Reality and the text
To mark the relaunch of the quarterly Fusoul, Ali Guindi sounds out its editor-in-chief
A conversation with Hoda Wasfi is like reviewing the last 50 years of literary and cultural critique in Egypt. More importantly perhaps, Wasfi has always worked to bridge the distance between Egypt and the West, specifically France. She has published much in both Arabic and French and works as a university professor in Egypt and France. Always an engaged intellectual, she stresses the importance of cultural practice ( al-momarasa al-thaqafiya ), and her career demonstrates a belief in the practical application of theories of culture. She is informed by, among other ideas, the belief that knowledge should be available to everyone, an aspect of the Nasserist socialism against which she grew up. "A mythical character", she says, Nasser honoured her with an official model when she came out first at college exams: "I was really young, I really believed there was a revolutionary transformation, a renaissance -- at least until [the war of] 1967."
In this and other contexts the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) quarterly Fusoul has been among her dearest projects. Now that it is being relaunched, she has followed Gaber Asfour as the editor-in-chief. In the introduction to the 2005 edition (400 pages -- and not a single picture), the role of the journal in "legitimising a new cultural reality" is stressed: "linking it to heritage and opening up new horizons for it... from a standpoint different from that of the traditionalists and with a vision that does not see heritage as a sealed entity or bewailed ideal". Fusoul certainly pumped blood into the at times barely functional body of national culture, offering translations -- many of which were undertaken by Wasfi -- and Arabising contemporary terminology. A public-sector initiative, the magazine is very affordably priced at LE7. Outlining the Cartesian and Lansonian modes of thought that dominated critical discourse prior to the appearance of Fusoul, Wasfi went on to explain the 1950s shift to Socialist Realism, introduced by Mahmoud Amin El-Alim and Louis Awad, which paved the way for a dialectic relation between literature and reality.
Part of this involved refuting both the Platonic notion of ideas and deterministic explanations of literary creativity, reinforcing an understanding of art as reflective, not projective, and distinguishing subject from content -- the role of Fusoul and its founding "suicidal brigade", led by, among others, Weesa Wasef, Gaber Asfour and herself. Understood in such broad terms, Social Realism lasted for 20 years, to be followed by constructivism, which demonstrated the influence of semiotics as well as social and psychoanalytical discourses. The text became an independent entity without preconceived ideas, analysis turned from a value judgement into a hermeneutical interpretation; this school flourished in the 1980s (it had risen, in the West, during the 1960s) and gave in to the influence of Foucault and Derrida. Today in Egypt, Wasfi went on, critics employ a pragmatic interdisciplinary approach that focusses on the text; different techniques are applied to different texts. Present-day schools of thought are so interconnected that one cannot be understood in isolation from the other; since existentialism grand narratives have not held water much -- "a culture of questions rather than one of beliefs".
Along such lines, even though it played a significant role in changing the course of art criticism in Egypt, Fusoul has been criticised as a compendium of translations of foreign thinking -- "the weapon of authentic identity crisis", even though "imported" readings of heritage generate a new understanding of contemporary culture. For Wasfi, at least, identity is a regenerative process. Ideas described as foreign are only so by virtue of their place of origin; they can be experienced anywhere, whether collectively or individually. Where they are broadly spread in the West, in Egypt such "schools" are repressed -- Fusoul works to legitimise them. Such an aim ultimately describes Wasfi's entire career, "the war of old and new" in which she engaged as the director of the Hanager Theatre and the Experimental Theatre Festival as well as in her writing; for the latter role, indeed, the French government honoured her with a medal of knighthood. To her mind the claim that culture is in a state of stagnation is groundless: "There may be stagnation in everything but." Openly, she stresses the excitement of a Generation of the Nineties that has left its mark on theatre, the visual and plastic arts, and poetry. The only reason that generation has not received the recognition it deserves, she says, is the hegemony of "the ancients", older, stagnating practitioners.
Wasfi, much like Fusoul, is a unique and controversial presence -- different from the image of an ascetic intellectual who evades the public and fights it out with the establishment. Cultural transformation, she believes, must draw on all aspects of life: religious, social, educational, economic and political -- for every change in any of these arenas, a corresponding change in culture. And it is precisely such an awareness that will give Fusoul an edge, under Wasfi's tutelage. The critique it contains will take them all into account, spotting promise where it can be spotted and perhaps, eventually, giving cultural life a thrust forward the way it did in the past.
Caption: Hoda Wasfi
C a p t i o n : Hoda Wasfi
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/748/cu4.htm