El-Makhzangi's mind games
Awtar Al-Maa' (Water Strings), Mohamed El-Makhzangi, Cairo: Miret Publications, 2002. pp114
Mohamed El-Maghzangi made his name in the 1980s with Rashq Al-Sikkeen (Knife Throwing), a collection of tiny narrative pieces that suggested a new literary form, one that he would pursue further in Safar (Journey), a fictionalised account of his sojourn as a psychiatrist in the Ukraine. In both these slim volumes El-Makhzangi's uniquely sophisticated voice sounded a preemptory note: it was as if, young and relatively inexperienced, this psychiatrist-turned-author was intent on stretching himself to the limit.
The genre of uqsousa, diminutive of qissa, or story, became associated with El-Makhzangi's name, bringing this aspiring author an early fame. Based on autobiography, these short, short stories combined well-grounded lyricism with folk-oriented observation and a mythological, larger-than-life sense of self. Drawing both on Youssef Idris, master of the Egyptian short-story and grandfather of the Generation of the Sixties of Egyptian writers, and the energy of the 1970s literary scene, starting his career as a vernacular poet, El- Makhzangi never lost sight of the links between psychology and poetry and the potential of both for confessional narrative.
Indeed, El-Makhzangi has sometimes alluded to the connection between himself and Idris, both authors having been qualified physicians who practised for a brief period before devoting themselves to literature. Idris was also often asked about his views on Chekhov, another doctor-writer and one of El-Makhzangi's host of influences. Yet, El-Makhzangi's remarkable adaptability -- he has also worked as a performer and has undertaken the inevitable stint in left-wing political activism -- also made room for a wide range of thematic concerns, including class-conscious upward mobility, east-west encounters and the relation between the seen and the unseen.
Within a few years, however, El-Makhzangi seems to have considered that the uqsousa had exhausted itself, turning instead to more traditional short stories, of which he has already produced one volume, and to what he calls "literary revelations", the term he uses to describe the present collection. In his last book, Al-Bustan (The Grove), El-Makhzangi's writing was as technically sound and beautifully constructed as ever, but for some it seemed to lack spirit. So powerful had El- Makhzangi's initial impact been, that when he later settled down to competent routine, the now not-so-young writer tended to disappoint. Yet, arguably, it was not until the appearance of Al-Bustan that El-Makhzangi began to become more aware both of his own, and of his writing's, limitations.
Writing, as he confided to the present reviewer a few months ago in the course of a long-awaited reunion, after nearly a decade of difficulties for both parties, had been too much of a life-or-death matter for him. His present state of disillusionment with the literary world had now given rise to serenity.
"The notion that you live in order to write is not a healthy one," El-Makhzangi explained. "In the end, you realise that life is there to be lived, that you don't live for anything in particular, and that you survive not for the sake of some impossibly ambitious attainment but for the sake of the people you love -- your family, your children. And once you have assimilated this new mode of being in the world, you write in an infinitely more relaxed, perhaps more complacent way. However, you also write something because it wants to be written, and if there is space for it to be published somewhere, then why not. But if there isn't, that doesn't really upset you in the least, at least not in the way that it might once have done."
Of Al-Bustan, El-Makhzangi said that it had been his wife who had persuaded him to collect the texts he had written since their marriage in book form. Otherwise, she had said, people would say that his marriage had been an obstacle to his career. Awtar Al-Maa, the present book, which has taken nearly as long to emerge as it has the present writer and El- Makhzangi to meet again, is less overtly lyrical, less conscious of style than is Al-Bustan. Although the 10 texts that make up the book are as tightly constructed and consciously executed as anything El-Makhzangi has written, the author's various literary tricks -- the style that helped to single him out -- is no longer of the essence, being instead a device whose superficial nature El-Makhzangi makes no effort to hide.
Central to these pieces is the notion of "resonance". The voices of remarkable sopranos, the reader is told, are of such purity and power that they can break crystal. But the secret behind this is the effect of the sound of such voices on the glass: in attempting to resonate with the voice, the particles of the glass "exert themselves", as it were, and, in so doing, their structure alters and the glass breaks. This physical phenomenon provides El-Makhzangi with the book's central metaphor, though he is, as usual, not beyond pursuing such facts for their own sake, simply seeking out what interests him. Along with such intellectual observations, as well as meditative exercises and travel notes -- much of the period separating Al-Bustan and Awtar Al-Maa was spent on journalistic assignments in some interesting, and, to the Arab ear, very obscure places -- such out-of-the-way erudition is often as important to any single text as the human story described.
In "A Dark Pyramid Topped by Snow," for example, apparently irrelevant information about Tibetan Buddhism is as much a part of the text as is its subject of inconsolable nostalgia. This is the sense of being far away from home, but nevertheless being unable to retrieve a sense of connection with what one calls home. In this story, a man, the "you" of the text, circles the stupa of Bhoudanath, in Kathmandu. However, unlike the Tibetan and Nepalese pilgrims with whom he shares the scene, and with whose manners and customs he seems to be remarkably familiar, his purpose is quite mundane. He is simply looking for a shop that sells phone cards. When he finds a shop of this sort, he buys $250 worth of cards, retires to his hotel room, and begins to make calls in an effort to reconnect with the home he somehow seems to have lost.
Yet, no sooner does he dial his home number, the most important of the many numbers he dials that afternoon, than he discovers that he no longer knows who he is phoning, and the conversation abruptly and awkwardly ends. "You" simply stare through the window at the pilgrims circling the stupa.
Rather than selecting a single, telling moment by which to express the notion of nostalgia, as the El-Makhzangi of Rashq Al-Sekkeen would have done, El-Makhzangi in his latest book has chosen to supplement any such attempt with the equally valid business of telling his readers about Buddhist monks in Nepal, or -- why not? -- Ayruvedic medicine in Mumbai. Through sharing such experiences the author also manages to speak of "your" physical disintegration, a condition that parallels "your" emotional homelessness. The text is short and concise, but it is neither qissa nor uqsousa.
The other texts that make up this volume are similarly informative, similarly innocent of stylistic flair, and similarly expansive even in their concision. "The Resonance of Water Strings", for example, by far the longest text in the book and the one that gives it its title, offers an example of the directions in which El-Makhzangi's writing has developed. "Borgesian" might be an appropriate adjective with which to describe the story, since it works as much as mind game as it does as fiction.
This text combines a case study of psychosis with a travel article on Cambodia as a way of meditating on misery and fear and the possibility of overcoming them. Written in the form of a letter secretly inserted into El-Makhzangi's rucksack as he treks through Cambodian forests in the tracks of the Khmer rouge, this is a text produced by a former patient of El- Makhzangi the psychiatrist. Each time that this patient encountered water, he heard voices speaking of terror and distress. It having become impossible for this patient to wash himself, he leaves Egypt, deciding to cross the world in search of a cure. At last, he settles among the Khmer rouge in Cambodia, deciding to make his home in what he considers to be virgin forest. There are "chambers", this man explains, where all the sounds made by human beings are stored, and water exiting from these chambers acts like a series of strings, resonating with the sounds stored within.
This man's problem is that, unlike the rest of us, he can hear these water-bourne sounds, and only in the Cambodian forests has he been able to shut them out. Interestingly, the patient's odyssey in search of a cure in some ways reflects El- Maghzangi's own decade-long series of journalistic assignments around the globe, mostly conducted from his base in Kuwait. Is El-Makhzangi escaping some tormenting resonances of his own? Whatever the answer to that question may be, one can only be grateful that his writing continues to flow.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
