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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There's no place like home
Awraq Al-Nargis (The Narcissus Papers), Sumaya Ramadan, Cairo: Sharqiyat, 2001. pp117; Ashgar Qalila 'Ind Al-Munhana (A Few Trees where the Road Curves), Nemat El-Beheiri, Cairo: Riwayat Al-Hilal, December 2000. pp166"Right before surrender, that is the most difficult moment. Perhaps this is the ultimate secret of its attraction. The limit of resistance, gnawing at the edge just after the entity itself has stretched to the maximum possible proportions. The abyss is featureless. It is totally new and impossible to imagine. Does something like this happen to those dragged to the scaffold?"
So begins the first chapter of Sumaya Ramadan's first novel, Awraq Al-Nargis. There is something special about first novels. They can offer fresh, reinvigorating insight into the human condition, but since authors often try to put their all into their first works, they can also turn out to be interminably long. Sumaya Ramadan's first novel, however, is neither startling in its insight, nor tediously long. Instead, it is an intense, difficult, but eventually fulfilling read, as is Nemat El-Beheiri's first novel Ashgar Qalila 'Ind Al-Munhana.
In her possibly semi-autobiographical novel -- someone once remarked that writers begin by writing about themselves and only then do they start writing about others -- Sumaya Ramadan traces several journeys, both within and without. On the narrative level, the novel records the journey of an upper-middle- class young Egyptian woman, Kimi, to Ireland to work on her PhD. This puts Awraq Al-Nargis firmly in the genre of mostly male Arab and Egyptian postcolonial writers who have written about travelling to the West to study, though women writers such as Ahdaf Soueif and Radwa Ashour have also written recently about such experiences. Ramadan's choice to write in Arabic, however, also makes her novel a valuable addition to Arabic literature, even if at times one feels the author would perhaps have been more comfortable using a Western language. Kimi makes a conscious effort to write in Arabic, perhaps illuminating Ramadan's own decision, though Kimi tears up her English writing fearing that this language will not quite work. "For it [English] is my language, and it is not my language... Even if I knew how to write, my language is unread. All languages are foreign, and my people's language is only good enough for storytelling, and all my stories are foreign."
The novel begins with Kimi in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and, on the verge of madness, she is institutionalised by her family. She recalls childhood memories of life at the family home in Egypt, her childhood having been a sheltered one during which she was driven to excel and to succeed by her upper- middle-class Muslim Egyptian family. Having always lived a sheltered life, her experience abroad shocks and alienates her, and this alienation gradually drives her to madness. Torn between two different worlds, she suffers from an identity and religious crisis, and Kimi is institutionalised for the first time in Dublin.
We learn little of Kimi's life in Ireland, except that she is isolated from human contact except for nightly phone calls from a man she refers to as her husband. This unnamed Arab lover, however, is already married and has a daughter, Mariam. Both religious differences and family objections would make marriage to Kimi difficult. A poet living between London and Beirut, he has an obviously domineering personality, and this seems to replace, for Kimi, the loss of the shelter of her Cairo family. She even calls him "daddy," and he acts as her mentor, preventing her from developing relationships with others and imprisoning her through his nightly phonecalls and long letters.
Kimi hangs on her wall in Ireland a map of exile and not of home. She does not, unlike other expatriates, try to reconstruct her homeland in exile, decorating her apartment with a poster of James Joyce, another of Samuel Beckett, a reproduction of a painting by Gaugin and various postcards. The most striking image of all, however, is a poster reproduction of Salvador Dali's The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, and in the chapter entitled "The Mirror" Kimi is struck by this image of narcissus as if for the first time, at this moment feeling the delicate glass of the bell jar surrounding her beginning to crack and taking her first steps towards madness.
The search for a home and for a homeland is Kimi's main predicament in her journeys between Cairo and Dublin and between sanity and insanity, "the way back [being] arduous and long." Throughout, she entertains a desire to go home, or to find a home where there is both comfort and peace of mind, Kimi repeatedly telling us (in English) that "there's no place like home." Home here is a state of mind, rather than simply a place, however, for Kimi does not feel any more at home in " [her] father's home" in Cairo with her mother and nanny than she does in Dublin in her empty room. After Sadat's assassination, she returns to a Cairo that has changed greatly from that of her childhood memories, and she returns too to a family bent on ignoring her nervous breakdown and institutionalisation.
By naming her protagonist (and alter ego?) Kimi, after Egypt's ancient name Kemet, Ramadan has chosen to associate her protagonist with the nation. One cannot, therefore, escape the thought that Egypt, like Kimi, is also going through a form of spiritual and identity crisis. But Kimi remains the novel's central reference, this emphasis upon the individual being typical of much postmodern literature and making the national associations of Ramadan's protagonist flimsy and implausible. In fact the novel's title confirms its agenda: this is a novel of introspection, of self, of self-inspection, and it is from here that the importance of Dali's narcissus comes. Kimi's journey (s) are magnified such that her predicaments seem almost larger than those befalling the nation itself. Nevertheless, does this itself imply that as a nation Egypt too is increasingly "closing in" on itself? Certainly the identity crisis and religious confusion that Kimi experiences seem mirrored in the predicament of many members of Egypt's younger generation.
