as the beast pounces on him, the man enters an otherworldly darkness. The suggestion is never spelled out that, instead of the wolf being a projection of his, for the duration of that semi-conscious state, the drunk is or becomes the wolf a la Zhuangzi. Shapeshifting, blessing or curse, is the prerogative of both the soldier who becomes a refugee and the writer who recounts the becoming. Is it what happens to Jaafar Al Mtalbi when he turns from the composer of the regime’s official songs to a professional blasphemer who is eventually killed in the most gruesome way. Is it what happens to the narrator of “That Ill-Fated Smile” when he is beaten up by Nazis, having been unable to suppress his meaningless smile all day? Is it what happens to Blasim himself when he writes? “Doctor,” says the Helsinki-based hero of “The Dung Beetle”, “we have observed the planet Duouis Tumla… and are now certain that no one lives on it except the six recorded by the space observation cameras. What is surprising is that they have not crossed the borders of their village on the banks of the Red River. That is a frozen river, but we are still ignorant of the nature of its substance. It looks to us like a river of frozen blood…”

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Hassan Blasim, Majnun sahat al-Huriyya (The Madman of Freedom Square), Amman: Al-Mu’assassa Al-’Arabiyya lid-Dirasat wan-Nashr, 2012; Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ and The Corpse Exhibition, two acclaimed volumes of short stories translated into English by Jonathan Wright, are published by Comma Press in Manchester, UK and Penguin USA

iPhoneographic images © Youssef Rakha

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Al Ahram Weekly

KENYON REVIEW (MINI) INTERVIEW

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With my late father, Elsaid Elsayed Rakha—lawyer, disillusioned communist, and incredible anti-patriarch, 1981

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What have you learned about the writing process in the last five years? 
I’ve learned too many technical things to list here, and they’re all the more difficult to list because it happened mostly in Arabic. But I also learned to pool different kinds of writing – journalism, literary nonfiction, poetry, historical research, erotica, and humor – to bring together my first novel, the Book of the Sultan’s Seal (forthcoming in English translation with Interlink). The result is a kind of pastiche, but maybe all novel-writing is pastiche. It’s not so much mixing and matching styles of writing as juxtaposing ways of looking at the world through mimicking the corresponding languages in which that world reveals itself, through people – the challenge being to maintain a unified and presumably compelling whole.
Since the novel was published it’s been called both an achievement and a pointless experiment: I’ve learned to accept that too. Not criticism per se – was it Ingmar Bergman who said that all criticism is poison? – because you can’t take in poison, but the fact that part of the value of a serious book is that some readers won’t like it. It’s always more interesting to ask what someone likes or dislikes about your work than whether or not they value it as such. Sometimes what is wrong with your book is simply that another writer feels superior (or inferior) to you, or that a person you’ve known doesn’t want to be a character, or to be that character. So your purpose in asking is never to change course to suit a wider variety of tastes. It’s to check your intentions against people’s expectations, taking their positions and underlying assumptions into account. I don’t tend to invent characters, I tend to reinvent and change real people; it’s not always possible to cut all relations with people I’ve written about, and I’m sure as hell not going to mess up my work just so that they stay happy with me!
More importantly, perhaps, in the last five years I’ve learned not to pay too much attention to Cairo literary-intellectual circles, which are limited and limiting spaces. While making up a sizable part of the very tiny proportion of Egyptians actually interested in literature, these circles are so incestuous and inward-looking and small-minded they can make writing, let alone being a writer, seem like a hateful exercise – a bad habit, almost. Now even if it is that, writing – even Arabic writing, even writing for oneself, without ambition – should never feel quite so despicable…

Tell us a little about your KR piece.  How was it written?  What was the hardest part about writing it?
The idea for the piece came up in (online) conversation with my US publisher, Hilary Plum, who being a writer herself is my guardian angel in your part of the world – even though we haven’t met. We were talking about Arabic literature in translation and I’d shown her a bunch of articles I’d written about literature and the Arab Spring for Al Ahram Weekly, which she thought too removed to be worth collecting for publication in America. She suggested writing a longer piece in which things could come together for readers not familiar with my part of the world.
My starting point was that there need not be anything fundamentally different about contemporary literature in the Arab world than in Turkey, Japan, Eastern Europe, Latin America, or anywhere else – which I really think there isn’t. So the challenge was to show that there has been a continuous tradition of sophisticated writing in Arabic even though, for ultimately political reasons, Westerners have not known about it; and to debunk the mythical (and, frankly, rather ugly) narrative of a recent boom in engaging writing that facilitated a corresponding boom in successful translation to English. The Arab Spring, which happened in the wake of the supposed boom, provided a suitable reference point. Western interest in “the Arab novel” as political commentary or anthropological source material can only misrepresent contemporary Arabic literature and misread its context.
The hardest part was bringing in all kinds of relevant details – Islamism, the Egyptian regime’s shifting alliances during the Cold War, the place of literature in society – each of which was complex enough for a separate essay. I also wasn’t always clear about what needed clarification, because naturally I take too many facts for granted – and it was in this department that Hilary’s contribution proved indispensable. It kind of proved my point, though: for someone who is interested in literature, even the most irrelevant and far-away society need not be more than a backdrop. It might require explanation but that doesn’t come in the way of the life-affirming exchange, both intimate and supra-cultural, that is literature.

