14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
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A curious procession
Al-Gazira Al-Baydaa [The White Island], Youssef Abu Rayya, Cairo: Supreme Council for Culture (Al-Taffarugh Series), Cairo 2000. pp97
On the back cover of this slim volume, the late critic Ali El-Ra'i makes two interesting comments. First, he points out that "death, here, is not the opposite of life, but rather its vital counterpart." Secondly, he describes the author's literary stance: "And from above, Youssef Abu Rayya observes the procession of life and of the living, his vision rising to the level of poetry and sometimes reaching a Sufi state." In both his comments El-Ra'i is on the mark. The dichotomy of life and death seems to be the only framework broad enough to cover Abu Rayya's miscellany of themes -- love, history, friendship, family, growing up and the rural-urban boundary. Indeed, only in the light of so broad-ranging a critical concept can one adequately grasp the unity of this fragmentary text.
As El-Ra'i indicates, the form of the novel betrays an aspiration to the sublime. And in this fact lies the novel's abiding paradox: while the book is full of earthy detail and grass-roots vitality, its form is an exalted expression of the writer's state of mind. It is as if wishing to familiarise his reader with Al-Gazira Al-Baydaa, the small Delta town at the centre of his writing, Abu Rayya has constructed a tower on the edge of the town and led the reader straight to the top, inviting her to look out through a telescope but never suggesting that she should walk in the town and observe directly. He eschews the conventional trappings of fiction, such as plot, character development and chronology, and instead sustains the reader's interest by sheer poetic force. Thus while the reader may not fully understand the connection between the book's two sections and may be distinctly unimpressed by Abu Rayya's analysis of modern social history, finding his digressions irritating, the evocative power of his language will surely establish a hold on her mind.
Parts One and Two of the novel comprise two (metaphorical?) journeys to White Island, told from the viewpoint of the same author-narrator in the form of a first-person narrative in the present tense: "The sun slopes slightly towards the west. Its image, reflected on the tracks, crawls on as fast as the car. I now approach Al-Gazira Al-Baydaa." However the first few pages of the book, with their numerous, brief footnotes, read like excerpts from an academic study of the social and political effects of introducing a railway line into the town -- an expository motif that runs parallel to the narrative through each journey, taking on a less scholarly and more meditative guise as each draws meanderingly to a close. The author-narrator is palpably obsessed with his topic, but in these expository passages he remains impersonal: "government documents and headquarters were moved to the town due to its being a stop on the railway... The age of caravans was past, and we witnessed the age of steam... [the towns of] Al-Salhiya, Al-Sawalih, Al-Alaqma, Al-Qurrien, Belbies -- all these atrophied in order for Faqous, Abu Kbeir and Zaqaziq to live. The matter was decided in favour of green towns and fresh water, against... sand and camels... And the administration inclined towards modern life..."
The book's autobiographical dimension is unmistakable. It is as if the author is telling his life story both through and within the story of the town. Part One, for example, depicts the death of the father and, by stream-of-consciousness association, the path into adulthood. These events serve as a framework within which to document a historical period. When the patriarch dies, matriarchy reigns. And during Abu Rayya's first journey, when patriarchy is seen negatively, the matriarchal bond is repeatedly emphasised. When the father dies, the word "darling" tumbles out of the mother's lips for the first time. In a unique passage that seems to summarise the book, Abu Rayya's personification of the town sounds like a soliloquy addressed to either a mother or a girlfriend: "Your history has the face of your river, a quiet flow... If a pebble is dropped, you go out to ascertain the news. I am tired of searching for your origins in old books." When the narrator proceeds to observe how ordinary his town is, he seems to be reflecting proudly on his own ordinariness: "You were not a miracle birth, unlike that of many other towns. You did not encircle a saint's shrine, nor did you huddle behind the barracks of a famous battle... Just the ordinary start of an ordinary village..."
"The death of a (matriarchal) nation whose birth symbolically took place with the introduction of the railway into a small town in the Delta."
In the Kitchen, Margo Veillon, 1966
The novel's second part depicts the mother's death against the backdrop of late President Sadat's policies of open-door economics and peace with Israel. And these social-political developments seem to signal the death of a (matriarchal) nation whose birth symbolically took place with the introduction of the railway into a small town in the Delta. However Abu Rayya's literary acrobatics seem to end here. Part Two mostly consists of a moving, conversational memoir of the mother accompanied by a personal account of her illness and death, along with Abu Rayya's version of Sadat's reign. The book ends with the author dreaming of an adolescent love reminiscent of experiences depicted in Part One. Like the mother and girlfriend, the object of that love remains ambiguous towards him as he struggles to assert his virility.
The novel's most memorable trait is its astounding range -- testimony to Abu Rayya's versatility. An image that comes to mind is that of a train that can barely move for being so crammed full of people. Yet, his readers' incomprehension notwithstanding, Abu Rayya manages to bring this train to its destination -- twice.
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