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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 April 1999 Issue No. 423
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Interview Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A glimpse of the story
By Radwa Ashour *
I went in. One of the workers stopped me. "I used to be a student here; I just want to take a look at the playground." [...]
Shagar did not go to this school. What shall I do with the teacher I invented? Shall I make her fall in love with him and wait for him to come out of the concentration camp, build their relationship and present a character modelled on one of the many types of Egyptian communists? My son will say -- and I am affected by what he says -- "That's typical of you. You paint a picture of a teacher and the heroine falls in love with him. Your generation, mom, is so full of romantic and, don't get angry with me for saying so, even melodramatic ideas. And because you are a leftist, you are going to make this handsome young man a leftist and the heroine, falling in love with him, will become a leftist too!" (I don't know whether such sarcasm, shunning any idealism, pains me or whether it assures me that this new generation has no need for the crutch of illusions.) Should I drop Fawzi Kamel altogether and turn his presence in the text into no more than a voice making the young girl aware of the possibility of breaking with the hegemonic? Should I keep him and make Shagar meet him years later? And if I do that what will Fawzi be like? [...]
But you won't make him like this or like that: you will be surprised as he shapes himself and imposes his fate and journey on you. Or else you'll find him going away while you're busy writing and then, suddenly remembering him, you'll turn around to look and not find him. No pre-planned decisions in writing. In the next chapter I will return to Shagar and come what may. Now I am on Sheikh Rihan Street a few steps away from the school in which I spent nine years of my life. I left this school to go to another in June 1960. On 22 March1960 the Arab League moved to its current premises, just a few steps away from the school, on Tahrir Square. In my memory nothing about all that. School buses taking us from our homes to school. Dropping us off in the school playground. Taking us from the school playground to our homes. But how is it I don't know Tahrir Square? Did I not pass through it everyday on my way to school? [...]
A few months after I graduated from university I would read the novel Al-Bab Al-Maftouh. Night time, 21 February 1946, the first scene, wrote Latifa El-Zayyat: "The cinemas were on strike and so were the shops and the buses and the tram. Police cars carrying armed soldiers passing through the streets, and very few pedestrians...talking." The voices multiply, commenting on what happened that morning in the city, informing us in detail: a demonstration of 40,000 people against the British, 23 dead and 122 wounded. Ismailiya Square -- Tahrir Square later -- the theatre of those events. Places suddenly acquire new meaning when you learn their story. Maybe not the whole story but a glimpse of the story, a part of it suddenly illuminating the place, and you see the place that you did not see before, and you understand it, and when you understand and know it it possesses you in the same measure that it occupies in your mind and imagination. In short, it will posses you in the exact measure it contributes to shaping you and your understanding of existence. Just like the Al-Halabawi house and Abbas Bridge. But talk about these will come later. I am now in Tahrir Square. I would read about the events of 1946 and then, in 1972, I would come to the square.
On the morning of 24 January 1972 I would go to Cairo University, to find it cordoned off by security forces and thus be unable to join the student sit-in occupying the Great Ceremony Hall. I would learn that the students had been arrested in the early morning and taken to prison. In the evening Mourid and I would go to Tahrir Square: students crowded around the stone monument in the centre of the square while others discussed the economic and political conditions of the country with passers-by, explaining the reasons for their sit-in. We head to the Izavitch Café and there meet a number of our writer colleagues and hear talk about the formation of a national committee of writers and students. We read the manifesto written by members of the committee expressing solidarity with the students and their demands, and denouncing the morning arrests. We copy the manifesto, as do other colleagues, and we disperse into smaller groups, each with a copy, to collect the signatures of writers and artists. [...]
There is another part of the story concerning my share of the event and concerning the event itself but now I leave the square from which, for nine years, I lived only a few steps away without knowing its 1946 story. As for its 1972 story, I witnessed and participated in it. The workers' demonstrations of 1975 passed through the Square, and so did the massive demonstrations of 1977, and so did Umm Kulthum's funeral. 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. [...]
Am I indulging in free associations without making sense? What has Shagar to do with all of this? I should return to Shagar. I have to make up my mind what to do with her. She has now left school and has joined the History Department of Cairo University. Were Shagar not a fictional character I would have met her during my student years at Cairo University: the Department of History where she studied is on the second floor of the same building as the English Department where I was a student. We were undergraduates from 1963 to 1967. [...]
Almost everyday she drops in at the university library -- the building facing the department -- spends hours there, sits sometimes in the south-facing reading room, sometimes in the north-facing reading room, browsing through the card catalogue. The library staff get to know her, and none of them asks to see her ID. They know her very well, years before she is appointed in the department, before Miss Shagar becomes Doctora Shagar.
* Excerpt from Atyaf, Radwa Ashour. Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, Feb 1999.Translated by Nur Elmessiri
