Sonallah Ibrahim: Rebel with a Pen 9781474405799

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Sonallah Ibrahim

Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature Series Editor: Rasheed El-­Enany Writing Beirut: Mappings of the City in the Modern Arabic Novel Samira Aghacy Autobiographical Identities in Contemporary Arab Literature Valerie Anishchenkova The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts Fabio Caiani and Catherine Cobham Sufism in the Contemporary Arabic Novel Ziad Elmarsafy Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt 1892–2008 Hoda Elsadda Post-­War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora Syrine Hout War and Occupation in Iraqi Fiction Ikram Masmoudi The Arab Nah∂ah: The Making of the Intellectual and Humanist Movement Abdulrazzak Patel Sonallah Ibrahim: Rebel with a Pen Paul Starkey edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/smal

Sonallah Ibrahim Rebel with a Pen

Paul Starkey

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Paul Starkey, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4132 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0579 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0580 5 (epub) The right of Paul Starkey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents



Series Editor’s Foreword

vii

Preface

x

  1. Introduction: Background and Context

1

  2. Rebel with a Pen

17

  3. Cairo Prison: Tilka al-raʾiha (1966) 34   4. Michelangelo and the Dam: Najmat Aghustus (1974) 51  5. CocaColaland: al-­Lajna (1981) 69   6. War in Lebanon: Bayrut, Bayrut (1984) 86   7. Consumer Society: Dhat (1992)

104

  8. Prison of Dishonour: Sharaf (1997) 123   9. Widening Horizons (1): Sex, Memory and Revolution: Warda (2000) 136 10. Widening Horizons (2): In the Land of the Capitalists: Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li) (2003) 155 11. Return to Childhood: al-­Talassus (2007) 171 12. The French Connection: al-ʿImama wa-al-Qubbaʿa (2008) and al-Qanun al-Faransi (2008) 189

vi | sona lla h i br a h im 13. Filling a Gap: al-Jalid (2011) 205 14. Epilogue

212

Bibliography

217

Index

225

Series Editor’s Foreword

T

he Edinburgh Studies in Modern Arabic Literature is a new and unique series which will, it is hoped, fill in a glaring gap in scholarship in the field of modern Arabic literature. Its dedication to Arabic literature in the modern period, that is, from the nineteenth century onwards, is what makes it unique among series undertaken by academic publishers in the English-speaking world. Individual books on modern Arabic literature in general or aspects of it have been and continue to be published sporadically. Series on Islamic studies and Arab/Islamic thought and civilisation are not in short supply either in the academic world, but these are far removed from the study of Arabic literature qua literature, that is, imaginative, creative literature as we understand the term when, for instance, we speak of English literature or French literature, etc. Even series labelled ‘Arabic/Middle Eastern Literature’ make no period distinction, extending their purview from the sixth century to the present, and often including non-­Arabic literatures of the region. This series aims to redress the situation by focusing on the Arabic literature and criticism of today, stretching its interest to the earliest beginnings of Arab modernity in the nineteenth century. The need for such a dedicated series, and generally for the redoubling of scholarly endeavour in researching and introducing modern Arabic literature to the Western reader has never been stronger. The significant growth in the last decades of the translation of contemporary Arab authors from all genres, especially fiction, into English; the higher profile of Arabic literature internationally since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988; the growing number of Arab authors living in the Western diaspora and writing both in English and Arabic; the adoption

viii | sona lla h i b r a h im of such authors and others by mainstream, high-­circulation publishers, as opposed to the academic publishers of the past; the establishment of prestigious prizes, such as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker), run by the Man Booker Foundation, which brings huge publicity to the shortlist and winner every year, as well as translation contracts into English and other languages – all this and very recently the events of the Arab Spring have heightened public, let alone academic, interest in all things Arab, and not least Arabic literature. It is therefore part of the ambition of this series that it will increasingly address a wider reading public beyond its natural territory of students and researchers in Arabic and world literature. Nor indeed is the academic readership of the series expected to be confined to specialists in literature in the light of the growing trend for interdisciplinarity, which increasingly sees scholars crossing field boundaries in their research tools and coming up with findings that equally cross discipline borders in their appeal. Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, the subject of this monograph, is one of the most important novelists in the post-­Mahfouz era. Coming to the fore in the 1960s, he and his illustrious generation of novelists would probably have received much more attention in their day if they had not lived under the shadow of the gigantic figure of Naguib Mahfouz. If we are to know how more divergent, innovative, ideologically and stylistically rich and varied the Arabic novel was independently of and beyond Mahfouz, intensive critical and scholarly attention needs to be turned to the ‘younger’ generation of writers who are now all in their late sixties at least. With Jamal al-­Ghitani, a towering figure of that generation, already departed (October 2015), Sonallah Ibrahim is now in the forefront of that generation, who started their writing careers in the 1960s, the heyday of Nasser’s nationalist era in Egypt and across the Arab world, and arguably one of the most productive and diversified decades in imaginative creativity in twentieth-­century Egypt, despite censorship and political repression. Paul Starkey’s present study will fill in a glaring gap in scholarship of Arabic literature and introduce to readers of English in a systematic, chronological order the artistic achievement and intellectual stance of the author, while placing his work not only in the aesthetic context of the genre

seri es edi tor’s f orewo r d  | ix in Arabic but also in that of the tumultuous history of the region during his career. Rasheed El-­Enany Professor Emeritus, University of Exeter; Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, Dean, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Preface

T

his book is designed as an introduction to the novels of Sonallah Ibrahim, widely regarded as one of Egypt’s, and the Arab world’s, most distinguished and distinctive contemporary writers, and a pioneer of the new mood that began to dominate the Arab cultural environment from the mid-­1960s onwards. Although there are several articles and book chapters in English devoted to Sonallah Ibrahim’s works, to my knowledge there is no comprehensive study of his novels as a whole in English (or in any other language, for that matter), and the present work is therefore intended to fill an important gap. It should be noted that the work does not attempt to cover Sonallah Ibrahim’s other varied literary activities – which include short stories (though this is not a genre to which the author has made any significant contribution), writing for children, translations, and non-­fictional writing, except where (as is the case with his prison diaries, for example) they are directly and obviously relevant to a discussion of the novels themselves. Sonallah Ibrahim’s novelistic output, which spans over forty-­five years, represents a unique contribution to modern Egyptian literature, as well as to Arabic literature more generally, being almost always closely related in some way or other to the social, political or historical development either of Egypt or of some other region of the Arab world. A reading of Ibrahim’s novels will therefore serve as an introduction not only to the development of Arabic literature over the last half-­century or so but also to certain trends in the historical and political development of modern Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, as viewed from the author’s personal perspective, which is consistently Marxist and anti-­capitalist in tone. In discussing the novels, I have tried where possible to relate the themes of the works to contemporary political or historical developments, while

pref ace  | xi at the same time exploring the literary techniques – for example, the use of ‘intertextual’ devices – which run like a thread through the novels from Tilka al-raʾiha (1966) onwards, and which have been developed and refined through the author’s long career. In terms of literary theory, I have deliberately kept my account ‘light’; some use has been made of the analytical framework provided by Gérard Genette when discussing the evolution of Sonallah Ibrahim’s often innovative narrative techniques, but this is not the primary focus of the present study. The book begins with two introductory chapters, the first of which attempts to sketch the literary and political background for the emergence of the new tone of writing heralded by Tilka al-­raʾiha, while the second provides a brief biographical introduction to the author himself. The remaining chapters focus on the author’s individual novels in chronological order; each also includes a section on the relevant political or historical background to the work in question. I conclude with an attempt at an evaluation (inevitably provisional, since Sonallah Ibrahim is, happily, still alive) of the author’s contribution to Egyptian and Arab literature to date. In doing this, I have assumed little prior knowledge on the part of the reader, beyond a general interest in literature and in the region. In keeping with the general ethos of the series, I have had in mind when writing the book primarily English-­ speaking undergraduates and MA students on Arabic or Middle Eastern studies courses, but as more of the author’s work is translated into English, it is hoped that it may also have some wider appeal – for example, to students of comparative literature, as well as others interested in the development of modern Egypt more generally. In keeping with the current policy of Edinburgh University Press, I have used a simplified system of transliteration based on that of the Library of Congress, but generally without the use of macrons or subscript dots. Where a person’s name is more commonly spelled in English in a different way, I have used this form, with the strictly transliterated form given in square brackets on first occurrence: thus, Sonallah Ibrahim [Sunʿ Allah Ibrahim]. My own interest in Sonallah Ibrahim was considerably enhanced by discussion at the 2001 meeting of EMTAR (European Meeting of Teachers of Arabic Literature, now renamed EURAMAL, European Association for Modern Arabic Literature), at which Raʾouf Musʿad, a long-­term friend

xii | sonallah i br a h im and colleague of Sonallah Ibrahim’s was present, and at which papers on Sonallah Ibrahim were presented by both Ulrike Stehli-­Werbeck and myself. I am grateful to EMTAR/EURAMAL members, particularly Ulrike Stehli-­ Werbeck, for encouraging me to continue my interest in the author and to bring this longer study to publication. In so doing, I am also grateful to Rasheed El-­Enany, the series editor, for his helpful and perceptive comments on an earlier draft of the book, and to all staff at Edinburgh University Press, particularly Nicola Ramsey and Ellie Bush, for their continued patience, advice and encouragement during the production of the work. For all remaining imperfections, I remain entirely responsible. Paul Starkey September 2015

