10 - 16 January 2002
Issue No.568
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 10 - 16 January 2002 Issue No.568 |
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Polysemic and multilayered
Children of the Alley (Awlad Haratina), Naguib Mahfouz, transl. Peter Theroux, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001. pp448
Of all Naguib Mahfouz's works, his novel Children of the Alley (Awlad Haratina) has remained the most controversial since its first publication in Al-Ahram in the autumn of 1959. Indeed, so controversial has it been that it almost cost its author his life in October 1994, when two young extremists took it upon themselves to implement a pseudo fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rahman, in which the spiritual leader of the Islamic Jihad group judged that Mahfouz, by writing Awlad Haratina, had become an apostate.
Many readings of this novel have been suggested that differ considerably according to the position of their authors, and more are no doubt still to come. Like all major works of art, Awlad Haratina is a polysemic, multilayered piece that cannot be exhausted by one reading alone, and it needs to be periodically revisited. The reading proposed here is informed by my own position, a position that should be made explicit to the reader before going further. Firstly, I am to a large extent an outsider. As a French arabist, I am not involved, or at least not directly, in the controversy over the novel, and I intend neither to attack nor to defend either the novel or its author. Secondly, in my reading of the novel I use a specific, sociological approach starting from an analysis of the text's position within "the circle of literary possibilities" at a given time and place. This implies consideration of the writer's position in the literary field, as well as consideration of the literary field itself at the time of writing.
"Awlad Haratina can rightfully be seen as emblematic of the fierce competition between religious and secular intellectuals. This contest has not yet been settled, even though the religious side scored a victory when they succeeded in preventing Awlad Haratina from being published in Egypt, first with the help of the state, and then with the aid of Mahfouz himself"photos: Mohamed Wassim and Yves Paris
What was Mahfouz's position in the Egyptian literary field, and how did this field look, when he wrote Awlad Haratina in 1958? Mahfouz had written the final words of the Cairo Trilogy in 1952, shortly before the July 1952 Revolution, and then he had stopped writing. The most common explanation for this, based on Mahfouz's own declarations, is that he had been led, as a result of political change, into a new period of expectation rather than of creation, and that he had exhausted the realist novel's potential in the 1500 or so pages of the Trilogy. However, a closer look at Mahfouz's biography and at the literary field of the mid 1950s reveals other factors at work.
First, Mahfouz did not entirely stop writing, dedicating himself instead to writing film scripts, mainly for the late Egyptian director Salah Abu Seif. This kind of writing had the advantage of bringing in a much higher income, which Mahfouz badly needed at this point in his life (he had married in 1954). Furthermore, Mahfouz was probably going through a period of disillusionment, or even despair, since, at this point in his career he had been writing for more than 20 years and had published eight novels and more than 60 short stories, but none of these had brought him more than scant consideration from the critics, and he had very few readers. Even the Trilogy itself was as yet unpublished. Mahfouz had written this as a single novel entitled Bayn Al- Qasrayn (Between the Two Palaces), and the idea of splitting it into three separate novels, and using the original title for the first of these alone, only came later from his Cairo publisher, Maktabat Misr.
However, within two or three years, between 1955 and 1957, this discouraging context had changed radically. Social realism, in the forties an avant-garde school of writing deemed suspect by both the literary and the political establishments, became the main, legitimate trend, not only in the novel but also in the literary field as a whole. Youssef Idris' first collection of short stories, The Cheapest Nights, Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi's novel The Earth, Nu'man Ashur's first play Al-Nas illi Taht and the first collections of poems by Salah Jahin (Kilmit Salam) and Salah Abdel- Sabour (Al-Nas fi Biladi), as well as Mahmoud Amin El-Alem and Abdel-Azim Anis' essay On Egyptian Culture were all published between 1954 and 1956, together contributing to the realist climate and paving the way for the success of the Trilogy when it appeared in 1956-57.
At the age of 45, Mahfouz thus finally obtained the recognition he had been yearning for over the previous two decades. Moreover, on a professional level he had left the Ministry of Awqaf in 1955 to join part of the young regime's new cultural apparatus. In other words, he had moved, during the same period in which he had stopped writing literature, from the margin to the centre of the literary field.
It was in this atmosphere of recovered self- confidence that Mahfouz wrote Awlad Haratina in 1958. Yet, in this new political and aesthetic climate, marked as it was by a new receptivity for realism, the easy way forward for Mahfouz would have been to capitalise on the success of the Trilogy and to continue in the same direction, as most of his younger peers were indeed doing. Mahfouz, however, preferred the more difficult path of innovation, a choice which is not surprising since Mahfouz, at all the turning points in his literary career from the late thirties to the late sixties, had consistently sided with aesthetic innovation, even if his political, philosophical and religious convictions seem to have remained unaltered. My reading of Awlad Haratina will start from this contrast between artistic innovation on the one hand, and political/philosophical continuity on the other.
