Self in absentia?
Taraf Gha'ib Yumkin an Yab'ath fina Al-Amal (An Absent Party Capable of Inspiring Hope), Alaa Khaled, Alexandria: Amkena, 2003. pp148
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The Ras Al-Tin Café, one of the older venues of Bahari, exudes the kind of subdued specificity that informs Khaled's experience
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Notwithstanding the breadth of scope and variety of the eight autobiographical pieces on offer in this book, they remain, by and large, the building blocks of a monumental and ongoing project -- one that begins, albeit differently, in Alaa Khaled's Khutout Al-Da'f (Weakness Lines), an extended essay on early life to which the writer brings a range of references and experiences, from his self-declared affinity with Henry Miller to an intellectualised visit to Siwa.
Expansive, confessional, unrestricted by generic or structural demands, Khaled's prose is always personal and poetic. (His poetry, by contrast, if equally personal, can be deliberately prosaic.) His overriding theme is "the self as a subject of research". This could be read as a euphemism for unrelenting egoism, and in Khutout Al-Da'f, on many levels, it is. Yet in the present offering, a book loosely modelled on journalism -- many of the pieces implicitly mimic newspaper reports or columns, genres that, the writer believes, are likely to dominate the literature of the future -- Khaled seems determined to transcend his isolation as writer-narrator-protagonist. This may be explained, in part, by the success of the self-financed Amkena (Places), Khaled's Alexandria-based, independent magazine, an admirable contribution to literary life. The attractively produced paperback is indeed the first in a series to be published under the rubric of that emergent quasi-institution.
In a sense Taraf Gha'ib constitutes an attempt at reaching out, even if, with a talent so profoundly self-centred, the process still inevitably involves a high degree of introspection. Thematically the self acquires a new declension, that of desire for hope if not salvation. A recurrent notion, it doubles as an instrument for transferring the energy of self respect and self doubt to other subjects. The "absent party" of the title -- and it would be well to point out that taraf is a largely evocative word that could mean (as well as "party") "edge", "side" or "personage" -- finds expression in a range of conditions or, to use the more aptly Sufi term, states. The desert, an old café, miniature objects, blindness, mental disability, magic, waiting: each text revolves around a nominal topic gleaned from real-life experience and reported with relative factual sincerity. Characters in whom such topics are embodied or played out emerge, sometimes taking over a more generally directed piece. Invariably the subject is presented so as to indicate its relevance to the aforementioned declension of self. "The hope," Khaled writes at the end of the last piece, another meditation on Siwa, "that things will change on the intervention of forces we do not see. These forces could be inside or outside us," all that matters is their presence.
Khaled's writing belongs to a thoroughly modern, romantic tradition that eschews calculated appeal in favour of direct immersion on the part of both writer and reader. Judged on a technical basis, the narrative thrust of many pieces will appear to be too cursory, too incidental to sustain even a few pages of text. As essays the pieces likewise lack lucidity: on many occasions the point the writer is trying to make will elude the reader. Both content and style vary too frequently, erratically almost, for the reader to maintain a sense of familiarity with what is being said. In the end the book's only consistent factor is tone -- meditative, knowing, slightly elegiac. Yet it is precisely this lack of focus, combined with a sense of writing as an act over and above any of its constituent elements, that provides Taraf Gha'ib with its sense of appeal. The possibility of boredom notwithstanding, as a reading experience Alaa Khaled is reminiscent not so much of Miller (whose subversive openness and generosity of spirit the present writer palpably lacks) as of Mohamed Shukri or Jean Genet, both of whom wrote structure-less, extended autobiographies in which the act of writing is prioritised over style and content.
The principal difference, and it is a difference to be reckoned with, is that Khaled has a relatively privileged middle-class background -- one that has prevented him from accumulating the kind of life experience that goes into the creation of Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (For Bread Alone) or Miracle de la Rose. Perhaps it was this complete absence of the underworld, of any genuine sense of evil or need for subversion, that made Khutout Al-Da'f come across as somewhat hollow and self-indulgent. In Taraf Gha'ib the writer's real-life pleasantness and decency is less of a problem. In "Years I will not forget, whose main title was 'free of charge'," for example, Khaled is more open to confessing his early need for helping the dispossessed, with whom, at some level, he must have felt he belonged. "I spent nearly six years at the blind people's centre," he begins. "I had this inclination to help people, and it seems I came upon a treasure when I discovered this centre. At last I had found the place that would absorb all that wasted energy. That was my feeling during those years." Never mind that the piece, one of the longest, spirals further and further away from this notion of an altruistic drive, taking up, in great detail, the life and times of some of the blind people Khaled encountered at this stage of his life: the compulsion to understand blindness as a metaphor for isolation largely justifies the writer's sensitive rambling.
That said, it is Khaled's savvy discrimination -- the very quality that informs the increasing popularity of Amkena -- that saves him from the trap of obscurantism or new-age frivolity. The hope sought out by the self remains just that, a hope. At no time does Khaled's perspective stray too far away from the limitations of everyday existence. Yet he does not give up his conviction in the existence of those "parties" that might give that existence meaning. When a beggar magician arrives at the small gift shop he manages in Rushdie, Khaled submits to his small-scale miracles with awe, handing him an LE20 note and letting him look through an envelope of LE50 notes, one of which will unaccountably disappear. Before he departs, the "holy man" in question leaves Khaled a wrapped up towel he has blessed; it will bring Khaled all manner of fortune, but he is not to unwrap it until the afternoon prayers. At the predetermined moment Khaled unwraps the towel, nothing happens. By then he has reassessed the encounter sufficiently to realise that the holy man was undoubtedly an impostor, his magic sleight of hand. Yet for many weeks Khaled keeps the towel wrapped up in safety, unwrapping it periodically at the predetermined moment. He knows, and so does the reader, that nothing will happen. It is a mere gesture of hope.
And according to this line of thinking it is not impossible to see the whole book, and the act of writing it embodies, as just such a gesture. Khaled's literary self-awareness may have marred Khutout Al-Da'f and many poems. In Taraf Gha'ib it has receded sufficiently to allow for a notion of writing the self that accommodates the irony of the possible pointlessness of it all. In this sense the book heralds Khaled's literary maturity. "I did not stop taking out the towel and unwrapping it before my eyes," the writer calmly concludes the latter piece. "Each time I would notice something new -- some rust particles, red stains on their way to disappearing, a thread that has come undone. Maybe these things are the symbols of the other world. I always dreamt of writing that could transcend the limits of poetry in intensity but remain at the same time transparent enough not to obscure the vast time that granted it existence." However tentative it must remain, a statement to the effect that such is the writing Taraf Gha'ib offers would not be entirely out of place.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
