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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 May 2000 Issue No. 480
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Cultural politics
By Edward Said
The aesthetic realm is autonomous and should never be confused with or reduced to politics, economics, or history, even though every work of art is necessarily connected to its own time and place in society. The essence of criticism is of course to specify the nature of that connection, which is totally different for every work, given that the aesthetic artefact is utterly individual and irreducible. In any case, all of that is something for consideration elsewhere, since what I want to discuss here is a considerably less complex, but nevertheless interesting issue concerning aesthetic work in the contemporary world. I simply wanted to state a highly schematic version of my own aesthetic philosophy at the beginning in order, in a sense, to make clear that what I shall be saying in what follows is not intended as and cannot be an extended discussion of aesthetics, but of politics and culture.
I shall begin with a couple of observations. For the past half century or so there has been considerable artistic ferment in the Arab world. Not only has there been one unquestionably great novelist (Mahfouz) but a whole range of other writing, drama, dance, cinema, sculpture, painting and music that attests to an enormous artistic production. This has included classical work, as well as popular art. To mention names almost at random like Taha Hussein, Um Kulthoum, Adonis, Youssef Chahine, Tayib Salih, Nizar Qabbani, Abdel-Rahman Munif, Mahmoud Darwish, Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, Tahia Carioca, Katib Yacine, Tawfiq El-Hakim, Saadi Youssef, Elias Khoury is only to begin to scratch the surface of a whole massive formation that has graced the Arab world and engaged literally millions upon millions of ordinary citizens.
The second observation is no less true, I think. And that is that most educated Arabs nevertheless feel that so far as the rest of the world is concerned generally, and the North Atlantic and more specifically the Anglo-Saxon worlds in particular, there is inadequate recognition of this great cultural fact. Even the towering Mahfouz, once the first flush of enthusiasm after his l988 Nobel Prize subsided somewhat, is always considered as a case apart, splendid though he may be. By that I mean that he is read and written about more carelessly, less knowingly, less attentively than for example distinguished contemporaries of his such as Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, or Chinua Achebe. I recall a long and genuinely appreciative article in the New York Review of Books (September 22, 1994) by the fine South African novelist J M Coetzee about Mahfouz's Harafish that, for a writer of Coetzee's remarkable talents and sophistication, was astonishingly crude, framed in generalities about Islamic backwardness, and all sorts of really rudimentary inaccuracies about style and even Mahfouz's problematic novel Awlad Haritna that one wouldn't dare write about novels in Spanish, or Russian, or even Japanese. Of course Coetzee was only using English translations, many but not all of them poor, and clearly he did not know very much about the traditions and milieu that Mahfouz has worked in, but the point is that he could write without that knowledge and still be considered an adequate and even competent authority because Arabic culture is supposed to be -- that way, deserving of that kind of flawed attention.
There are many reasons for that. Some of them are the cultural and religious hostility that exists between the West and the Arabs, the history of Orientalism, the problem of Israel, the absence of any serious cultural policy by the Arab countries, the depressed state of democracy in the Arab world, the astonishing mutual ignorance between cultures that seems to lead an independent life of its own. The results have been for Arabs a poorly understood and appreciated literature and culture that, considering the genuinely interesting and significant work that as a modern people we have produced, is simply unacceptable. Whereas there are excellent translations of Darwish and Adonis in French, as well as a respectable number of novels available in that language, as well as Spanish and German, neither Adonis nor Darwish actually exists in anything like a comprehensive decent English translation. As for Qabbani, and others of his stature, he is simply not known, nor is there any immediate likelihood of forthcoming translations on an adequate scale, done by first-class translators and publishing houses. Whatever exists is intermittent, spotty, uneven and, as in Mahfouz's case, seems to supply a momentary albeit steady and appreciative demand. Youssef Chahine, for instance, has acquired the status of a master but his films are routinely unexhibited in theaters in London or New York. What we need is an immediately available infusion of contemporary Arabic cultural production in the English-speaking world (now at the centre of the world cultural debate), and that simply is not there. The idea of an integral library in English of Arabic works is simply unthinkable in the present political and cultural climate, where Arabs are either viewed as a problem, or as possible candidates for a dubious "peace process." I do not want to labour this point, which I have been making for a long time now.
What I do want to say here is something a great deal more positive. For the first time since the Second World War and thanks to an exceptionally talented, if still somewhat underpopulated, new generation of artists in their forties, there are Arab names and accomplishments on the international stage. For these individuals no excuses or explanations have to be made. What they do, they do as artists writing, painting, filming exactly like their peers and equivalents in the West and elsewhere in the world (including India, Latin America, South Africa, Japan, etc.) with the same self-conscious assurance and with the same sense of achievement, since their work is seen as work, and neither as the exotic product of an Eastern society, nor as something to be explained or rationalised for that reason. Such figures as Zaha Hadid, Mona Hatoum, Ahdaf Soueif -- women all of them -- are recognized as architects, artists, writers without any qualification except that they are all Arabs, which is perhaps less important than that their work occupies the first rank by any international standard. Of the translated writers I would say that Tayib Salih, Elias Khoury, Kanafani, Hanan El-Shaykh and Nawal El-Saadawi, for very different reasons, have a comparable but in fact a slightly different status as artists from and in the Arab world. Whether that is because the three women artists I mention above live in the West, use its artistic idioms and languages, or are simply proficient on a new level, is hard to determine. But the fact is that they are prominent members of an artistic and cultural community to which the previous generation of Arabs has not penetrated before.