Artistic innovation is to be found first at the very beginning of the novel, which opens with a Prologue that introduces a first-person narrator, a character unfamiliar to readers of Mahfouz. This narrator introduces himself as a "writer," and explains that he has collected "the stories of the quarter (hara)" as heard from the ruwat, the traditional oral storytellers. The novel is thus presented as a compilation of stories framed by a meta-story and meta-narrative, a form reminiscent of the Arabian Nights. Another innovative element in the novel is the narrative presentation of the hara itself; in lieu of the precise, realistic descriptions of such quarters familiar from Mahfouz's previous works, the hara here is a stereotype whose features remain identical from one story to the next. It is always described using the same recurrent images -- bare-foot children playing in the midst of garbage and flies, women quarreling or cooking mulukhiyya, men smoking goza in the cafés. Indeed, Awlad Haratina is the first of several texts in which Mahfouz builds up this picture of a mythical hara.
Yet perhaps the novel's most interesting innovation lies in its self-reflexivity. The text often quotes itself, especially when the poets of the hara (shu'ara al-rabab) tell of the lives and deeds of the area's founding fathers and heroes. These poets are the custodians of a collective memory that is always under threat of being forgotten -- "the plague of our quarter" says the writer character -- as well of being manipulated and distorted by the authorities.
While the hara's first reformers -- Gabal, Rifaa and Qassem, the novel's counterparts to the prophets Moses, Jesus and Mohamed -- show great respect towards the stories of the past and seek inspiration in them for their reforms, the last of them, Arafa, displays only scorn and mistrust for these stories, saying that he only believes in what his eyes can see. This statement, together with the general presentation of this character, shows that Mahfouz's position vis-à-vis Arafa, who is the incarnation of the modern scientific outlook, does not differ from his attitude towards his previous characters. While critics of the novel usually consider that Mahfouz, after having tied himself to parodying the sacred books' stories or myths earlier in the novel, recovers his freedom in this last part, I would argue that in this part too he is bound by a "master-text", though not a written one. This text is nothing less than the story, or myth, of modernity itself; in other words, the last part of the novel too should be read as parody.
In this part of the novel, as well as in the previous ones, the writer is never completely bound by his text. Rather, he retains the freedom to express his own position and political philosophy in symbolic form. Arafa's quest for knowledge is not linked, for example, as one might have expected that it would be, with light and with the sky; instead, it is linked with darkness and the earth, Arafa working in a cellar at night, where, digging a tunnel to penetrate the Great House, he is buried alive. In other words, while the knowledge promised by modernity carries the hope of liberation, it in fact ends up by leading to harsher oppression, with Arafa -- like Robert Oppenheimer -- making bombs for the trustee of the waqf. Furthermore, the "disenchantment of the world" that comes with such knowledge fails to provide answers to the basic questions of existence, Arafa dying without having discovered Gabalawi's secret, sacred book.
In this way, Mahfouz presents two forms of knowledge -- a traditional one based on the transmission of heritage, and a modern one based on empiricism and rational criticism. Both have their merits and shortcomings; both have failed to deliver mankind from political oppression and social injustice. Mahfouz's long-standing philosophy is easily recognizable in this refusal to choose between science and faith, or between the old and the new, and in his inclination towards compromise, symbolized in the novel by Hanash, Arafa's younger brother.
The writer character in the novel's Prologue is an imaginary counterpart to the author himself, and close reading of these two pages will show that this character encapsulates Mahfouz's view of the modern writer. The written word, he indicates, is superior to the oral one, oral stories being "subject to the biases and fancies of the rawis", while written ones, "honestly compiled in an integrated piece", are "useful" to their readers. The writer here seems to be a unique social being, possessing rare competence since he belongs to "the few who know how to write"; nevertheless, his profession has not "raised him above the level of beggars," and it has brought him nothing but "scorn and sarcasm." Yet, he seems, or rather he pretends, to be above all social determinations, having been granted access to power and knowledge (Arafa's friend "will provide him with many secrets") and being familiar with "the secrets and grief" of the lower classes. In other words, the modern writer, according to Mahfouz, is more able than is any other social actor to approach the truth of his society, to understand its past, present and future, and to express its inner meaning.
This, finally, is what Mahfouz intends, with the utmost ambition, to do in Awlad Haratina. Not only does the novel include the grand narratives of the monotheistic religions, but it also includes that of modernity, and all in 114 chapters, the number of suras in the Qur'an. This all-encompassing novel is thus an expression of its writer's ambition, being the work of a writer who, having arrived at the peak of his career, goes on to assume the role of a leading intellectual, or of "the conscience of the nation" as the cliché goes.
It should be admitted, therefore, that the ulama of Al-Azhar did not misunderstand the book. But they did not combat it because, in their judgement at that time, it offended Islam; rather, they saw in it something that could rival and contest their spiritual leadership of Egyptian society. In this respect, Awlad Haratina can rightfully be seen as emblematic of the fierce competition between traditional and modern, or religious and secular, intellectuals in Egypt. This contest has not yet been settled, even though the religious side scored a victory when they succeeded in preventing Awlad Haratina from being published in Egypt, first with the help of the state, and then with the aid of Mahfouz himself, since it was Mahfouz who refused to allow the novel's republication in Arabic in Egypt, despite the lifting of the unofficial ban on the novel in the wake of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to its author in October 1988.
Reviewed by Richard Jacquemond
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