Wives and ancestors
Awraq Al-A'ela (Family Papers), Mohamed El-Bosati, Cairo: Dar Al-Hilal, 2003. pp136
In his latest work, Mohamed El-Bosati moves even further away from the muted lyricism that informed his widely acclaimed Sakhab Al-Buhaira (Lake Clamour) -- more an extended prose poem than a novel, and one in which character and action play a somewhat subdued role. Returning, with the benefit of experience and a newfound autobiographical confidence, to his early practice of quietly documenting Delta small-town life, El-Bosati has gradually shifted to a more explicit, if not necessarily more conventional, modus operandi.
The characters of his last three novels (Wa Ya'ti Al-Qitar, Layalin Ukhra and Ferdaws) are credible individuals playing out clearly constructed story lines; and the texts broach life not as a brand of mythologised memory but, more in line with the vast majority of contemporaneous sixties generation writers, as the real-life raw material for the story- teller's art. The narrator's voice is louder, firmer, more willing to engage with the reader at an immediate level. As a whole the literary exercise becomes less meditative than confessional; and El- Bosati re-emerges in the role of engaged witness rather than that of detached poet, along more accessible lines.
Such, at least, would be the hypothesis. Yet, on closer scrutiny the present slim volume, Awraq Al- Aa'ela (Family Papers) -- perhaps the text in which the aforementioned shift manifests itself most clearly -- turns out to be more of a variation on El- Bosati's usual theme of retrieving historically specific lost time than a radical transformation of perspective.
Set in an unnamed small town in the Delta, it chronicles the fates and fortunes of a relatively small cast of characters -- a single family through three generations, the patriarchs of which (Kamel, Shakir and the narrator's father) are living in the same house when the novel opens. The language may not be as overtly poetic as it was in Sakhab Al- Buhayra, but the revelatory intonation of the author's voice, his departure from the standards of narrative convention and his tendency to present characters as being agents of the passage of time, all testify to the abiding lyricism of El-Bosati's sense of being.
Likewise memory -- the memory of the narrator and those who recount to him their own memories, notably his mother -- remains his most fecund source. Seen through a less optically manipulated lens, the subject matter of the present book turns out to be similar to that of El-Bosati's previous work as well: the economic and social arrangements that control marginal, provincial lives. It is thus not so much in thematic concerns or literary approach that the author offers something new. Evidently it is, rather, the author's own position that has passed to a new stage in its normal course of development.
Further testimony to the fact that El-Bosati's essential characteristics have remained with him is that Awraq Al-Aa'ela employs this author's favourite and perhaps most propitious narrative device: the notion of the narrator as childlike observer, a witness who plays no direct part in the action and remains, at some level, the spokesperson for collective memory.
The story, if story it can be called, is told from the viewpoint of a small child who at times seems to be speaking in retrospect, from the perspective of an anonymous grown-up -- or indeed, during the closing chapter especially, that of the aging El-Bosati himself. As in all of El-Bosati's work, the narrator is the least significant character, yet it is the narrator's voice, rather than any other explicit or implicit aspect of the text, that sustains the integrity of the book, moulding an otherwise disparate set of life histories and anecdotes into a holistic document. For this is what Awraq Al-Aa'ela is, to a greater extent than anything El-Bosati has written: the document of a family (his family?) offered as a slice of unchronicled history.
Here, as elsewhere, and in more obvious ways, El- Bosati seeks a record of the manners and customs of the people he knows best. And it is through their peculiar charm that he puts forth a vision not of the universal or of humanity -- not even, or not primarily, of the socio-economic conditions of Egyptian life in the second half of the twentieth century -- but of the passage of time.
One of this book's most pleasurable aspects is that descriptive writing abounds in it: El-Bosati's account of the old great grandfather especially is deeply engaging. "He was very old," El-Bosati writes on the first page of the book, "so thin he could not bear the jilbab on his body but left it folded over the pillow and made do with [his undergarments]. Seldom did he leave his room. The few times when he shared food with us were [religious] occasions: he would be at the head of the tabliya, and my mother would wrap a towel around his neck and place the bowl of noodle soup before him with the meat ground into it. His quivering hand would raise the spoon, he would slow down to steady it before it reached his mouth, but the soup would still spill over the spoon and make him wet. We would furtively look at him, following my father's warnings, and try not to laugh."
This contributes to the cumulative portrait he offers of the grandfather, an idle, rough man given to nights out with three of his subordinates (it is said, paradoxically, that he was the reason the great- grandfather dismissed them from his flour mill, which Shakir's son took over in time). Shakir's scandalous sexual excess seems to be restricted to the violent kneading of breasts; rumour has it that his displays of manhood conceal a shameful impotence. In one anecdote that seems to support this rumour, the father and great-grandfather are awakened by the voice of a loud and foul-mouthed prostitute Shakir has brought home, complaining about the latter's failure to anything beyond kneading her breasts and asking her to wash.
The only aspect of the novel comparable in intensity to El-Bosati's portrait of these two characters and of the relation between them is the presence of women -- particularly the elder patriarch's complex involvement with them. The former relation is tackled in episodes occurring at the time of the novel's opening, when Shakir arrives late and retires to bed noisily, whereupon Kamel, in the adjoining room, begins to nag him about one thing or another.
It transpires that Kamel is more attached to the narrator's father than Shakir is, and that the latter harbours a deep-rooted resentment of the former's unwillingness to provide for his idleness. "Don't be cruel to your grandfather Shakir," the narrator's mother tells him. "He lived his whole life owning nothing in spite of his father's great wealth, and like other children of wealthy people maybe he was waiting for the inheritance. The inheritance never came... And he never went to school, nor did he learn to work the land. He was far away. He worked for his father, supervising the flour mill, and got his pay like any other worker at the end of the week. Even after he married nothing changed. He would ask his father to buy him and his wife clothes... Don't say 'stole,' he only took what he needed. Someone like him who goes here and there and stays up with his friends, the son of Hagg Kamel, such a big name. He had to have money to spend.."
The role of women in the novel would require a separate essay altogether. Interspersed with accounts of the family's economic highs and lows, their projects and legal papers, the story of the three patriarchs seems indissolubly chained to the presence of the women in their lives. Suffice it to say, however, that within the family being chronicled women seem to be in short supply. For the slowly growing narrator, his mother, "the only woman in the house," along with the poorer women who come along to help her with the housework, is the source of much information -- she recounts, explains, makes connections. And, like other selected women in El-Bosati's corpus, she seems to perform a healing function, displaying a remarkable understanding of the male characters' failings, down to Shakir's continual attacks on Um-Salem the cleaning woman.
Perhaps more pertinent to the novel's tragic thrust, however, is the figure of Shakir's wife, Zeinab, the book's most seductive beauty who dies long before the narrator is born. The book ends with the death of the narrator's father, and it is then that the uncanny connection with Zeinab -- woman, giver of life and death -- is subtly revealed. Following an account of the father's death at a relatively early age on returning from a city council meeting, the narrator as an old man refers to the fact that he had been leafing through his "family papers" recently when he recalled the sight of Kamel and Shakir sitting side by side as his father died, remembering the former's affection for Zeinab.
"It is as if I can hear Grandfather Kamel in his room, muttering at night. 'She took him. She would not have left him with us very long.' I close the tattered envelope, and put it back in the desk drawer."
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
C a p t i o n :
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 16 - 22 October 2003 (Issue No. 660)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/660/bo6.htm