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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 -10 February 1999 Issue No. 415
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Book Fair Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Of aubergines and autobiography
By Youssef RakhaPrivate Matthew's Dilemmas
Decorated in a range of gaudy greens, the Main Symposium Hall turned out to be far less "chic" than I had been led to believe. It was empty when I arrived just after noon, thinking I might be too late for the Katib wa Kitab (Writer and Book) seminar. The scheduled subject for discussion was Fathi Abdel-Fattah's autobiographical testimony, Thuna'iat Al-Sijn wal Ghurba (Duet of Jail and Exile) which deals with his experience of political internment (1959-1964) and his subsequent "self-imposed exile" (1976-1984) as Al-Gomhouriya's correspondent in East Germany. Due to the Friday prayers, as we were later told, the seminar had been delayed till one. Nevertheless, the hall was still half-empty when two of the five intellectuals who should have been there (writer Abdel-Aal El-Hamamsi and critic Ibrahim Fathi) finally made their way onto the stage. Under the intrusive eye of a huge television camera and beset by an occasionally disruptive cast, Abdel-Fattah could hardly have been more dauntless when asked to launch the discussion. Citing Goethe's opinion that an introduction by the author could only be an infidelity to the text, he added, "The worst person to talk about a book is the person who wrote it." True to his convictions, Abdel-Fattah then said very little throughout the hour and a half the seminar lasted. "I lived through the experience of concentration camps during the Nasser regime, and spent the years when Sadat ruled as an expatriate. All I can say is that I wrote about both periods honestly." That "no Egyptian should suffer any form of physical or psychological torture for daring to express himself" was both the book's theme and Abdel-Fattah's constant refrain.El-Hamamsi, for his part, delivered an extended panegyric, praising the book as the product of an era more democratic than either of those it described. He commended the book's "historical objectivity", which he identified with the writer's complete sincerity in dealing with his experience. His most endearing contribution, however, was an anecdote concerning the journalist Mahmoud El-Saadani (who, together with Ibrahim Fathi, was a fellow intern of Abdel-Fattah's in the infamous Oases camp of the 1960s). One of their guards, a man called Matta (or "Private Matthew", to use Fathi's preferred version of his name), had a son who had just graduated from prep school. One day, Matta was quieter than usual. He appeared to have much on his mind. "What's wrong, Private Matthew?" asked El-Saadani. "My son has finished prep school and I don't know what to do," replied the guard. "Let him go to secondary school, Private Matthew." Ð "And then?" Ð "To university." Ð "And then?" Ð "He will be a great intellectual and you will be proud of him." Ð "But what happens after he becomes an intellectual?" Ð "Why, he will join us here of course. Didn't you know that, Private Matthew?"
It was Fathi's speech, however, that finally brought the discussion fully to life. Speaking wittily, and out of a deep understanding of the historical and political questions raised by the book, as well as first-hand knowledge of the subjects it tackles, he chose to play the devil's advocate, rather than simply express his admiration. "What is it that turns brute facts into history? It is the narrative context in which the writer places these facts. It has nothing to do with the sincerity or personal integrity of the writer." Picking on specific occasions when Abdel-Fattah's poetic licence -- or was it the "gaps in his memory"? -- helped him depart from the strictly factual (for example, the communist poet Paul Eluard did not die, as the book states, in a Nazi concentration camp), Fathi proposed that the Thuna'iat was not, after all, as objective as it might appear. His personal commentary on the first part of the book, however, proved to be even more probing. "I was there and I know all about it. The interns put up an admirable resistance. In the face of horrific danger, they went on fasts, on strikes. And this book excels at describing this resistance. Conditions actually improved a little because of these efforts. The lowest circle of Dante's Inferno became a slightly nicer place to be." But what about Private Matthew? "He was friendly with many of us, but every time they wanted him to get something out of us or be nasty in any way, they promised him he would be promoted to the rank of shawish. So Private Matthew would do nasty things in spite of himself. Of course, he remained a private to the end. Despite his many infidelities to us, they never made him a shawish..."
