On alternative tracks
- An Takoun Abbas Al-Abd (To Be Abbas El-Abd), Ahmed El-Aidi, Cairo: Miret for Publication and Information, 2003. pp126;
- Shitaa Al-Ury (Naked Winter), Youssef Abau Rayya, Cairo: Miret for Publication and Information, 2003. pp135;
- Kharij Al-Kitaba (Outside Writing), Ibrahim Dawoud, Cairo: Miret for Publication and Information, 2003. pp109
Talk of a 1990s "renaissance of the novel", and especially of the new, daily-life poetics of shorter or longer prose texts, is countered by claims of an irredeemable regress -- a state of affairs in which even modern, Western- influenced literary conventions as much as mastery of Arabic have been replaced by nothing so much as largely ignorant hankering after half-understood and one-quarter digested concepts like postmodernism, magic realism and the self-referential text.
And while it is undoubtedly true that such discourse has contributed to the widening of the gap separating writers from any potential readership, it is equally the case that social and political conditions in the time of the birth of the Arab individual -- a painful, ongoing process -- have given rise to a range of exciting literary developments that, insofar as they remain involuntary, at least correspond at some level to the qualities described by the aforementioned discourse.
Picked almost at random, the three present slim volumes -- a tiny sampling of the 2003 output of the most active independent publishing house in Cairo, which, in common with many such financially untenable organisations rely largely on contributions from the writers themselves -- demonstrate relevant developments that shed both positive and negative light on this notion of "renaissance", and typify some of the general trends that characterised Egyptian writing in 2003.
For one such trend, Ibrahim Dawoud and Youssef Abu Rayya each demonstrate a compulsion to shift the focus of their literary practise. At the most superficial level, this tendency affects genre. Dawoud, whose brief beginnings as a taf'ila poet quickly gave way to an individual version of the so-called Generation of the Nineties' project of documenting telling details of daily life in an economical prose format -- texts that remain more like poems than short stories or essays and tend by and large to be described as poems -- has now, in Kharij Al- Kitaba (Outside Writing), opted for a more expansive, more openly confessional and less meticulous approach to the same goal.
The title would seem to refer to that part of the psyche not provided for by the regular practise of writing, a space that is more or less unoccupied. And, surprisingly for a literary voice that has never hinted at a place vis-à-vis society, Dawoud devotes that space almost wholly to social and class commentary, devising a series of topical frameworks within which to tell episodes of his life story or articulate his connection to places and people.
The text with which the book opens, Wist Al- Balad: Siyagha Akhira (Downtown: Final Draft), for example, adopts the downtown culture of literary outings -- long hours spent playing backgammon at the Zahret Al-Bostan café, etc. -- as the basis for a remarkably honest reflection on the provincial and economically dispossessed emigré's life in the city. In the process, Dawoud also tackles his position as an up- and-coming poet with few means to success at his disposal.
Dawoud's singular achievement in this piece is the strength of the connection he intimates with the area, implying that downtown is his property, the property of his psyche. Other texts revolve around places and people, moods and projects, relationships and plans. The impression that precipitates in the end is one of gradual divestment -- as if the writer is in the process of removing the clothing of genre and artistry in an attempt to forge a more intimate link with his potential (and potentially alienated) reader.
In his latest book Abu Rayya would seem to be doing the exact opposite of this. A writer of shorter novels set in the small towns of the Delta, he has consistently striven to avoid emotional implication in the affairs of his characters and the events that they go through. As a whole his work suggests a detached realism, free from subjectivity, and one that eschews
both obscurantist content and the idiosyncrasies of style.
Yet in his latest book, Shitaa Al-Ury (Naked Winter), Abu Rayya abandons the form of the novella in favour of a series of interconnected short stories that not only reveal previously unsuspected psychic complexity but also delve deep into the inner aspects of existence, employing what would seem to be a Generation of the Nineties' poetic style to match. Abu Rayya's device is the dream -- a magic realm that provides him with both subject matter and open- ended form -- and he uses it to explore the surrealist and Kafkaesque possibilities inherent, albeit in latent form, in his usual subject matter.
Al-Bukaa Al-Ba'eid (Far-Away Weeping), for example, begins like an account of a dream: "I saw me on the station platform, and him on the opposite platform walking alone in the twilight of sunset. I saw his back; I knew him from his gait. I said to myself, 'That's his back.'... I asked him, 'Where to?' But he did not reply, and his face, despite the distance between the two platforms, became bigger and bigger until it was extremely close to me."
However, almost as soon the dream has seemed to merge into reality, the narrator, on arriving in his home town, is informed of the death of the person he encountered. The text develops into a highly lyrical, emotionally charged elegy for this person, who remains anonymous to the end, acquiring symbolic status. Here, as elsewhere, Abu Rayya avoids explanation, leaving the reader somewhat disoriented, if on more or less familiar ground.
And it is here -- in a familiar space where disorientation is nonetheless experienced -- that An Takoun Abbas Al-Abd (To Be Abbas Al-Abd), the debut of a significantly younger writer, Ahmed El-Aidi, suggests a more effective answer to the question of revealing the psyche without alienating the reader. El-Aidi is conscious of living in the electronic age, and he invests the surface of his text with the omnipresent symbols of the Internet and the mobile phone: clip art, English words like "cut" and "paste" and a constantly flickering visual plane of communication make for an unusually disorienting, if by now greatly familiar, reading experience. With their variety of fonts and punctuation, and paragraphing that seems to echo the appearance of the Web page, the pages of the book look like computer screens.
At a deeper level the text also communicates the desperation and despair of one representative of the ever more prevalent middle class, whose connection with a streetwise, working-class- background guru, Abbas Al-Abd, a figure who is reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's Dean Mortiary in On the Road, informs the progress of events from start to finish. El-Aidi benefits from the irony inherent in a linguistic orientation that combines the latest Egyptian Arabic slang with standard Arabic, the traditional language of literary prose, and the predominantly English expressions that, due to the spread of the implements of the electronic age, have been incorporated into everyday speech. In doing so, he communicates a sense of alienation that borders on tragedy, even though the tenor of the book intimates black comedy to an even greater extent.
In an active reading culture, El-Aidi's book would have turned into a cult classic overnight. As it is, the book remains one among many attempts at resuscitating literary life at a time when despite the increasing availability of a large number of excellent books, literature continues to teeter at the edge of obscurity, a condition largely dependent on the continued absence of an active and interested readership.
To speak of a renaissance would therefore be somewhat premature. Happily, on the other hand, one can speak of a growing awareness among writers of the necessity of employing new means with which to reach out to a wider and wider reading public.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
