Issue No.590
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13 - 19 June 2002 Issue No.590 Books |
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Nineties, nicotine and forgetfulness
-Qanoun Al-Wiratha (Law of Inheritance), Yasser Abdel-Latif, Cairo:Miret for Publication and Information, 2002. pp87;
-An Tara Alaan (To See Now), Muntaser El-Qaffash, Cairo: Dar Sahrqiat, 2002. pp119
Each in its way, two new novels by Nineties writers typify developments on the contemporary literary scene.
In his debut novel, Qanoun Al-Wiratha, the title cleverly evoking both jurisdiction and genealogy, Yasser Abdel- Latif's early poetic experiments have witnessed few transformations. Eloquent, ironic and subversive avowals of the dissipation and despair of his generation, these have however now been added to by Abdel-Latif's utilisation of an airtight narrative technique, an ability to contextualise the self and a mature autobiographical vision.
Muntaser El-Qaffash, by contrast, has come a long way from the polished evocations of the literature of previous eras with which he began his career. In pursuing the short story's time-honoured objectives of sharp observation and economical concision, these were as brilliant as they were unreadable.
In both authors the need to tell a story is more evident than before, though for both the novel increasingly emerges as a versatile, loosely defined medium admitting of a wide variety of possibilities. While El-Qaffash's fable of domestic discord is as logically and tightly constructed as a folk tale, Abdel-Latif's contemporary Bildungsroman recalls the open-ended, contemplative, honest-to-God improvisations of the American Beat Generation.
Qanoun Al-Wiratha opens like one of Abdel-Latif's poems with a simple, telling scene that holds the key to an entire life's predicament. "A morning like thousands of mornings," the reader is told, "during long gone or recent years. A child still smoking by the wall of the school. He was not addicted to nicotine, but smoking was his only means of protesting against the length of the paste-marked road from home to school: however often he walked over the marks, they remained... Casting sidelong glances this way and that to check the atmosphere, no sooner had he given in to the pleasure of tobacco for a moment than the Azharite Arabic teacher with a pock-marked face laid a hand on his shoulder, catching him in the act: 'Your father -- away working in Saudi. You are the eldest brother. Responsibility. A good example. Sadaqa Allahu Al- Adhim.'"
"The next year he was by the same wall," the reader is then told, "this time smoking hashish... blowing out gusts of blue smoke, each of which was accompanied by a discharge of anger. This time he vowed to gouge out the eye of whoever caught him with the burning tip of his cigarette. Sadly, the pock-marked Azharite teacher too had been sent to Saudi, to teach the children of the Arabian peninsula in their own language and not to smoke during school hours..."
By contrast, El-Qaffash's novel opens with a confession on the part of the narrator, one that outlines the central theme of the book -- forgetfulness and the attempt to remember. This attempt ultimately boomerangs, causing worse confusion and psychic disaster. "Perhaps it all began with him increasingly forgetting the names of friends, relations, neighbours. To the point at which he would be careful never to mention the name of his interlocutor during conversation, replacing it with 'Brother,' 'Captain,' 'Ustaz,' 'Lord,' or 'Pasha.' And if he remembered the name he would elongate or mumble it for fear that it might be wrong. If the person did not object, he would slow down the rhythm of his speech, repeating the name frequently -- as if in compensation for the time he could not utter it."
A paragraph or two later, El-Qaffash's narrator begins to feel concerned. "A white sheet of paper is what his self would be if his forgetfulness continued and became worse. And he would have to start writing on it anew, in a new way."
While Abdel-Latif's use of interchangeable pronouns and romantic and existential references immediately places him in a postmodern context, his subversive account of student demonstrations at Cairo University, for example, touching obliquely on the insurgency literature of the 1960s, it is through such self-referential statements that El-Qaffash establishes a connection between what strives to be an approachable story and the serious-minded literary experiments that preceded it, and to which much of the present text still bears testimony.
"A month or two before," El-Qaffash continues, "while he was at work in the accountancy office, he noticed that he could no longer easily call the features of [his wife] Samira to mind... On returning to the flat that day, he opened the wardrobe to change his clothes and his eyes settled on it, the camera... He found it lurking in front of him, its prominent lens protruding like a human eye. He picked up the camera that day and went to his wife, snapping away several times in succession while circling around her."
With both authors' compulsion to tell a story comes their need to make an historical or intellectual point, a seldom-acknowledged feature of Nineties writing. And while El-Qaffash proposes the (photographic) image as a metaphor for our times, Abdel-Latif divides his fictional auto, or family, biography into separate chapters, each dealing with his overriding concern with the meaning of social and historical identity. Indeed, such was the subject of many of his poems.
The book's five chapters deal with growing up, love, political activism, drugs and family history, respectively. What Abdel-Latif gives up in the way of structure he makes up for through thematic division. And though the chapters seem to constitute separate texts in themselves, the numerous cross-references, the unity of tone and time span lend them structural credibility. Abdel-Latif thus improvises within a circumscribed framework, unlike the Beats, though he pursues his concerns as freely and "honestly" as they did.
In the opening sentence the narrator's apparent lack of interest in time -- "during long gone or recent years" -- in fact masks a historical focus not present in An Tara Alaan, whose concern with time and place is less overt. While not entirely linear, structure is more conventional in this novel, and the approach is more modernist than postmodern, El-Qaffash, in effect, telling the story of a camera.
Chapter divisions turn out to be inconsequential as the reader follows Ibrahim's misfortunes. He takes pictures of his wife, which are mysteriously vandalised, and his wife leaves. Ibrahim's friend-cum-mistress, to whom he shows the pictures, is briefly implicated and is upset, but she turns out to be innocent. And, just when life seems to be edging back towards normality, Ibrahim making up with both his wife and mistress, this photographic attempt at freezing time and defending the psyche against creeping emptiness backfires and the confusion crescendos.
Ibrahim is about to leave the house, having hidden the pictures in his pockets intending to get rid of them. And, as he exits, "with the palm of his hand he hit his pocket lightly to conceal the protrusion made by the pictures. The action of his hands became stronger and stronger until it felt like an urge to keep on walking. However, the pocket did not even out, and Ibrahim continued to hit it, the edge of a picture emerging like [the face of] an intruder to whom Ibrahim did not want to pay attention."
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
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