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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Organising a cultural and literary events in collaboration with Egyptian universities, the British Council has added a new perspective to its activities, suggesting a richer, more varied role for cultural centres in general.
One such event took place in March 1998 -- a literary conference under the title of The Arabs and Britain: Changes and Exchanges. It was, as is evident from the title, an occasion to review the long history of relations between the two countries, which one speaker described in terms of "love-hate".
Now the British Council has published the proceedings of the conference, in a nicely bound volume incorporating 37 articles of profound significance. In the face of such a labyrinth of theses, I'm finding it difficult, indeed impossible to present even a glimpse of the whole. That the publication is a kind of encyclopedia of its subject offers some consolation. Dipping into encyclopedias, one picks up what catches the eye, with little concern for being comprehensive.
One such eye-catcher is Nazek Fahmi's "Penelope Lively's Egypt: between colonial and post colonial discourse", an article I was drawn to for two reasons: that I knew Penelope Lively personally, and that I reviewed her book, Moon Tiger, discussing it with her when she visited Egypt a few years back.
As Fahmi says of her own experience, Egypt continues to exercise an emotional hold over one's being even after one's departure from the country. Lively spent 12 years in Egypt, four of them during World War II. Going through the novel one feels that it is a mixture of fact and fiction. "Lively pays tribute to her alter ego [Claudia], having inadvertently furnished much of the information on Egypt," writes Fahmi. "This information includes the names of people and places, the general layout of the country as well as of the major cities, some history and a small treasury of Arabic colloquialisms."
In this as in her other book, Cleopatra's Sister, there is a sense of nostalgia and a country revisited. She describes a number of Cairo's landmarks, like Beit Al-Kritliya, which she thought was "inspired by Arabian nights". Nazek believes that for both Lively and her protagonist -- as representatives of the British community -- Egypt was little more than a place, accurately described to provide a backdrop.
Lively's experience in Egypt is reflected in the life of the heroine of Moon Tiger. According to Fahmi this life "was conducted according to colonial decorum, living in an enclave of three substantial, garden-encircled houses, their own garden being unashamedly English in design".
Sahar Sobhi Abdel-Hakim provides another eye-catcher, "Fantastic habitats: liberal humanism in PN Newby's Egypt Trilogy". Having known Newby well (in fact we became friends), I was an avid reader of his books, starting with Picnic to Sakkara and ending with Kith, which I believe was the last book he wrote before his book on Saladin. Newby's experience in Egypt, especially his years of teaching at the English Department of Cairo University, gave him an insight into life in the country, particularly the middle class, which provided the bulk of his students. It was, he wrote, "central to me and my writing". His oeuvre of 12 novels, in which he uses his experience of Egypt, delineates Anglo-Egyptian relations at "the historically crucial moment of decolonisation". Historically, the trilogy -- Picnic to Sakkara, Revolution and Roses and A Guest and his Going" -- are set between 1948 and 1956, the central event being the Revolution of 1952.
Abdel-Hakim examines Newby's works within the framework of liberal humanism, a Western concept which has dominated Western culture for the last 150 years. It holds that "human beings share a common nature but each develops it to a certain degree in relation to his/her culture." What I particularly like is Abdel-Hakim's additional gloss. The concept, she says, "is individualist in its belief in the potential of the individual and his right to develop through culture, and humanist in its belief in the power of culture to bring enlightenment and, therefore, human progress".