1 Introduction: Background and Context

I

t is something of a truism to observe that the history of modern Egyptian literature, as indeed of modern Arabic literature more generally, has been intimately bound up with political and social developments in the region. General histories of modern Arabic literature traditionally began their accounts of the nah∂a, or ‘revival’,1 from the politically charged date of 1798, the date of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, and although more recent critics have been more nuanced in their approach, this date still (rightly) retains a prominent place in most accounts of the Arab literary and cultural revival. During the twentieth century, the 1919 Egyptian revolt against the British occupation provided inspiration for Tawfiq al-­Hakim’s seminal novel ʿAwdat al-­Ruh (Return of the Spirit; 1933), and we can point to a subsequent series of political events that punctuated the region and whose significance is reflected in the works of Arab writers, in both poetry and prose. Of these events, the most significant are perhaps the nakba (the ‘disaster’), the 1948 conflict leading to the founding of the State of Israel, with wide-­ranging repercussions through much of the Arab world; the Egyptian Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952, leading to the establishment of the Nasserist regime; and the naksa, the ‘great setback’, embodied in the humiliating defeat of the Arabs in the June (Six-­Day) War of 1967, which resulted in a period described by one commentator as one of ‘anguished self-­criticism, [and] a searching reappraisal of post-­war Arab culture and political practice’.2 The 1967 War is of particular significance in the present context, for it sparked a new generation of writers, often known as the ‘Generation of the Sixties’ (Jil al-sittinat), who began to react more outspokenly than before, accusing their predecessors of contributing to the defeat by their silence, and embarking on a re-­evaluation of literary forms, the role of the writer in society and the representation

2 | sonallah i br a h im of reality in fiction. Many of these writers were associated with the short-­ lived but influential magazine, Gallery 68, published in Egypt between 1968 and 1971, which brought together a number of leading Egyptian and non-­ Egyptian writers, and although Sonallah Ibrahim did not form part of this group as such, commentators on this critical period frequently cite his short novel Tilka al-­Raʾiha (first published in 1966) as a seminal work in ushering in the new mood. The close interaction between politics and literature in the modern Arab world is of particular relevance to the subject of the present study for another reason, for, with one possible exception, all of Sonallah Ibrahim’s dozen or so novels with which this work is concerned are related, to a greater or lesser degree, to political events (either contemporary or historical) in Egypt, the Middle East and/or the wider world. The purpose of the present chapter is therefore to present a brief synopsis of the relevant aspects of the development of modern Arabic literature in its historical and political context, from Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt (an event of direct relevance to the author’s al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa (The Turban and the Hat; 2008) and al-­Qanun al-­Faransi (The French Law; 2008)) to the publication of his first major work, Tilka al-­Raʾiha, in 1966. Subsequent political and social developments will be discussed as necessary in subsequent chapters, as background to the individual works in question. The Nahd. a As previously noted, the conventional starting date usually suggested for the nah∂a – the term usually used to denote the process of literary and cultural revival during the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries – is 1798, the date of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Although this date has less significance for other parts of the Arab world than for Egypt, its status as a literary turning point in the Middle East is difficult to ignore: for although it is possible to exaggerate its importance as the beginning of the process of the importation of Western literary forms (novel, short story, drama, etc.) into the Arabic literary tradition (arguably, the main outcome of the nah∂a in literary terms), it undoubtedly, more than any other single event, marked a turning-­point in cultural relations between Europe and the Arab world that greatly facilitated this process.3

int rod ucti on: ba ck g round a n d co nte x t | 3 The state of Arabic literature during the three centuries or so between 1516 and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Ottomans ruled most of the central Arab world, is a matter of ongoing study and debate.4 Literary characterisations of this period as the ‘Age of Depression’, common among both Western and Arab scholars in the middle of the twentieth century, now seem hopelessly outmoded. What seems certain, however, is that popular art forms, including the wider use of colloquial and dialectal Arabic (ʿammiyya), were beginning to gain ground at the expense of ‘high’ literature written in literary Arabic (fusha) during this period, and that such an increasing popularisation of culture was arguably a major factor not only in facilitating social change but also in creating an environment more receptive to outside cultural influences. One theoretical model for the development of modern Arabic literature would indeed see it as the product of an interplay between three distinct strands of cultural activity: an Arabic-­Islamic, ‘elite’ tradition, primarily associated with literature in the formal Arabic of fusha; a parallel, though less well documented, tradition of ‘popular’ literature in ‘ammiyya; and new influences and literary forms derived from the West.5 Be that as it may, the brief French occupation that followed Napoleon’s invasion saw a number of developments that marked the beginning of a break with previous tradition and laid the groundwork for significant cultural and educational innovation during the nineteenth century: these developments included the importation of a printing press, used for the production of a newspaper, Le Courier de l’Égypte, and a journal, La Décade égyptienne; the establishment of a series of provincial councils; and the founding in Cairo of a scientific institute, together with a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the country, subsequently published as the multi-­volume Description de l’Égypte. The credit for much of the country’s subsequent development, however, belongs not so much to Napoleon as to Muhammad ʿAli [Mehmet Ali], an ambitious soldier of Albanian descent who had originally come to Egypt among the Ottoman troops sent to expel the French, but who subsequently seized power, establishing himself in 1805 as ruler of Egypt and founder of a dynasty that (subject to varying degrees of foreign influence) would rule Egypt until the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952. Perceiving the importance of education for the development of the country, he not only began importing Western teachers into Egypt but also initiated a system of

4 | sonallah i br a h im educational ­‘missions’ that saw Egyptian students dispatched to the West to study, often also being required to translate their textbooks on their return. Syrian Christians were co-­opted to assist in the task of providing books for the new schools; in 1822, the official Bulaqiyya printing press was founded; and in 1828 the first issue of the official Egyptian gazette, al-­Waqaʾiʿ al-­Misriyya, appeared. These developments, which were carried forward under Muhammad ʿAli and his successors (most notably Ismaʿil, r. 1863–79), marked the first stages in the transition from a largely manuscript-­based readership to one based on the printed word (a process that was also accompanied by the growth of journalism), the gradual substitution of Arabic for Ottoman Turkish as the main language of administration, and the evolution of a more modern Arabic prose style more suited to the rapidly expanding Egyptian readership than the convoluted style of much Arabic prose under the Ottomans. Among other things, these developments indirectly laid the groundwork for the development of the indigenous Arabic novel and other ‘Western-­style’ forms that writers such as Sonallah Ibrahim were subsequently to make their own. Crucial roles in the early stages of the nah∂a were arguably played by travel and translation – two activities exemplified in the career of Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-­Tahtawi (1801–81), a Muslim imam sent to Paris by Muhammad ʿAli as leader of the first educational mission to France, where he stayed from 1826 to 1831. The work that he composed on his return, entitled Takhlis al-­ibriz fi talkhis Bariz (The Refining of Gold in the Summary of Paris),6 a lively and fascinating account of his often surprisingly sympathetic impressions of French culture, is not only an important work in its own right, but also set a trend for a series of subsequent works, by both Egyptians and other Arab writers, in which they recorded their impressions of the West (in either fictional or non-­fictional form) on their return and reflected on the differences between Western and Arab culture; Sonallah Ibrahim’s Amrikanli (2003), discussed in Chapter 10, could arguably be held to be distantly related to this trend. Al-­Tahtawi’s subsequent distinguished career included, among several other official positions, a period editing the Egyptian official newspaper al-­ Waqaʾiʿ al-­Misriyya, and the directorship of the Translation Bureau set up in 1841; although the first works to be translated were mainly military and administrative works likely to be of use to the new regime, literary works soon began to attract attention, and al-­Tahtawi’s own translation of Fénelon’s

