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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Radwa Ashour:
As one long prepared
Profile by Youssef Rakha
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion,
but not with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen -- your final pleasure -- to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing."The God Abandons Anthony", C. P. Cavafy
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters
Radwa Ashour sits back in her armchair, visibly alert; her eyes, for fear of being photographed, are inadvertently glued to the camera. Then she looks at me and smiles -- a knowing smile that immediately recalls what Alaa El-Dib has said informally: "With others, you might be completely impressed by your first conversation with them, but then that's as deep as you will ever get; you won't get beyond that first impression. With someone like Radwa Ashour, though, the first conversation shouldn't really count: the more you talk to her the deeper it will get; and you end up with an image completely different to the one you started with." As she adjusts her position to face me -- in a silently frenzied attempt to break free of the lens, finally -- her expression changes, and these words no longer readily apply.
Beyond the smile one is utterly clueless, because ultimately it is impossible to tell. Radwa Ashour is the literature professor, the politically committed intellectual figure, the timid but felicitous fiction writer; she is the teenage Nasserite embroiled in some struggle to change the world, the reluctant Egyptian graduate in America, the marvellously unpretentious wife of a Palestinian poet-refugee. Yet the person facing me now is a slightly androgynous, middle-aged woman whose aspect is at once "left-wing" and conventional, a seemingly everyday character who sits back to suffer the thought of being photographed.
For fifty years this is essentially what she has been doing: sitting back to suffer and understand, but also to resist from within. It is a tendency that makes the phrase "armchair revolutionary" perversely appropriate; far from invoking the image of ideologues who act like back-seat drivers, public entertainers or hagglers-to-infinity, in Ashour's case the phrase prompts you to consider the possibility of low-key activism -- a rough and earthy, self-consciously Third-World application of Sartre's engagement.
Ashour's very life course is a series of snapshots commemorating the dates of major or minor national events.
1946: While rebellious students are brutally crushed by pro-British authorities on the famous Abbas bridge in Manial, Radwa is born in a house "surrounded by the Nile", a few steps away from the site of the massacre. "I didn't know anything about it until I was eight or nine, but when I was told I was deeply moved, and the vision of those students caught between gunfire and the water [the authorities had opened the bridge in an attempt to trap the students] has remained with me." Her father is a lawyer, himself the son of a university professor; her mother, though not uneducated, had not attended university. "The house had a good library and so I grew up reading."
Bibliography
(fiction)- The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Student in America, a critical exploration of American society and the American psyche through the eyes of an adult Egyptian graduate visiting the US for the first time, 1983
- Warm Stone, a novel set in Cairo, 1985
- Khadija and Sawsan, a novel in two parts narrated respectively by mother and daughter, 1989
- I Saw the Date Palms, a collection of short stories, 1989
- Siraj, a novel set on an imaginary island off the coast of east Africa in the last decades of the 19th century, 1992
- The Granada Trilogy, a novel in three parts recounting the history of three generations of a Spanish Arab (Granadine Morisco) family, covering the period from November 1491 to October 1609, 1994-1995
- Apparitions, an autobiographical novel, 1998
(In the autobiographical Apparitions, her last novel, Ashour envisages a double, Shagar, whose life course is throughout juxtaposed with the author's own. Unlike Ashour, Shagar is an unmarried university professor who lives in Manial -- right across the water from where Ashour then lived -- and specialises in modern Egyptian history: all of which are potentialities in Ashour's own life. Interspersed with lyrical and self-referential passages that emphasise reflective reconstruction and effectively forge the link between autobiography and history, the novel flits from memory to reality, from past to presence; and as it does so the historical dimension of the area and its physical detail are effectively interwoven, evoking Ashour's childhood vividly.)
