25 - 31 January 2001
Issue No.518
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 25 - 31 January 2001 Issue No.518 |
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The artist vs the commissar
*Egypt with its rich cultural capital seems determined -- given the latest move by the minister of culture -- to squander one of its major assets as a leading country in the Arab world. Leadership is not a matter of diplomacy, politics, geography and demography only. It requires cultural weight as well. Cultural significance cannot be derived only from past accomplishments -- of monuments left standing by Pharaohs and Mamelukes -- but needs the dynamics of present cultural life. Egypt has been spending generously on international scientific and literary conferences set in Cairo and the rest of the country to enhance its profile as a cultural matrix. The official stance taken following the explosive controversy of Haydar Haydar's novel A Banquet for Seaweed in spring 2000 gave the impression that the cultural politics of Egypt defends freedom of creative expression. Yet the recent dramatic and swift intervention of the minister of culture in works he, himself, deemed inappropriate and pornographic -- without the support of any specialised committee and against the judgement of the distinguished editor of the series, Mohamed El-Bisati, who published the three controversial novels in question -- seems to cast doubt on the future of creative expression. It also undermines the image of Minister Farouk Hosni as an artist and a defender of aesthetic experimentation.
In contrast, a country like Ireland, whose population is no more than one tenth of Egypt's and which is situated in an extreme corner of Europe, has managed through wise cultural policy to make the utmost of its literary capital. Each and every bona fide creative Irish writer is guaranteed an income for life that provides him with security and comfort, albeit minimal. This is more than an appreciation of creative talent; it points to an understanding of the role of literature in upgrading the image of the country and its status among nations. Tourists and literary pilgrims go to Ireland to see Joyce's Dublin and savour Yeats's Sligo.
To say that the three novels banned by the minister of culture are mediocre is hardly a defence of the act of censorship. First, they are not mediocre, and second, even if they leave something to be desired, one can hardly produce literature without allowing unevenness in quality. The right to experiment is as crucial in science as it is in literature, and stifling experimentation is condemning the culture to sheer imitation at best and to stagnation at worst. To say that the authors of these works (Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman, Mahmoud Hamed and Yasser Shaaban) are no Mahfouz or Proust is a correct statement, but an irrelevant point. No culture can churn out serially Prousts or Mahfouzes, but it is precisely the room for innovation that allows the appearance of such giant literary figures. This reduction, if not yet obliteration, of innovative space on flimsy grounds by no less than an official who has always taken pride, not in his position as a minister, but in his identity as a painter, seems puzzling. This abrupt transformation from an artist into a commissar has made certain commentators see in the move a fuite en avant motivated by political expediency.
Whatever the motivations are, the move has not been justified except by appealing to the most ambiguous of criteria (common taste and public morality), as if society were a monolithic cultural entity with no ideological and aesthetic variations in its taste and morality. This attitude has been dubbed by the journalist Wael Abdel-Fattah "Victorian hypocrisy." Of course, the masses have shown in their literary genres -- from popular jokes to folk tales -- an admirable audacity and sophisticated subversiveness. Despite the frowning of literary institutions, the One Thousand and One Nights survived, thanks to the people and not to the establishment. The work known commonly in English as the Arabian Nights articulates all that is repressed, from the sexual impulse to the rejection of despotic power. If the criterion used to ban these three novels is not applied selectively but consistently, we may find many of our classics such as the writing of Al-Jahiz, Ibn Hazm and Abu Nuwas out of reach. Needless to say, this will not only be a shame; it will be a cultural disaster. Literature, by its very nature, contests and questions. It stretches the confines of imagination and expression, and it addresses the most fundamental issues in life, including the most intimate and elusive.
What are these controversial novels about and why have they been subjected to attacks? The official position does not deem them illegal, as it has been announced that they could have been published by a private-sector publisher. They have been confiscated clearly not because of their content, but because they were published by the Ministry of Culture. The problem is thus not in themselves, but in the identity of their publisher. Not only have these works been withdrawn from the market, but the overall director of the organisation in question, Ali Abu Shadi, has been sacked from his position and about half a dozen series editors in the organisation have resigned in solidarity, including some of Egypt's most prominent men of letters. Given the interest this controversy has triggered in readers who are borrowing from each other the few copies around, one wonders if there is not any private-sector publisher who will come forward and buy these copies and then make them available to curious readers, charging a respectable price and making a reasonable profit. After all, one of the main objections to these novels is that they use public money, and not private money, in propagating indecency; but what if that sum of public money were to be reimbursed by a private-sector publisher? Would this set the record right?
