Mohamed El-Makhzangi: "There will be time to murder and create...", TS Eliot A restless serenity Profile by Youssef Rakha

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'In the past I used to feel that I was constantly running out of time, that I had to rush through life if I were to accomplish anything. Now I know there is always time to do everything; what you have to strive after are the material and psychological conditions in which you can do the relevant, the meaningful things while you live.'

War and Prospects of Peace in Sudan, is certainly not about how to steer a course between secularism and religious fundamentalism. For its author, former Sudanese Foreign Minister Mansour Khalid, it's more a question of to be or not to be. This work, which I first read in manuscript, makes good opening gambits for Sudanese academic gatherings overseas. Like many of his previous publications, it focusses on Sudan, its people and politics.

Mohamed El-Makhzangi is a striking presence even as he dissolves into the crowd. A little man with bespectacled wobbly eyes, fluid gestures and a literary turn of phrase, his hard-won serenity counters a restlessness so hawkish it has repeatedly placed him on the threshold of collapse -- or death. Even in early adolescence, the title short story of his best known collection, Rashq Al-Sikkin (Knife Throwing) suggests, he had enough self-awareness to engage in a complex scheme of exchange involving weapon, enemy and target practise. Now in his early 50s, leading a thoroughly middle-class married life (he is the science editor of the Kuwaiti magazine Al-Arabi), El-Makhzangi finds solace in his two small boys, Bassam and Ali, in waking up at six to undertake breathing exercises, contemplate and perhaps write a few paragraphs before walking to work. He seeks out "the joy of breathing, the visual delights of a tree, of simple consciousness". The political world continues to invade his peace of mind; the hectic vulgarity of Cairo ("a city in which, until very recently, I had never lived") makes him yearn for what he describes as "the old refuge of selective memory", Mansoura or, as it was once called, Geziret Al-Ward (Rose Island); memories, like channels of spiritual energy, overtake him as we speak, forcing him to stop momentarily, looking up as if passing into another dimension of existence. Yet El-Makhzangi keeps up his defences with as much determination as he used to engage. A former gymnastics champion (he excelled at the parallel bars, winning major contests until enrolling at the Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University), El-Makhzangi does not smoke or drink, he does far more physical exercise than the vast majority of Cairo residents of his age, and he meditates.

A reluctant first-generation Cairene, he insists that he never left Mansoura before the age of 38. Mansoura was a remarkably cosmopolitan city, as he now describes it, with significant Greek and Italian minorities, lined from east to west by the banks of the Nile, from north to south by those of the smaller channel known as the Tawfiqi Rayah: "There were Western-style cafeterias," he recalls, "even a roller-blade rink, at a time when such things had not yet spread in Egypt, some four open-air movie houses, and vast expanses of green; the presence of Greeks and Italians, and doubtless also the temperament of the people of the city themselves, engendered a rare spirit of openness and tolerance. Beautiful girls: that may be yet another trick of memory, but when I remember the most beautiful women in my life, I invariably think back to Mansoura." His father, an educated man (he earned a university-level degree in design in 1925), the innovative, adventurous owner of a famous car mechanics' workshop, had built a red-brick house, the only one of its kind, just outside the city proper, at the edge of the agricultural fields, where the workshop too was located. "Until the age of 14, I used to work there on a regular basis, and I was so good at it people said I alone would inherit my father's skill." There were solitary felouka trips during which the young man would stop and contemplate nature. There was a childish love story, his first, with the seductively Caucasian daughter of one of the last Greek cotton merchants to leave Egypt, one of his father's many clients. There were friendships and brawls, fleeting "moments of song", as he likes to refer to the aesthetic experience, and the many-hued nature that gave rise to them. He was bright, an avid reader, his family's pride.

"It is strange but when I think about this largely carefree and rejuvenating life now, I realise it was all spent in open air, on the streets," El-Makhzangi remembers, "in dust-covered surroundings." Hunting dragonflies. Ogling young women on the high street, Shari' Al-Sikka Al-Gedida. One day, as navigator for the local Italian doctor, another of his father's clients who drove around even despite his poor eyesight -- "a man so profoundly kind, so well loved and so joyfully received everywhere, he seemed to me like the god of this world" -- El- Makhzangi was happily admitted into the prison, the orphanages and several households within hours. Medicine, he felt, was a passport into people's lives, perhaps even the secret of their happiness, the love they could feel for you. As a Cairo- based medical student through the 1970s, however, it was politics -- the central part of a broad sense of self as intellectual -- that preoccupied him. He had abandoned his early attempts at vernacular poetry, the first rudimentary examples of self- emanating song, he felt disillusioned with the academic toil of a university course in medicine and his inborn idealism found expression in left-wing activism. "I was counted among communists though I never became organised or committed to any party. Because I have never been able to cope with commitment of this kind, even in my work I never found myself in a preorganised routine. But I identified with ideals and had ideological convictions, even if they remained personal and eclectic. I hated expressions like 'the dictatorship of the proletariat', for example. I always made fun of the notion of historical inevitability. But I looked for social justice..."