1956: 10-year-old Radwa, resentful of her French schooling in which "foreigners and Jews were favoured and the emphasis was on adopting foreign ways, so that the more foreign the better", listens attentively to the speech in which Nasser announces the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. "I can still recall to mind that part of the house where I heard the radio announcing it." Four years later she was to be transferred, at her own request, to a state school, where she excelled to such an extent that by the time she graduated, her attending university was a forgone conclusion. "It is interesting because my mother had wanted to go to university but didn't, because the norm was for girls to obtain their secondary education certificate and get married, becoming housewives. In the end, in fact, my father was perfectly content."
1967: Radwa graduates. In the same way, her embarking on a career has become a forgone conclusion. During her university years, which happened to be uneventful politically, she "had got in trouble" because of her involvement in an oppositional campaign in the faculty elections. Soon the June defeat shocks the young academic, signalling an ongoing series of strong emotional, and sometimes literary, responses to historical events. She has also met and befriended a young Palestinian colleague, a poet in exile, through whom she would unassumingly embrace the Palestinian cause.
1970: The year of Nasser's death, she marries Murid Al-Barghouthi. In 1977, the poet is to be deported from the country when their only son, Tamim, is still an infant. "The fact that Tamim too has such a gift for poetry -- even colloquial Palestinian poetry -- really bothers me. How can you live with two poets who judge anything you write by the stringent standards of poetry? When they criticised my work, I used to get all worked up and defend myself, but then of course I would go back and rewrite it, because their comments, though they upset me so much, were often quite perceptive. Now I suppose I have grown used to it, it doesn't bother me anymore."
1973: Following the 1972 student uprising at Cairo University, Ashour participates in the founding of the Higher National Committee for Writers and Artists, an offshoot of a campaign against the detention of Ain Shams students who had protested Sadat's efforts to make peace with Israel. "My lack of understanding of the internal workings of politics and the fact that I'm not a born leader would inevitably restrict the scope of my political activity, but in those years I was nonetheless very active within the limits of what was assigned me."
Etc, etc.
Taking Ashour's biography into account, the engagement emerges as an instance of a broader tension between the desire for change and an essentially retiring, earthbound temperament. Even writing (the one self-assigned vocation) is balanced and tempered by the practice of teaching (a socially assigned, if beloved occupation): "I joined the Ain Shams University faculty soon after I graduated in October 1967, and have never stopped teaching since, except for the nine months after I got married [1970], when I had to join my husband in Kuwait, but even then I worked as a school teacher. I like teaching, it's the job I really enjoy, even though currently it puts pressure on me because I need the time for writing, but that's the only kind of pressure it's ever put on me. The only other job I might have enjoyed would've been a job that involves writing, like journalism, but I can't imagine myself otherwise. I see myself in the eyes of the students. I feel their eyes are a mirror that comforts and reassures me. I feel there is a value there, the value of that contact, a contact with a life in process. It is actually a very complex experience, which I live moment by moment; no two lectures are alike."
In a conference statement written five years ago in English, the tension between conformism and revolt is palpable: "Writing is a retrieval of a human will negated. I write, the space becomes my own, and I am no longer an object acted upon by history but a subject acting in history." Not only is there the black-and-white duality of acting (a positive and virile stance) and being acted on (perceived as negative and impotent), but the modernist idea that writing is outside history -- James Joyce famously described history as a nightmare from which he hoped to awake -- is peevishly modified to fit a specific mould. To write is to act, to alter society and possibly even affect history; such, at least, is the aspiration. One neither lives to write nor writes to make a living; rather, one lives and writes in the passive or active conviction that there is a statement to be made; and every aspect of oneself is subsumed within the framework of that statement. Ashour's repertory of literary performances will readily testify to this logic.
