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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Monthly supplement
The barber of Baghdad
Ard Al-Sawad (Land of Darkness), a novel in three volumes, Abdel-Rahman Mounif, Beirut and Casablanca: Al-Mou'assassa Al-Arabiya Lildirasta wal-Nashr (Beirut), Al-Markaz Al-Thaqafi Al-Arabi Lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi (Casablanca) 1999.Fiction and reality
Abdel-Rahman Mounif
Chinese monuments and miracles
Al-Seen: Mo'jizat Nihayat Al-Qarn Al-Ishreen (China: Miracle of the End of the 20th Century ), Ibrahim Nafie, Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Translation and Publishing 1999. pp200Deep roots, shallow soil
Landmarks in the History of the Communist Party of the Sudan in the half century 1946 - 1996, Mohamed Said al-Qaddal, Beirut: Dar Al-Farabi, 1999. pp310Cinematic maladies
Al-Cinema Al-Arabiya Al-Mo'assira (Contemporary Arab Cinema),Samir Farid, Cairo: The Supreme Council for Culture publications,1998. pp260Horses in the desert night
Night & Horses & the Desert, An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, Robert Irwin, London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press. pp462Heritage in the balance
The Arabic Literary Heritage: the Development of its Genres and Criticism, Roger Allen, Cambridge University Press, 1998. pp437Summer torments
Azhar al-Shams (Flowers of the Sun),Youssef Rakha, Cairo: Sharqiat Publishing House, 1999. pp143Hill of evil counsel Tal Al-Hawa ,Youssef Abu Raya, Cairo: Al-Hilal Novels, 1999. pp146
Century, conceived and edited by Bruce Bernard, London: Phaidon Press, 1999. pp1120 --see caption--
To the editor
At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-Wardani* Al-Faylaq (The Corps), Amin Ezzeddin, Cairo: Fustat Publishing House, 1999. pp174
* Ana Baqqa wa Adel Hammouda (Adel Hammouda and Me), Ahmed Fouad Negm, Cairo: Zeinab Publishing House, 2000. pp108
* Jamal Eddin Al-Afghani, El-Sayed Youssef,Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1999. pp255
* Masirat Hayati Hatta 1964 (The Course of My Life to 1964), Mohamed Youssef El-Guindi, Cairo: Organisation for Cultural Palaces, 1999. pp208
* Al-Mohammashoun wa Al-Siyasa fi Misr (The Marginalised and Politics in Egypt), Amani Massoud El-Heddini, Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, 1999. pp302
* Al-Kotob: Wughat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), monthly magazine, issue no. 12, January 2000, Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publication
* Al-Hilal, monthly magazine, January 1999, Cairo: Al-Hilal Publishing House
* Al-Arabi, monthly magazine, issue no. 494, January 2000, Kuwait: Ministry of Information
* Sotour (Lines), monthly magazine, issue no. 39, December 1999, Cairo: Sotour Publications
* Al-Osour Al-Jadida (New Eras), monthly magazine, issue no. 3, 2000, Cairo: Sinai Publishing House
* Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism), monthly literary magazine, issue no. 172, December 1999, Cairo: Progressive Nationalist Unionist Party publications
To see other book supplements go to the ARCHIVES index.
Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Hill of evil counsel
In this, his second novel, Youssef Abu Raya has transcended his initial achievement, releasing himself from the compulsion to document and concentrating instead on the immediate requirements of literary excellence: an exact, instantly recognisable collective voice (the narrative of Egyptian village life), a tighter, more economical construction and an ability to present the commonplace in poetic, almost mythical literary garb.
In this way he has markedly improved on his first novel, Atash Al-Sabbar (The Thirst of the Cactus, 1989), recently reissued in the Maktabat Al-Osra Series, which had an overriding anthropological concern and laboured to convey aspects of the Egyptian village -- that hard-won, elusive creature to which Abu Raya has devoted himself, approaching it from a variety of perspectives through the medium of a highly wrought, poetic prose.
What formerly would have taken him several pages to communicate, in the present work is more subtly expressed in condensed and lyrical form. The "overture" to the book is called Collective Voice:
"Our hamlet is legally subsumed under the kafr [district] (it has a mayor whose ability to inspire fear and reverence has been severely undermined), and is subsumed in turn under the markaz [centre] (it has a chief of police, an officer, guards and a big market), which is in turn subsumed under the capital (it has the government and the radio).
"To the East there is the railway, by virtue of which we know about time; to the West there is a village with a cemetery with clean white tombstones; beyond our houses there are the fields blending into the far horizon, in which farmers scatter, plough, irrigate and sow.
"Our village has a bailiff, whose house has a letter box, and a guard who passes by night; we see him as a Snake-Angel, like the one our grandmothers talk about."
Tal Al-Hawa is the name of a hamlet whose fate, along with the destinies of its inhabitants, provide this novel with its subject matter. Though the time is not specified, the narrative seems to take place some considerable time after the 1952 Revolution, the novel thus being set firmly in post-Nasser provincial Egypt. Reference is frequently made to the countryside's transformation under Nasser, and to what followed this transformation.
The novel's protagonist is Hagg Abdallah, a landowner of the post-Nasser period, who has bought up most of the local land. It opens with Abdallah's finding a newborn baby abandoned in the fields (the implication is that the baby is illegitimate), whose belly is marked by some indecipherable inscription, and it ends less than a year later with the same incident occurring again. The novel is structured by a quest for the two babies' parents, and this quest involves both the inhabitants of the village proper, as well as the Bedouins who live on its margins. The idea of historical transformation is involved here, since there has been a break from roots whose meaning can now hardly be deciphered. The inscription on the second baby's stomach turns out to be a map.
Hagg Abdallah is himself originally an outsider to the village, coming from a different part of the country and contriving, through by no means virtuous methods, to buy land given to the local fellaheen by Nasser. He is, therefore, a representative of a new kind of feudal lord, whose arrival signals the start of a new age. Through the presentation of historical types such as Hagg Abdullah and the mechanism of a quest for the children's proper parents, it is to the delineation of the emotional, social and political territory described by this new age in the life of the village that Abu Raya has applied himself with the greatest success.
