A year in review
Edward Said;
Mohamed Choukry;
Fadwa Tuqan;
Tahiya Halim;
Mohamed Dib
|
Marked by the loss of major Arab writers and intellectuals, the 2003 literary and intellectual year has been one of mourning for the departed and of sober reflection on the future. The pages of the Weekly reflected this generally sombre tone, with assessments of the life and work of figures such as the Algerian novelist Mohamed Dib, who died earlier this year, appearing in September, and reflections on the life of Palestinian-American writer and academic Edward Said, a long-term friend and contributor to this paper, appearing in the same month and in October. The year was also marked by the loss of Moroccan novelist Mohamed Shukri and of Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuquan.
However, the tone has not been completely sombre, and beginning with the January edition of the Books Supplement, the Weekly continued its efforts to make Arab writing better known internationally through the vehicle of English. Writing in the January 2003 edition, the distinguished Arabist and translator Denys Johnson-Davies, also a long-term contributor to the Weekly's pages, commented on the work of senior Arabist Pierre Cachia.
"Books about Arabic literature, be it for the student or the general reader, are thin on the ground," Johnson-Davies commented in the Weekly on 16 January. However, Cachia, who was educated in Cairo before moving on to Edinburgh University in the UK and Columbia in the United States, had managed to cram in a great deal of information into his, despite its modest form. "An aspect of Arabic literature which is either ignored or given but a passing reference by most scholars and critics is that body of work that has been composed in the vernacular," Johnson-Davies wrote. But Cachia was "both interested in this subject and well-informed", describing the practitioners of colloquial writing in Arabic "up to the present day, particularly in Egypt, with such names as Bairam Al-Tunisi and Ahmad Fouad Nijm".
In April, the Weekly cancelled its regular Books Supplement owing to the American- led invasion of Iraq, devoting an extensive supplement instead to "Mourning becomes Baghdad". Edited by guest editor and Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon, the supplement explored historical and literary Baghdad, one of the centres of Arabism, at one of its darkest ever moments.
"It is agonisingly difficult to write about one's hometown as it drowns in flames and suffocates with smoke," Antoon wrote. "I start to approach Baghdad, or rather one of the many Baghdads I have carried about with me for years, by measuring the extent to which its present reality betrays the enchanting and idealised signifiers that have taken it in turns to represent it ... For now it betrays, or is forced to betray, like never before all of the accolades bestowed upon it by its numerous rulers, chroniclers and lovers. It is no longer now the Abode of Peace, Mother of the World, Abode of Beauty, Gift of the Gods, Triumph of the Gods, Round City."
In the earlier 1991 conflict, "my best friend and I used to roam Baghdad, surveying the daily destruction and checking on friends and relatives to see if they had been consigned to the dubious category of 'collateral damage'," Antoon wrote. "The bombing had severed all communications in the first week, and the phones were dead. Now, tanks spit their fire towards a row of houses on the eastern bank of the Tigris, and blazes go up. A correspondent announces that Apaches are hovering over Baghdad for the first time, but, alas, this is a familiar species in our part of the world. They have come to make sure that Baghdad's residents join the Palestinians as the fortunate recipients of the latest form of lethal 'liberation'."
Containing translated extracts from memoirs, as well as works of Iraqi history and literature, and taking Baghdad as its theme, the April supplement looked back at Abbasid, Ottoman and modern Baghdad, ending its survey with Baghdad in the 1960s, Baghdad before Saddam Hussein. Recalling, from Egypt, a Baghdad he had never seen, Youssef Rakha wrote in the Weekly that "walking across Tahrir Square [in Cairo] the day after the arrival of the American and British forces in Iraq, I could think of nothing but the unmediated sense of identity [with Iraq] so many Egyptians felt. Anti- American sentiment was inflated, but it was justified and real, far more real than resentment of the Saddam regime. No one cheered when the dictator's statue toppled over; and subsequent images of looting and plunder could only inspire shame and a sense of having been betrayed. Everyone sympathised with Iraq, but what did Iraq mean?" This was a question the supplement tried to answer.