Philip Larkin has a great short essay on writing called “The Pleasure Principle.”  In it, he sketches three stages of writing a poem.  The steps begin like this: “the first (stage) is when a (hu)man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time.  The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.”  Are his stages germane to your writing process, and what you try to make when you write? 
I think they are, yes, to some extent. I think they’re especially germane to my writing a poem, which I do most often while I’m working on other things. But they don’t explain why, occasionally, that just doesn’t work and someone who is normally able to set off your poetic devices will be stuck and blame you, even though you’ve treated your new “emotional concept” in the exact same way… I think what matters in the procedure Larkin describes is how much space you leave within the device for someone to actually invent an emotional concept connected with the one that compelled you to construct it, because I doubt if emotional concepts that you become obsessed with can really be reproduced intact; and sometimes when you try to ensure they are reproduced as is that just alienates someone whose environment or ideas or beliefs are different from yours – which is exactly what literature should not do. I mean, the scary thing about Larkin’s procedure is that it sounds like the recipe for giving birth to a new cliche or – the easier thing, by far – finding a relatively new and interesting way of relaying a cliche. I am not necessarily denying that this may be the most any writer can ever do, but there are better and more fun ways of doing it.
My writing process doesn’t always depend on instantaneous obsession with an emotional concept. I mean, sometimes it does. But I have a few emotionally pertinent concepts that I’m obsessed with all the time: what it means to not be alone, for example; how something becomes real depending on whether you perceive it to be real or on how you talk about it; what society and identity mean for an individual… Each piece of writing is a way of indulging these same obsessions. I couldn’t tell you precisely what my concepts are because they are in constant transition and transformation, but it’s always interesting to trace the interests and experiments you are working on now all the way back to something you wrote ten years ago. And then you change: you really are not the person you were even two or three years ago; I don’t mean that metaphorically. How the obsessions carry over from one “I” to the next is something a writer might be aware of. It can be unnerving.

In the 1950′s, John Crowe Ranson invited a coterie of critics (William Empson, Northrop Frye, etc.) to write a “credo” for the The Kenyon Review. The results became an essay series by 10 leading critics on their core beliefs regarding literature and the critical practice, entitled “My Credo.”  What would you include in your own credo?  What core beliefs do you have about literature and books?
Most of the time I think of writing as a position on the world – a vocation, a lifestyle, an ethics – in the way that scholarship or performance, say, is a position on the world. Writing is the position on the world that’s not a political position, or the closest thing possible to a position that’s not political – even when it deals, on the surface, with political or historical subjects. What I mean by this is that the knowledge literature produces, the pleasures it involves, the seemingly unethical practices it sometimes permits, all want to experience something more than history. (Remember Joyce’s famous statement: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”) They want to say something more about a person or a group of people than where and when they live, what their lives look like, or what predetermined factors make them look that way – the nightmare, which it really is impossible to awake from no matter what. Literature wants to say something DESPITE that nightmare, something about what lives mean or could’ve meant, how beautiful they can be looked at in a certain way, or why they might be worth living. I think when you try honestly to do that, you speak to more people who are different from you than it’s otherwise possible. That’s partly why literature is important: it emphasizes things that are deeper and more consistent and that last longer than most “history”. In this sense, even though it should always be accessible, it’s a very specialized mode of information sharing; I believe it’s comparable to (though no longer part of) those scholarly endeavors we’ve come to group together as the humanities, which are older than but never entirely incompatible with the natural sciences, and which can rarely do without a historical-political frame.
Still, writing is about language, that infinitely imperfect but necessary tool for going about our lives. It’s about the space that lies between reality and the words with which we manage it: our only way of dealing with, creating, changing (or failing to change) what the universe throws at us or throws us into. Language is more consensual than most other reality-molding tools – weapons or borders, for example – even though those other tools still require it, and even though in literature it’s far more fluid than them. So playing with language – often with the many registers of spoken and written Arabic, in my case – will have to be included in my credo. I try not to do this for its own sake because there are more interesting things to be done in literature. But then it’s always fascinating to see how changing the rules of the language you use will ultimately shape the reality you’re summoning up as you use it. Maybe it’s more accurate to say “the alternative reality” since, like that of any information system, however interactive, the reality literature sustains will inevitably be more ordered and finite than actual, perceptual reality.
My credo would also include a couple of sentences about the fact that in Arabic, the word for book is a more recent usage for what used to mean simply “epistle”. All canonical books in Arabic are actually addressed to a friend or a patron, just like letters. That’s a very moving metaphor for me because when I write, it’s always TO someone, usually to my best friend (who lives in a different country and very seldom reads my work), but also to someone I don’t know. So, considering how limited the readership for literature is anywhere in the world, few things make me happier than finding out my letter has reached and moved someone who isn’t a writer or a critic, who doesn’t exist in the same part of space-time as I, and who may not even speak the same language (that is the advantage of translation and, in my case, of having two languages). It’s because, as well as being a specialized mode of producing knowledge, literature is an affirmation of your existence – in some ways, it is the only one. The thing that you communicate to another which tries to beat history is your person, your soul or your neurochemical imprint, which can’t be mass-produced and will always be subjective and at least slightly insane.