A self-styled Sadat hater ("I have since grown to feel that Sadat was one of the most interesting and amusing figures to rule this country, my differences with him developing into a kind of fondness," he says), El-Makhzangi went to prison four times. The last and hardest was in the wake of the 18 and 19 January events of 1977. "I had responded to interrogations in the spirit of the artist, not that of the political activist, openly stating everything I felt. I was therefore the number one suspect for Daqahliya. It may be a common, even hackneyed expression, but there is truth in the idea that men, and perhaps also artists, are born of hardship." This was the most difficult time El-Makhzangi had yet gone through: emotionally and economically troubled, he had the additional burden of his graduation examinations approaching while he was in prison, and he felt more solitary than ever. Yet he attended the exams, some while in prison, some following his release. He graduated. Sooner than he expected, he began to practise. Since 1972, when he was first imprisoned, he had undergone "the highest levels of stress imaginable", a trial he compares to cardiographies based on physical exertion. "The heart survived this crisis," he says. "That meant it could survive anything. It was the kind of situation in which either you die (whether physically or otherwise) or you live on by some form of miracle. I think I was granted that miracle." Prior to this his writing had consisted of "ecstatic song"; now it was principally "a song of grief, a heart-rending song".

Until 1985, the year of his departure to the former Soviet Union, where he earned a PhD in psychiatry and alternative medicine, El-Makhzangi worked as a government doctor in a variety of interesting outposts. Defeated in love, he devoted himself to literature; and his early mature writing, while seldom delving directly into his own psyche, is a poetic distillation of the human and natural circumstances he encountered. Many of the texts in his first collection of short stories, Al-Aati (The Arrival), reflect the real-life tribulations of the interns of the Damietta Respiratory Hospital, a tuberculosis treatment centre in which, after 2pm, he single- handedly assumed the role not only of physician but social worker and impromptu security administrator. The hospital constituted an ideal setting for the kind of "heart-rending song" he was practising, and conspiring with the intern gangs to make their lives easier, he lived in a pleasant house in the middle of cultivated fields opposite the old colonial building and found the time to write. "It was an encounter with the flesh and blood of life," he recalls. "The poverty-stricken patients, due to their living conditions outside the hospital, would inevitably die; I saw their rebellions as those of the condemned, the dead. And I worked to ease their suffering by letting male patients mingle with their female counterparts, for example, or overseeing their food rations..." Two sections of Rashq Al-Sikkin, Caged People and At Port similarly reflect his experience as a political detainee and a Suez Canal health inspector -- the person who leaps onto ships before they enter Egyptian waters to issue the required sanitary pass -- respectively. Damm Al-Ghazal (Deer Blood), the title story of another collection, recounts a real-life deer hunt he witnessed while a military doctor in an as yet derelict, desert- dominated Hurghada.

The colourful atmosphere of these locations -- and his brief stints at the notorious Abbassiya Mental Hospital and the Mansoura Mental Hospital -- proved to be an adequate stimulus for his newfound confidence as a devotee of literary song (the diametrical opposite of competitive sport, he contends), yet El-Makhzangi never published anything until much later. (Only now, he feels, does the world of litarary inspiration seem to be located inside rather than outside him; something that does not undermine his conviction that "whereas there is a world inside, outside there are worlds.") In 1973 he had met Youssef Idris at a public gathering in which, upset by a book the latter had written praising Sadat, El-Makhzangi admonished him in the form of a parable Idris was asked to complete. The older, established writer asked to see him in private, and for seven or eight years El-Makhzangi would visit him in Cairo, without once mentioning that he ever wrote fiction. A kind of friendship ensued, and Idris appreciated the younger writer's modesty and patience when he discovered a short story published, almost against his will, in a literary magazine. As a writer Idris was expansive and biased towards the vernacular. El-Makhzangi, by contrast, sought an extreme economy of means, insisting on a literary language that sought precision even at the expense of smoothness. He developed his own form of very, very short, poetically compressed narrative -- a form that quickly made his name in literary and intellectual circles. Yet Idris's influence as a story teller and paternal figure managed to seep through. It was on his advice that El-Makhzangi first settled in Cairo, and through his encouragement that he eventually left for Russia. Through the 1970s these visits were like "a spiritual elixir" that helped maintain an otherwise difficult balance. And it was through Idris and other, older writer friends that El-Makhzangi became accustomed to the literary milieu of which he was meant to be part. Then he departed.

