An impossible honour
Youssef Rakha sums up the repercussions of novelist Sonallah Ibrahim's refusal to accept the second Novelists Conference award
Sonallah Ibrahim
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Sonallah Ibrahim's explosive decision to refuse the award of the Supreme Council of Culture's Arab Conference for Creativity in the Novel has solicited a range of reactions, from wholehearted approval to the proverbial raised eyebrow. In essence Ibrahim's decision has divided commentators into two camps: those who feel that his refusal to accept the award remains a potent gesture of protest; and those who, proposing suspect motives, consider the decision in the broader context of cultural life. Among the latter are those who have repeated critic Gaber Asfour's statement that the same author had happily accepted the Uwais literary award, an Emirates institution which, though not government supported, embodies many of the values to which Ibrahim would seem to be opposed.
This line of thinking is complicated further by the fact that Ibrahim had virtually kept his decision a secret, not revealing the vaguest hint of his intention to refuse the award until the end of the speech he gave before Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and council secretary Gaber Asfour, which started out sounding like an acceptance speech. The notion of being unable to accept an award that "issues from a government that does not possess the credibility to give it" seems to question a widely accepted unwritten rule whereby Arab intellectuals have for many years permitted themselves to interact with the cultural establishment while maintaining a dissident stance vis-à-vis the regimes that support it -- a rule Ibrahim himself, many argue, had not refrained from following.
The most extreme version of the latter argument, naturally enough, finds expression in the responses of the establishment figures themselves. This week's issue of Akhbar Al-Yom, for one so-called national newspaper, ran an extensive feature on the event whose partisan tone and sentimental pandering act to undermine the credibility of the position it represents. Yet Hosni, Asfour and the conference's jury members make a powerful case against Ibrahim here and elsewhere in the press. Stressing the jury's objective stance and the establishment's increasingly democratic orientation -- without which, he said, Ibrahim would have been unable to undertake such a public display of dissident sentiments -- Hosni points out that Ibrahim's claims to independence from the establishment have no basis in reality, since he has travelled at the ministry's expense.
Asfour describes Ibrahim's performance as a humiliation to Arab intellectuals and the Arab literary arena -- a view that finds support not only in Hosni's statement that "Ibrahim refused, not the ministry's award but the jury's," but also in the response of Moroccan critic Mohamed Berrada, a jury member. While not objecting to Ibrahim's refusal of the award in principle, he takes issue with the way in which he did it, pointing out that to attend the ceremony and shake hands with jury members, only to turn around and snub them in public, constitutes a pointless and intentional humiliation. Sudanese novelist Al-Tayib Saleh, head of the jury that selected Ibrahim for the award (largely against the odds), likewise makes the valid point that Ibrahim's actions were childlike, melodramatic and insulting; and are likely to have only negative effects on the literary sphere.
At the other end of the extreme, a number of writers and intellectuals -- the names in question include Nabil El-Hilali, Sayed El-Bahrawi, Amina Rashid, Ibrahim Mansour and Gamil Attiya, among many others -- have drafted and signed a statement in support of Ibrahim's actions. "The undersigned present the great writer and novelist with the most refined expressions of respect," the statement reads. They also endorse his reasons for refusing [the award], which denounce the internal and foreign policy of the Egyptian government and grieve at the Arab regimes' impotence before American and Israeli brutality. "This position," the statement adds, "which has been absent from cultural life in Egypt since the resignation of Ahmed Lotfi El-Sayed as dean of [Cairo] University, gives the Arab intellectual his dignity back... The people's award to Ibrahim..."
The statement, published along with a variety of relevant material in the last issue of Al-Arabi, an opposition newspaper, captures some of the raw excitement generated by a public denigration of a regime widely resented by intellectuals. Yet there remains, in Ibrahim's own subsequent statements, for example, a valid line of argument that explains and justifies his position. "I wanted to make a show," Ibrahim explained in response to the question of why he never informed Asfour of his decision when the latter phoned to impart the news that he had been selected. "If I told him I refused, what would happen? If I drafted a statement explaining my refusal they could claim that I never got the award in the first place... I did not sleep for three days after I found out."
Be that as it may, Ibrahim's performance will likely continue to reverberate in the literary and cultural arena for many months to come. In so far as it is a general news item, however, divested of the cultural context in which it was conceived, it remains a wide-ranging and powerful snub to the regime -- something no writer or intellectual has undertaken for many years -- and for which at least some intellectuals will remain grateful.