int rod ucti on: ba ck g round a n d co nte x t | 5 didactic novel Les Aventures de Télémaque laid the foundations for a translation movement that gathered pace towards the end of the nineteenth century. Further twists to the ‘Arab traveller to Europe’ theme with a more fictional flavour than the work of al-­Tahtawi were provided by, among others, the Egyptian educator and official ʿAli Mubarak (1823–93), whose four-­ volume ʿAlam al-­Din describes the adventures of an Arab shaykh ( possibly modelled on al-­Tahtawi himself, who accompanies an English orientalist to the West to acquaint himself with Western civilization; and by Muhammad al-­Muwaylihi (1858?–1930), who inserted into the second edition of his seminal Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham (The Tale of ʿIsa ibn Hisham; (perhaps the last great work in Arabic to be cast in the classical maqāma form)7 an additional section entitled al-­Rihla al-­thaniya (‘the second journey’), based on a journey made by the author himself to the Great Paris Exhibition of 1900.8 In the meantime, the Lebanese [Ahmad] Faris al-­Shidyaq (1804–87), an eccentric polymath who spent several years in Britain translating religious material for the Church Missionary Society, had in 1855 published in Paris a work entitled al-­Saq ʿala al-­Saq fi ma huwa al-­Fariyaq (Leg over Leg in Respect of Fariyaq) that has been described, not without exaggeration, as the ‘first real approach to fiction in modern Arabic literature’.9 Although this was too idiosyncratic a piece of writing to have any direct successors, the obvious Western influence to be seen in the work provides useful confirmation that at least some contemporary Arab literati were becoming increasingly familiar with, and interested in, Western literary traditions and practices. By the time of al-­Muwaylihi’s writing at the end of the nineteenth century, prose writing in Egypt had begun to develop in a number of different directions. In addition to a major growth in the production of newspapers and magazines, and a continued increase in the number of translations and adaptations from Western languages (mainly French and English), Egyptian publications were beginning to reflect the first stirrings of Egyptian feminism, and a number of novels were produced by Egyptian women; few, if any, of these publications, however, could rival the series of some twenty-­two historical novels published by the Lebanese émigré Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), who from 1891 produced a novel a year – each novel closely based on a period or incident in Islamic history – until his unexpectedly early death. Although the construction of these works may seem to the modern critic at times almost

6 | sonallah i br a h im unbearably pedestrian, they retain an importance not only because of their enduring popularity but also because they laid the foundations for a ‘historical trend’10 in the modern Egyptian novel which has encompassed not only the early novels of the Nobel-­prizewinning novelist Naguib Mahfouz [Najib Mahfuz] (1911–2006) published in the late 1930s and early 1940s,11 but also a number of more modern and contemporary novelists, including members of the so-­called ‘Generation of the Sixties’ such as Gamal [Jamal] al-­Ghitani (1945–2015), with whose name that of Sonallah Ibrahim is often linked.12 1919–45 Despite the early efforts of the nah∂a pioneers, it was not until the interwar years that the Egyptian novel can be said to have reached any sort of maturity. A significant landmark (at least in retrospect) was the appearance of Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab13 (written in Paris in 1910–11 and first published in 1913), one of the first full-­length Arabic novels to combine a contemporary Egyptian setting with a romantic plot developed on Western lines. Although works of popular fiction continued to be published during the 1920s, however, Haykal’s pioneering work was not immediately built upon, and few novels of major literary significance appeared during this period. By contrast, autobiographical writing (which had not been a conspicuous feature of the pre-­modern Arabic or Islamic literary tradition)14 received a major boost with the publication in 1926–7 of the first instalments of the blind Egyptian author Taha Hussein [Husayn]’s autobiography, al-­Ayyam (The Days), which recounted his childhood in an Upper Egyptian village with considerable psychological insight. The work undoubtedly derived part of its impact from the fact that the author himself was concurrently engaged in a major controversy over a work of literary criticism, Fi al-­shiʿr al-­jahili (On Pre-­Islamic Poetry; 1926), in which he cast doubt on the authenticity of much pre-­Islamic poetry (an argument no longer widely accepted); but the blending of fact and fiction exemplified by al-­Ayyam in an autobiographical context represents a strand in the evolution of modern Egyptian prose writing on which, as we shall see later, Sonallah Ibrahim himself was to draw heavily.15 If the 1920s may be regarded as a somewhat unproductive period as far as novel writing was concerned, the same could not be said of the fol-

int rod ucti on: ba ck g round a n d co nte x t | 7 lowing decade; indeed, it was during the 1930s that the novel in Egypt can truly be said to have ‘come of age’. The increasing interest in the form is evidenced by the institution of a novel-­writing competition, which was won by a work by Ibrahim al-­Mazini (1890–1949) entitled Ibrahim al-­Katib (Ibrahim the Writer; 1931), the semi-­autobiographical nature of which is immediately suggested by its title. The credit for initiating a new realistic trend, however, belongs almost certainly not to al-­Mazini but to Tawfiq al-Hakim, better known as a playwright, whose rambling two-­part novel ʿAwdat al-­Ruh (Return of the Spirit), published in 1933 (the same year as his seminal drama Ahl al-­Kahf, People of the Cave),16 depicts the life and loves of a middle-­class Egyptian family at the time of the First World War. Clearly based on the author’s own experiences, the work culminates in optimistic mood, with a brief depiction of the 1919 popular revolt led by Saʿd Zaghlul that for al-­Hakim represented the ‘Return of the Spirit’. The increasing importance of the novel in Egypt was also reflected in publications by other leading writers of al-­Hakim’s generation, including Taha Hussein and Ibrahim al-­Mazini (already mentioned above), ʿAbbas Mahmud al-ʿAqqad (1889–1964) and Mahmud Taha Lashin (1894–1954). For the most part, these authors – like Tawfiq al-­Hakim, indeed – are today remembered for the contributions that they made in other areas of literary life rather than for their novels: Al-ʿAqqad’s largely forgotten Sara (1938), for example, which revolves around an unsatisfactory love affair, is flawed by excessive analysis and abstraction, and the author retains his reputation for the role he played in the poetic Diwan Group, for the contribution that he made to Arabic literary criticism, and for his numerous studies on literary and other figures from the medieval Islamic period rather than for his one venture into the field of the novel.17 In a similar way, Mahmud Taha Lashin’s single novel, Hawwa bila Adam (Eve without Adam; 1934), which again revolves around an unsuccessful love affair, has been eclipsed by the author’s contribution to the maturation of the Egyptian short story, in particular through his membership of the so-­called ‘Modern School’ (al-­Madrasa al-­Haditha).18 It is only when we come to Naguib Mahfouz that we encounter for the first time in Egypt (and indeed, the Arab world more generally) a novelist who not only remains widely known on the international level (particularly following his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988),19 but was also

