6 - 12 December 2001
Issue No.563
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 December 2001 Issue No.563 |
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photos: Randa Shaath
Mohamed Berrada:
Objective intimacy
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past
-- T S EliotProfile by Youssef Rakha
Mohamed Berrada is a name one hears often, and more often than not in a positive tone of voice. Throughout the Arab world, intellectuals of every persuasion appear to await his arrival at cultural and literary events with excitement. And once invited, it must be said, he seldom fails to make an appearance, no matter where on the face of the earth he happens to be residing at the time. Critic, writer, university professor: his professional designation matters little to those who welcome him into their midst, seeking, it would seem, not only his books, lectures and speeches but his sheer presence. For many years, after all, he was involved in collective activity. As a long- standing member of both the Socialist Union for Popular Forces and General Union of Moroccan Writers (which he headed from 1976 to 1983), there is, in his background, the story of a generation of politically committed literati struggling towards an elusive dream of justice and freedom all across the Arab world. Morocco may be a different setting -- "our experience in modern culture and education is relatively short, having started in the 1950s," he points out, "and our involvement with French culture influenced certain aspects of Moroccan life and thinking" -- but the story is the same; and it is not as if Berrada ever stayed put.
"In Morocco I studied in a free secondary school," he recalls, "that is, a school that was established by the national movement to resist the French mandate. Later," while working in the Moroccan Broadcasting Corporation (1961- 1964), and later on in life, "I was in an opposition party, and I witnessed the oppression that accompanied the disastrous transformations taking place after independence, when a small class of rich, educated and powerful Moroccans virtually replaced the occupier. There was a brief experience of political detention, yes, but it wasn't the worst side of this whole period. One saw, with one's own eyes, the falsification of so many deeply cherished values: the Arab dream of social and political change was coming to so little in the end. But the party to which I belonged eventually did accomplish something, however small in comparison to what one had initially envisaged. Eventually, in 1992, the palace would place the party in power; and in this sense one did achieve something. But everything had changed so fast, and the discourse changed with it. In the Union, at any rate, one supported young Moroccan literature and defended the right to freedom of expression."
His impeccable French notwithstanding, Berrada speaks a peculiar variety of Arabic: universally accessible, this inimitable vernacular combines the accent of Moroccan darja with the vocabulary of Egyptian ammiyya and the syntax of the Levant. In a formal address, moreover, shades of all the aforementioned elements pervade his perfect enunciation of the classical tongue. (One cannot help remembering that, for Berrada's generation of writers from the French- occupied Maghreb, the drive to master the language was an essential part of the struggle for cultural and national liberation; in this side of the struggle, at least, Berrada was superbly triumphant.) It was a surprise, therefore, when, turning momentarily to a compatriot in the middle of our conversation, Berrada slips effortlessly back into (incomprehensible) darja, abandoning his multi-Arab persona and unwittingly reminding the hapless observer that he remains a Moroccan. His unassuming demeanour does not impinge on the dignity of his aspect. Short and fair, he has the slightly bowed shoulders, hurried gait and concerned look of the overworked academic. His gaze is anxious and alert, so sharp it is almost shrewd in its intensity.
'Fortunately, an illusion always stays with the writer: that true life resides in what he is to write in the future. A beautiful illusion: our lives are suspended over the edge of words that are yet to come, words that we choose as a lasting essence, against the peripheral, fleeting present'
"Sometimes," he continues as an afterthought, "I participate in cultural gatherings in France or in the Arab world. I am getting used to living through the stage of retirement" -- his tone is ever so slightly bitter -- "but at the same time" (as if to check himself) "it affords the opportunity to write, finally; because, at the university and in the Union of Arab Writers, time for writing was not as forthcoming as it might be. And so I am trying to use my retirement to make up for all the writing I didn't undertake. Paris is not a homeland, no," he points out calmly, referring to his current place of residence, to which he returned recently after leaving in the mid- 1970s. "It is, rather, a place to stay; and I have not stopped making regular visits to Morocco, nor would I say that I have stopped keeping up with political developments in my homeland, though I would not claim to be directly involved in politics any longer. But since my wife lives in Paris, and since there is, in many ways, more of an opportunity to get ahead with learning, my learning," he repeats, "and following through my experience of culture, it seems a suitable place to spend this part of my life, writing and thinking," thus reclaiming lost time.
The travel bug invaded Berrada's system very early on (he has visited, aside from the Fertile Crescent and the Maghreb, Spain, Italy, Vietnam, the United States and the former Soviet Union). It was bound up not only with literature -- a department in which he "cannot always surrender to intellectual and critical writings, feeling from time to time that there are those things whose expression must lie beyond conceptualisation and methodology" -- but also with politics, which remains, by historical necessity, an inescapable facet of his life. As an Arab his background is remarkably rich: a Moroccan, he is married to a Palestinian (the writer and activist Laila Shahid, Jean Genet's 1970s companion in Lebanon and currently the Palestinian ambassador to France); and at the age of 17, he left his homeland, where the opportunity to receive a university education in Arabic was not yet available, to live "in an independent country bursting with revolution and living the dream of Arab unity," he would later write. "What had an even deeper effect on me was the Egyptian climate, surging as it is with vitality and the love of life, the magic of the nokta and words." Cairo, he avows, is the only city that competes for his passion with Fez, the geographic "womb" he considers himself to have come out of. He arrived there in the summer of 1955, a momentous and traumatic event that gave his fictionalised memoir of the period, Mithl Sayf Lan Yatkarrar: Mahkiyat (Like A Summer Never To Be Repeated: Tales, 1998), its meditative title.