Samra with Abla Kamil
Samra with the intriguing Bassma
"Nasrallah's hero Ali is played brilliantly by the young, striking-looking (indeed very harsh and assertively Egyptian in manner and style) Bassem Samra. Young Ali is a resident of Rod Al-Farag who works in a government butcher shop while also nurturing ambitions of leaving Cairo for Paris where he dreams of having a career as an actor"
My comments here are occasioned by a new name, the Egyptian director Youssri Nasrallah, also of the same generation as the others I have mentioned above, but unlike them in that his primary residence is still the Arab world. Nevertheless he has recently achieved a significant status as cinema director in the Anglo-Saxon West with his new film, Al-Madina, recently screened at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and accepted for distribution by a major distribution group. These indices of success are of course far less important than the film's actual achievement, which was celebrated in an unprecedented way by the famously grudging New York media. For one, Al-Madina makes no concessions to what might be considered exoticism. This is not a film delivering local colour, nor is it about a particularly Arab/Egyptian predicament, nor is it explicable in socio-economic or ethnographic terms of the sort that would take such things as globalisation and the Third World into account. All of these elements are there of course -- it is the story of a young Egyptian lower-middle class man who wants to be an actor -- and its language, images, and manner are obviously Egyptian. Yet its appeal and the level of its aesthetic existence assume a much larger and more universal audience as well as a far greater ambition and reach. Most important, the appeal of the film is filmic, so to speak, and not dependent on cultural explanations that are required to understand or in some way excuse and explain it by some special code.
Nasrallah's hero Ali is played brilliantly by the young, striking-looking (indeed very harsh and assertively Egyptian in manner and style) Bassem Samra. Young Ali is a resident of Rod Al-Farag who works in a government butcher shop while also nurturing ambitions of leaving Cairo for Paris where he dreams of having a career as an actor. Much of this aspect of the film owes something to Chahine's Alexandria series of course, but Nasrallah's story is mercilessly, even brutally unsentimental, and focuses not only on the superb Cavafy poem about no one being able to leave the city (and indeed taking it with one everywhere) but also on the associations between young people that imprison and enrich at the same time. A whole middle section of the film shows Ali in Paris not as an actor but as a boxer who fights in rigged, i.e. fixed, fights, for which he gets money that mostly goes to his local Algerian-Moroccan manager. He becomes part of a crowd of illegal Arab (and mainly Palestinian) immigrants in Paris, subject to the precariousness of their lives and the harried existence they lead in search of employment and legitimate residence papers, an experience never before told in film with such relentless drive.
In the end Ali becomes an injured street person and, because of an accident in which we think he may have lost his memory, although the film is brilliantly ambiguous here, he does in fact lose his passport to his manager who steals Ali's ticket and goes back to Egypt, while Ali and a kindly French nurse, superbly played by Ines de Medeiros, develop a restricted relationship that ends abruptly. Part of the film's force is that its reflections on identity -- acting, authenticity, gender, sexuality -- are complex but never misleading or dishonest, never prudish or elusive. It is a film about male relationships, partly homoerotic, partly not, and this dimension is integrated with great skill into the larger question of where, in a globalised and uncertain world, one is, where one can be, and how. The metaphor of acting superbly carries the burden of all this, so much so that in the last scene Nasrallah delivers a scene in Cairo, after Ali has returned there, that threatens disaster, but in fact turns out to be, like Truffaut's ending for Day for Night, a scene being shot in a film.
This is not to say, however, that Al-Madina dodges political questions or issues that are difficult and complex: on the contrary, it doesn't but rather they are integrated into the film as part of its aesthetic, rather than ideological and/or socio-cultural, structure. What I found remarkably impressive is the care taken with subsidiary aspects of Ali's story: his on-and-again-off-again love affair with a neighbour's daughter, intriguingly played by Bassma, his equally rich relationships with his shilla (this being a story of shillal), the whole reach of allusions to aspects of contemporary Arab life, from working in the Gulf to the miseries of existence under Arafat's Authority, and the easy, unaffected way Paris and Cairo are treated with both the respect and unintimidated attention they deserve as later metamorphoses of Cavafy's Alexandria. Above all, long though the film is, one never feels any sense of drag or time-wasting: it is taut, lean, ruthlessly edited, with no maudlin and dawdling or local color scenes inserted for audience-pleasing effect. At the end of its screening at the Museum of Modern Art Nasrallah announced (I must say somewhat to his audience's evident discomfort) that his film had only played at the Alexandria Film Festival, and that there were no plans for commercial screenings in Egyptian cinemas.
Ali's last tango in Paris
This is an appalling state of affairs, entirely due to the total absence of a government policy protecting Egyptian films from the rapacity of American distributors and the greed of city theater owners who want only to show blockbuster mass market imported films. This brings us back again to the whole matter of culture as politics, the distribution, dissemination, affirmation of culture as a way of making political gains, an art perfected by our opponents both in the Zionist movement and the West. We have never understood (or if we have, we have turned away from its lessons) the value of what it is that we are as a people and culture, and have steadfastly put our faith (a heritage from colonialism) in the white master or in middle-men. That is why films like Nasrallah's find audiences outside the Arab world, and acquire reputations there, rather than at home where cynicism and self-righteous posturing rule the day. That such works as his, Hatoum's, Hadid's, Soueif's achieve the eminence that they have is a testament to how they have been freed and have finally escaped from the debasing obstacles placed in their way at home. And by an almost cosmic irony, since all this work is plainly by and about Arab experiences and artists, it ends up by giving us all the unearned pleasure of seeing how well we can do, given the chance.
