Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Two Dr Jekylls and no Ms Hyde

By Nur Elmessiri

Atyaf (Apparitions), published recently within the Al-Hilal novel series and written by Radwa Ashour, author of the delightful Granada trilogy, starts out as a gripping novel. In its opening pages we are introduced to the world of the protagonist Shagar first through lyrical passages about a grandmother haunted by apparitions from the past and then through a humorous section dealing with Shagar's childhood and family. And then, "What happened?" A voice interrupts on page 15: "Why did I suddenly jump from Shagar the child to Shagar in her old age? I reread what I have written, stare at the computer screen and ask myself should I go on with the story of Shagar as a child, or return to the grandmother and follow the fate of her offspring till I arrive once again to the granddaughter? And the apparitions? Should I keep them peripheral, mysterious, hovering around the margins of the text, or should I bring them in and narrate some of their tales? And Shagar? Should I keep her and let the story hang between us, or drop her altogether and make do with talking about Radwa? But why did Shagar come to me when I set out to write about myself? And who is Shagar?"

Any reading of Atyaf must take into consideration how well the work proceeds from and handles these questions. One can decide not to feel cheated that the not-so-small claim made by the cover -- that Atyaf is a novel -- remains a promise unfulfilled. Then, having read beyond page 15 and, with a review in mind, reread Atyaf, one can begin a discussion of the book in an academic tone, making use of the theoretical lexicon that the text demands.

Part novel, part autobiography, part social and political history, Radwa Ashour's Atyaf is a complex text. To call it a "work" or to refer to Ashour as its "author" would be to ignore the challenges posed by post-structuralist theorists to more conventional ideas of what the writing/reading process entails. What begins as a "novel", in the more commonly understood sense of the term, becomes in Atyaf a self-reflective process of writing interrogating itself, interrogating other texts.

More recognisably up-front collage than morass of a palimpsest Atyaf does not, however, require a reader with a degree in literary theory to follow its gist. At several points in this autobiographical odyssey, unfolding mainly within the space of the Egyptian Academy, Ashour takes her reader with a firm but gentle pedagogical hand, providing various theoretical frameworks that would make less difficult the approach to the non-transparency of the text-in-process.

"In the evening Mourid and I would go to Tahrir Square: students crowded around the stone monument in the centre of the square... A few metres away from the heart of the square is the Omar Makram Mosque. Time and again I will walk from the mosque among mourners to bid friends and colleagues farewell. Most probably my friends and colleagues will bid me farewell from the same place." Radwa Ashour

Ashour's self-conscious text could be placed in the category of texts that, in order to be approached, require sophisticated-to-incomprehensible theoretical equipment. Yet to bury Atyaf under the weight of the very academic lexicon that it seems to demand would be unfair to what is, on a deep human level, a stimulating read. Though it is lighter than the theoretical discourse it invokes, Atyaf is challenging. Pandora's box-like it raises, explicitly and implicitly, the kinds of difficult questions that all writers at some point ask themselves: What does it mean to write? What is a novel? Why bother to write one? What compels me, Thoth-like, to keep record? What does it mean for me to trace and leave traces of a life? What is auto-bio-graphy? Why bother to remember? In an uncomfortably palpable way Atyaf raises the overwhelming question that, whether writers or not, whether or not we have lost someone to death who has or has not left behind an apparition, we all ask ourselves: What is a life?

Born in 1946 into a family many of whose members belonged to liberal professions, Radwa Ashour studied English Literature at Cairo University. She is now Professor of English Literature at Ain Shams University, a novelist, the wife of Palestinian poet Mourid Al-Barghouti and Umm Tamim. The story she tells describes in loving detail the various houses in which she lived as a child, most notably the one with a view of the Nile and the historic Abbas Bridge.

Ashour was a schoolgirl at a decisive moment in modern Egyptian history: her first few years of schooling saw her studying the history, geography and culture of France and later, after 1956, the Arabised curriculum. Partly through the eyes of the schoolgirl, partly through the grown-up eyes of a woman who has given much of her life to progressive ideals, we get a glimpse of the ethnic discrimination born of the tense late 50s atmosphere.

