 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The locusts of Cervantes
By Youssef RakhaThe work of the 1990s generation of novelists has been a marriage of extremes. In the attacks launched on contemporary Arabic literature in the first two volumes of Al-Garad: Al-Shi'r Al-Misri Al-Hadith (The Locusts: New Egyptian Poetry, March and July 1994), poet Ahmed Taha, editor of Al-Garad, put forward the idea that poetry was a "daily" form of creative expression. Social, political and national concerns were of no interest to literature, said Taha; nor was (classical) linguistic virtuosity. At the same time, though, a handful of more conventional and better recognised short story writers who had began their careers in the 1960s and were themselves proponents of the qualities that Taha was attacking, had turned, in a remarkable display of gusto, to "the depreciated legacy of Cervantes", as Milan Kundera called the novel, producing what were, in effect, extended short stories with a strong poetic breath and a (direct or indirect) awareness of their historical specificity.
Taha's battalion of younger poets (Mohamed Metwalli, Bahaa Awwad, Hoda Hussein) are Westernised, amoral and explicit. In surrealistically subversive texts, which are invariably written in prose, they suggest a view of the world that is both rootless and specific. Intent on attacking moral and cultural taboos, they use "the language of the streets", noisily heralding the advent of an Egyptian Beat Generation (the Locusts) that will obliterate all residue of an outdated mode of existence.
The names that have come to be associated with the novel (Mohamed El-Bisatie, Bahaa Taher, Ibrahim Aslan), by contrast, belong to older writers who favour grass roots and understatement. In sober, coherent, occasionally symbolic narratives, they continue to explore what it means to be Egyptian, and to belong. They display a deep sympathy for the disinherited and the dispossessed. Their writing bears testimony to a yearning for epic and myth. And their language is always beautifully polished, intensely poetic and heavily dependent on the standard Arabic idiom which they themselves contributed to forging in the 1960s.
In very different ways, Mustafa Zikri and Miral El-Tahawi have each exemplified the convergence of these two forces. Eager to play their parts in the vogue that the novel is enjoying, they are nonetheless stimulated by the transgressive, vernacular spirit that the "new poetry" represents in an unadulterated form. When the two young authors' latest novels* were discussed in public during the Book Fair, it was the explicit tone in which they dealt with controversial topics (sex, drugs, women's issues), rather than their originality as writers, that marked them off in a positive way.
Each had already produced a collection of stories and a novel, which were well received. Zikri, moreover, had written one of the most remarkable screenplays of the decade, Afarit Al-Asfalt (Devils of the Tarmac), and El-Tahawi's first novel, Al-Khibaa' (The Tent), had been translated into English almost as soon as it was published. Short as they may be, these books are clearly emblematic of the state of literature now. Not only do they trace the two writers' distinctive paths; they map the whole territory currently occupied by the novel.
A scene from Afarit Al-Asfalt (dir. Ossama Fawzi), Mustafa Zikri's cinematic debut Zikri, for one, has all the rough vitality, fascination with newness and lack of interest in structure that prevails among the garad of contemporary literature. Presenting himself as a magician in the style of Garcia Marquez, he turns out to be merely a conjuror who brings a seethingly urban brutality to his acts. It is rather the genre in which he expresses himself, and his oblique references to poverty, crime and the endless repressions of an underdeveloped society, that establish his affinity with the 1960s novelists. His first novel, Huraa' Mataha Qutiya (Drivel about a Gothic Labyrinth), like Afarit Al-Asfalt, drew on his experience of low-life Helwan and, despite a self-conscious reference to Borges, owes more to Kafka than to any Latin American or post-modernist writer.
Al-Khawf Ya'kul Al-Ruh, too, fails to deliver what it promises at first sight. It offers neither the philosophical depth and literary erudirion of Borges's stories nor the epic richness and sustained credibility of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The link with Fassbinder's 1973 film of the same title, Angst essen Seele auf, is in no way obvious. But the rambling, exploratory style of Huraa' Mataha Qutiya is taken a step further as the protagonist-narrator, sometimes identified as Mustafa, recounts his involvement with a mysterious foreign couple who live in the posh district of Garden City. As with Huraa', nothing is ever concluded. Passages that seem to be taken directly out of The Castle are juxtaposed with graphic descriptions of violence. Madam Nana "submitted to her husband's desire for her to go down with him into the basement," we are told in the course of a love scene which soon develops into a Kafkaesque parable, in which Mustafa sleeps in a room where the ceiling gets closer and closer to the ground, "and to stretch her leg before him on a thick block of wood, so that he could raise his arm in the air, to the point where the whiteness of his armpit would show, and with an old, heavy cleaver, strike at the delicate leg which is as white as his armpit..." Dream dissolves into reality and, though the subject matter allows Zikri less scope for divulging his knowledge of underground Cairo, the irreverent, taboo-breaking tone of his writing is unmistakable. Knowing, if not knowledgeable, self-references abide. Mustafa tells Madam Nana about his work: "I was writing second-rate sentimental novels, which were popular among ordinary readers." Consistently the reader is invited to speculate as to how and why things happen, and Mustafa Zikri, while he writes Al-Khawf Ya'kul Al-Ruh, figures alongside Mustafa in a more realistic depiction of the writer's everyday life. Perhaps to circumvent the authority of the autobiographical "I", the protagonist is referred to in the second and third persons as well. When Zikri weaves a previously published short story into the fabric of his text, however, one cannot help feeling that he must have run out of ideas halfway through.