El-Makhzangi had grown up on Russian literature, Soviet translations of the classics being more affordable than novels by Arab authors. He was interested in psychiatric developments in the Russian school. And more importantly, he was eager to encounter the kind of socialist society to which he aspired. Louis Awad and other prominent figures had procured him a PhD scholarship in the USA, but once Russia became an option, El-Makhzangi's mind was made up. Psychiatry had interested him more than other branches of medicine but he had largely avoided it. "Unlike other disciplines, it does not yield immediate results." Following a clash with the authorities -- he had refused to go aboard an Israeli ship in Alexandria -- he gave in to his paradoxical fate as a non-practising psychiatrist. Exhilarated, El-Makhzangi initially saw Russia as a dream come true. Yet after the surface magic of the first few weeks, spent "in the embrace of Egyptian friends", Moscow proved a terrible disillusionment. "I was torn between my convictions and aspirations and the reality of life in a communist society," El-Makhzangi testifies. Bribery, corruption, bureaucracy, the totalitarian ethics of a police state all gnawed at his ideological identity. In Moscow he quickly clashed with the authorities and was transferred to Kiev. If not for the support of a Kiev-residing Egyptian expatriate, Iman Yahya, "a good friend to this day", El-Makhzangi might have killed himself. Eventually a love story and the availability of cultural resources made for a smoother transition. Kiev proved beautiful, and the Pavlov Hospital afforded the enjoyment of the forested hill on which it was located and a memorable encounter with the art of Vrobel, whose Last Supper (a depiction of himself and fellow interns of the Pavolov hospital on which El- Makhzangi was taught to discern the physical appearance and gestures associated with a variety of psychiatric conditions) adorned the walls of a near-by cathedral. The great musical tradition of Russia, too, transformed his appreciation of sound. Yet he returned, qualified as he was, to a life of poverty and loneliness. Only then, it seems, serenity set in.

In 1991 El-Makhzangi married a Syrian woman, in 1992 he settled to a well paid job in Kuwait. "I had neither house nor money, I though I couldn't go on like this. And as a writer you need an atmosphere of calm, of security. You need your freedom, of course, but you want that security to fall back on." After Safar (Journey), a record of his sojourn in the Ukraine written in the style of Rashq Al-Sikkin, El-Makhzangi produced Al-Bustan (The Garden), a more conventional short story collection. Once in Kuwait, however, creativity was blocked. "Perhaps," he explains, "because I felt I was on a mission, to save up for a secure life back here." Instead he seized on the opportunity to write travel pieces, some of his best appreciated work ("One female reader," he recalls, "wrote to the magazine saying she would do anything, anything for me if only I agreed to take her along."). He travelled to, among other out-of-the-way locations, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Indo-China. "Fellow editors who were competing with each other to go to the West," he comments, "thought my choices not only impetuous and risky but positively mad." In these experiences, many of which figure in his latest collection of short stories, Awtar Al-Maa (Water Strings), he sought out, and managed to communicate, a sense of fascination, the kind of innocent wonder that had kept him going all his life. Financially secure, El-Makhzangi returned. But the initial encounter with Cairo proved too much, and he spent two years in his wife's birthplace, Hums. "There is a fish and that fish can only live in a particular body of water, though," he says.

The decision to return was difficult, Cairo was not instantly welcoming. But with the benefit of experience and the security of a clearly defined social arrangement and daily routine, defence mechanisms -- "the price of which is a little isolation, a little absence from literary circles and the media," a little compromise -- have proved successful. "After the few weeks of war you find yourself fighting a severe depression. And yearning for the old refuge which, once you think rationally about it, it turns out, no longer exists." To create, El- Makhzangi once believed, one must live solely to write; what he has discovered is that one must have the minimum requirements of a humane life in order to write in the first place. An aspect of his newfound serenity, this realisation has taken nearly 40 years of ceaseless restlessness. "I don't feel we're in a society that promotes real creativity," he says, referring to the economic, social and political conditions he has had to cope with since settling in Cairo. "In the past I used to feel that I was constantly running out of time, that I had to rush through life if I were to accomplish anything. Now I know there is always time to do everything; what you have to strive after are the material and psychological conditions in which you can do the relevant, the meaningful things while you live. One must not exaggerate, saying that writing is life, life is writing. Writing is a part of life, which is so much more complicated than all that. And under these conditions," El- Makhzangi looks up again, appearing to have remembered something. "Under these conditions," he resumes, "creativity is like a breeze on a summer night," he quotes the Mohamed Abdel-Wahab song. "It is a breeze, occasional and perhaps accidental. It is extraordinary, never the rule. As for the rest -- well, you must realise how terribly stifling our summers are."