Qabl wa Ba'd (Before and After), by Tawfiq Abdel-Rahman, has been the focus of criticism more than the other two novels. Very few could read it for what it is: an anti-novel about an anti-hero. Just as we recognise in contemporary literature protagonists who are principal characters but devoid of heroism, so do we come across novels which undermine the very structure of a traditional novel. In my opinion, this novel attempts to write such a narrative, albeit not with great success. But it should be judged in terms of its genre and literary conventions, not in terms of ready-made rules. It depicts the ramblings of a spineless character, a 60-year-old man, a "kind of old scarecrow" as Yeats would say, worried about his impotence, among other things. His frame of mind and his stream of consciousness betray the devastating effects of his upbringing and life. He is what critics call a naive narrator, and the first-person narration is disjointed with certain scenes of intimacy presented in a report-like manner. If anything, this kind of sexuality and sexual scenes turn you off sex. The main character is the metonym of the social conditions that produced him, but this link between the individual and social ills is not well managed, but it is certainly there. The novel is essentially a tragic story, as the novelist-critic Alaa El-Dib pointed out, but it is not the kind of tragedy that elates you; it is the kind of tragedy that disturbs you, if you were to read it in terms of its type. We encounter such sickly, inconsistent, obsessive protagonists in first-person fictional narratives in world literature. The one that comes to my mind as a brilliant model of this narrative sub-genre is Dostoievsky's novella, Notes from Underground, and his short story, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." The underground man is despicable, but his very way of thinking and behaving is not an end in itself; it points to the conditions that produce not so much a monstrosity as a hopeless and helpless character.
Ahlam Muharrama (Forbidden Dreams) by Mahmoud Hamed has received prizes. It is a fascinating novel written in five intersecting tableaux and shows sophisticated use of narrative techniques and multiple viewpoints. It is a moving story of abuse and loss. The sexual scenes are minimal and are artistically functional in the work, showing the degradation of a simple woman after rape. The disoriented characters in the novel are presented with the background of the disorienting Gulf War.
Abna' Al-Khata' Al-Romansi (Children of the Romantic Error) by Yasser Shaaban, an emerging young writer who has received several literary awards, is about the children of the parent generation of the '60s, with all the confusion they have inherited from parents associated with romanticism, both emotional and national. This new generation is depicted in somewhat surrealist conundrums, in nightmarish settings, with a psychoanalytic approach reflecting the author's profession. The sexuality present in this unusual novel associated with the instinct of death bespeaks the impact of Freud's late work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. By no means could this work be considered as pornography; one has to read dozens and dozens of pages before coming across a sexual scene written in a detached clinical way. The novel follows a current style of reflexive writing, where the writer comments on the very act of his writing as well as mixing shards of actualities in his fictional universe. The integration of these innovative techniques in the body of the novel is sometimes lacking, but then it is in the nature of experimentation to try its hand at new ways of presenting fiction.
These three works are experimental and succeed in varying degrees, but banning them is not simply depriving the literary market of three novels. It inaugurates the renunciation of experimentation and freedom of creative expression. The accusation of pornography is completely inapplicable to these works, and perhaps it is time to remind the casual users of the term of its meaning. Pornography is made up etymologically of two Greek words: "graphy" comes from the Greek root that means "writing" and "porno" from the Greek root that means "prostitute." Thus pornography means not only writing that includes sex -- which after all is what we encounter in scientific discourse and literary discourse from the epic of Gilgamesh to Joyce -- but also that includes the commercialisation of sexuality, as it is in prostitution. Reference to the sexual in pornography is always labelled so and sold as such. Pornographic works revolve around sex from the first page to the last and they commodify sex, while in literature sexuality is part of a wider plot and is used to characterise fictional figures and human relations. Anyone excited by the prospect of reading these three novels in order to get a pornographic kick will be very disappointed.
* The writer is a professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo and editor of the literary periodical, Alif.
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