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13 - 19 June 2002 Issue No.590 Books |
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Questions of exile and memory
Love in Exile, Bahaa Taher, trans. Farouk Abdel-Wahab, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2002. pp277
First published in July 1995 (Cairo: Dar Al- Hilal) and winner of the prestigious Egyptian State Prize for best literary work of the year at the 1996 Cairo International Book Fair, Bahaa Taher's novel, Al-Hub fi Al-Manfa (Love in Exile), has recently been published by AUC Press in an excellent English translation by Farouk Abdel-Wahab, which does remarkable justice to the original's subtleties of tone. Set in a nameless European city in 1982, the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the barbaric massacres in the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps, Love in Exile continues to be very timely and pertinent. As the author said in a 1995 interview, the novel is "a question about memory, a question about the past's judgement of the present and the present's judgement of the past."
While the exile to which the novel's title refers is at one level geographical, it is the temporal exile of the nameless protagonist that is the novel's main concern. "She was young and beautiful," we read in the opening paragraphs, "I was old, a father, and divorced ... I was a Cairene whose city had expelled me to exile in the north. She was, like me, a foreigner in that country."
A socialist and Nasserite in the 1980s, the novel's protagonist, a journalist, has been relocated to a European city because of his ideological orientation. The protagonist-narrator, however, acknowledges that he had welcomed this relocation "to get away from Egypt altogether after the divorce." Through the medium of this honest narrator-protagonist and against the brilliantly captured backdrop of a traumatic historical moment, which extends back to the 1950s through flashback telling the tale of an entire generation, Taher's novel is at once ruthlessly honest and compassionate in its exploration of the agonizingly fuzzy line separating "exile" from "escape."
The protagonist is divorced; the Nasserite dream is dead; the personal and the political are intimately connected. The protagonist- narrator acknowledges that his having clung to Nasser against the onslaught of the materialistic values that arrived with Sadat's economic Open-Door policy in the 1970s was a "clinging to [a] personal dream," while the attacks on Nasser by his ex-wife Manar were part of a domestic game. While Manar and Nasser, the personal and the political, are figures of the past when the novel opens, questions about what went wrong seeming superfluous, the protagonist, however, also feels exiled from the present. Though he might protest to Ibrahim, his friend and a Beirut- based journalist, that "the secrets" of things that happened in 1969 are unimportant in 1982, elsewhere he notes that "all the riddles (of the past) were as alive as they had been long ago."
While on the one hand, a desire to have the past over and done with characterizes the novel's protagonist, on the other, and perhaps as a result of the vehemence of this desire, he is also afflicted with an inability to exist in the present. The protagonist feels like a "ghost from a bygone era," vagrant in time and alienated from history. Yet, at the same time, he also feels alienated from his past self. At more than one point in the novel he puzzles over "the connection between this gentleman [himself] sitting in the cafe overlooking the river and the green European mountain, and the hungry, poor child [also himself] who walked two hours a day wearing torn shoes in the dust, the mud, the heat and the cold to go to school, dreaming all the way of Paradise because it had lots and lots of food in it."
Nasser had forged some sort of connection between that hungry child and the middle- class journalist, but, with the death of the dream Nasser had represented, they are split asunder, with the present self, disengaged from both the present moment and the past, confusedly trying to piece the two together. At the time the novel opens, the protagonist's attempts to forge a meaningful connection between past and present are repeated failures: he cannot even remember the nightmares from which he is trying to awake.
"Everything," the narrator-protagonist relates, "changed after what happened in Lebanon." In a twist of irony reminiscent of Greek tragedy, however, this "change" involves a further exile from history. Driven by a sense of historical urgency, he momentarily pushes aside his disillusioned persona and attempts to make a statement about the Israeli invasion, regardless of editorial policies at his newspaper that have an eye on placating America and Israel. He plies himself with caffeine in order to work up the energy to face the challenge at hand, is overwhelmed by the pressure and has a stroke as a result. As he falls, a photo of Nasser's smiling visage falls with him, shattering. Past self and present self are thus further split asunder.
In the hospital where he convalesces there are no newspapers, no politics, no history, only cartoons and television comedies. Doctor's orders are to avoid unpleasantness, which, given the events in Lebanon, means do not read the newspapers or watch the news, change your profession, put your head, ostrich-like, in the sand, in short, ignore the historical moment. As a result of the stroke, the protagonist has no choice but to escape from the present as history and conflict, as is embodied in the situation in Lebanon, to the present as love and innocence, as is embodied in his lover Brigitte.
Like the protagonist, Brigitte is a foreigner and a divorcée, and, like him, her divorce was occasioned by the pressure exerted by history and politics on personal affairs. An Austrian who had fallen in love with an African university colleague, a refugee from Equatorial Guinea, later marrying him but losing their unborn child in a vicious racist attack, Brigitte has been shattered by an unjust world, losing her husband who sank quickly from political idealism to alcoholism.
Brigitte and the protagonist had been quietly falling in love since their first encounter at a conference on human-rights abuses in Chile. After his stroke, the protagonist pushes aside the thought that it might be "shameful to feel all this joy" of loving and being loved by Brigitte "at this age, these days, in the midst of war," and throws himself into the present moment. "What joy," he declares, "to lose all the past now to find you, Brigitte!"
