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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 27 October 1999 Issue No. 452
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Ibrahim Mansour:
The duke in his domain
Profile by Youssef Rakha
Walking-stick in hand, a lean old man with a huge white beard makes the rounds of the cafés, barking greetings and speaking his mind
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Without a single book of fiction or criticism to his name, Ibrahim Mansour is a widely acclaimed writer and a critic whose opinion counts. Of both these facts he is shyly, endearingly proud. He has a childlike laugh and a loud voice, but he is very subdued when talking about himself: "I should tell you I am self-conscious," is the way he begins while pouring more wine to help relax him, and slowly, reluctantly warming to the tape recorder. He talks in fits and starts, beginning a new sentence before he has finished the last one, as he himself notes when he demands to listen to what has been recorded halfway through. He only really relaxes when the tape recorder is off, though. On the slightest pretext, he drifts to any topic other than himself. And he jokes. Even the most sombre topics he tackles with light-hearted sincerity, frequently gesticulating and pausing to think. His humour is delightful, not to mention contagious. Yet to his listeners it is an incentive and an aid; it never distracts him from making his point. Which point, it must be conceded, is contentious: that to publish your work, to be bound by the term "published author" is an act of predetermined will, "something I never so much as contemplated, since I never had any plans for my life." It is also a one-way journey: if you write continually over a long period of time, if literature happens to be among your principal concerns, the real challenge is not to publish.
Besides, Mansour is an author who has been read. The people who count -- his friends -- have had immediate access to his work; they have given him immediate feedback. Surely nothing more is needed to complete the cycle, not when the writer in question is such a well-known figure and so deeply involved in cultural life.
photos: Randa Shaath
"People write for different reasons, which vary according to personal constitution and circumstances. Some people -- and I am not among them -- just live to write, and these are the ones who are productive, the ones who accomplish something. For me, the principal priority was always to live -- human beings are not created to write, you know -- and that's what I wanted to do: live comfortably, not in the material sense, but in the sense of being happy with the life that I have. For a lot of people, writing can be a substitute for living, but if you're happy with your life, why write?"
Why write indeed?
"I had started doing my own reading, with a friend of mine -- only one of my friends. We read detective novels. My father had a decent library and it was available to us, but his father liked detective novels and we started off with them. The only serious book I remember reading as a schoolboy is All's Quiet on the Western Front, in Arabic translation. That must've come from my father's library. I don't know what motivated me, but I read it to the end. It was at that time too, maybe a little later, that I taught myself English through reading. The first book I read in English was The Picture of Dorian Gray -- that too came from my father's library. But it was my friend who wrote novels, long-winded things in which he imitated the detective novels we were reading. This friend went on to become a public prosecutor and a few years ago he stopped reading altogether; he no longer reads anything. He's the one who wanted to be a writer. And that's always the way, you know; it's not as if you can really plan it. When I wrote it was simply because I had something specific to say, and I could never think of an audience to say it to. Sometimes I would write it with a particular person in mind, and it would take the form of a letter -- and all that mattered then was for this person to read it. It's really inexplicable. You see someone and not only do you not like that someone, maybe you don't even know him. But he moves something in you, he makes you want to express something. And you write."
Notwithstanding the apparent idiosyncrasy of Mansour's philosophy, one must not forget that it is the heyday of "the 1960s generation" that we're talking about. The extraordinary loyalty Mansour has displayed for the unwritten mores and underlying values inherent to this multi-faceted and politically committed movement has allowed him, nearly half a century later, to encapsulate its spirit, exemplifying its qualities precisely. A flammable, easily sociable and highly literate man, Mansour is a veteran café-goer and experienced political detainee. He has a clear-cut vision of utopia and some prejudices, but he also has a strikingly fair-minded approach to the arts and an active interest in almost everything under the sun. The whole "culture" of the leftist 1960s finds expression in his person: his fascination with existentialism, his fidelity to one or another form of Marxism, his impassioned search for an Arab and Egyptian sense of identity in the face of an increasingly dominant and often ruthlessly capitalist West. That is, of course, as well as the vividly bohemian lifestyle he has subscribed to, a lifestyle that allows for personal indulgences and plenty of conversation -- the art with which Mansour feels most at home. (His only published book to date, Cultural Duality and the Crisis of Egyptian Dissent, is a collection of sociopolitical interviews with writers -- all of them personal acquaintances of Mansour's.) To a greater extent than contemporary figures, Mansour has kept to the simple ideals of the 1960s, guarding not only against fame and fortune, but against regular employment (he never had a job for longer than a year), family life (he remains childless, and of his four marriages the one that survived is his marriage to a Europe-residing woman), and the urge to show his work to people he doesn't know personally. While remaining strictly outside the establishment, he has become the purveyor of a whole generation of intellectuals, their purest voice and ethical monitor. He stands practically alone at the centre of the 1960s, yet in the ever wider intellectual circles of the 1990s, his judgement is respected and his counsel sought; his image -- part Hemingway, part grandfather-figure -- is both familiar and far-fetched, like a nostalgic cry from the recent past.
