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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 March 2000 Issue No. 472
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Darourat Al-Kalb fil Masrahiya (The Need for the Dog in the Play), Girgis Shukri, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000. pp101
Monthly supplement
Alexandria re-inscribed
No One Sleeps in Alexandria, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, tr. Farouk Abdel-Wahab, The American University in Cairo Press, 1999. pp409
Southern PartThe Crusades through Muslim eyes
The Crusades -- Islamic Perspectives, Carole Hillenbrand, Edinburgh University Press, 1999. pp648Economic schizophrenia, global style
Misr wa Riyah Al-'awlama (Egypt and the Winds of Globalisation), Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, 1999. pp264Canine ruminations
Darourat Al-Kalb fil Masrahiya (The Need for the Dog in the Play), Girgis Shukri, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000. pp101History and parallel history
Tumanbay: Al-Sultan Al-Shahid (Tumanbay: The Martyred Sultan), Emad Abu Ghazi, Cairo: Mirette, 1999. pp96Sun Dancer speaks his sorrow
Prison Writings: My Life is my Sun Dance, Leonard Peltier, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1999. pp243Novel of novels
Al-Bashmouri II, Salwa Bakr, Cairo: Supreme Council of Culture. 2000, pp151Chagall's Arabian Nights: Four Tales from The Thousand and One Nights with lithographs by Marc Chagall, Prestel Verlag, 1999. pp163 Read caption
To the editor
At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-WardaniMagazines & Periodicals
* Al-Kotob: Wughat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), a Monthly Review of Books, issue No. 14, March, 2000, Cairo: The Egyptian Company for Arab and International Publishing
* Aafaq Ifriqiya (African Horizons), quaretrly, Cairo: State Information Service, issue no. 1
* Al-Thaqafa Al-Alamiya (World Culture), bimonthly cultural magazine, Kuwait, no.99
Books
* Al-Riwaya fi Nihayat Al-Qarn (The Novel at the End of the Century), Ali El-Ra'i, Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal, 2000, pp371
* Al-Himaya wal-Iqab: Al-Gharb wal-Mas'ala Al-Diniya fil-Sharq Al-Awsat (Protection and Punishment: The West and the Religious Question in the Middle East), Samir Morqos, Cairo: Miret, 2000, pp210
* Al-Wataniya Al-Misriya fil-Asr Al-Hadith (Egyptian Nationalism in Modern Times), Amina Higazi, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2000, pp555
* Khamriya, Amin El-Ayyouti, Cairo: Al-Hilal, 2000, pp121
* Awlamat Al-Faqr (The Globalisation of Poverty), Michael Chossudovsky trans. Mohamed Mostagir, Cairo: Sotour, 2000, pp328
* Hal Intahat Ostourat Ibn-Khaldoun? (Is the Myth of Ibn-Khaldoun over?), Mahmoud Ismail, Cairo: Dar Qibaa, 2000, pp333
Books is a monthly supplement of Al-Ahram Weekly appearing every second Thursday of the month. We welcome contributions and letters on subjects raised in this supplement. Material may be edited for length and clarity; and should be addressed to Mona Anis, Books Editor, Al-Ahram Weekly, Galaa St., Cairo, Arab Republic of Egypt; Faz: +202 578 6089; E-mail: m.anis@ahram.org.eg
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Illustrations courtesy of International Commitee of the Red Cross
"Folk drawings and tales", Cairo, 1996
Canine ruminations
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
The Need for the Dog is both poet Girgis Shukri's predicament and the uncertain, evocative name he has given it. For, in the recesses of this author's late-in-the-day literary sensibility, there is an emptiness, or ambiguity, that is forever in need of a name.
One clear trend in the poetry of the last decade has been the need poets have felt for individually resonant, sometimes shamelessly nihilistic, images, symbols, motifs with which to fill what is perceived as a human and cultural void. To use one of Shukri's own metaphors, life seems to have turned into an endless, vapid, inevitably derivative film in which the poet performs the twofold function of actor and viewer; the theme that runs through this film, however hollow it may turn out to be, is what the poet seeks to capture.