8 | sonallah i br a h im to exercise a considerable influence on subsequent generations of Egyptian writers, including Sonallah Ibrahim himself. Following an earlier trend, Mahfouz launched his novelistic career with a series of historical novels, beginning with ʿAbath al-­Aqdar (The Game of Fates; 1939), but quickly diverted his attention instead to the world around him, producing a series of works in which he explored the search for new values in contemporary Egypt. The series of Mahfouz’s novels beginning with al-­Qahira al-­Jadida (Cairo Modern; 1946?) and Khan al-­Khalili (1946)20 – works peopled with the colourful personalities of the backstreets of Cairo – culminated in the so-­called ‘Trilogy’ (al-­Thulathiyya, written before the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution but not published until 1956–7); the work chronicles in loving detail the life of a lower-­middle-class Egyptian family in the period between the two world wars – a hint of the turbulent period on which Egypt was about to embark being provided in the last section of the novel, when the two brothers Ahmad and ʿAbd al-­Munʿim go their separate ways, one to the left wing of the Wafd party, the other to the Muslim Brotherhood. Following the unfortunate experiment of Awlad Haratina (Children of our Quarter, translated into English as Children of Gebelawi; 1959) – an extended religious allegory that incurred the wrath of the conservative Muslim establishment – Mahfouz then embarked on a series of works, beginning with al-­Liss wa-­al-Kilab (The Thief and the Dogs; 1961) and ending with Miramar (1967), which blended social criticism with wider existential and philosophical concerns, and which may be read as an increasingly pointed series of protests at the direction the Nasserist regime was taking the country. These novels combine a powerful sense of alienation with an increasing appetite for structural experimentation – a combination that is also a characteristic of many of the next generation of novelists, not least Sonallah Ibrahim himself, whose first major work (Tilka al-­Raʾiha)21 was published during this phase of Mahfouz’s career. Following the 1967 Six-­ Day War, Mahfouz – who had effectively stopped writing for several years after the 1952 Revolution – again underwent a period of self-­imposed silence, and produced no further extended prose works until al-­Maraya (Mirrors; 1972), a series of vignettes of Egyptian characters arranged (slightly oddly) in alphabetical order. Although he went on to produce a number of further novels, however, a new generation of writers (including Sonallah Ibrahim) had by this stage begun to make their mark, and

int rod ucti on: ba ck g round a n d co nte x t | 9 Mahfouz no longer occupied the pre-­eminent position that he had enjoyed in the field of the Egyptian and Arabic novel during much of his earlier career. The Egyptian Novel in the 1950s and Beyond The career of Naguib Mahfouz himself was a unique one in terms of its length and productivity, spanning as it did substantial periods of time both before and after the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution. The ramifications of that revolution left an indelible mark both on the Egyptian and on the wider Arab literary scene, and together with other political events in the Middle East – most obviously, the war in Palestine leading to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 – had helped to usher in a new generation of writers with different attitudes and outlooks from that of writers like Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-­Hakim, and indeed of Naguib Mahfouz himself. The new mood can perhaps best be summed up in a single word, iltizam (‘commitment’), a term that had first been used in this sense around 1950 as a translation of Jean-­Paul Sartre’s engagement, and which was thrust into prominence by the Lebanese author Suhayl Idris around 1953. In the debates that followed, a sort of ‘generation gap’ appeared between those older writers who adopted a position of ‘art for art’s sake’, and ‘committed’ writers and critics of the younger generation; but it is a measure of the dominance of the idea of iltizam that even writers such as Tawfiq al-­Hakim, previously notorious for his ‘ivory tower’ attitude to contemporary politics, felt obliged to reflect the new mood to some extent in his own work. In the Egyptian context, the new ‘catchword’, iltizam, was most obviously epitomised by the novel al-­Ard (Earth, translated into English as Egyptian Earth; 1954),22 by ʿAbd al-­Rahman al-­Sharqawi (1920–87) – a work that subsequently became widely known throughout the Arab world in the film version directed by Youssef Chahine (1969). In addition to its distinctively ‘realist’ style (a style involving, inter alia, the use of vigorous Egyptian colloquial in the dialogue), this work is also of interest for its use of historical analogy – for in writing of events in Egypt during the 1930s, al-­Sharqawi was also almost certainly venting his unspoken fears about the possible course of developments under the new Free Officers’ regime. A number of other talented writers also came to prominence during this period, including the woman writer Latifa al-­Zayyat (1923–96),23 whose first

10 | sonallah i b r a h im novel al-­Bab al-­maftuh (The Open Door; 1960) focused on the issue of women’s liberation in the context of the quest for national independence; Fathi Ghanim (1924–99), whose first novel, al-­Jabal (The Mountain; 1959), set in Upper Egypt, tackles the theme of the clash between tradition and modernity in the context of the villages of Gurna; and Yusuf Idris (1927–91), almost certainly the most gifted writer of his period, who, in addition to the plays and short stories for which he is rightly better known, published two novels and a number of novellas.24 Mahfouz’s works excepted, however, the most exciting developments in Egyptian literature during the 1950s and early 1960s belonged to the theatre rather than the novel. Playwrights such as Nuʿman ʿAshur (1918–87), Alfred Farag (1929–2005), Lutfi al-­Khuli (1929– ), Saʿd al-­Din Wahba (1925–97), and Yusuf Idris (already mentioned) – sometimes grouped together under the title of the ‘new wave’ of Egyptian dramatists25 – consciously tried to mould a specifically Egyptian, politically ‘committed’ drama, which often merged traditional forms of Arab theatrical activity with contemporary avant-­garde developments in the Western theatre, and which undoubtedly benefitted (at first, at least) from the new regime’s recognition of the theatre’s potential as a propaganda tool. If the 1950s and early 1960s belonged to the dramatists, however, the period following the 1967 Arab defeat in the Six-­Day War is most obviously associated with a group of writers – mainly, but not exclusively Egyptian – who were predominantly novelists and short-­story writers and who are commonly known as the ‘Generation of the Sixties’ (jil al-­sittinat). It is to this generation that the subject of the present study, Sonallah Ibrahim, himself belongs. Despite the great diversity of background of authors emerging during this period (who include a number of prominent women writers such as Alifa Rifʿat (1930–95), Salwa Bakr (1949– ) and Nawal al-­Saʿdawi (1931– )), the majority shared a number of common assumptions about, and attitudes towards, contemporary society, and in many cases employed similar themes and techniques. The principal ‘mouthpiece’ for the group of intellectuals most closely associated with this new movement was a short-­lived but influential periodical called Gallery 68, which appeared in eight issues between 1968 and 1971 under the editorship of, among others, Edwar [Idwar] al-­Kharrat (1926–2015), himself one of the most imaginative Egyptian writers of his generation, as well as a prolific translator, and who acted as a sort of ‘mentor’ to the group.26

int ro d ucti on: back g round and co n te x t | 11 A short digression on terminology is in order at this point, for although the term jil al-­sittinat is almost always associated more or less closely with writers whose work appeared in Gallery 68 – an imposing list, which includes, inter alios, Yahya al-­Tahir ʿAbd Allah (already mentioned), Ibrahim Aslan (1935–2012), Sulayman Fayyad (1929–2015), Gamal [Jamal] al-­Ghitani (1945–2015), Ghalib Halasa (1932–89), ʿAbd al-­Hakim Qasim (1834–90), Yusuf al-­Sharuni (1924– ), and Bahaʾ Tahir (1935– ), whose novel Wahat al-­Ghurub (Sunset Oasis)27 won the first IPAF (International Prize for Arabic Fiction) award in 2008 – to apply the term exclusively to these writers seems unduly restrictive. There are two main objections to such a definition. The first is that the literary and other links between authors such as, for example, Gamal al-­Ghitani, who published in the periodical, and Yusuf al-­Qaʿid (1944– ), who did not, make the inclusion of the one and the exclusion of the other a somewhat artificial exercise. The second (and more important in relation to the subject of the present book) is that commentators on this critical period in the development of modern Egyptian literature almost universally cite Sonallah Ibrahim’s short novella, Tilka al-­Raʾiha, first published in 1966,28 as the seminal work in ushering in the new mood, even though Sonallah Ibrahim himself had no direct connection with the periodical. In this connection, it is also relevant to note that although the disillusionment that is one of the hallmarks of the Generation of the Sixties has often been held to spring, at least indirectly, from the Six-­Day War of 1967, the seeds of that disillusionment had in fact been sown considerably earlier, as is evidenced by the date of publication of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novella. In the short discussion of the Generation of the Sixties which follows, I shall therefore draw no distinction between Gallery 68 authors and others, but will simply attempt to draw attention to some ‘common threads’ that run through much of the novelistic output of this period, as background to the extended discussion of Sonallah Ibrahim’s own works in the chapters to follow. First of all, in terms of general mood, it is fair to say that Tilka al-­Raʾiha set a benchmark for the expression of alienation that has seldom been surpassed, either by the author himself or by his contemporaries, and that this general tone, most frequently characterised as one of ‘disillusionment’, is an almost constant undercurrent in the novels of the succeeding years. Moreover, although almost all the novelists of this generation could be

