Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 October 2000 Issue No. 503
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Steadfast ministrations

By Youssef Rakha

The journey to "the plateau" is beset by contradictory directions. Many confirm that Osama Anwar Okasha is there. Others, automatically appointing themselves spokespeople for Egypt's leading television dramatist, insist that he has moved to the "other building where the big blue truck is parked," the film laboratory. There, I am assured he has left altogether and is not expected back tonight. As I wind my way outside, the absurdly named Arts Town in Haram -- the Radio and Television Union space in which the second part of Zizinia, Okasha's wildly popular soap opera, is now being filmed -- suddenly seems vast and silent.

When finally I resort to the mobile phone, Okasha turns out to have been in the same spot for at least an hour. "Whoever told you that I left?" While he berates me for the time it is all taking, I am under the paranoid impression that I will go back to the studio and still not find him. No sooner do I walk in than I realise my mistake, however: those who initially directed me to "the alleyway" meant the make-believe Alexandrian alleyway inside the building, not the actual alleyway where I was further misled by at least two of the innumerable technicians and low-brow bureaucrats slouching about individually and in crowds. Okasha is discussing the script with a young actress: sitting comfortably outside a make-believe ahwa, looking the same, I imagine as he must look outside a real ahwa in Alexandria, the setting of Zizinia and the city where he prefers to write.

The dichotomy is relevant: real and make-believe, there and not there; Okasha seems persistently to occupy two worlds at the same time. Four months ago, for one thing, he placed a bid on Monkhafad Al-Hind Al-Mousimi, a new novel that he "somehow, I-don't-know-how, found the time to write." The point is evidently to reassert his position as a writer of fiction "regardless of the genre." And it was something nobody had banked on since Okasha made his name. As if that was not enough, he announced, in a newspaper article on the elections, that the Wafd Party offered the ideal framework for building true democracy. Commentators thus instantly thought they recognised a retrograde Nasserist -- or, at least, a dramatist whose work is informed by an admiration for Nasser's era (and a corresponding loathing for Sadat's) -- going back on his ideology.

"A storyteller does not remove one galabiya to put on another," he says of the first issue. "Writing, for him, is of the same stuff, and he offers the same part of himself whether it's drama, a novel, a short story, whatever it is that he writes. What can happen is that a genre, a particular kind of experience, will, as it were, abduct you, but it can't kill another experience inside you. Each genre is a kind of experience, and nostalgia for it persists." As for the second issue, he points out, again, that he professes no ideology; what he admires about Nasserism could never be cast in the mould of a political party now; neither is it in contradiction with his faith in Al-Wafd as a democratic vehicle. The insurgent energy has been tempered indeed, but not quite lost. And it is to his position as an independent writer that everything in the end wends.

Nodding to his left-wing "intellectual" beginnings, Okasha recites a line of poetry about the omnipotence of the first love. "If it was a question of future ambitions, as you have rightly suggested, one has achieved enough. To purposely aim for greater success would be almost indecently vain. But it's simply a question of carrying through something you've already started." An indistinct garble, the sound of studio technicians quarrelling, overtakes Okasha's voice when I play the recording. "You can't imagine for how many years that novel was asking to be written -- " that is all I hear after the garble desists. "If it wasn't a novel experience it wouldn't have formed this way inside me, so cumulatively that I found the speed with which I wrote it disturbingly suspicious. Neither does it mean that I will no longer have television drama experiences that I will want to write. That work too will inevitably ask to be completed in new ways, and so on."

At the apex of his career (Zizinia and Hassan Arabesque, his last two serial dramas, proved as successful as the now classic Layali Al-Hilmiya), Okasha seems quietly confident, almost cold in his analysis; and suddenly it dawns upon me that none of it really touches him. That must be why he plays down his many hats so insistently, I ponder, claiming a single writer's galabiya instead. Writing just happens to be what he does, and he does it steadfastly according to specific formulae, and he wants to do it effectively, not simply well. "What does it mean for a writer to exist if there is no readership?" Okasha points out that even Naguib Mahfouz was unknown to the general public until his novels were made into films. "Perhaps that's what first drew me to the genre of television drama, the one artistic medium that reaches millions at the same time."

Following this line of thought, television viewers would embody a surrogate readership that comes with its own, enormous restrictions. "I don't deny that, and I have had problems with the censors. Our media is totalitarian and performs only one task: to polish up the government's image. I am a dramatist whose works happen to be produced by the television, that's all." And, like it or not, Okasha lingeringly holds on to his informally acquired title of Intellectual, too. Social history as soap opera -- his pioneering forte -- has its own, obvious limitations. And the dramatist's predilection for cliché-ridden "political" discourse parallels his gift for creating life-like social types: neither, at bottom, is a very intellectual activity. Yet Okasha's achievement evidently transcends a dramatic apotheosis of the middle-class morality his characters profess.

To Okasha, as he speaks of the drive behind Zizinia, no less than "laying the foundations for Egyptian identity" is at stake. Others attempt to pigeonhole him, both intellectually and ideologically, dismissing his achievement for the mere entertainment that it actually is. Yet Okasha resists easy classification, eager to guard his rights as an individual writer who claims, among other grand predecessors, Greek tragedy as the model for even his most popular work. Asked about the irony of the October celebrations coinciding with the massacre of Palestinians (following the Al-Aqsa Mosque uprising), he nonchalantly points out that the Egyptian government will not go to war. By the end there is no reason to think that the metaphor he prefers -- that of journeying from literature to television and perhaps, occasionally, back -- is not ultimately closer to the truth.

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