18 - 24 January 2001
Issue No.517
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 18 - 24 January 2001 Issue No.517 |
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Qabl Wa Ba'd (Before and After), Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman
A tale told in the first person narrative voice, Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman's debut comprises the structurally problematic conjunction of a just-retired civil servant's memoirs of, and flashbacks to, his social life amidst the literati and intellectuals of Cairo, and an account of his affair (which unfolds as the novel progresses) with a remarkably liberated married woman, a secretary of working-class origins, Qadriya, whom he meets in his workplace in Ismailia. The racy chapters set in the present of the novel and dealing with the love affair and the protagonist-narrator's retirement contrast sharply with the meditative, sophisticated and unpretentious reflections on his own past (profoundly interesting) social life in the capital. The latter aspect of the book -- that comprised by the memoirs -- sometimes makes the description of the love-affair seem uninteresting, even slightly naive, by comparison.
The result is an impression that the book was created through an arbitrary, perhaps unsuccessful, meshing of two texts, each with a separate, self-contained structure of its own. The fact that this is the author's first ever attempt at fiction might account for this structural weakness. "I've always postponed writing," the narrator confides towards the end of the book, "in order to read more and to know more, and I never started. [But there were] many things that I wanted to write about besides these papers, which I have kept for so long..."
Between Ismailia, Zagazig (the narrator's city of origin) and Cairo, Abdel-Rahman realistically depicts a wide range of themes and characters, divulging his first-hand knowledge of the nooks and crannies of Egyptian middle-class life and the life narratives of some of Egypt's intellectual figures and literati.
The protagonist's sexual obsessions aside -- and Abdel-Rahman draws the link between this and his advancing years -- the story is at bottom one of autumnal disillusion and distress: "What have I done with my life? [I am] a mere senior employee who retires and persistently corrupts a young wife's life. I never cared about my job but I was always trying to live an easy life." Following his retirement, the love affair dwindles increasingly into only occasionally seeing the beloved, then not seeing her at all. The end of the novel sees the protagonist by the family's graveyard in Zagazig to visit his father, remorseful and despondent: "One day I will be carried to this graveyard."
Ahlam Muharrama (Forbidden dreams), Mahmoud Hamid
Mahmoud Hamid's first novel, Al-Sifr Al-Hadi Wal-Ishrun (The Twenty-First Zero), dealing with the disillusionment and alienation of a 21-year-old man, was well-received by critics. Hamid's second novel depicts a similar alienated protagonist, a young Egyptian journalist from the urban working class of Gamaliya, on a short visit to Cairo from Saudi Arabia where he works, the aim of which is to cast his vote at the Journalists' Syndicate elections.
The events of the novel take place over a week (2-9 March 1991), though a major section of the novel deals in a flashback with events which took place in September 1978. Told in a plurality of voices, the novel is divided into five main sections. The first deals with the first day of the protagonist's arrival in Cairo; the second with the flashback, taking place 13 years earlier. The third section is a security report about a day (8 March 1991) in the life of the protagonist's brother, an artisan in the Gamaliya area, and a member of an Islamic extremist group. The fourth section of the novel comprises a day (5 March 1991) in the life of the upper middle class girl with whom, in his university days, the protagonist was in love and who, in spite of being in love with someone else, sleeps with the protagonist any way. The final section, taking place on 9 March, sees the protagonist going to a bar to bid some of his Cairo friends farewell before returning to Saudi. The group gets drunk and, walking across Qasr Al-Nil Bridge, is stopped by a police patrol that asks for their identification papers, harasses and insults them. The novel closes with this group of young men -- all journalists and lawyers -- being beaten up by the security soldiers on the bridge.
One of the most powerful sections of the novel is the flashback taking to 1978, entitled "Farha," the name of the protagonist's sister, a teenager who suffers from polio and limps and who helps her father in his tea buffet at the bus terminus in Al-Darasa. Having been raped in the nearby cemetery by one of the bullies of the terminus she is then picked up by several other men in the area. When the protagonist, a teenager in 1978, informs his father that he saw her with a man in the cemetery, the father, along with the protagonist's older brother (who later becomes an extremist), kill her. This tragedy haunts the protagonist and the novel as a whole.
It was for this part, published initially as a long short story in Akhbar Al-Adab, that the writer was awarded the first prize in a literary competition held by the Cultural Development Fund. The awards were presented, ironically enough, by Minister Farouk Hosni himself.
Abnaa Al-Khataa Al-Romansi (Sons of the Romantic Fault), Yasser Shaaban
"There is a rifle aimed at a person standing almost 200 metres away," Shaaban's first novel begins. "From my place here I see two people standing almost behind each other, and the bullet flies, flies... Watch... one of them has leaned his head in some direction so that the bullet which could not have been observed from his place passed. And there was an amusing comment: 'leaning his head saved him from a death, definite and strange' [...]
"The man stands near the coffin in which a body that was behind him now lies with two holes on either side of his skull. A touching scene that brings him into a coma so that he imagines himself in the other man's place with two holes in both sides of his skull, only if he hadn't leaned his head[...]
"He had to pay attention. There were steps that announced that another person was approaching [....] Now a body through which blood flows, a body which sweats and shivers, is hidden in a body through which blood does not flow, a body that neither sweats nor shivers. The steps are coming closer, and the rhythm is almost feminine and sad."
This is the central image and situation around which the novel, a psychodrama, is constructed: the three male characters (perhaps aspects of the same subject) -- "he who became a sniper; he who became a corpse; and he who became an evader" -- in the presence of death and sex in perilous proximity. As such, the tenor of the novel echoes Bataille's fascination with how eros and thanatos are inseparable, almost obscenely intertwined paramours.
At some level, the protagonist is a budding psychiatrist, a member of the oppositional Tagammu Party, and a poet. Yet, to speak of central character at all would be to ignore one of the main features of the novel: its shifting perspectives and pronouns, its multiple voices, its deconstruction of the concept of a self with clear boundaries. The human psyche and the body in which it is housed is lifted from history and laid out across a table in the medical theatre or on the psychiatrist's couch. Setting and tone are also clinical/medical, sparse, verging on the abstract, so expansive in scope that the concrete detail becomes almost an afterthought.
One of the voices, that with which the novel opens, is that of the quasi authorial fabulator (with distant Sternian and Kunderian echoes), clinically detached from the objects and scenes -- men, women, fantasies, sexual or otherwise -- which he presents in the space of the narrative.
Related stories:
The crux of the matter
The protagonists' case
Floating bureaus
The crux of the matter
The intelligentsia and politics
No novel proscription 11 - 17 January 2001
Intellectuals' dilemma 11 - 17 May 2000
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