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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Somewhere in between
By Youssef Rakha
The Supreme Council for Culture has been remarkably busy in recent months, concluding an event only to begin another one, and often seeking the participation of high-profile figures from various parts of the world. Perhaps spurred on by the relentless emphasis the current Ministry of Culture has placed on generating artistic and intellectual hype -- the interminable festivals, retrospectives, symposiums, seminars -- these events are intended in part to keep officials and "the public" permanently occupied with important issues, in part to back up claims of concern for the people and of cultural renaissance. Alas, their intellectual content seldom lives up to the terms in which they are promoted. And questions about both the extent of their relevance to the public and what they ultimately achieve continue to present themselves even more forcibly than before.
The most recent of the Council's activities, the second conference of Moroccan and Egyptian novelists (15-17 April) -- the first conference took place in Casablanca in May 1996 -- comprised an intense, forbiddingly packed programme of seminars (four two-hour sessions daily, the last three of which were condensed into one) that resembled, if anything, a crash course in the contemporary Moroccan and Egyptian novel. Literary intricacies of a very large number of novels (the last works by, among many others, Egyptian novelists Mohamed El-Bosati, Ibrahim Aslan and Gamal El-Ghitani, and Moroccan novelists Mohamed Zifzaf, Al-Mailoudi Shaghmoum and Abdel-Qadir Al-Shawi) were divulged by an impressive array of Moroccan and Egyptian writers/critics (among others, Bahaa Taher, Edwar El-Kharat, Fatma Moussa, Abdel-Karim Al-Jowieti and Ahmed Al-Yibouri). Yet the good old public -- for whom one would think such a course is intended -- remained largely absent. Looming large over the proceedings, too, were the figures of Egyptian critic Gaber Asfour, the Council's ever-vibrant secretary-general, and the Moroccan critic Mohamed Berrada, whose recent autobiographical work, Mithl Sayf Lan Yatakarrar (A summer never to be repeated), caused a major stir in intellectual circles throughout the Arab world. The four opening speeches, cleverly mimicking subsequent sessions, were delivered by veteran experimental Egyptian writer and literary theorist Edwar El-Kharrat (in his capacity as head of the short story committee), Berrada (representing the Moroccan academics participating), Egyptian critic Salah Fadl (representing Egyptian academics) and Asfour.
In these and subsequent speeches, the conference was more often than not envisioned as an opportunity for that portion of the two countries' literatures written originally in standard Arabic (until recently a relatively small proportion of Moroccan writing, most of which was written in French) to be discussed -- a breeding ground for beneficial peer interaction with an emphasis on the search for shared artistic-intellectual features and common sociopolitical ground. More modestly, and perhaps also more accurately, it was seen as a chance for Egyptian writers and critics to meet with their Moroccan counterparts in a formal -- perhaps too formal -- setting that provides a public medium through which both sides could express their profound, if hardly ever critical, appreciation of each others' work. "Prior to all critical and cultural considerations," declared Berrada, "this meeting responds to the imperatives of friendship between writers in Egypt and Morocco, since the earliest manifestations of modern Moroccan literature [in Arabic]." This was not only the conference's true guiding principle but also, ultimately, its strongest point.
"Under the umbrella of friendship" -- in Berrada's words -- "this meeting becomes a spontaneous [occurrence] very far from tightly constructed academic planning." Aside from a formal set up that encourages the lone speaker's tendency to reiterate and, by insisting on jargon-ridden learned eloquence, ultimately fails to compel -- one consequence of such "spontaneity" is that it does nothing for literature in predominantly illiterate, non-reading societies. But even within the literary domain, the lack of any genuinely critical (hence provocative or stimulating) discourse implies not only tedium (a condition that was somewhat counteracted with the occasional burst of non-literary insight or verbal wit) but also a relegation of the serious questions (to what extent are the traditional tendencies towards verbal embellishment, used by El-Ghitani in other works, compatible with an effective expression of the 21st-century human predicament around which his book, Hikayat Al-Mo'assassa, is thought to revolve?) to a merely laudatory surface level of discourse (El-Ghitani continues to employ the Arabic narrative tradition effectively but in this instance he invests it with narrative features gleaned from Kafka and Huxley, among other modern sources, equally effectively).
Other discussions likewise concentrated on questions of genre (is this a novel? an ensemble of flowing narratives? a complex narrative construction made up of short stories and/or tales?) and the central metaphor of each work under scrutiny, which was often present in the title of the book: El-Bosati's Wa Ya'ti Al-Qitar (And the train comes), for example, was approached from the standpoint of the train metaphor and its multiplicity of possible meanings: the train of life and time, the train of the Egyptian and Arab novel, etc. The Moroccans who spoke were thought by some to be more formidably intellectual than their Egyptian counterparts, by virtue of both their command of an impressively classical language and their erudite knowledge of Western, mainly French critical discourse. The overall impression was one of gravity and hard work but, outside the arguably restrictive formal setting, the conference was definitely more of a literary get-together than a public gathering. Until the question of how to involve the public is addressed more practically and realistically, however, such events will always remain somewhere in between.