A senior education official, Mansour's father had set an example -- a large family with a secure home and a stable income -- which all but one of his sons proceeded to emulate. "The last thing I wanted was to be a civil servant. My greatest aspiration was, of course, to become a bum -- if I managed to." Early on, Mansour had made up his mind to live, he insists, and when it was time to embark on a career, he was too scatty to have plans for the future. Intent on confounding middle-class expectations, he simply drifted, jobless and for the most part street-bound, but never in need, alone or without a roof over his head -- and never idle. For as long as he cares to remember there were the cafés, the innumerable friends, the literary/artistic and political debates which gave the simple pleasures of life an urgent and exciting edge. There was the flat where he grew up in Maadi, having moved there from Shubra where his parents first resided when, at the outbreak of the second World War, they came to Cairo from Mansoura, where he was born, and of which he paradoxically retains vivid memories. There wasn't much of an inheritance when they died; nor was there help from his friends, who were not often in a position to provide financial support. This fact explains the short-term jobs that he took at various points in his life: translator of literary texts; journalist; news reporter; correspondent, notably for the well-known Lebanese newspaper, Al-Safir, in Austria and Cyprus. What it does not explain is his work as co-editor of the influential literary periodical, Gallery 68, a decade after his graduation in 1958. (An alternative and experimental forum that emerged after the 1967 defeat, this was the magazine in which Mansour's best-known short story, There Are 24 Hours in a Day, first appeared, reluctantly on his part.) His early involvement in an underground communist organisation (1950-'58) and his informal roles as literary mentor and, reportedly, political agitator (since the 1970s) must be counted among his most complex investments. It was to varying extents through them that he ultimately devoted himself to a career in living.
Typically, Mansour would rather talk about "being happy with the life that I have" than about "the struggle" or "the cause", but this overbearing desire to live, far from being hedonistic or self-indulgent, can only be understood in the context of complete rebellion. Though he denies that his involvement in politics was anything exceptional ("when I was growing up it was inevitable, because of the general sense of engagement that kept people healthily in touch, in contrast to the shocking stupour of these days"), Mansour passionately recalls that "it was all very serious then -- people died, they got tortured and had their lives ruined for the sake of politics." Since his political activism effectively ceased, he has been hounded preposterously by intelligence agencies, both within Egypt and beyond, yet he still doesn't spare an opportunity to mention the suffering of the Iraqi people, the dispossession of the Palestinians, the new world order's glaring injustices. And he never worries about money. "When I'm broke it's not much of an issue. Maybe I was always very lucky, but actually I never had a serious financial problem." So the simple pleasures of life remained affordable, and this was all that mattered. "The ideal life, to me, is one in which nobody would have to work -- that would be paradise. If you look at the paradise promised by all the world religions -- communism not excluded, even though it's not a religion as such -- that's what it is: the ideal life is one without cares, without obligations. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs -- isn't that right? Nobody has to have a job, never have to work, and if you do it's only because you enjoy it. Otherwise you read, you go to the cinema, the theatre, listen to music, go out to see your friends. Talk. It's one of the greatest gains in life, to have a great many close friends. And if you have friends with whom to live like this, what's the point of writing?"
