Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page | Make yourself heard

"Somewhere between the pressure of absurdity and the inevitability of mission, my life has almost been wasted. But I obstinately resist." Ala' El-Deeb summarised his literary endeavours in this way in his 1982 memoir, Waqfa qabl al-Monhadar (A Stop before the Fall), though an English paraphrase can hardly do justice to the economy and power of his original. Avowedly a member of the bourgeoisie, he is, in no particular order, also a disillusioned leftist, a seeker after Arab identity, who has nevertheless been closely involved with the West, a journalist who brings literary discernment to his articles and an author who brings the urgency and relevance of journalism to his literary writings. No label readily fits him, though he is one of the most widely read Egyptian writers of his generation.

Despite this multiplicity of roles, El-Deeb has nevertheless managed to retain a rare sense of wholeness, juggling the various components of his multi-faceted life. He has also always been careful to guard against the East-West 'schizophrenia' that he considers to be rife among literary intellectuals of his generation. Talking to this generous and indefatigably humble man is, in fact, rather like dipping into his fiction: one encounters a starkly independent intellect that is spurred on by interests as wide-ranging as the Tao Te Ching or twentieth-century Hungarian literature. But one also encounters a uniquely disarming warmth, which makes even El-Deeb's formal pronouncements sound like intimate confidences. "They've already advertised it in Sabah Al-Kheir magazine," he says of Oyoun Al-Banafsij (Violet Eyes), the final volume of the trilogy of novels that has occupied him for the last decade. This novel, like the previous two, has been serialised in this widely-read Cairo magazine, where El-Deeb has been reviewing books and editing the literary pages for most of his working life. The complete novel is to appear next week in the Riwayat Al-Hilal series (Al-Hilal novels) from the publisher Dar Al-Hilal. "It's all in there somewhere, but I don't know how I'll ever get it onto paper," he says in his confidential way. He speaks slowly, long pauses taking up the space between sentences. "It's like jumping off a steep cliff." The trilogy deals with the misfortunes of a contemporary Egyptian family. Each volume can be read separately, but each is nevertheless in dialogue with the others. The sequence takes up the lives of the middle-class, academic protagonists from where their marriage left off, its author says. And in the much-delayed final volume the family's adolescent son tells his version of the narrative that his father and mother have separately and intermittently divulged and concludes it.

The completion of his trilogy is, however, not the only project that El-Deeb has planned. A selection of his shorter fiction, Al-Mosafir A-Abadi (The Eternal Traveller), spanning more than thirty years of uninterrupted, if painfully slow, creativity, is also appearing next week in the Aswat Adabiya (Literary Voices) series issued by the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, and its author talks of this in retrospective mode.

Gamil Shafiq
illustration: Gamil Shafiq

"I've taken three or four different routes in story-telling," he says, putting on a white cotton hat apparently to compose himself, "which are differentiated by the texture of the writing, or by the nature of the confessional experiment that one undertakes. I want all of them to be represented." Aside from these remarks, El-Deeb pooh-poohs questions of genre. "These boundaries remain meaningless to me," he says, rejecting talk of the novella, novel or short story. "Whether short story or novel, the act of writing is always an attempt to break out of predefined shapes in order to reach an expression of only one state, which I think dominates everything I have done. A is the state of existence in the world."

"Nothing else really matters much," he goes on. "Not form, not style. Only this state. I think it's the uniqueness of each writer that is his genuine contribution. If there is no uniqueness, there is no point in writing. If you are not saying something that has never been said, and would never have been said had it not been for you, and cannot be said by anyone but yourself, then..." He breaks off.

To approach El-Deeb's work, and, to an even greater extent his life, is not only to encounter this 'uniqueness' -- a romantic vision of a better future that is yet clouded by the absurdities of everyday life in the less fortunate half of the contemporary world -- but also to witness the author's struggle to resist either a 'romantic-missionary' or an 'existential-absurdist' framework within which his writing might be read. Instead he insists on the need to find what he calls his own individual voice. "I think this is the expression of the genuine pain that one has lived through and still lives through to this day," he tells me, adjusting his hat. In fact, the Absurd, El-Deeb adds, when considered as a literary programme, "no longer reveals anything other than the void, or spiritual emptiness of twentieth-century man. On the other hand the political position-taking and social obligations that we grew up with -- the Left, Communism and all that -- created a lack of flexibility that became an obstacle to artistic and literary thinking. After the collapse of socialist ideology, and one has lived through that too, there came a conviction, a near certainty, in the necessity of art and artistic expression -- a belief that the universe, and existence and oneself is as much in need of artistic expression as they are in need of other things. I think that one survives in the end on a certitude that one invents for oneself in order to justify one's existence."