Tell us about a teacher (“teacher” construed broadly!) who has been important to your writing. 
There are a few possibilities here. I want to talk about the late Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), who spent most of his life in San Francisco and had connections with the Beat Generation and City Lights, and whom (perhaps not as sadly as it sometimes feels) I never met. Strangely enough but not – in retrospect – unexpectedly, it was a few months before he died that I first heard of him. I didn’t even hear of him. I walked into a bookshop in Abu Dhabi, where I was living at the time, and picked up a collection of poems; the author’s name was very unusual but vaguely familiar.
I think it’s symptomatic of the catastrophe that was Arab nationalism that this Assyrian-Christian Iraqi, whether because he was an emigre or because he was neither a (Muslim) nationalist nor politicized, remains largely uncelebrated even in literary circles. As far as I’m concerned he is the 20th-century incarnation of the great Abbasid poet al Mutannabi. He has the same incredible inventiveness, the same facility with language, the same combination of intense self-interest and lack of keenness on personal topics. From the time that I found that collection, “The Lantern Bearer in the Night of Wolves”, and until I finished my Book of the Sultan’s Seal, I read all of Sargon’s poems that were published; it is still that first book that I return to most often.
I have no idea what Sargon taught me. Some of my poems are modeled on poems he wrote, some are more or less direct reinterpretations; sometimes I feel that every good poem I’ve written since 2007 is thanks to him. But his “influence” – I guess that’s what you would call it – lies somewhere else entirely. I guess he was what I could never be: a true vagabond (a Beatnik) who had to provide for himself as soon as he started traveling in his teens; a dedicated poet who worked in Assyrian as well as Arabic and English and saw translation as an essential part of his career; a globetrotter with no connection to a city like the one I have with Cairo. But he is perhaps the only contemporary figure who saw the Arabic language exactly as I do:
“There is no pure language in this sense. [Arabic] happened to be the strongest so it pulled around itself, like a magnet, all the dying languages that had seen their day centuries ago. It was a powerful language that absorbed other languages… So, when I write my poetry in Arabic, I tell you this – and it’s a secret between me and myself – sometimes I feel that I am really writing in all these languages, because I believe, finally, that any language contains all the dead memories of the races who contributed to it… it’s like raw material for me. I feel that this language could be extended endlessly into some new idiomatic formulations – which I’m doing all the time.”
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One flew over the Dhakla oasis

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THE NATIONAL

After a few hours, Youssef Rakha writes, the presence of djinns seemed wholly unremarkable

Eight months ago, my London-based Egyptian friend came home to carry out the field-work component of his doctoral thesis, which explores the assumptions involved in treating the mentally ill. All he needed was an isolated, relatively self-contained spot where there was no modern psychiatric care. So, rather than learning a new language on top of everything else (the endless required literature reviews, etc), he decided to return to his home country.

For posterity’s sake I should say I am speaking of Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed: frustrated astronaut turned orthopaedic surgeon-in-training turned disgruntled psychiatrist turned, finally, philosopher and doctoral candidate. Mohammed had always liked the Western Desert. And so, like the old caricature of the Colonialist desperately in search of nutty Natives, he set off from Cairo to research all five of its oases. Eventually he settled on Mut, the capital of Dakhla – according to him “the most baseline”, the most typical and unremarkable of all, and of course without a single psychiatrist to its name. The idea was to live there on and off for six months, researching how the local approaches to madness – exorcism, for example – measured up to the western status quo.