12 | sonallah i b r a h im described as ‘committed’ in some way or other,29 their commitment was of a different order from the commitment of ʿAbd al-­Rahman al-­Sharqawi in al-­ Ard – less optimistic, more outspoken, tinged with rejection and self-­doubt. Paradoxically, perhaps, although the orientation of many writers (including Sonallah Ibrahim) might be described as ‘neo-­realist’, their disillusion with contemporary society was frequently accompanied, as in Naguib Mahfouz’s own works, by an increased awareness of the potential of earlier traditions of Arabic literature as a starting point, or support, for their own narratives – the awareness of this potential gaining additional momentum from the search for new forms of expression either in imitation of, or as a reaction to, the various forms of Western ‘modernisms’. The fluctuating, and often unpredictable, demands of the censor not infrequently prompted the use of a historical period as a metaphor for the present, while various forms of ‘intertextuality’ (the incorporation into a narrative of texts from outside the main text itself)30 became a favourite device in the works of many authors and is one with which Sonallah Ibrahim himself is most conspicuously associated. These features (not all of which are equally relevant for a discussion of Sonallah Ibrahim’s own works themselves) may be well illustrated through a consideration of the novels of Gamal al-­Ghitani, one of the most talented, as well as prolific, writers of this generation. His first full-­length novel, al-­ Zayni Barakat (1971), set in Cairo just before the Ottoman invasion of Egypt in 1517, revolved around the historical figure of al-­Zayni Barakat ibn Musa, who served as muhtasib of Cairo from 1505, and who appears to be, on one level at least, a metaphor for Gamal Abdel Nasser [Jamal ʿAbd al-­Nasir], whose survival of the 1967 defeat paralleled al-­Zayni’s survival of the Ottoman invasion of Egypt in 1516–17. In the course of his narrative, al-­Ghitani makes extensive use of the Egyptian historian Ibn Iyas’s (1448–c. 1524) Badaʾiʿ al-­Zuhur fi waqaʾiʿ al-­duhur (Wondrous Flowers on the Events of the Times), which he both quotes and parodies, while at the same time introducing into his narrative events and characters with no historical basis whatever, to create a work in which the dividing line between fact and fiction has become completely blurred. The intertextual techniques used by Gamal al-­Ghitani in al-­Zayni Barakat were further developed and refined in subsequent works such as Waqaʾiʿ Harat al-­Zaʿfarani (Events in Za’farani Alley; 1976), in which the author makes extensive use of official reports and

int ro d ucti on: back g round and co n te x t | 13 newspaper extracts, while in Khitat al-­Ghitani (Al-­Ghitani’s Maps; 1980), the author parodies the traditional Islamic khitat form to paint a picture of contemporary Egypt that is not only rife with corruption but has also (as Gamal al-­Ghitani, together with most of his fellow Egyptian writers, perceived it) capitulated to the Israeli enemy. Many of the techniques and themes to be found in Gamal al-­Ghitani’s works – most particularly, the potential for using various forms of intertextuality – are prominent also in novels by other contemporary Egyptian authors such as Yusuf al-­Qaʿid, as well as those of Sonallah Ibrahim himself; and although Gamal al-­Ghitani’s use of history as an analogue for the present is not in general a conspicuous feature of Sonallah Ibrahim’s writing, the blurring of the dividing line between fact and fiction seen in al-­Ghitani’s al-­Zayni Barakat is certainly one of the defining characteristics of Sonallah Ibrahim’s work, from Tilka al-­Raʾiha (1966) to his most recent publications, as discussed in later chapters of the present study. Despite their obvious thematic and technical links with the works of his contemporaries, however, Sonallah Ibrahim’s works also have a flavour all their own, part at least of which can no doubt be attributed to his own background and early experiences. Before embarking on our analysis of his novelistic output, it will therefore be appropriate, in the following chapter, to give a brief account of Sonallah Ibrahim’s own life – a life that since the mid-­1960s has been dominated by his devotion to the craft of writing, and an understanding of which seems crucial for an understanding of the direction of his literary career. Succeeding chapters will explore each of his dozen or so novels individually, and the book will conclude with an attempt at an overall evaluation of his work. Notes 1. For which, see Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 23–41. 2. Abdallah Laroui, cited in Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 2nd edn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), p. 60. 3. For a general account of the cultural development of modern Egypt, see Paul Starkey, ‘Modern Egyptian culture in the Arab world’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Modern History of Egypt, vol. 2: Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the end of the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 394–426.

14 | sonallah i b r a h im 4. On this, see, in particular, Roger Allen and Donald Richards (eds), Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, vol. 6: Arabic Literature in the Post-­Classical Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), passim. 5. On this, see Reuven Snir, Modern Arabic Literature: A Functional Dynamic Historical Model (Toronto: York Press, 2001). 6. English translation, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826–1831), translated and introduced by Daniel L. Newman (London: Saqi Books, 2004). 7. For the classical maqama, see J. S. Meisami and Paul Starkey (eds), Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 507–8. 8. For al-­Muwaylihi and Hadith ʿIsa ibn al-­Hisham, see Roger Allen, A Period of Time (London: Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1992). 9. Boutros Hallaq, ‘Love and the birth of modern Arabic literature’, in Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor (eds), Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 1995), p. 17. English translation of al-­Saq . . . by Humphrey Davies as Leg over Leg or the Turtle Dove in the Tree: concerning the Fāriyāq, what manner of creature might he be, 4 vol. (New York: New York University Press, 2013–14). 10. To use Hamdi Sakkut’s term. See Sakkut, The Egyptian Novel and its Main Trends from 1913 to 1952 (Cairo, 1971), especially pp. 46–84. 11. On whom, see (among numerous other works both in Arabic and European languages), Rasheed El-­Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: the Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993). 12. See further below. For a general introduction to this generation of writers, see Elisabeth Kendall, Literature, Journalism and the Avant-­Garde (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). 13. English translation, Zainab, by John Mohammed Grinsted (London: Darf, 1989). For a more extended discussion of this work, see Ami Elad, The Village Novel in Egypt (Berlin: Schwarz, 1992), pp. 54ff. 14. On this, see Dwight F. Reynolds (ed.), Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (Oakland: University of California Press, 2001). 15. On Taha Husayn, see Pierre Cachia, ˝āhā Óusayn: his Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (London: Luzac, 1956). 16. On al-­Hakim generally, see Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower (London: Garnet, 1987).

int ro d ucti on: back g round and co n te x t | 15 17. For further information on al-ʿAqqad, see David Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics (Leiden: Brill, 1974), pp. 3–65. 18. On Lashin, see Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi Books, 1993), especially pp. 215–68; Hilary Kilpatrick, ‘Óawwāʾ bilā Ādam: an Egyptian novel of the 1930s’, Journal of Arabic Literature 34 (1973), 48–56. 19. Mahfouz remains the only Arab winner of the prize. There is an enormous amount of literature on Mahfouz, in Arabic, English and other languages; a good introduction is provided by Rasheed El-­Enany, Neguib Mahfouz: the Pursuit of Meaning (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003). 20. The precise dates of publication of this sequence of novels have been the subject of some controversy. For a discussion, see, for example, El-­Enany, Neguib Mahfouz (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 220–1. 21. For which, see Chapter 3 below. 22. English translation as Egyptian Earth by Desmond Stewart (London, 1962); new edition with foreword by Robin Ostle (London, 1990). For al-­Sharqawi, see Hilary Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel (London: Ithaca Press, 1974), pp. 126–39. 23. For whom, see Sayyid al-­Bahrawi (ed.), Latifa al-­Zayyat: al-­adab wa-­al-watan (Cairo: Nur, Dar al-­ Marʾa al-ʿArabiyya lil-­ Nashr: Markaz al-­ Buhuth al-ʿArabiyya, 1996); English translation as The Open Door, by Marilyn Booth (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000). 24. There is a large literature on Yusuf Idris both in Arabic and English, as well as English translations of several of his works and short-­story collections. For a convenient introduction, see Dalya Cohen-­Mor, Yūsuf Idrīs: Changing Visions (Potomac: Sheba Press, 1992). 25. See M. M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 140–205. 26. For a full account of Gallery 68, see Kendall, Literature, Journalism and the Avant-­Garde, especially pp. 86ff. 27. English translation as Sunset Oasis, by Humphrey Davies (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008). 28. Two English translations of this work are available: the first, as The Smell of It, by Denys Johnson-­Davies (London: Heinemann, 1971); the second, as That Smell, by Robyn Creswell (New York: New Directions Books, 2013). For a full discussion, see Chapter 3. 29. On commitment generally, see, for example, M. M. Badawi, ‘Commitment

16 | sonallah i b r a h im in contemporary Arabic literature’, Cahiers d’histoire mondiale 14: 4 (1972), 859–79. 30. On intertextuality in modern Arabic literature generally, see Luc Deheuvels, Barbara Michalak-­Pikulska and Paul Starkey (eds), Intertextuality in Modern Arabic Literature since 1967 (Durham: Durham University, 2006; reprinted Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

.