May and June 2003 saw the loss of two distinguished painters, one Egyptian and one Swiss, whose depictions of Egypt had come to mark the way others saw it and reminding Weekly readers that the human losses brought by 2003 had not only been literary. Writing on the Weekly's culture pages on 29 May, Nigel Ryan wrote of Tahiya Halim that, "like Inji Efflatoun, a painter of the same generation, Tahiya Halim produced many pastoral scenes in her later career. Like Efflatoun light was increasingly consolidated as a major compositional device in her paintings. But by leaving the white ground to come through increasingly attenuated strokes Efflatoun's effects came to depend on a vacancy. Tahiya Halim takes another, a far more painterly route, depending on the layering of substance, of paint and still more paint, to build the flickering optical illusions. It is an approach at once more dexterous and convincing, an approach that eventually resulted in what may well, when stripped of inadequate polemic, come to be counted among the most consistent body of painting produced in Egypt in the second half of the 20th century."
Of Margot Veillon Ryan wrote on 12 June that "it is the constantly deferred arrival at the heart of a thing that defined Margot Veillon's art for seven decades, and it is a goal of which she would never lose sight." Quoting Veillon, the article reproduced writings she had made in April 1960 about Egypt: "a feeling of anxiety takes hold of you when you see things of such outstanding beauty. You become conscious of the artist's obsession to externalize and feel the need to put all that you see down on canvas or paper. Occasionally, and this is almost painfully beautiful to witness, the Nile becomes a long, flat mirror; the reflection upon its surface has a completely abstract quality and the light on the water reflecting the sky is extraordinary. One single ripple will carry streaks of an intense cobalt blue and of yellow -- or rather gold, bronze and creamy yellow -- all sparkling with lilac and mauve. From time to time in this seemingly flat landscape there will appear a black mountain enveloped in sand."
July saw the Books Supplement feature a long piece by Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif on French writer Jean Genet and on Genet's late book on Palestine, Un captif amoureux. "If the Palestinians found in Genet a passionate friend and a thoughtful interpreter," she wrote in the paper on 17 July, "Genet, writing in the early 80s, found in them the subject that would draw from him a powerful and layered articulation of the themes that had informed his work of the 40s and 50s: the heroism of the outlaw, the beauty of the constant, willful overturning of the established order, the transfiguration of eroticism into chastity, the power of a non-religious spiritual life, the weightlessness of death, the continuation of a feeling beyond the life of the individual who felt it, and the tensile and creative relationship between the image and its reality."
Later in the same month, the distinguished historian Margot Badran reviewed the career of the pioneering Egyptian feminist Hoda Shaarawi on the Weekly's culture pages, examining Shaarawi's famous trip to Rome in 1923 to attend a meeting of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance. "Eighty years ago the Egyptian Feminist Union made its case: it established the integrity of its own feminist project. It made clear its national feminist well-springs and claims while internationalising its struggle," wrote Badran of Shaarawi's example. "The colonial dimension of patriarchal domination had to be fought not only from within Egypt but from within the heart of global feminism. Even as colonialism pulled them asunder the injustices that women suffered within their various countries linked them in profound ways. Egyptian feminists did not elect to stay in a corner but to go forth and face the battle on many fronts."
In August, Edward Said contributed an article assessing his own 1978 book Orientalism to the Weekly's pages, seeking to describe, for the last time, the singular importance of this unique book. "Speaking both as an American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind of simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change -- backed up by the most bloated military budget in history -- are the main ideas debated endlessly and impoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called 'experts' who validate the government's general line," Said wrote in the Weekly on 7 August.
Nevertheless, the kind of sustained humanistic exploration of the issues that Orientalism had tried to promote could help. "My idea in Orientalism, Said wrote, "is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us."
Tragically, it was not long before the Weekly had the sad duty of reporting Edward Said's death to its readers, and in its issue appearing on 29 September, the paper carried memories and farewells from a host of leading Arab writers and thinkers. "The death of the distinguished Palestinian intellectual Edward Said last Thursday left the Arab world devastated at the loss of a sober and independent Arab and international voice who championed the causes of national liberation and of Palestinian rights," the Weekly wrote on 25 September. "We at Al-Ahram Weekly will sorely miss his contribution, since we have had the privilege of publishing Edward Said's political articles from the first day that he began writing regularly for the newspapers until his very last article" in August 2003.
In its edition of 2 October, the Weekly carried tributes to Said by, among others, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Mahmoud Darwish, Mohamed Sid Ahmed, Hanan Ashrawi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Ferial Ghazoul, Daniel Barenboim, Samir Amin and Mourid Barghouti. On the paper's front page Tamim Al-Barghouti reported from New York on Edward Said's funeral, writing that all present "were united in the sense of loss that the absence of Edward Said entailed. However, Arab students like myself, who came to the US in search of that small oasis of academic freedom that Edward Said so brilliantly guarded, felt like orphans confronting an uncertain future. The same could be said of Arab-Americans in general: with Edward Said's death, the Arab presence in the United States has lost even the small margin of articulate self-assertion that he provided."
