Abdel-Aziz Hammouda: The American way proved a tortuous path From dream to reality Profile by Gihan Shahine

photos: Ayman Ibrahim

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'Studying in the US was the dream of my life.There I sat with friends, three or four hours before my flight to New York, in the early morning hours of 29 January, listening to Dvorak's New World symphony. Rushdi told me Dvorak had composed it aboard a ship carrying him to the new world. Dvorak obviously composed the symphony feeling the same obsession with the American dream that I was feeling. I was moved, and the symphony reduced me to tears'

For those still seeking an answer to that most- widely asked question since 9/11 -- "why do they hate us?" -- the president of Misr University for Science and Technology, Abdel-Aziz Hammouda, presents an interesting case study. Not only in his capacity as the first Egyptian professor to specialise in American literature and obtain a scholarship in the United States in the mid-1960s, when Gamal Abdel-Nasser was heading east for both weapons and scholarships. Nor as Egypt's cultural attaché to the US between 1990-2, and the author of a critique titled the American Dream, as well as the co-author of The Hatred Industry in the American-Arab Relations. More interestingly, Hammouda embodies the duality he has identified as having long governed Arab attitudes towards the US: a fascination with the American dream counterbalanced by a rejection of US foreign policy that has lately developed into a strong wave of anti-Americanism.

Hammouda lives in an elegant, American- styled villa in Maadi. It is already sun-set when we arrive: the once isolated two-storey villa sits quietly behind tall trees, slightly removed from the traffic that has turned the once bucolic neighbourhood into a busy thoroughfare. The villa is cosy: the comfortable sofas and wooden floors are lit indirectly by lamps placed on side-tables. It is a very American interior. Hammouda, who speaks in fluent English, asks us to help ourselves to cans of soft drinks or tea and coffee.

It would be a mistake, though, to see Hammouda simply as an aficionado of American culture for he has always been on a mission, having taken to heart the advice -- to study abroad to serve Arab and not foreign culture -- proffered by his professor and mentor Rashad Rushdi. The table lamps might have been made in America, but the light that they cast has been used to write books, political articles and plays in Arabic. And Hammouda's literary project has always been to defend local culture against the onslaught of foreign cultures. And in the process of that defence he has been an eloquent critic of US foreign policy.

"I'm still a fellah -- a peasant's son -- and I still think the same way villagers do," Hammouda begins. "There is no way you can escape the early, formative years of your life."

Hammouda prides himself on his modest beginnings. Born as the youngest member of a large family in a small village, Delipshan, five kilometres from Kafr Al-Zayyat, Hammouda spent the first four years of his schooling at the local kuttab. He began at primary school in 1947, and was only seven when his father died, leaving a household of eight in the care of his oldest brother, who was then 18 .

"Knowing that my brother struggled to put food on the table gave me a competitive urge," Hammouda says. "I was always top of my class, though I remember once crying for whole week when I lost that position in one of my term exams in primary school."

School days were not smooth sailing for Hammouda. There was no public transport in Hammouda's village and, more often than not he would walk the five kilometres to school in Kafr Al-Zayyat.

"Sometimes I would ride a donkey, when it was not working in the fields," he recalls.

"I would walk the five kilometres on rainy days, when the dusty roads had turned too muddy for an animal to tread. My mother would beg me to stay at home on such days but I loved school too much to stay home. I used to come home not only with my clothes wet, but with my shoes full of water."

Diligence, however, yielded proficiency in both Arabic and English which, with peer pressure as an added factor, drove Hammouda to "abandon his early dreams of becoming a nuclear scientist or a pilot". He concentrated on literature, a decision he would later regret.

In the summer of 1956 Hammouda was admitted into Cairo University's Faculty of Arts to study English literature.

"It was then that I received my first cultural shock, as an 18-year-old villager descending on the big metropolis. All my colleagues were almost native speakers of English, they were the children of what remained of the aristocracy and they hardly spoke an Arabic sentence."

The realisation that he could "never be as flippant in English" as his colleagues drove him into the seclusion of the college library, where he spent all his leisure reading books in English about English literature. By the time he hit the third year at college the time in the library had ensured he possessed "a decisive edge over all my colleagues".

"A major change occurred in the university system when I reached the fourth year, which marked my future life and career."

Hammouda pauses and adjusts himself in his chair, as if to underline the importance of what comes next.

"It was 1959-60. Despite the fact that Egypt's honeymoon with the US was coming to an abrupt end American literature was unexpectedly introduced, for the first time ever, as an independent course in Cairo University's Faculty of Arts."

Nasser was at the time getting into pan-Arab stride. Realising that the US would never arm Egypt to the extent it would attain parity with Israel, Nasser had turned east in his search for weapons. Israel had already launched raids on Egypt's eastern borders, including the June 1955 attack on Rafah, and the US had engineered the World Bank's withdrawal of its offer to finance the construction of the High Dam.

"Still, it was thought only natural, politically and culturally, to think of introducing American literature as a separate course," says Hammouda.

"America had already emerged as the largest military and economic power following World War II and we were almost 50 years behind in teaching American literature."

Hammouda immediately fell under the spell of American literature.