I wanted to fly out to see him, but only return tickets were available, and the flights were a week apart. I couldn’t be away that long. In time I accepted that a 12-hour bus journey was my only option. Which is how my story begins …

Madness is fascinating. But so was Mohammed’s description of Mut – named after the ancient mother goddess, but otherwise devoid of links to ancient Egypt. He described it to me in paradoxical terms: an urban community of subsistence farmers; its people of neither Nile Valley fellahin ancestry nor Bedouin stock. Many of the city’s residents, Mohammed told me, trace their ancestors to Suez, an origin so unexpected it might as well be Mars. Others claim Arabian, even Ottoman descent. They share a distinct lack of interest in the world beyond their little city, along with an encompassing belief in the power of djinns.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but these details must have gone straight to the exoticism antennae on my head. An insular community where the supernatural enjoys a stronger-than-average presence in the collective psyche: my voyeuristic, rationalist neurons were buzzing, informing me of my superiority, readying me for some kind of exotic encounter extraordinaire. By the time I arrived at the newfangled Cairo Land Port, I was feeling slightly guilty. Surely I should be suffering the 12 hours in solidarity with Mohammed, who complained of isolation and boredom every time he called me – not looking forward to indulging in some complicated Orientalism.

I had barely made it to the platform when I noticed a podgy midget in a Mao suit eyeing me with an unsettling mixture of curiosity and contempt. Though I already knew the answer, I walked over and asked him how long it takes to get to Dakhla. After answering non-committally, he launched into a sort of cross-examination: where was I from, where exactly was I going, what for, who with, for how long, why? Finally he stepped abruptly away with forced politeness – only to go on giving me sidelong glances for as long as I remained in his sight.

Over three days at the town’s central cafe – Mohammed’s centre of operations – I saw for myself that it was exactly as he told me: everyone did in fact believe in invisible, fire-based djinns who wander the town speaking Syriac, a dialect of Middle Aramaic that has been extinct for centuries. These djinns, it seemed, could do anything: from snidely controlling your thoughts (paranoid schizophrenia) to shrinking themselves down and lodging themselves in your prostrate (erectile dysfunction). Within a few hours of my first day, I had heard enough about them that their presence felt perfectly ordinary, mundane, unremarkable. It did not strike me as particularly strange that bachelors live in fear of wedding-night impotence caused by a supernatural “knot” commissioned by their enemies, tied by some evil “sheikh” who knows all the fail-proof hexes by heart.

Other, less mystical things perplexed me more. Why did people in Mut, unlike most anyone else in millennial Egypt, love Bollywood films so much? How did they not realise that the childish violence broadcast by World Wrestling Entertainment is all staged? And why did everyone I met apart from Mohammed’s few friends give me the same look I got from the midget in the Mao suit at the bus station? Divine retribution, perhaps: for the three-day duration of my stay, the remote Orientals taught the Cairene Orientalist that they distrusted and despised him more than he could ever mystify or objectify them.

The look trailed me everywhere, from the cigarette kiosk to the town’s sole kebab restaurant, in the dark, empty internet cafe with straw seats so shaky and uncomfortable you could barely sit on them, on sleepy street corners and in bustling corner shops. It identified me as precisely what I was: a westernised Cairene dissatisfied with bland Egyptian food, the discomforts of my filthy one-star hotel, the lack of activities beyond worship and shisha, the absence of women from social space, the hopelessness of culture and art, the insularity – the terrible, terrible ordinariness of life.

In the end only the Asian-looking straw hats on the heads of farmers – utterly unlike anything traditional anywhere in Egypt – struck me as in any way noteworthy. The landscape was no doubt distinct (even in autumn, daytime heat was unbearable), but the streets themselves looked so indistinguishable from a Nile Delta town that whenever I went out for a walk I headed reflexively for the nonexistent corniche. And talking expansively with Mohammed (there was nothing else to do), I came to see just how badly he had been disillusioned as well.

Mohammed hoped that spirit possession might turn out to be a partially viable alternative or supplement to the increasingly prevalent biomedical model of mental illness. Then the “sheikh” who was providing him with information, a Tramadol addict continually using needles on his own arms, came up with a new method of exorcism, one inspired by Mohammed’s modern medical presence: instead of beating his patients up, splashing them with water blessed by the Quran or simply breathing the verses onto their head, he would henceforth write the relevant verses on paper in gazelle’s blood, then soak that paper in tap water, then inject the possessed with the resulting solution.

A handful of madmen roamed the city freely – well fed, muttering about djinns, occasionally solicited for sex. But the truly memorable characters in Mut were the same ones you might encounter anywhere. On my last day, one of Mohammed’s case studies, a lost soul in his mid-fifties, approached our table at the cafe, looking more or less presentable. Everyone invited him to join in for a drink, but he did not oblige. Instead he stood there with a tortured expression on his face. “You want me to sit with you, do you?” he said. “How many cockroaches are you?”

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