12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Death on asphalt
The Long Way Back, Fuad Al-Takarli, translated by Catherine Cobham, Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001. pp379"The only thing occupying my mind while I was standing in the hot sun beside the university was the image of a person listening to his own death rattle, hearing himself dying; even if it was only for a moment, a second, a tenth of a second, he could hear the sound of his death. Or perhaps he heard a collision inside him, two objects colliding somewhere in his head -- bang! -- then darkness. Or -- a third possibility -- maybe he heard an explosion and was about to look round, thinking it was some distance away, when he was swallowed up by the darkness": the thoughts of one of the protagonists of Fuad Al-Takarli's The Long Way Back, Karim, whose closest friend Fuad was run over by a car and died on the street.
Baghdad in the sixties
"A dog is walking slowly and a speeding car hits it. [...] it's left to suffer, to watch itself die without a word, a cry, a shout for help [...] in front of everyone [...] A dog is squashed crossing the street, its limbs scattered here and there, then along comes the dustcart to pick up the pieces with the rest of the rubbish. Another dog goes by and into the slaughterhouse, and another and another. A chorus of black eyes singing of suffering, saying farewell to life": the thoughts of Karim's older brother Midhat.
Enter the beautiful, melancholic cousin Munira, a schoolteacher, into the lives of the two brothers in 1962 Iraq and into the "old-established" extended family household of Baghdad's Bab Al-Shaykh quarter comprising: father Abd Al-Razzaq, mother Nuriya, sister Madiha (a schoolteacher separated from jobless, drunkard existential failure of a husband, Husayn), her two daughters, Sanaa and Suha, and the two elderly women of the family who are incessantly demanding to be fed.
Spanning the period Autumn 1961 to Spring 1963 and probing the middle-class heart of "an unstable society with no future; a society on the edge of the abyss [...] where you [...] don't know what's going on in the world, can't avoid sexual complexes, and are obsessed with poverty," The Long Way Back is set against the backdrop of a politically unstable period of Iraqi history, one which saw the execution of one president and the rise to power of a new regime. Though Baghdad's streets, bars and its Kurdish quarter figure in the novel, particularly towards the end when Midhat's fate becomes fortuitously linked with the fate of the nation, the novel zooms in on one household's series of misfortunes and is mostly set inside an old two-storey house with a central courtyard, the dramatic possibilities that such an architectural structure can afford being exploited by Al-Takarli to the fullest.
The Long Way Back begins with Karim's loss of his friend Fuad, and it ends with Midhat's death; in between, their alcoholic brother-in-law Husayn drifts, and their cousin Munira, beloved of both Karim and Midhat, does her best to survive as a rape victim in a society where an unmarried woman without a hymen is as good as dead. Raped by her 18-year-old nephew Adnan who, the end of the novel suggests, will rise to political power with the new regime, she sees herself as "a typical daughter of this country, suspended eternally between death and prostitution," the latter being the fate suffered by the lover of Karim's dead friend Fuad. "I was not a victim, as tradition required," Munira reflects, thinking:
"not an anonymous corpse lying butchered on the side of the road, nor a feather in the wind, as they say. I was a bit of each of these, lost in the midst of miseries and vile acts which were not meant to be divulged. I didn't complain because I wasn't meant to. I preferred to tell myself that the little I had left could have been destroyed too. That was how I learned very quickly to think about what was left and care for it. So I erased some of the big headlines from my life and dragged my shattered limbs along to join the tail end of the caravan, where I would remain. Among the spiritually and emotionally damaged, you could live without pride or glory; among them the future and human aspiration had no meaning, and sometimes you found wonderful small happinesses there."
This tendency to depressing nihilism aside, there is no denying that formally there is something of the masterpiece in this novel by a winner of the prestigious Owais Prize for the Arabic Novel. Specific events -- to cite but two: the knocking on the house door by Karim the night of Fuad's death, and the knocking on the same house door by Adnan to bring Munira news of her transfer from Baquba (which she is escaping because it is Adnan's home town) to Baghdad -- are narrated several times over from different perspectives, not just from first-person points of view (Karim's and Munira's), but also from non-omniscient third-person points of view inflected in different modes, each time suggesting the voice of a single character. These characters include: the uncannily observant spinster Aunt Safiya with her traditionalist know-how, the innocent eight-year-old Sanaa, Midhat in the course of one chapter undergoing transformation from a cynical egoist to someone who, falling in love, begins to experience something close to compassion -- and so on. Each voice is, on the whole, distinct (the translator having done a remarkable job in this difficult respect), and the reader is afforded access to a wide range of modes of being and of consciousness, witnessing the same event several times over, each time through a different set of eyes.
The narrative does not progress on a linear track, but rather, circles around the events, retreats through flashback, starts all over from point A. Vistas on to alternative, less dismal scenarios are thus continually opened up for the reader; "hope," even if only as a promise about to be broken, shadows the narrative. Beautiful poetic descriptions of the play of light on people and things -- at dawn, sunset, at night with a full moon in the sky -- provide oases of relief in a mercilessly sad story. The palpable presence of the seasons is a firm mainstay of what would have otherwise been an unbearably bleak plot. Rain fell on the day of his death. It was springtime in the orchard when she was raped, and still, she can have fond memories of the smell of spring. It was springtime in the orchard when a boy found his father who had disappeared from home for three days with his mistress, and still, years later, the boy, now a grandfather, can recollect the encounter with a fond laugh. Autumn is when a best friend dies -- and when on the rooftop, you come close to merging with the beloved who reminds you of him. The seasons' felt presence, like the provision of manifold perspectives, is a trope through which the possibility of transformation is suggested and promised.
