Part of Europe: part of nowhere
Qit'a min Urubba: Riwaya (A Part of Europe: A Novel), Radwa Ashour, Cairo: Dar Al-Shorouk, 2003. pp220
Radwa Ashour has written a difficult book -- again. It is a challenge to tie its threads together. Indeed, the author's latest protagonist/narrator, the nameless Looker, himself repeatedly writes of his fear of losing the threads.
The subtitle "Riwaya" which adorns the book's cover seeks to place the work firmly on the fiction shelves. But this is not a novel, and not history either. Nor is it a historical novel -- a redundant term if ever there was one; perhaps, if the book must be assigned a genre it would be closest to post-modern history. The narrator himself repeatedly oscillates between wanting to write a book, a story and an essay.
Even post-modern histories are better started at their beginnings, though defining a beginning for this book is as difficult as defining its genre. Ashour begins with the awe felt by Westerners at the sight of the Sphinx, the laying out of the modern city of Cairo and the fires of 26 January 1952 that burned much of the centre of the city. The protagonist calls himself Al-Nazer, which, in current Egyptian usage, means headmaster. And though the narrator makes a point of differentiating the different meanings of the term, pointing out that what he intends is the literal meaning of the word, "Looker", the didactic, educational meaning of the term will not be lost on readers either.
The Looker in the novel at once documents what he sees with his own eyes and what he sees in historical records. At the novel's heart, therefore, is a desire to write about what one has seen, hence the term Looker, but also to write about what one has learned by insight.
The centre of modern Cairo was Khedive Ismail's dream. However, Ismail, the Looker tells us, had trouble "seeing" and grew up in Europe having been sent there for eye treatment. This new Cairo was built along the lines of a European city, in the layout of its streets and squares as well as in the architecture of its buildings and palaces. It was part of a larger project to modernise Egypt, which encompassed administrative, legal, economic and educational reforms, involved digging the Suez Canal and holding the extravagant celebrations at its opening. It was also a project that, arguably, led to Egypt's indebtedness and to the British occupation of Egypt.
In her novel, Ashour attempts to map the fate of Egypt and of the Arab world as a whole through the history of downtown Cairo. In tracing Cairo and Egypt's relationship to Europe, she historicises the dilemma at the heart of the Arab world's relationship with the West: whether or not to emulate Western models.
The centre of town, wist al- balad, comes to life as the people behind the names on the buildings are invoked and "looked" at. The Looker is fascinated by the trinity of Groppi, Cattaoui and Baehler, whose buildings dominate Soliman Pasha Square, now renamed Talaat Harb. These foreign -- often Jewish -- entrepreneurs who built central Cairo are contrasted with the Looker's three female neighbours. Francesca, Denise and Adelle are Italian, French and Sephardim Jewish, respectively, and they each represent a different type of the Europeans who were part of the life of the city before the 1952 Revolution and who disappeared in the 1950s.
However, the two events framing the Looker's life are the 1952 Cairo Fires, an attack on the symbols of the Western presence in Cairo, and the 1991 Gulf War, the beginning of a new phase of imperialism in the Arab world. The Looker narrates his recollections of the fires as a teenager walking the streets among the mob, these events reshaping the structure of central Cairo and being a precursor of the July Revolution and thus a turning point in the political and social history of Egypt. He draws a connection between the madness of the fires, the anger of the mob, and the expressions of public anger at the Zionist occupation of Palestine that had preceded them. This is a connection sometimes not made by historians, who tend to focus instead on the conflicts between the British, the monarchy and the majority Wafd Party at the time.
Although the Gulf War is only tangentially invoked as a turning point in the history of the nation, it marks the beginnings of a period of physical paralysis for the protagonist, followed by the Looker's account of the autumn 2002 demonstrations against the impending US-led invasion of Iraq and massacres in Palestine. This time the demonstrations do not take place in central Cairo, but at the gates of Cairo University and at Al-Azhar Mosque, and the Looker, now in a wheel chair, joins the throng much as he did in 1952.
The narrator moves freely in and out of these parentheses, which act more as excuses to make further connections. He traces five generations of the Rothschild family, for example, members of which were associated with the sale of Suez Canal shares and later with the 1917 Balfour Declaration giving British support for a Zionist state in Palestine. The modern, westernised city of Cairo attracts various kinds of Europeans, including Jews who become involved in the Zionist movement and in the establishment of the state of Israel. Among the historical marginalia that the Looker uncovers, for example, is the story of the first Zionist flag flown over Jerusalem in 1917, made in Cairo by Morineau Cicurel and Eliezer Slotkin, two Jews living in Egypt, the former an entrepreneur and owner of a department store.
The Looker writes of various Zionist activities taking place in Cairo and Alexandria in the late 19th and early 20th century, some of which were open and others were not. There is a method to his mad scribbling of notes, his citations and quotations from documents and histories, his recollections of the streets at crucial junctures in the nation's history, his jumping from the times of the Khedive Ismail to the impending US-led war on Iraq, and in between like a crazed flea:
"What foolishness makes me imagine that I can bring together all these odd pieces in one notebook and raise it high and say this is my story?! And what's worse is that I am not a professional writer, what will I do in this rubble.
