2 - 8 August 2001
Issue No.545
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 August 2001 Issue No.545 |
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YESTERDAY marked the 10th death anniversary of Egyptian short story writer, novelist and playwright Youssef Idris. Born on 19 May, 1927, in a village in the Sharqiya province of the Delta, Idris studied medicine at Cairo University, graduating in 1951 and working briefly at Qasr Al-Aini Hospital and as health inspector for the Ministry of National Guidance.
Youssef Idris
It was during his university years -- the same years which saw his involvement in the nationalist political activism that led to his being jailed four times -- that he began to write the short stories that, together, comprised his first collection Arkhas Layali (Cheapest Nights). Published in 1954, the collection earned him immediate critical and public acclaim. Over the next five years, he published three more short story collections, two novellas -- Qisat Hobb (Love Story, 1956) and Al-Haram (Adultery, 1959) -- and a number of short plays, including Gumhouriyat Farahat (Farahat's Republic, 1957).
Critics and readers alike were, and still are, impressed by those aspects of Idris's writing which, in retrospect, constituted a clear legacy bequeathed to future literary generations and to the Egyptian literary canon, those aspects being, writes Roger Allen (The Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Routledge, 1998): "the broad choice of themes and settings, particularly his obvious familiarity with life in the provinces; his instinctive eye for detail that allowed him to capture vignettes of Egyptian life in an authentic way; and the use of a fictional language that, in its spontaneity and blend of the colloquial and standard registers, proved an ideal vehicle for these evocations of Egyptian life and characters."
Ironically, it was with this last, perhaps most important, Idris contribution to Arabic literature that writer Taha Hussein took issue. This point of contention notwithstanding, Hussein clearly recognised Idris as a writer of distinction who was, already in his lifetime, leaving his mark on modern Arabic literature.
The 1960s saw, as with the Naguib Mahfouz oeuvre, Idris's stories -- for example those collected in Akhir Al-Dunya (The End of the World, 1961) and Lughat Al-Ay-Ay (The Ay-Ay Language, 1965) -- take, in their attempt allusively to tackle sensitive social and political issues, a symbolist/surrealist turn. It was also during the 1960s that Idris wrote his play Al-Farafir, 1964, an allegorical exploration of the authority vs freedom theme. In as far as it draws upon traditional, folkloric Egyptian equivalents of what in the west is called "theatre" in order to formulate an indigenous, culturally-specific dramatic idiom, Al-Farafir is incontestably Idris's most significant contribution to Egyptian drama.
Idris's literary output decreased in the 1970s and 1980s, partly because of his poor health, but also because much of his time and energy went into the articles he wrote for Al-Ahram.
Idris's "ability to craft miniature fictions of wide significance out of the mundane aspects of life," writes Roger Allen, places him "in a select group of the most distinguished short-story writers in modern Arabic literature." He lives on in his literary legacy.
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