"Whatever negative feelings some of us might have had, what with the strength of the anti- American political discourse, those sentiments were nothing compared with the dazzling, almost blinding, allure of the American Dream. We had the interesting experience of having two American professors teaching the same courses, one of them being the US cultural attaché to Egypt. There we sat, fascinated, listening to the two professors for two semesters."

America had long been no more than an image, haunting a distant corner of the mind. As a child in the village Hammouda had nightly listened to the stories of the American action movies that his friend Adel used to watch in "the mysterious capital".

"We used to surround him every evening to listen, spellbound, to the adventures of Tarzan and Cheetah. Those stories were our only window on the American way of life."

For Hammouda, as for many others, the US symbolised the values of freedom, equity and self-determination as voiced in Wilsonian political discourse.

The first thing Hammouda thought of upon graduation was to apply for a scholarship to America. And thanks to his professor, Rashad Rushdi, the first Egyptian to head the English Department after the end of the British occupation of Egypt, Hammouda was appointed as an instructor in the Faculty of Arts, and was subsequently granted a government scholarship to the United States.

"Studying in the US was the dream of my life." he begins, recalling the last hours he spent in Rushdi's house before leaving for the land of his dreams.

"There I sat with friends, three or four hours before my flight to New York, in the early morning hours of 29 January, listening to Dvorak's New World symphony. Rushdi told me Dvorak had composed it aboard a ship carrying him to the new world. Dvorak obviously composed the symphony feeling the same obsession with the American dream that I was feeling. I was moved, and the symphony reduced me to tears."

Hammouda's illusions, though, would soon be wrecked on the hard rocks of reality. He arrived at John Kennedy Airport in New York and "instead of wasting five hours waiting for the bus that would take me to the town where my university was, I decided to venture into New York city".

"It was rush hour in New York, between 5 and 6pm, the streets were so crowded, people were rushing out of their offices going home, and it was impossible to stop anybody and ask about the way. And there I received my second cultural shock: New York, I realised, was a very cruel city, a city without a heart. 'Is this the American experience I've been yearning for?' I wondered. Of course, later, I realised New York is not America, and that real America is in the small cities, where people are very nice and simple.

"By the time I arrived in the US, the American dream, though it had remained untarnished in the Arab mind, was already receiving its third sharp blow inside the US: the Vietnam War."

Earlier, the depression had led many Americans to question the direction of their national life.

"Then, in 1950, came the second blow: the McCarthy era, the years of the Red Scare, when senator Joseph McCarthy got the American government involved in the ugliest and most infamous era of political and cultural persecution in US history, accusing anybody with radical ideas of being a communist.

"People were actually afraid for their lives because of their ideas at the time. I lived the heyday of protests against the Vietnam War. It was a time when Americans came to realise the US was not the land of milk and honey."

And so did Hammouda, particularly when, a few years later, he experienced "the US bias for Israel". He returned to Egypt, with his PhD, a year after the 1967 war.

"It was then that I had my first taste of the duality, or to be more frank, the hypocrisy of American foreign policy in the Middle East."

Hammouda explains how "relations between Johnson and Nasser were at their lowest ebb and US claims to support Egypt and Syria all proved untrue."

The biased media coverage of the 1967 war exacerbated Hammouda's growing anti-American sentiments.

"American TV portrayed Arabs as the new fools of the world, while the press, including America's leading newspapers were inundated with lies about us, Arabs, following our defeat in 1967."

Hammouda frowns as he remembers "one particular editorial describing Arabs as cowards who had never won a single war outside their own borders, and attributed our defeat in 1967 to that deliberate falsification of history."

Which, according to Hammouda, was added proof that the US media was under the control of the Zionist movement.

Hammouda's gradual disenchantment with American policy was never translated, however, into hatred for "the American way of life or the honest, sincere Americans I got to know".

"This is what the New Right in America does not seem to realise," Hammouda notes. "In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans asked why Arabs hated them, oblivious to the fact that Arabs do not hate America per se, but object to US foreign policy in the Middle East."

Hammouda remembers one night when he was in the US watching an American documentary on the Holocaust. Hammouda was in tears, a reaction that immediately raised the eyebrows of his American companion. Hammouda was quick to explain that he "cannot help but sympathise with people's sufferings", but that he is strongly against the fact that "we, the Arabs, and not the Germans, are actually the ones paying for those atrocities."

Hammouda turned down a tempting offer to teach in an American college and returned to Egypt in 1968.

"It was a year after our defeat, when sentiments were high, and I decided to return home with my wife and daughter, even if that meant struggling on a crust of bread and salt."

A twist of fate, however, brought Hammouda back to the United States in the early 1990s, as Egypt's cultural attaché.

"It was 25 years later, and with critical distance I was mature enough to see the American dream more objectively and to realise that America was not the land of milk and honey which, we, as Arabs, tend to perceive from a distance."

Which was precisely the view Hammouda voiced in the weekly articles he wrote for the international edition of Al-Ahram newspaper at the time.

When the second Gulf war broke out in 1990, during his stay in the US, Hammouda says he also realised "how simple Arabs, like myself, are made to pay for the sins and mistakes of irresponsible Arab rulers.

"We always feel our image, as Arabs, is unfairly distorted in the West," says Hammouda. "And it is true that the Zionist movement has always been diligent in distorting our image in the West. What we tend to forget is that some of us, too, work equally hard at marring that image."