2 Rebel with a Pen

S

onallah Ibrahim was born in Cairo in 1937, into what appears to have been a somewhat dysfunctional family. His father, a high-­ranking Egyptian civil servant, was nearly sixty when Sonallah was born – the first child of his father’s considerably younger second wife, who had originally been hired as a nurse to tend to his paralysed first wife. ‘I am the son of a father from the upper-­middle class’, Sonallah Ibrahim recalled a few years ago. ‘But his family looked down on me because my mother was from a poor background. She was more like a maid to my father’s first wife.’1 For reasons that are not entirely clear, the second wife apparently disappeared from the family scene at an early stage, a development that did little to alleviate the somewhat lonely existence that Sonallah Ibrahim appears to have suffered for most of his childhood.2 Details of his childhood are fairly sparse, but it is clear that his relationship with his father (who in terms of his age was more like a grandfather to him) was an important one in his formation. Sonallah Ibrahim’s father had held civilian posts in the War Ministry in Egypt and the Sudan, and the writer records that, like many men of his generation, he embodied a number of contradictions: he describes him as being both ‘religious’ and ‘enlightened’, and records that from him he learned both ‘to respect many religious values’, and at the same time ‘to hate the British occupier, the King, and corrupt parties; to be ready to rebel against the prevailing conditions and ideas; and not to accept anything that was not in accord with reason’.3 Bored at school, where he was a mediocre student, he quickly sought refuge in the world of fantasy – conveyed to him, as to other writers of his generation, through the Riwayat al-­jayb (Pocket Stories) series of publications, where he made the acquaintance of such ‘heroes’ as Arsène Lupin, Robin Hood, the Three Musketeers, and Captain Blood – many of

18 | sonallah i b r a h im them renowned, as the author notes, for ‘taking from the rich and giving to the poor’.4 He made his own first writing experiments at the age of twelve or thirteen, and also tried translating stories from English into Arabic at about the same time. In 1950, Sonallah Ibrahim moved with his father and younger sister from al-ʿAbbasiyya to Dokki, near Cairo University, changing schools in the process, and around this time won third prize (3 Egyptian pounds) in a story-­ writing competition for a story entitled ‘al-­Asl wa-­al-Sura’ (The Original and the Copy). In retrospect, at least, the author seems to have regarded this title as prophetic: ‘I didn’t know at the time’, he notes in Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat (Oasis Diaries),5 ‘that my whole life would revolve around this difficult comparison, and the continuing attempt to reconcile the ideal with the real.’ In the meantime, spurred on by the growing political ferment in Egypt and the increasingly open activities of organisations such as ‘Haditu’,6 he was also developing an interest in politics, and began building up an archive of political press cuttings, a habit that he has continued to this day. At the beginning of 1952, Sonallah Ibrahim participated in demonstrations at Cairo University and elsewhere, where he made the acquaintance of colleagues who would be his fellow inmates in the Oasis Prison (Sijn al-­ Wahat). He was briefly arrested in the days leading up to the Cairo Fire7 of 26 January 1952. Later that year, in the autumn of 1952, a few months after the Free Officers’ Revolution that marked the end of the Egyptian monarchy and the institution of a regime that was to last – under Presidents Naguib, Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak8 – until the fall of Mubarak in February 2011, he enrolled (at what seems a surprisingly young age) in the Cairo University Faculty of Law, with the intention of studying law and drama. Despite remaining there for three or four years, however, he repeatedly failed his exams and did not complete the course. Instead, he turned to journalism and politics, which at this stage he saw as his life’s mission; he became involved with left-­wing political organisations, produced magazines and wall-­posters, and made the acquaintance of others who would later become prominent in Egyptian (and Sudanese) literary and political life – Bahaʾ Tahir, Yusuf Idris, Ihsan ʿAbd al-­Quddus (1919–90), and the Sudanese poets Jili ʿAbd al-­Rahman (1931– ) and Taj al-­Sirr al-­Hasan (1930–2013) among many others. It was at this stage that his literary horizons appear to have started to

rebel wi th a pen | 19 expand to embrace a wide variety of world literature, which he read largely in books exchanged among his colleagues; in this way he made the acquaintance, inter alia, of the works of Chekhov, Steinbeck, Sartre, Brecht, Malraux, Camus and Thomas Mann (at least some of whom left a lasting influence on his work) – though the group apparently failed to make much sense of Henri Lefebvre. In 1954, Yusuf Idris promised to publish one of his stories in the magazine Ruz al-­Yusuf, but was himself detained before he could make good on his promise; a similar fate also befell Sonallah Ibrahim himself the same year, when with a group of friends he founded a society known as ‘al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida’ (‘The New Culture’) and staged a debate about the merits or otherwise of foreign investment in Egypt. These developments coincided with the so-­called March Crisis, an episode in the ongoing power struggle between Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohammed Naguib that began almost immediately after the 1952 Revolution and eventually led to the ousting of the latter in 1954. It was at this stage, apparently under the influence of Gorky’s Mat’ (The Mother; 1906 – presumably in its English translation),9 that he took the decision to become more directly involved in political activity and joined ‘Haditu’, which was calling for the overthrow of the ‘military dictatorship’;10 neglecting his studies in favour of distributing pamphlets, he incurred the wrath of his father, but for the first time in his life stood up to him, threatening – by his own account – to kill him if he threw the pamphlets away.11 In June 1955, Sonallah Ibrahim’s father died, and his younger sister moved to stay with his elder half-­brother, leaving Sonallah Ibrahim on his own at an unusually early age. This development afforded him the opportunity to immerse himself in political activity, and he quit university, living in a succession of flats, the first of which belonged to a Jewish family who were preparing to migrate to Israel. Although his primary focus at this stage was clearly politics, he continued to indulge in some literary activities, writing a short story about a love-­tryst between two revolutionaries, which he hoped to publish in the party magazine, until the editor refused it;12 he also acquired valuable experience as an English-­Arabic translator in an enterprise involving a Soviet magazine. During this period, he was arrested again on several occasions for political activities, as the Communist Party’s hitherto largely covert activity became more open. The ups-­and-downs in the fortunes of the various

20 | sonallah i b r a h im factions of the Egyptian Left at this time are almost impossible to follow at a remove of over half a century, but it is clear that the political atmosphere was a highly charged one. Sonallah Ibrahim himself notes that the three Egyptian communist parties merged at the beginning of 1958,13 and to the charged political atmosphere in Egypt itself must be added significant developments in the wider Middle East – the same year witnessing not only the inauguration of the short-­lived political union between Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic,14 but also the revolution of July 1958 that brought the Baath Party to power in Iraq.15 A major turning point in his life, for Sonallah Ibrahim as for many others, came on 1 January 1959, when, as part of Nasser’s redoubled campaign against the Left, he was arrested and found himself first in Cairo’s historic citadel, before being transferred to the Misr Prison. The prison, so Sonallah Ibrahim records,16 was provided with a good library, to which inmates had indirect access, and he was here able to extend his reading to include authors such as Taha Hussein and Ibrahim al-­Mazini, as well as the English writer Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. A book by a Swedish author awoke in him an interest in the animal world on which he was to pen a series of books some two decades later, and he also made the acquaintance of the world of Frank Lloyd Wright through Ayn Rand’s controversial novel The Fountainhead, about which he had mixed views.17 From Misr Prison, Sonallah Ibrahim was transferred, with others, to al-­Wahat (Oases) Prison, where prisoners were divided among four different blocks accommodating, respectively, communists held without charge, communists sentenced to specified prison terms, Muslim Brothers (who had been implicated in a recent attempt to assassinate Abdel Nasser in Alexandria) and non-­political prisoners. From there, he was in turn transferred, after only a few months, to al-­Qanatir al-­Khayriyya, where conditions were considerably harsher, and prisoners were effectively barred from any sort of literary activity, with the exception of access to the Old and New Testaments and the Qurʾan. In February 1960, Sonallah Ibrahim was again transferred, with other communists, to Alexandria, where he appeared before a military court on charges of conspiring to overthrow the regime. At the end of the trial they were taken directly to the Abu Zaʿbal [Zaabal] Prison outside Cairo. There they were immediately subjected to a regime of humiliation, beatings and tor-

