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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London calling
Innaha London Ya 'Azizi, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Beirut: Dar Al-Adab: 2000, translated as Only in London, by Catherine Cobham, London: Pantheon, 2001. pp288
Hanan al-Shaykh, the distinguished Lebanese writer, is one of the most talented and best- known female novelists in the Arab World. She is also one of the best recognized in the West, her books swiftly being taken up by Western publishing houses and translated into several European languages, especially English, sometimes even before their appearance in Arabic. Al- Shaykh has occupied a special place in Arab writing since the publication of her second novel, Hikayat Zahra (Zahra's Story), one of the best novels ever written by an Arab woman and one of the best on the Lebanese Civil War, especially in terms of its far-reaching insights, sensitive treatment of its theme and sophistication of its narrative discourse. This work, followed by others such as Misk al-Ghazal (Women of Sand and Myrrh), Barid Beirut (Beirut Blues) and two collections of short stories, Wardat al-Sahra' (Desert Rose) and Wa Aknus al- Shams an al-Sutuh (I Sweep the Sunlight from the Rooftops), established Al-Shaykh as a prominent writer and proved her ability for narrative innovation and for the employment of diverse narrative languages and structures.
Al-Shaykh is one of only a handful of Arab women writers who write intuitively, seeming to know by instinct that each narrative form has its own particular content, and that each narrative experiment inspires, or even dictates, its own form. This is why al-Shaykh's novels are marked by difference, uniqueness and productivity, both in form and content, and it is the origin of her remarkable insight into the human psyche and into socio-cultural context. Her texts are born out of real experience of their subject matter and a real knowledge of the world of which their author writes. Hence, they give the reader the sense of experiencing the world portrayed at first-hand, together with a confidence in al-Shaykh's representation of that world's characters and themes.
Like her previous novels, Only in London, experiments with narrative discourse. However, it differs from these in certain respects, the most obvious of which is the author's departure from her familiar subject of Lebanese society and culture, al-Shaykh in her new novel exploring a different territory, London, the place she has made her home. London is geographically and demographically large, having a population of over seven million. The city also plays a major role in world politics, economics and culture, and it is one of the few European capitals in which it is possible to meet people of a large number of different nationalities, races and cultures. This is true even of Arab nationals; when I moved to London, I met more people from more Arab countries, not to mention other countries, than I did when I lived in Egypt. Writing about so rich and teeming a metropolis is not an easy task, as is evident from the novel's title. In fact, it is a monumental one, surpassing the resources of this novel, which attempts to portray only one of the city's many dimensions.
The novel presents the "Arab" part of London, which is in the heart of this teeming city around Edgware Road. This area is frequented by Arab visitors from countries that the late Syrian novelist Hani al-Rahib called "little oilstans" in his perceptive 1999 novel Rasamt Khatta fi al-Rimal (I Drew a Line in the Sand). The moment one approaches the area, one feels that the larger city of London has been left behind, and one is now entering a peculiar world that is neither Arab, ruled by prohibitions and repression, nor truly London, in which different cultures and civilizations co-exist freely and spontaneously. This is a strange Arab world awash with businesses open to serve clients from the little oilstans, providing them with all the entertainment they could desire, including halal food and cheap alcohol. In addition, and this is one of its glaring distortions, it provides materially rich men and women from culturally and educationally poor countries with prostitutes and gigolos from the culturally rich, but economically poor, part of the Arab World. This striking area, full of its own ironies and contradictions, can thus provide rich material for any novelist, not only because it provides an already usefully disfigured representation of the Arab World, but also because its exaggerations of Arab traits and discrepancies is often more than the equal of any comic representation or satire.
Indeed, had al-Shaykh done no more than offer us a portrait of this neighborhood bristling with contradictions, writing the equivalent of Naguib Mahfouz's classic Cairene novel Middaq Alley about London perhaps, then she would already have illuminated important aspects of the current Arab crisis, which is forcing many into exile abroad. She would also have demonstrated some of the predicaments of that exile, namely that the exiled are followed, even in their exile, by the contradictions they have left behind, soaking up many of them in banalities. Focusing on the inner dynamics of this unique Arab area in the heart of London would have enlightened both Arab and European reading publics. However, the novel is more ambitious and complex in scope than this, attempting to encompass Arab life in the whole of London and not just in the Edgware Road area, and this ambition has left its mark on the novel's structure. For this is something like a braid, in which the various locks are interwoven, but in which each remains somehow still separate from the whole. In truth, writing the story of the Arabs in London is beyond the capacity of al- Shaykh's novel, for such a story could go from Sir Magdi Yacoub, the famous heart surgeon, to Samir, the monkey charmer of al-Shaykh's story, who entertains the Gulf rich, and it would need to show how these two extremes, with all the different social, educational and cultural classes in between, are connected. One novel could not do this much; a world of such wealth and scandalous contradictions cannot be addressed in a project-novel based on only four characters.
These four are, however, of considerable interest. There is Lamis, an Iraqi woman whose family forced her to marry a rich man that she disliked, and with whom she had a child, Khaled; but who later had the courage after years of suffering to seek divorce. There is Amira, or Habiba, a Moroccan woman who, failing to get married in her village in Morocco and emigrating to London, has become a prostitute rendering her services to rich Arabs. There is Nahid, an Egyptian friend of Amira's, who works as a belly dancer in the Edgware Road nightclubs, and, tempted by the prospect of more money, is also a prostitute. She often joins Amira, who pretends to be an Arab princess in order to extract money from her Arab clients who believe they will in time be generously rewarded by her family. And there is Samir, a Lebanese gay man who has dreamt since his country's civil war of going to London where he can openly declare his sexual orientation. To do so, Samir seeks help from a smuggling ring, and they successfully bring him to Britain in return for his transporting a monkey in which gems have been hidden. Once Samir arrives in London, these are extracted from the monkey's intestines, Samir is given one thousand pounds sterling reward, and the monkey. This subsequently becomes Samir's constant companion and friend, and later Samir makes a living as a clown by using the monkey.