Throughout the novel Kimi is conscious of the power of words and of writing. The novel thus ends with a new beginning, and with Kimi attempting to overcome her fear of death by writing herself into words as a way of confronting her inner demons and her fears:
"To erase and rewrite on the same scrap of paper. I write, I erase, and I write. What if someone reads these drafts before they are... completed? Writing is never completed, yet people still read! How could anything be completed except by dying? This is self-evident. As long as it is still alive, everything must be in some kind of process. Only when we die do we become complete. Or when they make us die in their words, those who insist on keeping images of us. Or, having let ourselves die, when we like to claim that we were one way or another, or still are. Because there is something seditious about endings, about the temptation to determine the terminal point about ourselves, to make ourselves die... We choose nothingness, as an alternative. Nothingness is more merciful. This requires that we never end, ever, that we erase and write and live anew, perhaps."
Nemat El-Beheiri's first novel, Ashgar Qalila 'Ind Al- Munhana, is a counterpoint to Ramadan's. It too begins with a narrator returning home to Egypt and to a family that she is not sure will receive her with open arms.
"The asphalt on the other side of the road shines brighter, perhaps because of the irony of the months and days and dreams and nightmares that I lived through in a small house at the end of the road, an irony that resembles a tragedy or a comedy...
The car I now drive is so defective it is funny, carrying connotations of the defeat that informs my return, as opposed to the pride of entering the city with flowers of longing for a beautiful man I loved for many years...The car is slow, and when it shakes it sounds like the cracking of bones, reminding me of this wound... I feel a desire to rush towards the escape road so that 'A'id doesn't catch up with me."
El-Beheiri's narrator Ashgan Masry (literary "Egyptian Sorrows") is a typical, middle-class Egyptian woman who goes on a journey to the East to an unnamed Arab country. Like Kimi who goes West to study, Ashgan's journey is voluntary: she goes East for love. Yet she too faces alienation and longs for home, a home that she looks for in the face of every Egyptian she passes in the street. Ashgan's recollections of Egypt, however, are not romanticised, and she too feels pressure from her family to conform. A cousin, a feminist writer named Anas El-Khal, encourages her to seek a different life for herself, and her subsequent marriage to an Arab "foreigner" against her family's wishes is for her an act of rebellion.
In her husband's native country, which seems to be modelled on Iraq, many things begin with the letter "h" -- "harr [heat] and harb [war] and other things," such as huzn [sadness] and hizb [political party] and hubb [love]. Ashgan fails to assimilate herself to her new environment, feeling alienated even from the husband she had first come to this country to marry. Ashgan and her husband 'A'id's marriage fails in the impossible political and social conditions in which they live. This is a country dominated by a single political party, whose apparatus invades every aspect of the individual's life and all corners of civil society. Such invasiveness is epitomised by the pictures of "Mr President" that decorate the facades of buildings, public offices, mosques, public washrooms and even brothels. There are photographs of Mr President hanging in people's living rooms, including that of 'A'id and Ashgan. People live in terror of the State and of the secret police, shown for example when Ashgan uses a piece of wet newspaper to clean the windows -- a typically Egyptian habit -- and 'A'id panics, almost going mad with fear of the possible repercussions. That crumpled piece of paper which eventually ended up in the garbage can had the photograph of Mr President on it.
'A'id, an intellectual and journalist covering the war his country is fighting with an enemy state, lives in constant fear of the authorities. He translates this fear by confining Ashgan to the house and isolating her from society and from neighbours and acquaintances, much as Kimi's lover had done in Ireland. He becomes paranoid and excessively secretive, keeping facts regarding his work and relation to the party from Ashgan, but during the night he drinks and hallucinates, his daytime respect for the authorities and for Mr President vanishing as his anger and frustration break free.
Ashgan seeks out friendship, encountering a variety of odd people and being drawn to Egyptian expatriates like herself. She befriends the fruit vendor and the garbage collector and invites them to her kitchen to her husband's horror and disdain. She brings little details of her homeland to the house that help to relieve her homesickness and remind her of her mother, her sister and her cousin: tapes of Umm Kulthoum and Abdel- Halim Hafez, copies of Mahfouz's Harafish, Youssef Idris's Haram and Taha Hussein's Al-Ayam. Unlike Kimi, Ashgan thus reconstructs an Egypt of sorts in her voluntary exile.
When Ashgan goes with her husband to a government office to obtain official identification papers, the couple are interrogated separately by police officers, and Ashgan is accused, surreally, of being married to her husband. This absurd accusation, solemnly declared, is contained in the novel's last chapter, which contains the crux of the book. As she is being interrogated, Ashgan and the reader feel the omnipresence of Mr President whose photograph naturally looms large above the officer's desk. In her mind Ashgan recalls memories of her courtship, of her love for her husband, her marriage and of the surreal experience of living in this country of heat and war. She is finally released into a winding, apparently never-ending corridor. She searches desperately for 'A'id, but will he ever return?
Kimi and Ashgan are very different women, and Sumaya Ramadan and Nemat El-Beheiri are very different writers. Yet they share the common (perhaps unfortunate?) predicament of both being women in twenty-first century Egypt. For both Kimi and Ashgan, and perhaps also for Ramadan and El-Beheiri, escape and ultimately salvation are to be found in writing. Though they face significant challenges, both Kimi and Ashgan try to meet them, suggesting that these challenges are not completely insurmountable. There is still room for the individual to come through and to come home, though not necessarily in triumph.
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
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