As is the case in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, to which Al-Takarli's novel bears striking resemblance (in terms not just of narrative form, shifting perspectives, the use of a cosmic temporal framework in which to embed clock and calendar time, but also in terms of characters: Caddy/Munira, Quentin/Karim, Benjy/Sanaa, Jason/Midhat-before-his- transformation), all perspectives prismatically reflect and converge on the "damaged," elusive, secretive woman who thus, formally speaking, constitutes the tantalisingly shifting "centre" -- the "broken heart" -- of the tale. Munira, a frail creature in blue dress and black abaya, is the muse and source of most of the novel's delicately lit and lyrical epiphanic moments. Her name means "Luminous One," or "One who Provides Light," and, indeed, her "aura" brings a light of sorts, albeit vulnerable and inconstant, into the lives of Karim and Midhat, and is the forever-broken promise of transformation and redemption moving the story forward. She becomes, like Fuad's childhood beloved, "everything to [them], a symbol of life and the world as [they] dreamed they could be." To the two young men belonging to a society on the brink of an abyss, "this creature of uncertain dimensions" is "magical," "radiant," "mysterious," "unearthly," "ethereal."
Munira, the rape victim barely able to sustain herself, as seen through Midhat's and Karim's eyes: "She was survival, then, his beloved, she was the essence of his life;" "She seemed the last beacon of hope in my life;" "She had acquired the keys to my soul, to my destruction and also, possibly, to my salvation." Ironically, Munira (who, unlike Faulkner's Caddy, is given a narrative voice) feels "helpless," does not want to act. "I felt," she reflects when Midhat proposes to her, "I was heading inexorably towards a locked door whose key they had cruelly given to me." Ignorant of what she had to endure -- rape by a nephew in whose house she was a guest, a poor relation -- Midhat runs away from home when, on their wedding night, he discovers that Munira is "flawed." From bar to bar he ponders the question: "So was this guilty, sinful," "deflowered and soiled ... girl the umbilical cord attaching him to life?" Or was he still "trapped in the dark caves of his forefathers' moods and desires, [...] floating with the herd on the filthy tide of dross left by those who had secretly carved his unconscious"?
While Midhat ponders these questions history is in the making. It is February/Ramadan 1963. It occurs to him to make "that decisive jump" under a car racing past; the image of Munira, then "would be nothing but blood and bones and broken flesh. Munira would become a fragment of the remains, when she had once inhabited an anonymous corner of this disintegrated heap of flesh, perhaps been a melody arising from it somehow, which nobody would hear from now on." When finally he chooses life -- and Munira -- with all of its complexities, the Kurdish quarter, in which Husayn's sordid lodgings are located, has come under siege. He tries to make his escape at night. At the peripheries of the besieged area, he loses his foothold several times, and, in the dark, "there was a stink of urine, excrement and rotten food." As he runs across the street to the other side where safety lies, he decides "He would simply tell her [Munira] that he had come back for her, his wife, because he had conquered all thoughts of death in himself":
"He was running confidently across the wet, tarred surface of the street, looking at the horizon and the sky opening out above him, when he felt the shot burn along his right thigh [...] He looked around bewilderedly, but saw no one [...] When he saw a faint gleam of light in a dark corner on the other side of the street, he understood what it meant. He went on waiting for what was no more than a hundredth of a second, but for him it lasted forever; then he knew, before the dreadful pain tore into his chest and shoulders, that he had not survived. His body, spattered with mud and blood, writhed and shuddered alarmingly on the asphalt of the empty street."
And so the novel ends.
Chronologically, the last lines of The Long Way Back are Karim's April 1963 thoughts with which the penultimate chapter closes: "The night was quiet. Leaning against the wooden balustrade, I looked around me in darkness. I had nothing more to lose. To be aware of the beginning of the end was an odd feeling, one which not everybody had the chance to experience. My mind was calm, as if I was anaesthetized. I could see nothing ahead of me and felt that, with her [Munira's] help, I could perhaps understand the end."
There is no equivalent of The Sound and the Fury's Easter Sunday Dilsey section with its redemptive "I seen the resurrection and the light" in Al-Takarli's The Long Way Back. "This mass of pages," the reader who has lived with and suffered the death of the author's creatures is told in the postscript on page 379, "does not contain what people believe it does. No sighs, no talk, no groans or smiles. No sublimity, suffering, fear, or desire. No eyes, lips, blood, or tears. If they are thrown away they will not protest. They are dumb pages which are neither harmful nor beneficial, and it is better for them and for everyone if they are left in peace and forgotten." Surely we are not meant to take this postscript seriously if, immediately preceding it, after the closing line, we also read: "Paris, 9 February 1966-Baghdad 5 September 1977." Worrying an entire world into being for over a decade, then publishing, republishing, and having it translated, hardly constitutes leaving in peace or forgetting.
Reviewed by Nur Elmessiri
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