Nothing could be further from El-Tahawi's economical, calculated style. One may well argue that, like Zikri, El-Tahawi has in effect rewritten her first novel, replacing the old setting with a slightly different one and relocating her characters accordingly. Certainly the stream-of-consciousness composition, the elaborate, often exquisitely poetic language, the obsessive concern with woman's place in society, and the whining, it's-not-fair tone were all present in Al-Khibaa' with the same intensity. Whereas Zikri carries the sign of the post-modern, moreover, in both Al-Khibaa' and Al-Badhingana Al-Zarqaa' El-Tahawi is more appropriately assessed from a modernist perspective. References to herself and to other writers are rare. It is true that the entire last section of Al-Badhingana Al-Zarqaa', perhaps due to the fact that El-Tahawi teaches Arabic literature at Helwan University, is devoted to a personal, highly selective reinterpretation of Tawq Al-Hamama (The Dove's Collar, Ibn Hazm Al-Andalusi's 1022 extended monograph on love). But it is the autonomous operation of words, the (often forced) psychoanalytic overtones, and the abrupt, fast-moving shifts of perspective that fundamentally distinguish her writing.
Al-Badhingana Al-Zarqaa', in a series of poetically intense glimpses which successfully evoke the vernacular idiosyncrasies of places, ages and people, recounts the life story of an Egyptian girl from the moment of her birth in the countryside till the time of her graduation from university in Cairo. She journeys both outwards and inwards. As if being a girl was not bad enough, as an adolescent she commits the unforgivable sin of drinking beer. "Hot pepper was placed in her mouth and she was tied to the leg of the bed and the lights turned out, and her doll was confiscated from her embrace, and from now on it was common usage to call her 'brought up in the streets', as the latest in a series of names she would be called: from 'the blue aubergine' to 'the monkey', 'the puppet', 'brought up in the streets'..." Her protagonist remains a passive agent, however, never challenging authority in a direct way and, though she introduces other voices (characters) whose experience may be more indicative of the desire for social change, the inherent lack of commitment to a true feminist ideal ultimately undermines the book's politicised "message", making it seem artificial and contrived. The voices, on the other hand, if one overlooks names and spacio-temporal locations, are practically interchangeable.
While Zikri, meditating on the enigmas of existence, is sometimes too clever for his own good ("The dice throw is the dreamer and the result of reading is the dream," he tells us in the final passage of Al-Khawf Ya'kul Al-Ruh, "and the table that receives the dice throw is oblivion..."), El-Tahawi is always personal and to the point: "The boy I loved gave me a necklace the colour of clouds and left, so I kept counting the beads of his absence, and painting the days, once the colour of the moon, once the colour of the sun, and once the colour of the blood which my womb expelled regularly..." Throughout the book, El-Tahawi excels at portraying unrequited love from a (middle-class) woman's perspective, but her most impressive achievement is the way she deals with the passage of time. The protagonist's link with her mother, for example, develops from mutual hostility to a melancholy reconciliation, and the transition is unexpectedly smooth and perfectly coordinated with the two characters' separate histories. By virtue of her linguistic ability and her direct concern with historical fact, she undoubtedly has more in common with the 1960s novelists than Zikri, but her approach to the trials and tribulations of Egyptian women is intentionally shocking, and her persistent, pioneering Western-style critique of a male chauvinist society is as daring as anything Al-Garad has produced. The "blue aubergine" rejected by her family at birth for not conforming to their expectations ("They found out early that I was a disappointment") will continue to contravene involuntarily and suffer the consequences, both physically and psychologically. She will also learn more about herself, however, and survive to write an elegy for her life and times.
In the hands of the 1990s writers, Cervantes's Arabic legacy, written in an experimental idiom which is still in the process of being developed, is made up of epics of the harshly physical world of Cairo and myths of the invincible Locust. It simultaneously heralds the advent of a new age and deplores the loss of an old one. It rejects its roots but never fails to identify them and, despite its apparent subscription to what has been called "an excessive egotism", in contrast to the socio-political awareness that typified Arabic literature in earlier stages, its importance derives from its relevance to society.
All things considered, radical developments in Arabic writing, if they exist at all, are still in their initial stages, but the way is open before the locusts of Cervantes.
Al-Khawf Ya'kul Al-Ruh (Fear Eats the Soul), Mustafa Zikri, Sharqiyat 1998. Al-Badhingana Al-Zarqaa' (The Blue Aubergine), Miral El-Tahawi, Sharqiyat 1998.