Berrada would not reconcile himself to French education until a decade later, when he entered the Sorbonne, receiving his doctorate, on the work of the Egyptian critic Mohamed Mandour, in 1973. All things considered, he clearly favoured the ordered, reliable path of the scholar to the precarious existence of the angry young artist. This brought him to the place of eminence he now occupies. But having arrived, to use one of the Arabic canon's staple clichés, in the autumn of life, what might this prominent man of letters be doing with himself? "Three years ago," he explains in a tone more evocative of spring than of autumn, his tightly constructed sentences punctuated by sidelong glances at his watch, "I obtained my retirement from the University of Mohamed V, in Rabat, as a professor of modern literature and criticism. And since then I have lived in Paris, devoting myself to writing" -- a new novel, Imra'at Al-Nisyan (Woman of Oblivion) is due to appear in a week's time -- "and making the cultural journeys that I did not always have time for in previous years, indulging in cinema, theatre and music. You could say this is a stage of returning to oneself and rediscovering, as well as deeply reassessing, one's relationship with time, which is, as I now realise, what writing novels is ultimately about."
Here as elsewhere -- particularly on the podium, where his speeches are distinguished for conciseness and appeal -- Berrada's presence is indelibly low-key, but unmistakable. His is the rare voice of reason, as articulate as it is, ultimately, noncommittal. He is wholly devoted to what he does, butt there is not a trace of obsessiveness in the way he goes about it. But this must never be mistaken for lack of engagement. He is involved, vigilant, reflective; only one has the feeling that he is never entirely overwhelmed; the feeling, too, that painstaking premeditation is his way of ensuring that, should the object of his interest cave in on him suddenly, he will still be able to escape. Cairo, one such object, seemed in the 1950s like a paradise. "Now, when I visit it," he writes, "I feel as if I am being chased by all the basic questions that marked my generation in Morocco and in the whole of the Arab world: what could have brought the surge of national unity and renaissance -- our great hopes of the 1950s -- to this painful state of failure, surrender, the spread of sectarianism, extremism and autocracy?"
A pre-retirement autobiographical note, on his childhood, reflected: "I always have the feeling that I was born in Fez, but my papers prove that I was born in Rabat and moved to Fez as small child, to live with my uncle and his wife, because they were childless and because, after my father passed away, my mother married another man in Rabat. I don't remember, then, the face of my father; and my child's memory remains unaware of the city that received me."
And there you have it in a nutshell: a clear-cut conflict, dryly declaimed; a sense of tragedy that barely manages to seep through the elegantly burnished surface; and, most importantly perhaps, an unchanging subtext of emotional restraint, reflected in his failure to write creatively for most of his life. Was this a form of procrastination? "When I was a schoolboy, reading the likes of Taha Hussein and El-Aqqad, and trying my hand at short stories, I thought that through non-fiction I could express national ambitions. I thought that by laying the foundations of culture, literature and learning, I was doing something for the collective dream that informed my generation of educated Arabs. But eventually both my relationship to writing and my concept of literature changed: I discovered that writing cannot express anything, literature cannot be a direct instrument of change. Writing," he asserts, "is a complex and playful process that incorporates the imagined as well as the real. I also found out as I grew older that the articles and analyses that I write have not adequately expressed my feelings." Less politics, more literature; less criticism, more fiction: Berrada's endeavours thus shifted onwards.
Yet however varied his roles -- and their evaluations by interested parties -- there is no disagreement about his status as one of the most highly cultured and cosmopolitan members of the Arab intellectual community. So far he has written two novels -- Lu'bat Al-Nisyan (The Game of Forgetting, 1987) and Al-Daw' Al-Harib (Fleeting Light, 1993) -- besides his debut, Salkh Al-Jild (Flaying, 1979), a collection of short stories. Otherwise his opus consists of a book on the 1960s black icon and anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and one on modern Moroccan fiction. "I wrote a lot in the press," he has declared in another context, "and struggled in the party, and assumed positions in the Moroccan and Arab cultural arena. But I am realising more and more that writing [creatively] is the means that allows us to understand ourselves and our societies with depth and penetration. I have lived divided between activism and writing because the circumstances of my society did not permit me to specialise, and because writing loses its force before the misery of human beings and the terror of oppression. Yet," Berrada adds with characteristic objectivity, "I have been careful to reconsider many of the given precepts with which I lived, and to remain open to other cultures... I live, in person, the adventure of literature as an attempt to establish a discourse that cannot be summarised by other discourses," he concludes. His intelligence notwithstanding, it has taken him this long to realise.
At the Supreme Council for Culture, where this conversation took place on the occasion of a recent conference on the poet Salah Abdel-Sabour, it was easy enough to locate Berrada -- everybody, down to the youngest security staff, knew not only who but where he was -- but so many trailed his path through the labyrinthine structure of the building, attempting a conversation or an interview, that the task of having some time to oneself with him required prior arrangement. Two years before, at a French-organised folk music festival on the west bank in Luxor -- he was in Shahid's company, in less formal attire and with fewer demands on his time -- one had a better idea of his personality: dignity and alertness were the same, yet the range of facial expressions was broader. One image lives on in memory: at the edge of the courtyard of zikr, where Upper Egyptians swayed to the sound of a local munshid chanting a canonical Sufi poem, Berrada stood with a broad smile on his face, utterly engrossed in the act of singing along the lines, which, as a professor of Arabic literature, he happened to know by heart. His alertness had dissolved into an expression of pure rapture; and for a moment one had a glimpse of his intimate relationship with the culture, so rarely evident in his considered use of language, so divorced from his shipshape approach to literature.
Such, one senses, is the dispossessed Berrada, the Berrada who, prior to being disillusioned, embraced the Arab dream, and the Berrada whose relationship with time turned out to be more important yet than his interest in politics... a Berrada who -- deep within the heart of the critic, the writer, the university professor -- continues to fight for his life.
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