Obituary:
Ibrahim Mansour (1935-2004)
Ironic, but somehow poetically apt, that the person Naguib Mahfouz has called "Egypt's leading oral critic" should die on a Tuesday morning, Tuesday being the weekly occasion on which, along with hundreds of writers and artists, Ibrahim Mansour gathered in one or more of a handful of venues downtown to discuss literature, art and politics. The Tuesday evening ritual is one of a few activities instituted by the so called Generation of the Sixties, of which Mansour was perhaps the most readily recognised embodiment, that have survived into the third millennium. It involves beer, cigarettes and conversation -- a ceaseless string of introductions, alliances, rivalries, discussions and debates, sometimes turning into violent arguments. With his trademark white beard and walking stick, by the 1990s Mansour had become, in those circles, at least, an instantly recognisable celebrity, noted as much for his abrupt manner and bitterly delightful humour as for his penetrating insights. Backed up by a long history of impassioned, if frequently abortive involvements in politics -- and a remarkably unselfish devotion to the literary and artistic work of others -- he was the Papa Hemingway of Café Riche and its so called strategic depth, the little ahwa baladi Zaret El-Bostan. He also made regular appearances in bars like the Stella and Grillon and at the Atelier du Caire. Yet his career as gifted writer and respected critic had progressed along a far-fetched path, one of its typically outrageous tenets being that, for someone genuinely concerned with literature, the real challenge is not to publish.
Born in Mansoura, Mansour spent a brief part of his early life in Shubra before his family moved to the Maadi flat in which, living alone, he suffered the final throes of the disease that was to take his life. Unlike the vast majority of his peers, he remained faithful to the culture of the Sixties till the end of his life: notwithstanding his fascination with Marxism and existentialism -- largely in the context of the struggle for a collective national identity -- he refrained from regular employment, family life and personal ambition. He remained a keen follower of the news, a fully engaged social critic, an outspoken dissident and activist -- his last major effort being the founding of an intellectuals' tajamu' with which to counter the Islamist campaign against the Organisation for Cultural Palaces' edition of Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's Banquet for Seaweed, and eventually to critique American foreign policy in Palestine and Iraq. Growing up in the 1950s had furnished him with a framework in which to develop a perspective other than the example set by his father, a senior education official: a large family with a secure home and a stable income. He participated in the work of underground organisations -- the cause of a string of political detention experiences -- and founded the Sixties' defining literary magazine and forum, Gallery 68, on whose editorial board he continued to serve until the magazine was discontinued.
Mansour graduated from law school at Cairo University in 1958. And despite a series of temporary jobs as literary translator, journalist and foreign correspondent -- notably for the Lebanese Al-Safir -- in Austria and Cyprus, his only abiding interest was conversation, the art in which he invested the greater portion of his considerable political and artistic energy. Other than a singular short story, Al-Yom 24 Sa'a (There are 24 Hours in a Day), Ibrahim leaves behind only Cultural Duality and the Crisis of Egyptian Dissent, a collection of extended interviews with leading writers, most of them personal acquaintances of his. Aside from literature, however, he leaves behind an endless series of anecdotes and images: he was the principal agitator in a famous protest against Sadat's visit to Israel in 1977, for example, an occasion on which he is said to have borrowed one of Café Riche's table-cloths to turn it into an impromptu banner. (The newly reopened Café Riche, it is worth noting, was the site of the first conference of the aforementioned tajamu'.) Even more important than the anecdotes is the example his selfless devotion of collective self-realisation and vivid bohemianism has set. Even without a single book of fiction or criticism to his name -- a largely intentional circumstance, this -- Mansour's image and voice will live on as a defining aspect of Egyptian cultural life in the second half of the 20th-century.