rebel wi th a pen | 21 ture which quickly ended in the tragic death of a colleague, Shuhdi ʿAtiyya, a leading Egyptian communist, with whom he had worked closely before their arrest; this incident caused considerable embarrassment to Nasser, who was forced to order an inquiry after it had been raised with him by the Yugoslav leader, Marshal Tito, at a meeting in Belgrade.18 Several more moves followed, until in mid-­May 1964, as part of Nasser’s drive to ingratiate himself with the Soviet Union in order to secure funding for the Aswan High Dam, Sonallah Ibrahim,19 together with many others, was exonerated and released early, after a total of five and a half years. Sonallah Ibrahim’s prison diaries, published some forty years later as Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat,20 present a highly personal view of a lifestyle in which, although cruelty and deprivation were the general order of the day, friendship, solidarity and even humour were also to be found in abundance. Thanks to the nature of the Nasserist regime, Egyptian prisons at the time contained a prodigious variety of inmates, with a wide range of views, providing considerable scope for Sonallah Ibrahim’s imagination. At least during certain periods, security seems to have been somewhat lax, allowing scope for a variety of cultural and sporting activities; relations between inmates and guards were often quite informal, and the guards brought the prisoners reading material, enabling them at one time to accumulate a collection of some 10,000 books, newspapers and magazines. In an attempt to improve upon the wretchedness of the food provided by the prison, the inmates also set up their own farm, and at one point, a sort of ‘book fair’ was staged inside prison. It was during this period that Sonallah Ibrahim made his first serious attempts at writing short stories; he also wrote several chapters of a novel entitled Khalil Bey, which was never published but which formed part of the basis for his subsequent novel entitled Talassus (Stealth), discussed in Chapter 11. In addition to these first attempts at fiction, between 1962 and 1964 he kept a diary in which he recorded his ideas and comments on books he had read, as well as thoughts on literary theory and political and philosophical topics, and plans for future stories of his own; it is these jottings that were subsequently published, together with an introduction and an afterword, as well as copious annotations, as Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat. Sonallah Ibrahim’s prison diaries are remarkable for the wide acquaintance that they reveal with the works of foreign writers, not only from the

22 | sonallah i b r a h im Soviet Union (a not unnatural interest for an Egyptian communist intellectual at the time) but also from the West; the diaries are replete with the names of Camus, Zola, T. S. Eliot, Brecht and the like – a recurring preoccupation being with the works of Ernest Hemingway, whose style, as we shall see, was to become a central influence on that of Sonallah Ibrahim himself, at least in his early works. This acquaintance is all the more remarkable in that, as Robyn Creswell notes,21 ‘[e]xcept in a few cases, Ibrahim did not have access to the texts mentioned in the Notes in the original language, or even in translation. He did not read the novels or poems . . . [but] imagined them as they were described or excerpted in the pages of Cairo’s cultural supplements, French journals, and American magazines.’ A major preoccupation of the author is with the nature of ‘realism’, which had been a central concern of Egyptian (and other Arab) authors since the late 1940s and early 1950s; indeed, Creswell goes so far as to suggest that Notes from Prison ‘can be read as a late episode in the debate between Realism and Modernism among intellectuals such a Georg Lukács, Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin during the 1930s and 1940s – the great age of speculation about the relationship between politics and literature.’22 In November 1963, Sonallah Ibrahim started to transfer these jottings to Turkish ‘Bafra’ cigarette papers with a view to smuggling them out of prison – a task in due course accomplished by Husayn ʿAbd Rabbihi – and when he was released from prison in mid-­May 1964, he was able to recover them from his sister. He kept them safe and transferred them to computer in 1998, but did not at first think of publishing them, as he considered them too personal. In 2003, however, he was invited by his old friend Mustafa Nabil, the editor of the periodical al-­Hilal, to contribute a few pages on the factors that had contributed to his formation as a writer; extracts from the diaries were published in the November and December 2003 numbers of al-­Hilal, following which he made the decision to publish them in book form. The diary entries, which extend from April 1962 to April 1964, are more than occasionally a little cryptic (reflecting the need to avoid sexual topics and allusions to people within prison) but are copiously annotated in their published book form, to an extent that they provide a potentially invaluable source for researchers on the left-­wing politics and personalities of the period.23

rebel wi th a pen | 23 Despite the obvious hardships of Sonallah Ibrahim’s years in prison, they were also highly fruitful ones in terms of his development both at a personal level and as a writer, and it was indeed at this point that he made the decision to devote himself to writing rather than political activism.24 This period also provided material for two of his novels – Tilka al-­Raʾiha (1966) and Sharaf (1997) – which will be discussed in more detail below. In April 1964, in anticipation of the Soviet leader Khrushchev’s visit to Egypt, it was decided to release all communists currently held in Egyptian jails – a process that was completed during the course of May 1964, and is described by Sonallah Ibrahim in the ‘Fadhlaka khitamiyya’ (Closing Summary) that forms the last section of the version of Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, as published in 2005. Sonallah Ibrahim found himself transferred first to Bani Suwayf and then to Cairo; the somewhat messy arrangements for his release that are described in Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat form the basis for the opening pages of Tilka al-­raʾiha, to be discussed in the following chapter.25 Sonallah Ibrahim’s notes on this period record that ‘the country was in the grip of a “police state” atmosphere, which led to the spread of negativity and indifference, and a turning away from political activity among the common people’ – a telling indication that the mood of despair and cynicism traditionally associated with the aftermath of the 1967 defeat in fact had its origins in the preceding period. Finding a job was not always easy for the large number of newly released prisoners, but following his release from prison in 1964, Sonallah Ibrahim briefly found employment in the Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida bookshop in Cairo, owned by Shuhdi’s widow. The ambiguous relationship between the Nasserist regime, on the one hand, and the Egyptian communists and other parties of the Left, on the other, continued during this period, but by this stage Sonallah Ibrahim had decided that he wanted to devote his life to writing rather than political activism. The final paragraphs of his ‘Fadhlaka’ record simply that: My organisational connection with Haditu ceased from the moment of my release without any conscious decision on either side. Neither of us made any effort for the other. After that, I took no part in the Socialist Union or in the avant-­garde organisation, nor did I attend any of the conferences of the . . . committee headed by Kamal Rifʿat or his deputy Muhammad

24 | sonallah i b r a h im Nusayr. No one invited me to any of these things, for I was not important enough. I also had my own agenda. In the room in Heliopolis, and the rooms that followed it, I was contemplating the biggest adventure I had undertaken in my life: to be a writer.26

In summer 1965, Sonallah Ibrahim made an extended trip to Upper Egypt in the company of two other writers, Kamal al-­Qilish and Raʾuf Musʿad, in ‘an attempt to realise the dream of writing about the great [Aswan High Dam] project’. An account of their three-­month journey was subsequently published in Cairo in 1967 under the title Insan al-­sadd al-ʿali (The High Dam Man);27 the notes that Ibrahim made during this trip also formed part of the basis for a later fictional work, Najmat Aghustus (Star of August; his second published novel), written during 1966–73 and first published in 1974. In December 1965, he turned down an offer of employment as a clerk in the Abu Zaʿbal factory of the National Company for Mining Industries, but on 1 July 1966 – two years after his release from prison – found employment as an editor for the Egyptian state-­run Middle East News Agency (MENA = Wakalat Anbaʾ al-­Sharq al-­Awsat) at an initial salary of LE10 a month, which was quickly doubled when Muhammad Yusuf al-­Jindi took over as director of the Agency.28 It was not so much for developments such as these, however, that 1966 marked a definitive year in Sonallah Ibrahim’s career as for the fact that it also saw the publication of his first short novel (or novella), Tilka al-­Raʾiha, discussed in detail in Chapter 3, which immediately caused a literary sensation and was quickly confiscated by the authorities. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, which not only marked Sonallah Ibrahim’s entry into the modern Arabic literary arena, but in retrospect arguably also changed the course of modern Arabic literature, appeared in incomplete Arabic versions several times before it was finally published in a full version in 1986 in Khartoum, Cairo and Casablanca in quick succession. By this time, perhaps uniquely in the history of modern Arabic publishing, it had already appeared in a complete English version by Denys Johnson-­Davies, published some fifteen years earlier in 1971; it is also one of the few works of modern Arabic literature to have been retranslated into English – a second version, by Robyn Creswell, appearing in 2013.29