For one thing, the real impetus behind The Granada Trilogy, her widely acclaimed and award-winning three-part novel -- attempting to reconstruct the period through the power of empathy, the novel progresses from the heyday of Arab civilisation in Spain to the Arabs' final exodus -- was the aftermath of the Gulf War. The suffering of the Iraqi people had already brought back memories of earlier Arab misfortunes: "As a child, I used to pray for the liberation of Algeria and Palestine. And in 1967 I knew fear in a way I had never known it before, a fear far worse than the worst thing that could happen. Imagine you are in a space capsule: if it breaks and you tumble out, what happens then? You will be suspended, you are neither on earth nor in heaven. A real fear that started in 1967 and was so thoroughly distilled it became a cup of hemlock in the crisis of Iraq. Nothing came out of it except the book [Granada, the first part of the trilogy], and through the book I got rid of part of the fear that might have really plagued me.
"Sometimes I have the illusion that I fall ill for psychological reasons. In 1991 I got a liver infection, and I was, still am convinced that this was bound to happen after the bombardment of Iraq. In October when they conferred in Madrid, I was very ill, I couldn't get out of bed. That's roughly the time when the book was written." Any presumption the writing might involve is consciously undermined, while the historical value of an articulate document becomes paramount -- even, and especially, when such a document is imagined into being at the relevant historical moment.
But Granada was more than this -- it was the belated resolution of a personal, possibly a lifetime's dilemma; and even then the dilemma wasn't completely resolved: "By the time Granada was published, I had written a number of books, yet the incessant question of whether or not I was good for anything still persisted. I was terrified, very scared that I had no talent, because in my view the bad, even the average writer is a completely dispensable being. Perhaps this is an unhealthy ambition. At university I studied literature, I had always enjoyed reading; and the reason I chose the English department of the Faculty of Arts was to extend the scope of my knowledge of literature. Of course nothing could have shown me the futility of my efforts more clearly than the texts I was constantly encountering as a result. First I read Chekhov, and it really scared me. As much as I loved it, I got scared, because I knew I could never write anything like that, let alone even better.
"Then I went to a young writers' conference in Zaqaziq in 1969. Looking around me, I saw Bahaa Taher, Yehia El-Taher Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, Abdel-Hakim Qasim, Amal Dunqul and others. Admittedly, they were all about a decade older, but each had something to show for himself, some form of evidence that he was really talented. And what had I written, apart from one short story that proved nothing? This scared me even more and I stopped writing. It wasn't until 1980 that I finally made another attempt. I had health problems and underwent a serious operation, and I felt I might be dying, and suddenly I had this sensation of abrupt awakening: I'm dying to write, and perhaps I will die before I do, so let me write something, say a word or two in time, and it doesn't matter whether or not I'll manage to write what nobody else has written. So, based on my relatively recent experience in America I wrote The Journey, and as I did so, for the first time I was learning; nothing teaches you to write better than writing.
"But to get back to Granada: The night of the 15th [the day of the month when a new issue of the Al-Hilal novel series, within which the three books were published, appears] was my worst experience of waiting, even worse than marriage and childbirth, because this was my very best shot: if it flopped I would know there was no use continuing. It was like waiting to be told whether or not I should stop writing. And when it turned out Granada was well received, that immense, terrifying question mark remained inside me, of course, but I was finally able to contain it; it no longer swallowed my entire being."
Radwa Ashour sits back in her armchair. Aside from her involvement in government and civil organisations, the brisk attention she pays to her academic career and the historical statement that fiction makes possible and to which she has increasingly devoted herself, what can she do with her disillusion? The Arabs are not united: Palestine is not liberated and Algerians are slaughtering each other. Not only does the glory of Arab civilisation remain a memory to be marvelled at, but the lustre of Nasserism has faded and the world, the city has shed its skin. Ashour partakes eclectically in radically oriented activities. Despite the ideological divide, she observes with awe as beveiled female students demonstrate against Israeli and American atrocities.
In C P Cavafy's poem -- the title is taken from Plutarch's Life of Anthony -- the image is of a whole city departing: while the citizens file away in what amounts to a funereal procession, Mark Anthony, abandoned, stands gravely at the window and, like a noble fighter, bids imminently departing glory a solemn, sad farewell.
photos: Randa Shaath