In September's edition of the Books Supplement, Ferial Ghazoul reviewed the work of late Algerian writer Mohamed Dib. "When the national radio of Algeria announced on the second of May the death of Mohammed Dib at home in Paris, a sense of irretrievable loss captured those who knew his works," she wrote. "The sad news announced not only the departure of a celebrated author but also the disappearance of a generation of Francophone Algerian writers associated with the struggle for national liberation: Kateb Yacine (d. 1989), Malek Haddad (d. 1978), Mouloud Mammeri (d. 1989), and Mouloud Féraoun (d. 1962). Together they made the Algerian cause and their country's struggle for independence known to the world. They transformed the Algerian case from its localised expression into a universal drama. With the realism of a Zola and the grandeur of a Chekhov, Dib renders the suffering of the Algerian people."
October brought news of one of Egypt's best- known writers, Sonallah Ibrahim, who, in refusing a state award because "'it is awarded by a government that in my view lacks the credibility that would make this award worth receiving,' recalled to my mind what Edward Said once said about the intellectual being 'embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant'," wrote Mona Anis in the Weekly on 30 October. Ibrahim's gesture, made at a conference on the Arab novel, demonstrated "how imaginatively impoverished we had become", she wrote, "how accommodating to the constraints of time and bureaucracy".
On 23 October Mursi Saad El-Din used his Plain Talk column in the Weekly, which has appeared like clockwork every week since the paper's founding edition in 1991, to reminisce over one of literary Egypt's most important publishing ventures. "The recent publication by the Egyptian Book Organisation of eight volumes of Al-Kateb Al-Masry (The Egyptian Writer), a literary magazine published between 1945 to 1947, has brought back some pleasant memories," El-Din wrote. "The magazine's editor-in-chief was Taha Hussein, and the publication over which he presided provided young university graduates at the time with a window opening on to international culture." Though "true literary magazines were not lacking at the time, Al-Thaqafa (Culture) and Al-Rissala (The Message), the two most popular, were wholly devoted to Egyptian literature. Al-Kateb Al-Masry was the only vehicle that served as an introduction to foreign literature."
November's edition of the Book Supplement returned to a theme broached by Denys Johnson- Davies in his comments on the work of Pierre Cachia in the January 2003 edition: that of knowledge of Arabic literature abroad. As the November supplement explained, Johnson-Davies' translation of novelist Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North in 1969, three years after it first appeared in Arabic, "set the Sudanese masterpiece on a path of resounding success and triggered a series of translations into almost all major languages. Last month the novel's international reputation was confirmed further, and its author canonised, when it became the first Arabic book to appear in the Penguin Classics series." The Weekly reproduced Johnson- Davies' introduction to the 1989 edition, the translator commenting in the paper on 20 November that "one of the outstanding characteristics of Season is its sheer readability."
Literary critic Samia Mehrez returned to the controversy triggered by Sonallah Ibrahim's refusal of the state novel award on 30 0ctober in the Weekly, writing of the event that "as I listen I am reminded of the epigraph to Tilka Al-Ra'iha (The Smell of It), Sonallah's very first pseudo-autobiographical novel that was published in 1966 upon his release from five years in political detention and that was subsequently banned. The epigraph was taken from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 'This race and this country and this life have produced me... and I shall express myself as I am'."
A few week's later Weekly readers had to take in the sad news of the death of another Arab writer for whom honesty of expression had been paramount, the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri. "The engaging vitality of his style notwithstanding," said the Weekly's obituary on 20 November, "it is Choukri's subject matter that constitutes a major achievement -- no one in Arabic literature had presented first-hand experience of street life with such unmediated honesty. Straightforward, articulate and intimately expressed, his texts are almost miraculously free of tragic inflection; populated by prostitutes, thieves and strongmen, they are under the influence of neither ideology nor morality."
Finally, as 2003 came to a close the Weekly celebrated the 92nd birthday of Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz on 11 December, showing the great writer seated next to fellow writer Tawfik El-Hakim and singer Umm Kulthoum in a front- page photograph. Many happy returns.