We listen to an elderly woman affiliated to Radwa's family's country house at Belebeis rattling off delightful Egyptian equivalents of cockney rhyming slang, are given a taste of Al-Mutannabi through Mourid's and Tamim's dialogic poetry recitations, and get a glimpse via coincidences of geography put to good narrative use of 1919, a time neither we nor Ashour can remember.

On campus we are at once in the Academy and in a universe bristling with politics: demonstrations, tear gas, the political detention of faculty and students. In the dark basement lecture hall we muse on Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and on the connection between African-American poetry and the lives of late 20th century Egyptian undergraduates. We share Dr Ashour's indignation at the open-door policy ethics of a university administrator who decides to lease out precious campus space to a privately run laundromat.

Bewildered, we laugh with Radwa, looking back from the safety of the retrospect, as she tries to negotiate the harrowing, Kafkaesque procedures to issue a passport for her Palestinian son born in Egypt to an Egyptian mother and Palestinian father. We laugh some more at the strange permutations of Mourid's name on ever-changing identification papers.

From 1977, when Mourid is expelled from Egypt for protesting against the Camp David Accords, till 1995, Tamim's formative years, we follow the diasporic path of the Ashour-Barghouti family, shuttle back and forth from Budapest to Cairo, wait at airports and worry each time whether Mourid, sometimes in the company of such eminent, politicised Arab men of letters as Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef and Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah, will be allowed to pass through passport control.

The Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps are razed to the ground, their residents brutally massacred while we, unawares, are packing our suitcases, munching on a bar of chocolate in the airport lounge, unpacking, and getting our grocery shopping done. With Ashour we "remember" how it feels to be Mourid's mother who tries to remember precisely what she was doing on Monday at 11pm when her oldest son, Mounif, was lying on the pavement of a Paris street bleeding to death. "Was she sleeping? How could she have been sleeping? The thought nearly drives her to insanity. Sleep becomes an unpardonable sin, and lack of knowledge, instead of absolving, confirms the guilt."

This, one of the most powerful moments of an autobiography that continuously weaves personal with collective history, is followed by a harrowing account rapidly oscillating between the step-by-step genocide taking place in Beirut and the domestic details of Radwa's contemporaneous life in Cairo. Unfortunately the quotes from newspapers and Ashour's political gloss which then follow, instead of successfully sharpening, blunt the edge of what had preceded.

Forgetfulness and laughter are tactically necessary if an individual memory is to be preserved and if a people and their tale are to survive. Trilogies about Granada (spanning 1494 to 1604) can be written in answer to what the US-led 1990s did (and is still doing) to Iraq. Emile Habibi can liken his Pessoptimistic Palestinian anti-hero to a meowing she-cat; Palestinian caricaturist Nagi Al-Ali, assassinated in London, can still elicit laughter from the grave. While in prison Egyptian activist and writer Latifa El-Zayyat, Ashour's mentor, can worry about where the heck her smart dress could have gone. A Palestinian family, driving from one unoccupied Palestinian reservation to another through dangerous Zionist settler territory, can make the bus driver wait while they call out "Abu Ammar, Abu Ammar" in the hope that their cat, named after a now-discredited Yasser Arafat, will come back to the bus.

The sometimes effective, sometimes not, juxtaposition of personal with collective history, detailed description of childhood haunts with historical documents and newspaper clippings, literary theory with narrative, makes for an interesting, illuminating and sometimes powerful read. Tone in Atyaf ranges from the intimate to the analytical and, at times, the didactic. The use of leitmotif in forging a coherent structure, though at times subtle (as, for example, with the cat motif), is at other times so heavy-handedly obvious as to verge on the contrived (as, for example, with the ancient Egyptian goddesses motif which is used to bring the narrative to its abrupt closure). Audience remains a problem, perhaps a problem which no autobiographical disclosure can ever quite resolve.