Open your eyes, open your mind: the pleasures of literature are not confined to the page, and there was song and dance galore to greet those who this week answered the call to the Book FairCafé Culture, Culture Café
The supposedly informal seminar on Miral El-Tahawi's second novel, Al-Badhingana Al-Zarqaa' (The Blue Aubergine -- a derogatory allusion to the baby girl who occupies centre-stage for the first few pages of the book) did not start till half past four -- just enough time to have a look around the venues surrounding the Culture Café where the seminar was scheduled to take place. Just enough time, too, to try and work out the difference between them. In the New Creative Works Tent, a few people had gathered around poet Amgad Rayyan to discuss the development of the prose poem -- the much talked-about "new" genre which does away with rhyme and metre in favour of an open structure and flowing, individually determined rhythms. One scandalised member of the audience stood up to ask if the invocation of frogs and spiders constituted a new poetic orientation, and whether the departure from family mores and conservative conventions made sense in an "Eastern" (by which he meant, presumably, a "backward") society. It was a female poet he was referring to and, despite Rayyan's repeated pleas, the prevalent sense of male chauvinism was overpowering. Even more overpowering, though, was the feeling that the seminar topic was utterly decontextualised. The spontaneous rapport that informed the nearby cafeteria, where writers and artists gathered informally throughout the afternoon, could not have been further from the atmosphere of tension and mutual distrust that characterised speaker-audience relations in the tent seminars, which were ultimately much more formal than one had expected. Not only were the seminar audiences largely ignorant of the books they came to hear discussed, but in most cases they had not even heard of them before they stepped into the tent. The intellectuals' insistence on speaking their own language only exacerbated the general sense of futility that hung over the proceedings.There was no sense of futility, however, when it was the turn of Wafaa' Awad's Fi Al-Iraq Al-Mala'eka Tamout (In Iraq The Angels Die). Hordes of people thronged the Culture Café in a scene that started out looking like a political rally, and ended up by actually being one. El-Tahawi's book, as a result, had to wait an extra 45 minutes. "Down with Clinton," they were still chanting, while critic Salah Fadl took his seat and, in the presence of a silent Abdel-Wahab Al-Bayyati (the great Iraqi poet now living in Jordan), launched into what turned out to be one of his university lectures -- comprehensive and illuminating, eloquent, delivered in impeccable standard Arabic, but hardly appropriate to the occasion. The few audience members who hazarded a question at the end had clearly not understood much and, despite further attempts to explain, their comments were an embarrassment to everyone. "Miral discovers the contours of history as she traces the contours of the body," said Fadl. "In her writing we encounter the paradox of polyphony residing within a single, unique voice, and imagination that takes reality as its starting point..." By the end of Fadl's speech, Amgad Rayyan, the only other speaker, had little to say and very little time in which to say it. The novelist's own contribution was minimal, despite the relevance and interest of her book -- a brilliant exploration of the female psyche in Egyptian society, which pursues and expands the postmodernist project set out in her first novel, Al-Khibaa' (translated into English as The Tents). With visible reluctance, she read a beautifully poetic passage. Asked how she felt about the seminar, she replied that the diffident tone in which she had read betrayed her feelings exactly.
A Day in the Life of a Book Fair
The sun had set when I made my way back towards the cafeteria. In the Okaz Bazaar, which had been shut when I first came out of the Main Hall, stood one of 12 more or less anonymous poets who were all condemned to read their work on the same evening. I had planned on staying at the fair for as long as possible, but the number of speeches, arguments, faces I had encountered now seemed sufficient for one day. The quality of the poetry being read, moreover, and the stale tone in which it was delivered, did not make the Bazaar seem a particularly enticing option. The same could be said of the Culture Tent, where two or three people lingered purposelessly while on the stage a young poet, looking utterly bored, surrounded by musical instruments, fumbled with a piece of paper. The Main Hall Poetry Evening, on the other hand, would not start for another three hours. "But if quantity must inevitably reduce quality," said my companion, "why have so many activities in the first place?..." He had summed up my impression of the Fair. "Exactly!", I shouted, and we set off together, in search of the nearest gate.
Who would go to a book fair in search of a movie or a play? Injy El-Kashef examines the motives of the audience