Globalisation disorients, implying as it does the predominance of one set of values over others. It sets the scene for an increasingly automated, apolitical existence, and it furnishes 1990s poets with their specific tone of voice, one that is at once contemplative and angry, hedonistic and cynical, stuttering and eloquent. Self-consciously or not, the woes of globalisation -- problems of national, religious, social, and intellectual identity, the urge to break taboos and the feeling of surreal or absurdist estrangement and postmodern déjà vu that this creates -- have marked out the present poetic generation's variable thematic territory. Globalisation accounts too for the fast-paced, prosaic register in which the new poetry (al-shi'r al-jadid) is written, a register that has only a dubious relation with the traditionally lyrical.
As one pre-eminent representative of this generation, Girgis Shukri, for example in his collections Bila Moqabil Asqut Asfal Hidha'i (To No Avail I Fall Beneath my Shoe, 1996) and Ragul Tayib Yukalim Nafsahu (A Kind Man Who Speaks to Himself, 1999) had tackled themes of love, death and everyday existence in a twilight zone between subversion (the cynical) and expression (the lyrical). His individual poetic project could thus be taken as an impressively articulate instance of the general predicament facing poets in the 1990s. In this, his most recent collection, however, Shukri seems to have gone further, wholeheartedly giving himself over to exploring the sen*se of disorientation that can result from globalisation. As a result, in its latest stage of development, his sensibility has become paradoxically more commonplace: the frequent expressions of nihilism in this volume undermine what one had appreciated as the poet's previously solid poetic substance and distinctive craftsmanship. The original spirit of his writing remains, but it is in many cases powerless and diffuse in the face of the volume's somewhat predictable and repetitive imagery. "Good morning, O Lord/ So what will you do this morning?"
The collection's title poem is its longest, being constructed in the manner of a play divided into four connected chapters. These are rather tenuously related, but the ruling question throughout is, "Is the dog really necessary?", a striking question which unfortunately is given only a disappointing, anti-climactic answer. In the final lines of the poem Shukri writes, "I died peacefully /For this is necessary in the play", which makes the idea explicit, but earlier in the piece there had been little aesthetic or logical justification for such a link between a newborn infant's cries and the yelping of a hapless puppy, even if both were then swiftly transformed into the mutely outraged and uncomprehending howling of a single human-canine voice.
Despite occasional verbal sparks ("people who live in their coats"), in general Shukri's extended image of the dog -- as a kind of stand-in for everything that has been deprived of a name -- is too meagre a support for the poet's ambitions. Similarly his dramatic monologues, many of which are included in the present volume, though they give a powerful impression of the speaking voice, could have answered his ambitions better had they been both more lucidly constructed and better thought out. As is the case with the writing of many other contemporary poets, one gets the impression that in this volume's title poem, which remains the most striking in the book as a whole, a good short poem has been expanded and diluted only in order to create a not-so-good longer poem.
Girgis Shukri is a conscious craftsman, though this turns out to be a dubious virtue. For if craftsmanship gives way to a lack of substance, the way it frequently does here, then sooner or later it will exhaust itself. The most disturbing aspect of this collection, in fact, is the nonchalance with which the poems pursue the supposedly shared experience of globalisation, the New World Order, and its minutely documented frivolity. There is only a thin line separating real frivolity from ironic and conscious commentary on it, and in this sense the book sees Shukri walking a particularly precarious tightrope.
However many of the shorter poems collected here are refreshing and effective nevertheless, retaining the precise physical immediacy and lyrical appeal of Shukri's last two collections. The poet's jacket is shown acquiring mythical proportions in the first poem, for example, being both the poet's companion in solitude and an inanimate reflection of himself. "My jacket loves the street the way I do," he writes, "And I don't know how this love was born/ I don't remember/ Where this jacket came from/ Only when I hate the world/ I disappear into my jacket/ So it walks alone/ Not talking to anybody."