But he is no mere hedonist. If anything, he is a Faust figure in reverse who asks for a moment of love and forgoes both knowledge and power in a world where those who have power manipulate knowledge to serve unjust causes and where arms dealers thrive and civilians are massacred. Nor is he so naive as to believe that anything as fragile as a present moment, unanchored to the past, can either stay or fructify in the future. Thus, while Brigitte proposes that they think of the future, perhaps have a child, the protagonist only wishes "for the day to pass slowly."
It passes, but not slowly enough, for the protagonist's momentary exile/escape from history is ruthlessly brought to an end by the Sabra massacres. Horrified, he watches the news coverage. He writes and sends real articles for a change to the Cairo newspaper for which he is a correspondent. He helps organize and, with Brigitte, takes part in a demonstration. For a brief instant, both their love and the horrors of a historical moment are welded into a meaningful, if painful, present.
Fate, however, conspires to separate the lovers in the form of an Emir, who, though a major partner in an arms concern selling arms to Israel, wants to found a "progressive" Arabic newspaper in Europe for "image" purposes and thinks he can buy off the protagonist. This turn of events brings the novel to its bleak, if ambiguous, end.
Bahaa Taher's novel, set in the early 1980s, was a gripping, moving read when it first appeared in Arabic in 1995. It continues to be so in 2002 in this English translation by Farouk Abdel-Wahab. From invasion to invasion, intifada to intifada, Palestine lives on, Love in Exile testifying to this -- "that," to borrow words from the Author's Note to this novel, "and the blood of the martyrs."
I must say what I've seen, You must publish it
One morning when I hadn't slept well as had been the case since the war began, Bernard called me and said, "Come right away! There's something important about Lebanon that you must hear."I went to his café. He was waiting for me with a blonde lady, on the heavy side, about forty years old. He introduced her to me saying, "This is Marianne Eriksson, a nurse from Norway who left Lebanon yesterday. She is spending the day here en route to her country."
She said with a faint smile, "I was kicked out of Lebanon. There is a difference."
I studied her pale face and bloodshot eyes as she leaned her back to the seat languidly, her hands hanging down her sides, yet making an effort to appear awake and alert. I said to myself, this is a woman who needs to sleep, not talk.
She turned to Bernard and said with that tired smile, "Even the expulsion was a problem. Did I tell you how they expelled us? They were detaining us in the hospital after closing it and the Norwegian ambassador kept trying to get us repatriated for five days, to no avail. Each time they found an excuse for keeping us in detention: once because they didn't work on Saturdays, another time because the officer in charge of giving permits was on field furlough. The ambassador told me that their commander told him, "What's the hurry to leave? The girls are having fun..."
[...]
She asked me what newspaper I worked for and I told her, "A newspaper in Egypt."
She nodded and said, "I understand." Then she fell silent for a moment, "Or, actually, I don't understand. But where would you like me to begin?"
I said, "I'd like to know something about you first."
"You're right. I work, I mean I used to work, in the Ain al-Helweh refugee camp in the south with other foreign nurses. We were assisting the Palestinian doctors and nurses there.
"At a moment when the shelling stopped, the Belgian doctor Francis Capet took a chance and said, 'I'll try something with the Israelis.' He took an ambulance and packed it with as many burn victims and critical cases as he could and he drove to the entrance of the refugee camp but he returned less than half an hour later to tell us that the Israelis refused to take the wounded and told him that they would not offer him any help unless he handed over the terrorists, meaning the Palestinian doctors and nurses who worked with us at the clinic. Doctor Capet whispered in Sidon to take ten of the wounded he had taken with him. He said that the hospital was also overcrowded, that the situation there was as bad as the situation here. He didn't have the time to tell me more than that nor did I have the time to listen. Our clinic ran out of medications and there was nothing left to offer by way of first aid except words and putting covers over the faces of the dead.
"In the morning everything was over. I mean everything in the refugee camp was gone: the houses, the people, everything. When I went out for a few moments at dawn I did not recognise the place. There were fires in the few houses that were still standing and flames and smoke coming out of the rubble of the houses that had been destroyed. There were a few people going through the ruins, looking for their relatives or for the bodies of their relatives. There was no other sound except the coughing and soft, muffled moaning that you didn't know whether it came from the standing houses or from the rubble. On the ground, bodies and body parts were everywhere, especially around the shelters. I'll explain something about these shelters; they were holes in the ground that were covered and lined with concrete. They worked to some extent against air raids because unless the roof was penetrated directly by the bomb, the shelter provided protection from the shrapnel. But with the heavy artillery that was blasting the houses and the land, most of these shelters turned into tombs for those who took refuge in them. Dozens of them, children, men and women had crowded into those shelters. I saw one of them that had turned into a small pond in which heads, legs and arms floated. Of the floating bodies I was able to count...."
I noticed that her voice was choking and that she was signaling me to stop the recording, so I pushed the button. She was overcome with tears that she couldn't stop, and she kept wiping the corners of her eyes with her finger and saying, "Please excuse me. I am a professional nurse. I've seen a lot of pain and many different things in my life and I've gotten used to it, but when I saw...."
I said in a weak voice, "If it gives you pain to speak, this is enough."
The intermitted whistling had started in my ear and the headache at the back of the head and I really wished she would stop but she said, "No, no matter what, I must say what I've seen and you must publish it."
Extracted from chapter 6 of Love in Exile entitled "Lorca's Drum for the Poet's Blood".
Reviewed by Nur Elmessiri
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