Al-Ahram Weekly | Books Supplement

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585
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A tight corner
Ayyam Wardiya (Rosy Days), Alaa El-Dib, Cairo: Al-Hilal Novels, January 2002. pp144
Alaa El-Dib's Ayyam Wardiya (Rosy Days) tells a story of escape from city, to town, to asylum, to village, to no-man's land, from the alarmingly ugly, dishearteningly hopeless social and political reality of contemporary Egypt to an inconsequential dream world, from historical engagement to mystical withdrawal and retreat.
Amin El-Alfi, the novel's protagonist -- for whom Palestine was "the twin of his soul, the twin of his defeat, the face of pride that no mirror could reflect, a symbol, an overriding idea according to which he evaluated where people stood, a catalyst with which to break compounds down into lies and truth" -- having left Cairo after the 1967 defeat, and with it a leftist-intellectual life, is a school inspector, married with two children, in the Delta town of Mansoura, which turns out to be no rural haven from disillusioning city corruption, dishonesty and greed.
Amin manages, however, to find little pastoral places to which he can escape from a barren, meaningless life: the space beneath an oak tree to which he walks through town in pajamas and slippers, the maqam (tomb) of a minor Mansoura wali (holy man), a balcony turned into a room of his own where bottles of cheap brandy are consumed, cigarettes chain- smoked, pills popped. Life -- work and marriage -- in Mansoura becomes unbearable. Extremely depressed, Amin suffers a breakdown and checks in to the Nablus Psychiatric Hospital, so named because the owner is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, on the outskirts of Cairo.
Once there, images of the past return to him, and for a moment his quest for the holy grail of nobility and a passion for life, materialises in the form of a Palestinian woman, hospitalized to recover from the trauma of rape by Phalangists. This woman befriends Amin, and the two of them spend a demoralising evening together in a Downtown Cairo intellectuals' haunt. When he is finally discharged from the Nablus, however, Amin does not return to Mansoura. His home, and with it his beloved balcony, no longer exist: his wife has divorced him, taking custody of their children, and the building has been demolished. The oak tree, over-watered by real- estate profiteers, has also died.
After wandering through the Delta like the shade of a shade: a vagabond talking to himself, a Mansoura government employee, a Cairo intellectual whose vague notions "of progress, civilisation, humanitarianism were nothing but reptiles and insects moving about in a heap of old, rusty tin cans," Amin finally returns to the Delta village of Hosmayia Bahari that his father had abandoned for Cairo a generation earlier, driven by dreams of social prosperity. That, too, has changed beyond recognition. The village is not quite as Amin imagined it would be, as ugly and as lacking in ideals as are the town and the city.
Only on the outskirts of the village, in the company of old Ibrahim Abu Khalifa, a once bright-eyed friend of his father's and another victim of the ignominious times' slings and arrows, can Amin find, if not the joy and passion that he continually seeks, then at least a semblance of mystical serenity that can perhaps bring back the flavour of the period before 1967. Here, where Ibrahim Abu Khalifa -- Voltaire-like -- finds solace in cultivating a little patch of garden, no news reaches Amin, not even of Palestine.
Less three-dimensional character than frame of mind, an allegorical figure with whom most of El-Dib's readers will readily identify, Amin El-Alfi represents a dismal Arab historical moment, a kind of collective zone of consciousness. Depressed, disillusioned, so sapped of vitality that he requires chemical assistance merely to function, and so lacking in the minimum level of creativity required for ordinary day-to-day living that for a while, he -- once a political idealist and now a pathetic wreck -- finds life in a psychiatric asylum more tolerable than life outside.
From defeat, "the personal, humiliating wounds of June [1967]," to defeat (during the days of the invasion of Beirut, he stays in his bedroom with a drink and a smoke, "seeing reflected in his wife's gaze the meaning of men vanquished"), "everything in the outside world was pushing him into a final, tight corner." Living in a present that is "stagnant, without a future," Amin "contemplates death as a way out or a solution, not like a prophet, martyr or suicide; but he had never imagined that the state of siege would be as suffocating as this."
This state of siege that is Palestine "inhabited Amin's every thought and illusion, his daily sense of humiliation, the stabbing at his heart." "Should he," Amin, in bed in an asylum built by the rich for the rich, wonders, "remember the living or the martyrs, or should he make do with contemplating the ruins of himself? Was it a public, political, national issue, or had it turned for him into a personal issue, one into which he had cornered himself a long time ago?"
Like its depressed, tired protagonist, El-Dib's novel, weighed down by the gloomy historical moment in which it was born, goes nowhere in particular. Time is being done, as in prison. True, there are some uplifting moments in Ayyam Wardiya, like, for example, the story of a Palestinian refugee who crossed the border into Israel, went to where his bulldozed family home had once stood, spent 48 hours watering the wasteland, and left. There is also Moftah, a bright-eyed Nubian schoolboy whom Amin takes under his pedagogic wing. But, these bright patches, given the general tenor of El-Dib's portrait of the times, are flashes in the dark.
When a friend visiting Amin at the Nablus Psychiatric Hospital remarks "'I can smell the smell of Palestine here,' the sentence was more than he [Amin] could take. Limp modern Arabic rhetoric, turning meanings into artificial falsehoods [...] What smell? What Palestine? I can smell the smell of Palestine here ... a sing-song phrase [...] The sentence took before him the shape of the entire umma [Arab nation], with its chewing up of speech, its mastication of water, belting out mendacious songs in order not to see the truth: a slut half- hiding coyly behind thick-skinned stupidity, ignorance, petrol, modern gadgets and shiny clothes. All that was left was for her to stand on a chair and recite poetry and sing anthems of Return, Struggle and Steadfastness."
This is a moment of honest, scathing, self-referential irony if ever there was one, as if to say: how much longer will we go on milking Palestine for words?
Reviewed by Nur Elmessiri

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