Nor do the more unpleasant aspects of his career seem to worry him. Even in the worst circumstances, he maintains, one adapts to one's circumstances, living on. Whether it is his time in the army or one of his many and various prison experiences, there are always people, conversations, events. "Actually, I have forgotten all the unpleasant aspects of prison. I was totally upset about my military service, but by the time I left the army I was sorry to leave. And it's the same with prison. You have time on your hands and no responsibilities, no obligations. Besides, when you're imprisoned for political reasons, you usually end up with friends."
Of his political activities, Mansour's father had expressed neither approval nor disapproval. "My mother was a bit worried, of course. I mean, she'd never come across anything like this, but my father, who did have an interest in politics, just left it up to me." At one point, he remembers, he was forced to hide under his sister's bed while she was asleep, so that his mother could convince the officer who had come to arrest him that he was not home. "Officers were reasonably decent then and it would've been a little inappropriate for him to barge in on a young woman who was sleeping." When it was time to go to university, Mansour was content to listen to his father. "I wanted him to tell me where to go. I knew I had to go somewhere, but had absolutely no idea. I really didn't give a stuff which faculty I would go to, what subject I would study. So when he said law, I was only too happy to go along with that." The day he went to the Cairo University Admissions Office, though, there was a long queue in front of the law admissions window. The Faculty of Arts window, right next to it, was less busy. So he simply moved from one queue to the next. "This really is as much difference as it made to me -- I didn't want to stand in the longer queue." Though he later transferred back to law, probably under pressure from his parents, his attitude to academia had not changed since his school days. "At school I didn't pay much attention. I just passed the exams, just to keep going, and if I stood out in one class or another, this was totally unintentional. It wasn't one of my priorities, to stand out academically. None of this was on my mind at all." On his mind, rather, were the writers he had, professedly unwittingly, started to befriend ("somehow I always ended up with writers"), the reading material he exchanged with them, the political dilemmas he faced ("soon my work with the organisation, especially the secret aspects of it, turned out to be unpleasant and disappointing"), the women he was courting (Mansour prides himself on the fact that his relationships with women have always been humane, based on a mutual free choice), and the cafés, the bars -- all the haunts he soon began to discover. The rebelliousness, therefore, started early; so, it seems, did love. It was not until the late 1960s, however, that his role took on the weight it carries now.
His two most treasured memories are of the time he spent with El-Deeb and the Jordanian writer Ghaleb Halasa, principally in Halasa's flat in Doqqi, the place where the progressive romanticism of the 1960s was lived out to the last detail ("In the furnished flat," wrote Allaa El-Deeb, "unoccupied by wife or children, something was always in the process of being created"); and of the time following Sadat's first visit to Israel ("the first electric shock I ever received," as El-Deeb put it), when, "fearing for my own personal identity, not just the identity of my country", Mansour roamed the backstreets and alleyways of Cairo with books of history under his arm, locating Islamic and Coptic monuments, reading about them and spending as much time in them as he could. He even obtained a set of index cards on which he wrote down the details of each monument. Keeping them on him at all times, he felt safe, he says. "It's hard to explain this kind of feeling, but when you've been living in one of these monuments, when you know the exact details of its history and become familiar with its surroundings, it's as if the monument is a part of you; there is this incomparable feeling about it. Because it is the building that protects you. You fear for your identity and it protects it for you. You observe the surroundings to make sure that it's there, your identity, that it has a long history of existence -- and you're part of it." Mansour resided almost permanently in the area surrounding Al-Mu'izz Lidin Illah Street, particularly Gamaliya, for a few years. Then, almost as imperceptibly, he returned to Maadi, receiving friends and going out nearly every day. Since then, he has had to travel to be with his wife -- albeit with a degree of restraint. "It doesn't make a difference to me where I am, but I never really saw the attraction of living in Europe." He has written very little, but the moral and practical support he has offered young writers is remarkable. In her recent poetic tribute to him, the young poet Aliya Abdel-Salam wrote, "Why did you release the light so your hands dried up/ Release the river over your mother's face in the morning?/Pave the way for the birds to sing around the balconies of the poor/For the November leaves to grow heavy with the details of history and woman".