And why -- a reader, slowly beginning to share the exasperation felt by Radwa herself, has the right to ask -- why, oh why, Shagar?

A student of history at Cairo University, Shagar decides to specialise in modern Arab history when qualifying for her MA in 1967 instead of continuing with her previous research area of interest, Ancient Egypt. Shagar's proposed thesis topic, the Deir Yassin massacres, is turned down because, according to her supervisor, it is too contemporary, so she writes her thesis on the digging of the Suez Canal. As a teaching assistant she joins student demonstrations, the in-fighting during which contributes to the all-too-predictable path of disillusionment she will tread. Soon Shagar becomes a university professor, facing the kinds of demoralising problems that national university professors with integrity and a sense of ideals face in societies passing through unsettling transitional moments. Having attended a conference in Cambridge to deliver, with the aim of debunking Zionist discourse, a paper on Gandhi's response to Martin Buber, Shagar then returns to the topic on which she had always wanted to write -- the Deir Yassin massacres. One political-allegorical thing leads to another and, sensing that she might be on the brink of insanity, Shagar resigns from her university post.

One-dimensional, and so without a past or personal history -- and this in spite of the central preoccupation of Atyaf -- Shagar fails to protagonistically carry the weight of her story. She is a late 1960s-1990s progressive university student then a professor with ideals -- and that's that. No personal tics, no family, no lovers, no friends (two brief sentimental encounters with the neighbours' son in the elevator, and a colleague with integrity whom we briefly meet at a committee meeting, hardly count). Nothing endears her even to a reader sharing the ideals for which she allegorically stands. A protagonist without a real agon, her trauma-ridden path of disillusionment is one with which a reader might find it difficult to empathise: apart from in the opening pages, and then only briefly, we do not get a glimpse of the idyll that a disenchanted old woman must have once inhabited (as a child, adolescent, young woman, or woman in her prime) if her disenchantment is to begin to have any meaning.

"Why do I race ahead of events to Shagar as an old woman?" The narrator's voice keeps at its rhetorical question. Why indeed? The earlier question -- Should I drop her altogether? -- cannot have boded well for Shagar.

The incorporation of various documents under what is signified by the word Shagar does not lend any depth to the word. The eyewitness accounts of the Deir Yassin massacre and the autobiographical notebook bequeathed by Shagar's grandfather (b. 1898), each interesting, moving and historically illuminating in themselves, serve only to further obfuscate the question raised persistently by and in Atyaf: Why Shagar?

For Radwa to hide behind? Certainly not. Their points of overlap are so many and so clear that Shagar's redundancy (even if we are prepared to take her in the spirit of allegory) is annoying in the extreme. As a device by which Radwa, in the manner of Virginia Woolf in Orlando, can explore what it would be like to still be Radwa but without a warm, supportive family, and without intellectually challenging friends who, even under conditions of extreme duress, know how to have a good laugh? Perhaps this way madness lies, especially in an autobiographical endeavour. The sad shade of madness does haunt Atyaf but only as a domesticated concept and not as a possible autobiographical mode of being.

A pity that having been visited by an apparition the affable autobiographer did not spend more time with the mad woman in her attic. Having decided to keep Shagar at a very safe distance one wonders why Ashour kept her at all. Though interesting in itself, the discussion towards the end of Atyaf of the ancient Egyptian concept of the ka and the pre-Islamic concept of the qarin, both equivalents of the European double or alter-ego, does not at a formal level justify Shagar's aborted existence. For an alter-ego to be truly alter (or "other") it should not merely reflect back to the self hosting it a comfortingly familiar (and perhaps flattering) image.

Though Atyaf, conventionally speaking, is neither a novel nor an autobiography, the reader need not fear finding himself or herself in a bewildering Borgesian or unsettling Steppenwolfian Hall of Mirrors. Identity is safe and sound. Ashour's name is on the cover; Radwa sits at her computer; Shagar is a character for whom Radwa Ashour finds a proper place in a book. Having said this, Atyaf is still as challenging to read as it must have been challenging to write.

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