Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

But is this enough? Such a great event, a turning point in the history of Egypt, indeed of the Arab world at large, deserves something more. It should be immortalised and there is nothing better than art and literature to do this.

Until now the West is celebrating World War I. One can mention dozens of films showing life on the battle front, battles at sea and the courage of individual soldiers.

There are many ideas that can be implemented to give the October War its due. I am here reminded of a literary movement that has been associated with the Second World War. I was reminded of this movement when I received a newly published book about a group of poets who lived in Egypt during the war years, between 1939 and 1945. It is the Personal Landscape group comprising such well-known names as Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Robin Fedden and G.S. Fraser. Personal Landscape was a magazine created by the first three poets, advised by another poet Terence Tiller. Spencer, Fedden and Tiller were lecturers at the English department of the then Fuad El-Awwal University. Durrell was press attaché at the British Embassy.

Hundreds of poems were written by military men who had never written poetry before. The war created poets. Some of them never wrote poetry after the war; they did not come back. But their poems remained. G.S. Fraser, himself a leading poet, wrote: "A war is one of the few periods of English history, in this century, when a large number of people who might not otherwise think of themselves as poets feel a need to write poems."

Many anthologies have been published, containing the poems of both the military and the civilians who wrote during and about the war. These poems assured the existence of a living memory of that event. In the introduction to one of these anthologies, Oasis, the editors write: "At the time of compiling Oasis we felt less need to describe a war. We were in it. Poems could be more reflective, an oasis, in fact. However, a generation later, when choosing poems to supplement Oasis, we realised that we were presenting a picture of yesterday to today. So we have chosen more poems that tell of the war, more poems of action."

What I want to say is that a generation after the end of the Second World War, new anthologies were published in remembrance of an event that touched dramatically the lives of millions. Poetry can immortalise things and people.

Going through the poems, one can trace the development of the war. But there is also the human side. Comparing World War II poets to those of World War I, G. S. Fraser writes that the sceptical feelings which the poets express are often the reaction to new, strange and picturesque surroundings, homesickness and loneliness, but seldom contain the pessimism of First World War poems. The universal theme of the later poets seems to be less a protest against war as such than feelings of a personal kind shared by many soldiers and, to some degree, hopes for a better world after the war. They reflect both a sense of loneliness and camaraderie.

I do not believe that it is too late to think along similar lines as the British War Office which was responsible for the production of two of the anthologies, Oasis and Return to Oasis, and to produce an Egyptian equivalent that would help immortalise ordinary people's experience of the October War.