Despite the retrospective tone in which El-Deeb speaks of his career, he is nevertheless excited by at least one text that he has recently republished. "One piece I really wanted to see back in print was Al-Sheikha (The Old Woman)," he beams. "It represents a kind of writing that I never returned to." This story -- a parable about a stranger who challenges, and eventually succeeds in ending, the authority of a fair-skinned woman over a village of dark-skinned paupers -- offers an early example of El-Deeb at his lyrical best, and appeared last year in a selection of El-Deeb's novellas (published by Maktabat Al-Ossra). "I feel that there are two kinds of literature," he says. "One is contrived and architectonic, and the other is confessional. And in the latter" -- he momentarily digresses -- "the state of existence I've been telling you about is given free reign, so much so that it becomes the raison d'être behind every incident and behind every character." He stops to light a cigarette. "Al-Sheikha belongs to the first, 'contrived' kind however -- so maybe it can be included in both the short novels and the short stories. In any case, I never went back to that way of working. It has symbolism; it works through insinuation; it has all those vapid things that one experimented with but soon abandoned. Still, I find it very interesting to look back on."

Concerning this selection, however, El-Deeb also has other, rather different reflections. "When I reread my novellas recently, when they were about to be republished, I felt that they were small, weak, mediocre works, and not worth very much. Maybe this was an effect of the time separating me from when I wrote them. But when I reread Al-Qahira, and remembered something that had made me happy, this made me realise the benefits of living for a long time: you see things differently and understand them in a fresh way." The story of a frustrated middle-class man who murders a prostitute after she becomes pregnant, El-Deeb's novella was, he says, written under the influence of Camus and particularly of the French writer's novel L'Etranger. The protagonist even delivers a speech in court at the end that is reminiscent of the one delivered by Meursault. "I was crazy about that novel," El-Deeb explains. "I wanted to write something like it." He smiles as he lights another cigarette.

"When I reread it recently I felt that Camus's focus in L'Etranger was a discussion about the relationship between the protagonist and God. And I realised I had known that even when I wrote my own story, but that I had been terrified of approaching this subject. Internal and external pressures both prompted me to be afraid, and so I distorted and disfigured my protagonist in order to make him abuse established authority and to challenge it through him. Camus, however, because he was free from fear, was not obliged to make distortions, and therefore reached a rare degree of truth and humanity. Al-Qahira is definitely a less probing work than is L'Etranger, because it suffers from internal and external censorship. Ultimately, it fails where Camus succeeded. But the interesting thing is that the experience made me feel, in a very tangible way, that the Arab author is deprived of the freedom to discuss fundamental issues, that we are suppressed at the roots."

El-Deeb warms to his theme. I suggest that when it comes to confessional writing, perhaps internal censorship is more important than external? "But my point is that the internal too is determined by upbringing," he returns. "A way of thinking that is suppressed and disturbed. Imagination is suppressed. Opinion is suppressed. Nobody is willing to confess. People hide, cover up, pretend to be telling you secrets." Will we ever have a home-grown Henry Miller? "What I mean to say is not that Miller has no equivalent for us as a personality, but that he has no equivalent in terms of intellectual position, as a stage of development," El-Deeb adds. "It's not simply a question of confessing to sexual experience or to political infidelity. Rather, confessional literature has to be seen as a form of purification, a scraping away of the layers of stagnation and dullness that befall people in a world where they are totally consumed just in order to continue breathing. The prevalent position is one of compromise and concession, and compromise and concession look dreadful in art. They are disgusting enough in life, but in art they look even worse."

Concerning recent social developments that might be thought to have changed this situation, El-Deeb repeats one of his favourite metaphors. "It's like a well-dressed person with dirty underwear," he says. "It is rotting. It is not being dealt with, and it continues to rot. It's not a question of political orders, whether one is more repressive than another. The question is first and foremost a social question, and this is not being dealt with. This is the terrible failure of art and literature and thought." The thwarted longing to establish himself as an active influence on society seems to have taken its toll on El-Deeb. "Over the years these things have played a very meagre role in affecting the human being who exists here" -- he is beginning to sound more and more diffuse. "And their output is not sufficiently radiant, they haven't been effective. Abdel-Wahab, Umm Kulthoum, especially Umm Kulthoum, and before her Sayed Darwish, they're the ones who made an impact. But even our major writers," El-Deeb says dreamily, "they haven't affected people in any distinct way, have they?"

"It may be a novel, or a confession, or a partial autobiography... but its only object is that you hear my voice," El-Deeb wrote of his work in his 1995 'Afterword' to Waqfa. "Not as a writer who makes judgements or possesses wisdom, but as a baffled and lonely man comforted by the thought that his words might have a baffled and lonely reader like himself." Now he switches off the tape recorder. "Don't you think that's enough?" he asks and smiles wearily. "I'm going to go out now. I need some fresh air. Why don't you come?" And as he struggles to get dressed, cursing bad health and old age and the very need to put clothes on to go out in, the words seem to fit his demeanour precisely. It is this private communion that remains after the need to reach people is frustrated and the social message misses its target. Rather than succumb to the human void that a hardened intellect might lead to, or to the fixed preconceptions of a political belief-system, why not make yourself heard?