"This rubble is my life and my story, and I have a question that unites the pieces of my life. I want to tell it. I will go to libraries and get more books; I will scribble what passes before me; I will walk the streets and look carefully, and write. [...]
"Your granddaughter asked you:
"'What have you done, grandpa, how have you got us to where we are today?'"
This is the book's central question and the predicament facing many an Arab intellectual. The Looker's cleaning lady, Umm Abdallah, reprimands him for concerning himself with old buildings: "Hadn't you better write on unemployment, private tutorship and high prices? Since you're going to write anyway and read books anyway, why not write about what concerns us? I said, I am not a journalist. She said, Is a journalist better than you, or are you afraid of insulting the government?" However, Ashour is writing about "what concerns us", and central to her vision is a dream that has gone sour, as well as an apprehension about what Westerners have done to Cairo, and, by extension, to Egypt and the Arab world. The Westerners we come across in this novel are for the most part either greedy businessmen, or entrepreneurs having unavowed aims behind them.
The main exception is Eddie Saleh, son of the Looker's pre-revolutionary neighbour Adelle. In inventing Eddie, Ashour has acknowledged an often distrusted, sometimes disdained, breed of anti-Zionist Jews of "Arab" origins in Egypt's history. After 30 years or more away, Eddie resurfaces in Cairo in the 1980s to receive a cool welcome from the Looker. The relationship later picks up, and the two enter into a correspondence of sorts. Having lived many years in Israel, Eddie is able to expose Zionist lies, and he then emigrates to France, his opinions dramatically changed.
In chapter 12, Eddie sends the Looker a translation of an article from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, being the testimony of a bulldozer driver who had taken part in the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camps in April 2002. The man, who calls himself Kurdi, describes the zeal with which he approached the destruction of Palestinian homes, and his sheer hatred and thirst for blood is chilling.
Ashour's point seems to be that it is equally chilling to reflect that this madness is what history, with all its dreams of modernity, has arrived at. Eddie writes a memoir of his days in Egypt and sends it to the narrator. It concludes: "Israel is a nakba (catastrophe) for the Jews," a reference to the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe in 1948. Israel, Eddie says, has been a catastrophe for the Jews, since it has gradually eroded their humanity through systematic killing. This account of Jenin is followed by an account of the death of Fares Oudeh, a 15-year-old Palestinian, in front of an Israeli tank, which Shaharazad, The Looker's granddaughter, helps him piece together from newspaper accounts.
The Looker remains elusive in the novel, and we know little about him. We know he was born in 1937. We know his father had a white-collar job at the National Bank of Egypt, that he was married and had three daughters, and that his wife left him and took the girls. We know he was found legally insane by a court, that he had a brother, killed in the 1967 Arab- Israeli War at the age of 21, and two sisters. By the end of the book there is a suggestion that he used to work at Cairo University, although we are not told in what capacity. We know he was paralysed in 1991 and condemned to a wheel chair. We know he lived in downtown Cairo for most of his life, except for the brief interlude of his marriage, during which he lived on Manial Al-Roda, where Radwa Ashour herself grew up. We know he is a very confused man seeing the ghost of his brother.
There is a tendency to associate the narrator's views with those of the author, though Ashour alternates between the first and third persons in her novel, perhaps to frustrate precisely such an idea. She makes her narrator a man who is older than herself. Even were the Looker to be understood as a version of Radwa Ashour, he is also, and more importantly, the personification of a certain type of Arab consciousness, one that grew up with the Arab-Israeli conflict and dreams of national liberation. That consciousness now sees ghosts, has nightmares and fears going mad. It is also sharply alienated and deserted, much as the narrator is in his downtown apartment. And it is this confused, mad consciousness that Ashour attempts to write here.
The book closes on multiple and ambivalent endings that leave the reader wondering whether there is method behind this madness; whether the bundle of threads introduced throughout really do tie together. They include a fascination with the West, a western fascination with the East, the rise of Zionism, the establishment of Zionist organisations in the 19th century, the 1952 Cairo fires, the Revolution, the 1967 war, the Camp David accords, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Gulf War, the Jenin massacres and the war on Iraq. Has the Looker died, or has he died only in his nightmares?
All historians, and Ashour is certainly one, write about the past in order to say something about the present. What Ashour says about the current state of Egypt and the Arab world is disturbing: that Israel is now a part of Europe, while the Arab world has become a part of nowhere, gradually being erased from the map of the world. At least for Ashour, Khedive Ismail's dream of making Egypt a part of Europe has become a nightmare.
Reviewed by Amina Elbendary
C a p t i o n : A L'Americaine, burned down in the Cairo Fires in 1952 and photographed by royal
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 19 - 25 June 2003 (Issue No. 643)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/643/bo4.htm