Tomorrow... apricots
In the Time of the Mishmish: A Painting in Twenty Parts, Alijah Gordon, Malaysia: Samizdat, 2002. pp111
The apricot season in Egypt is notoriously short. Its fragile flowers blossom in the Coptic month of Amsheer, the windiest month of the year, which inaugurates the Khamsine season. Very few of the flowers survive to become mishmish, or apricots, the first fruit to appear, fleetingly, after winter's dreary regimen of citrus fruits and bananas. Apricots can all too easily be missed in the inundation of plums, peaches, grapes and watermelons that follows. In Egyptian vernacular Arabic, bukra fil mishmish -- tomorrow, when the apricots come -- expresses a mythical tomorrow that will never arrive.
Alijah Gordon, then Shirley Gordon, was in Egypt in the mid-1950s as one of the first foreigners to be granted a scholarship by the Revolutionary Command Council that had taken power in 1952. During the heady years of 1954-55, she witnessed the early power struggles between the officers who had mounted the 1952 coup d'état, now known as the July Revolution, and their eradication of other centres of power within the country. Her book is a series of impressionistic scenes written to a pulsating cadence. The imagery is electrifying, capturing the mood of a critical period in the country's history.
Entry into Egypt is made by way of the mysterious, bountiful Nile, "a jugular vein reaching down and nourishing the body of the land". General Naguib has just been deposed, and Colonel Nasser is trying to consolidate his grip on power. Nasser, in military uniform, celebrates the 3rd anniversary of the 1952 Revolution by boarding a train from Cairo and crossing the Delta on his way to Alexandria. He tries to emulate Naguib's popularity, the man then adulated throughout the Nile valley from Khartoum to Damietta. The population has been brought in to cheer the new leader, a tactic which Nasser would go on to use countless times, not least in his efforts to save his presidency following Egyptian defeat in the 1967 War with Israel and Nasser's staged resignation on 9 June 1967.
The book contains cameos of the young officers that came to power with Nasser: an unassuming Abdel-Hakim Amer, already promoted to General; Anwar Sadat, pious and proud of his terrorist past, calmly justifying the assassination of Amin Osman by claiming that he was not a "real Egyptian". The monopolisation by officers of civilian jobs was already being instituted, and the ominous consequences of this are presciently felt by the author: "A colonel in industry, Wing- Commander Hassan Ibrahim El-Sayed, now head of the Industrial Development Board: background, flying. He's learning, learning, his education a costly thing of mistakes and time and expenditure."
The new regime was then blamed for the loss of the Sudan, despite the Free Officer Salah Salem's efforts at dancing in his underwear with Dinka tribesmen. "Egypt was to 'lose' the Sudan, and the people murmured that even the useless Farouk had not 'lost' the Sudan," the author writes. Nasser then diverted people's southward gaze to the East and North by concluding the Czech arms deal, mobilising for war with Israel and finally nationalising the Suez Canal. It was hoped that unity with Syria in 1958 would deaden the pain of the Sudan's loss.
The author understands the great hopes that the officers stirred in the Egyptian people and their pride in being ruled by "brown" men like themselves from modest backgrounds. These officers, people then felt, were aware of the problems of the poorer classes and they sincerely wished to improve their lot. As a result, Nasser went on a two-pronged offensive, attempting to gain the support of the masses, mostly of the rural fellaheen, after consolidating his position in the armed forces, and systematically disposing of both his enemies and previous allies. "October 1954," Gordon writes, "brought Neguib's open and final dethronement and subsequently his journey to Marg, further up the Nile, there to remain a prisoner". The notorious Mansheya incident is also described, when Nasser used an assassination attempt against him in Alexandria as a pretext for liquidating the Muslim Brotherhood. Communists are also incarcerated, to please the West among other reasons. Nasser announces that he has imprisoned 1,000 communists "far out in the Peninsula of Sinai, in Tor with no relief from the burning sun".
Land reform is instituted and the nationalisations of the 1960s are in the offing. Regressionists, imperialists, feudalists, communists and capitalists are now all the enemies of the people, and Nasser is fighting on every front.
This is a book describing a potential that never materialised, a period of decorative constitutions, distrust and conspiracies. Although it is clear that the author's grasp of Arabic is limited, she is extremely perceptive and she has a fresh vision of the events unfolding around her. She empathises with the Egyptian attitude towards the afrangi, or foreigners, but, like many northerners, she is uncomfortable with the idea of a river that "flows northwards, upwards", and is probably uncomfortable, too, with a language written from right to left.
She describes the Revolution's first grand public works project, installing turbines in the old Aswan Dam to produce electricity at a cost of LE27,500,000 (or $78,950,000 -- notice the exchange rate). Plans for Egypt's industrialisation were being hatched, but Gordon sympathises with the poor and destitute: her heart is with the Nubians uprooted by the first Aswan dam and now on the verge of being uprooted again by the High Dam, as well as with the fellaheen under the landlords' yoke. The book contains a photograph of a fellah talking to Gordon bearing the caption, "Alijah learns from the masses."
The book contains minor mistakes, probably because it has been written from memory and because its author was then abruptly exposed to a very foreign culture in the process of revolutionary change. Examples of such mistakes include the fact that Kafr Saqr is here translated as "Place of the Vultures" instead of Village of the Falcons, probably in sympathy with the fellaheen dominated by their local landlord. Abdel- Rahman El-Sharqawi is given as "Sha'arawy", and it might be mentioned that Anwar Sadat was married to an English woman.
However, such occasional errors do not mar this gem of a book, which casts light on events whose interpretation has been revised countless times. It clearly depicts the many international and domestic constraints Nasser then faced, sometimes forcing his hand in the decisions he had to make. Above all, Gordon's book gives us a feel for the texture of these two years, which were crucial to the make up of present-day Egypt.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 20 - 26 March 2003 (Issue No. 630)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/630/bo5.htm