Extract from Violet Eyes

By Ala' El-Deeb

Tamer Fakkar is an Egyptian poet born in 1975 and now in his final year at the Faculty of Arts, Philosophy Department. He was born in the Gulf, the son of the former university professor Mounir Fakkar (of the novel Atfal bila Domou' ["Children without Tears"]) and the academic Sanaa Farag (of Qamar 'Ala Al-Mostanqa' ["A Moon above the Quagmire"]). Here are his confessions and some images from his life, to which the present writer has added a few things of his own.

-1-

I rushed out early in the morning before Friday prayer in order to avoid the solitude that would have besieged me in the flat. These old Cairo streets retain a trace of beauty in autumn that even the polluted environment has not yet killed. I seek it out, and it eludes me. The street winds down to a block of dust. Even if I were a thousand years old, I wouldn't move so heavily, or so vapidly. Is it a result of last night's hangover, of the mixture of narcotics that I took, or does it come from the smoke that I ceaselessly inhale? Or is it just the usual heaviness, that inexplicable tiredness that I often feel weighing on my heart? My body has no boundaries now, no outline to separate me from other people. No features, no identity. At any moment I might collapse by a wall, a discarded mass of humanity that hurried pedestrians will barely notice. The streets have lost all flavour and meaning.

I walked into the old and spacious Independence Café. It is looked after less and less now, and it gets dirtier with every passing day. The thick, broad window panes are dirty. Scraps of paper, dirt, the filth of passing customers have accumulated beneath the tables and chairs. The smell of stale smoke and of the cheap alcohol that they serve behind the small enclosure at the back rose in my face, mixed in with the smell of a rotting toilet that nobody ever bothers to clean. All this obliged me to take a seat near the door.

I once came to this café as a child with my father, and I had a cold, red-coloured drink in a big glass. Then it was a large and open place, where the sunlight fell on a clean floor. The old waiter smiled cordially and warmly that day. All my life I have come back to this same café, and when I became alone in this frightening city, I made a point of always coming back to it, as if I were scratching at an old wound. Now a painful emptiness nestles between every moment. White domino pieces lie face up and face down. They snatch at my eyes and at my heart, and then they scatter again before me. I sit tired and solitary in the café, waiting indifferently to see where the day will take me.

-2-

Every few days I buy a new pen. At last Hussein gave me a new pen and said, 'I don't think you'll write anything of value with it'. I often contemplate that black pen. Sometimes I am seized by a desire to crush it like a cigarette butt. It has a strange magic quality: it always summons Hussein to me. When my friend comes I have mixed feelings towards him. I'm genuinely eager to see him, but something about his presence makes me restless, as if he were distracting me from an important task -- or perhaps I simply make out that he is. In a few minutes, though, our meeting becomes very intimate and surprising, especially if he manages to roll a couple of cigarettes.

Suddenly he came into the cafe and collapsed in front of me, silent. He stretched his long thin legs out in front of him and raised himself on the seat, and I realised that he had written a new poem. I could sense his tension as I read the same lines written with the same pen on the same paper in the same clear and careful hand. I did not manage to look up at him after I was done, for he would have read my face. I felt that he was simply rearranging the same old words, and that nothing real would ever come from this ceaseless shuffling of cards. I am certain that he knows my real opinion of his poems, just as I think he knows that he is my friend and that I love him. He quietly took his poem back while I said what is normally said in such situations. Then a dubious silence fell on us, which only intensified the café's gloom and the heaviness of those hours that precede or follow the afternoon. He suggested that we get up or look for something to eat, and I suggested that we do nothing at all. We remained seated, leafing through a few magazines and watching the passers by.

My real opinion, which I hide from Hussein Kazim and even from myself, is that poetry is a predetermined destiny, a series of roads and paths that we are destined to tread, and to say and to live. Poetry is another life, to which we have been inspired, and which has been given to us. As for all that gibberish and those high-sounding words about 'schools' and 'modernism', the pre- and the post-, these are no more than conjurer's tricks that would easily be swallowed up by a true poetic locution, or by any true line or rhythm, should we manage to write one. I hide this conviction even from myself, and instead find myself engaged in foolish arguments and impotent discussions that only serve to exhaust the soul. I even argue with Hussein, despite the fact that he is the only person with whom I can laugh at the crude texts that others write, and which look to me like gigantic caricatures, utterly without expression.

The evening suddenly overtook us, and our meeting drew to a foolish close when Hussein tore up his poem into tiny scraps, put these in the ashtray, and, without my realising what he was doing, stretched his hand across holding a lighted match. The waiter hurried across to us as the poem went up in flames. He was scared to death. Had he not known who we were, he would have accused us of perpetuating a terrorist act.

Translated by Yousef Rakha

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875