A deliberate spontaneity

Sanaa Seleiha, Bayya' Al-Farah (The joy merchant), Cairo: Al-Ain, 2007. pp182

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The intimate description of everyday details revealed by everyday people is the real value of this book, a new collection of short stories by journalist Sana Seliha. In 27 pieces the writer champions what, judging by current trends in Arabic literature, must be considered a dying art. These are very short pieces, moreover, ranging in length from three to four pages and leaving little room for the reader to identify with their characters. Most employ the very difficult traditional one-shot technique, requiring not only technical skill but serious intellectual and literary scaffolding, all of which is convincingly promised and sometimes, if not always delivered. The author dedicates the book "to whom it may concern", pointing to "sketches of people, places and times". Yet places and times are hardly present at all; it is people who act out these miniature dramas, and they do so in a way that dictates the liter form -- a happy if not always satisfactory conjunction, seeing as it can leave you, rather, high and dry.

In the opening piece, "The Visitor", a middle-aged woman convincingly encounters a mouse -- her only visitor in a long time and, as it seems, for a long time to come. A powerful portrayal of middle- aged loneliness. "I am a chicken" is rather the masterpiece of the collection: a middle-class housewife wakes up to realise her voice is gone, replaced by a clucking sound like that chickens make. Wishing her son a good morning, she clucks; the boy laughs, thinking it is a joke. The same happens when her husband comes back from work; and this breaks the routine of their relationship, with the husband returning home the next day with a hot meal and plenty of affection hoping it will all bring back her voice -- but she turns away from the food, grabs a corncob, spreads the seeds on a plate and eats them. The husband even injures his hand trying to stop her. Maintaining a powerful humour, the story ends on a symbolic note: at night the alleyway where she lives is still, quiet except for the faint sound of all those women clucking behind closed doors. But such feminism rarely features.

Most of the stories are told by women about women, but feminist issues remain dormant. The image of a lonely, often middle-aged woman awaiting a man to fill the vacuum of her life is in fact rather prevalent. Not all are successful: in "The Good Old Days", the reunion of a long separated pair of female friends finds stilted, unconvincing expression in the classical-Arabic dialogue; Seleiha often falls prey to sentimentality. The stranger who breaks the silence often turns out to be an animal -- a cat or, as in "The Visitor", a rodent. The recurrence of the word "exhale" might hold a clue to the drive behind the entire collection, which can be read as a kind of literary exhalation not always as tightly controlled as it should be. "The Man who Laghed" bears testimony to the contrary, exemplifying the marriage of the spirit of the moment to the form of writing perfectly. In the absence of his nagging wife and grown-up children, a man is trying to tune into an Um Kulthoum song on the radio. It takes him some time to make himself a cup of coffee and find his cigarettes, but when he is finally ready, he loses track of the radio wave -- he bursts into laughter -- the end.

"Prescription for a Happier Marriage" -- the sketch of a woman making food for her husband in an attempt to improve his mood -- is, by contrast, devoid of irony or humour. "A Matchless Man" -- an equally disappointing account of a man who, on his way home from work, ends up in a politician's posh party -- the odd one out in the collection. Here as elsewhere the author's skill in the use of the vernacular is astounding, however, often laugh-out-loud. Yet this is often marred by sentimentality or an excessively classical turn of phrase, notably in the title story, in which a man held up in traffic tries and fails to buy a jasmine necklace from a street vendor. In "Fly, Kite" the symbolism is perfect, but the character -- a street vendor with a knee ache, who manages to sell all except for one of his kites, a sad specimen that has lost its colourful tail -- is too vague. Nor is there any attempt at linking the pieces into a whole. This need not be a problem of course. Still, the ultimate impression is one of spontaneity, a spontaneity like a deep exhalation -- you either take it all, or nothing.

Review by Rania Khallaf