Café at Edgware Road, London
The novel opens with three of these characters on a plane from Dubai, together with an Englishman, Nicholas. Following her divorce from her Iraqi husband, Lamis has decided to move to Dubai to work in flower design, and she purchases a variety of dried flowers in Britain and travels to Dubai. There, the authorities accuse her of smuggling drugs (her dried flowers collection including poppies), and, though she pleads innocent, she is arrested and deported following a tough bureaucratic procedure. This leads her back to London, which she had left in the first place to escape her memories of a failed marriage. Only by chance does she meet Nicholas on the plane, but the Englishman falls in love with her, and a relationship develops that is one of the most plausible and convincing aspects of the novel.
Nicholas, flying back from Oman after meeting his employer, falls in love with Lamis due to his fondness for all things oriental. There is, therefore, more than a touch of "orientalism" going on here, in the sense that Edward Said has given the word, where the occidental falls in love with an exoticised, imaginary Orient. Yet, the Lamis- Nicholas relationship is rich enough, and rounded enough, for the author to have developed a fascinating novel out of this alone; each time Lamis introduces herself as Iraqi, for example, she finds herself obliged to say that her presence in England has nothing to do with the Gulf War. She is therefore caught between preconceived western ideas about Arabs, and about Arab women in particular, and her desire to benefit from her new reality, which offers her liberation. She embraces life in London, while still being claimed by traditional relationships that prevent her from breaking away. One sees in Lamis a woman who has experienced traditional Arab marriage, burdened with conventions and conditions that do women significant harm. Her courage in getting a divorce is commendable, by this decision sacrificing a stable and comfortable, yet void, life in order to be free to enjoy a Londoner's British life. She attends an English school to get rid of her Arabic accent, and she makes tremendous efforts to integrate herself into the surrounding culture, all the time realizing that she can't get out of her own skin.
Although Lamis loves Nicholas and feels personally and sexually satisfied with him, something she did not feel in her long marriage to her Iraqi husband, she remains hesitant to make a commitment. Thus, she enjoys her affair with Nicholas, but remains unable to commit herself to sharing a steady life with him because of the stigma associated with this commitment. She ends her relationship with Nicholas after he leaves for Oman, returning to him after a period of separation.
The three other Arab characters in the novel, Amira, Samir, and Nahid, are more closely linked. They present a parallel world to that of Lamis, for their world, the bizarre one of the Edgware Road, is both similar and dissimilar to hers. These two worlds, however, do not really touch, and neither do they satisfactorily join together to make a narrative whole. In fact, they cannot really be integrated, for Lamis's is a normal world, that of a person experiencing exile in the turbulent last years of the 20th century, while the other approximates to a world for tourists, rising out of the English tabloid scandals of Arab sheikhs, their cheap sexual exploits and the way they squander their excessive wealth. One wonders why al-Shaykh has brought these things together in a single novel, when their juxtaposition fails to create unity. Lamis never meets the other characters except en passant, and such encounters neither succeed in creating real relationships between the characters, nor do they add appreciably to the narrative. Different people from different walks of life probably do meet on the streets of London, as described here; yet, what do these four Arab characters really add to the novel al-Shaykh has written about Lamis and Nicholas?
The most vivid of them is Habiba al- Mustanimi, alias Amira. She is the embodiment of the Arab prostitutes encouraged to come to London by the rich, but ill-educated, Arabs from the various oilstans who are interested in women capable of speaking their own language and entertaining them with dancing in all-Arab night clubs. Such an atmosphere makes one feel that one has left London and is in one of the houses of ill-repute that overflow in many Arab cities. Amira, however, is not satisfied with the role allotted her here in this cheap farce of a life, feeling smarter and stronger than her patrons and clients. She pretends to be an Arabian princess in order to raise her prices, these clients paying more for a high-society woman than for an ordinary prostitute from the materially poor, but culturally rich, country of Morocco. Amira succeeds in this deception, living luxuriously and spending her money on Samir, the Lebanese gay man, who has no shelter or love apart from that Habiba provides. While Habiba is ultimately severely punished in the novel, Samir finds himself able to express his real self in London, denied him by the strict and hypocritical moral codes of his own society. His presence in the novel adds a comic and critical dimension, simultaneously causing both sympathy and laughter.
Yet, one feels that these characters do not represent a convincing picture of the dark reality of this area of London and its marginal characters. While it successfully portrays certain actual events and characters, it fails to transcend these to expose the predicament, the indignities and the contradictions of the larger Arab World. The characters in the novel's Edgware Road strand do not conduct a dialogue with the Lamis strand. Lamis lives out her own existential dilemma, torn between the magic world of the Ahwar (the March Arabs in southern Iraq) where her father was born, and the difficult world of London where she wants to start afresh and find a meaning to her life. However, she finds this impossible, as is indicated by her inability entirely to rid herself of her Arab accent, with all its class and cultural implications, and al-Shaykh's novel as a whole suffers from a similar dilemma, since it too is torn between two worlds and two themes.
Reviewed by Sabry Hafez
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