rebel wi th a pen | 25 In 1968, Sonallah Ibrahim left Cairo and moved to East Berlin, where he worked as an editor for the Arabic section of the East German news agency ADN for three years, before moving in 1971 to the former Soviet Union, having been offered a scholarship to study cinematography in Moscow. There he studied Russian and worked on a thirty-­minute film about Egyptian political prisoners by the Syrian film-­maker Muhammad Malas; but it seems that his temperament was not really attuned to the medium of film, and although he attended some classes and watched as many films as he could, the experience confirmed to him that his true vocation lay in the writing of novels. He was, however, able to utilise his cinematographic experience at a later date in Bayrut, Bayrut (Beirut, Beirut; 1984), discussed in Chapter 6; in addition, and more directly, his Moscow experiences provided the material for the later novel al-­Jalid (Ice), discussed in Chapter 13. In 1974 Sonallah Ibrahim returned to Egypt and worked briefly again in a publishing house, before quitting his job a year later to devote himself exclusively to writing. In the same year, 1975, he married. Although most Egyptian (and other Arab) authors have traditionally had to supplement their income from writing by working in other sectors – most often, in journalism, academia, or a civil service department – Sonallah Ibrahim apparently made an agreement with his wife at the time of his marriage ‘that I would be a full-­ time writer and that we would solve our financial problems with each other’s help. And in fact we haven’t had serious financial problems.’30 It is evidence of his seriousness of purpose that, in line with his general philosophy that one cannot do two things well at the same time (the same philosophy that had earlier prompted him to drop direct political action in favour of writing), he has since then turned down at least one offer of a position editing the culture pages of a newspaper.31 Since 1975, and with Tilka al-­Raʾiha and Najmat Aghustus already to his credit, Sonallah Ibrahim has spent the majority of his life in Cairo, living what would appear to the outsider to be a mostly rather humdrum existence in a modest apartment in Heliopolis. From there he has penned a series of some dozen novels, many of which have involved a considerable amount of historical research, and each of which may be regarded as constituting a political statement in some way or other; these novels will be discussed in detail individually in the succeeding chapters of this study. The series of

26 | sonallah i b r a h im novels, which began with Tilka al-­Raʾiha (1966), and which spans over four decades in terms of their dates of publication, comprises the following works: Tilka al-­Raʾiha (That Smell; 1966); Najmat Aghustus (Star of August; 1974); al-­Lajna (The Committee; 1981); Bayrut, Bayrut (Beirut, Beirut; 1984); Dhat (1992); Sharaf (Honour; 1997); Warda (Warda; 2000); Amrikanli (2003); and more recently, al-­Talassus (Stealth; 2007), al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa (The Turban and the Hat; 2008) and al-­Qanun al-­Faransi (The French Law; 2008), and finally al-­Jalid (Ice; 2011). As will be seen, the publication dates of many of these works are separated by several years, and indeed, ‘waiting for Sonallah Ibrahim’s next novel’ appears to have become during certain periods almost a pastime among some Cairo intellectuals. In terms of technique, most of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels listed above contain autobiographical elements (with the exception of al-ʿImama wa-­alQubbaʿa, which has an exclusively historical setting), and many are characterised by a mingling of fact and fiction that is sometimes difficult to disentangle; this feature is particularly marked in al-­Talassus, which, though labelled as fiction (riwaya), has many of the essential characteristics of a childhood memoir. The terse, ‘telegraphic’ style that characterised the author’s first novel, Tilka al-­raʾiha, and that partly explains the almost explosive impact of that work on first publication, is used intermittently rather than consistently through the series of novels; longer works such as Warda and Amrikanli tend to use a more expansive, less ‘modernistic’ form of expression, though the earlier style, as we shall see, makes a comeback in al-­Talassus and al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa. Most obviously, many of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels are distinguished by the copious use of intertextual devices that form such a conspicuous feature of much writing of this generation, not only in Egypt but also elsewhere in the Arab world. Less typical of contemporary Egyptian authors is Sonallah Ibrahim’s concern with the politics not merely of his own homeland but also of the wider Middle East. Thus, while Dhat (1992) and Sharaf (1997) may be seen as focusing mainly on the state of Egyptian society (a particular concern being the effect of Sadat’s ‘liberal’, free-­market policies), al-­Lajna (1981) appears equally if not more concerned with the effects of globalisation more generally. Bayrut, Bayrut (1984), for its part, is set in the context of the Lebanese Civil War, while Warda (2000) takes its inspiration from the struggle for national

rebel wi th a pen | 27 liberation that took place in the Dhofar Province of Oman during the 1960s and 1970s. A later novel, Amrikanli (2003), tells the story of an Egyptian professor (clearly based on Sonallah Ibrahim himself) teaching history at an American university; in an ironic twist, the title of the work forms a pun that can be read either as a single word Amrikanli, or as three words, Amri kana li, meaning roughly ‘Once I was my own master’. More recently, al-­Qanun al-­ Faransi (2008) is set almost entirely in France, and although partly concerned with French–Egyptian relations in a historical context, also touches on wider issues of colonialism, with an Algerian rather than an Egyptian focus. In addition to his novels, for which he is widely known both within and outside the Arab world, Sonallah Ibrahim has supplemented his income by various other forms of literary and cultural activity, including translation work, and books for children – a genre that in general has not attracted much interest or attention in the Arab world. In total, he has written some dozen children’s educational books, including novels and short stories – some of which revolve around animal and plant life, for example in the Red Sea. He has also produced scripts for cinema and television and translated a variety of books into Arabic: these include The Enemy, a novel by the American writer James Drought; several works by Grimm; and Brudians Esel, a novel by the German author Günter de Bruyn. In 1994, he published a selection of prose works by Western authors in an anthology under the title al-­Tajriba al-­unthawiyya (The Female Experience); and in 2000 he collaborated with the French photographer Jean-­Pierre Ribière in Cairo from Edge to Edge, a rich and highly original portrait of a city as seen through Ribière’s lens and Sonallah Ibrahim’s pen. These activities have enabled him to maintain a comfortable, if fairly basic, lifestyle in Heliopolis, as well as a professional independence that has been available to few authors in Egypt (or indeed the wider Arab world generally), where the direct or indirect dependence of writers and other intellectuals on the state has not only been the norm but has also arguably been responsible for impeding the imaginative development of much modern Arabic literature. The question of professional independence in the Arab literary world is nowhere thrown into starker relief than in the matter of literary prizes awarded either by governments or by other ‘official’ or ‘semi-­official’ bodies. In 1992 Sonallah Ibrahim accepted the Ghalib Halasa Award from the

28 | sonallah i b r a h im Jordanian Authors’ Union, and in 1993 accepted the Sultan Uwais award, worth $50,000, from the United Arab Emirates; in 2004 he also accepted the German-­based Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded after consideration by an independent jury of five Arab intellectuals (who included the prominent academics and critics Sabry Hafez and Faisal Darraj) ‘for his enduring fight for freedom of speech and democracy in the Arab world’; the organisation’s citation noted that ‘Throughout his works, Sonallah Ibrahim has made a continuous appeal to retain a critical conscience, to see through and comprehend political connections and entanglements. His novels encourage the reader to resist and not to tolerate the deplorable state of affairs, but to fight them.’32 Within Egypt itself, however, his relationship with the prize-­awarding bodies had for some time been a more complicated one: in 1993, his novel Dhat had been nominated as novel of the year at the Cairo International Book Fair, but the nomination was withdrawn when it was brought to the attention of the authorities that the book ‘discredited’ the state; in 1996 he privately rejected the Naguib Mahfouz Award offered by the American University in Cairo; and in 1998 he failed to show for the award when his novel Sharaf was nominated for the Cairo International Book Fair novel of the year award.33 Beyond the ‘prize circuit’, he had, by his own account, also ‘refused an invitation to visit the USA in the 1980s because the American ambassador had insulted the president and I felt this was a humiliation’.34 These incidents pale into insignificance, however, when set beside the stir caused in 2003 when he publicly and controversially refused the LE100,000 Arabic Novel award offered to him by the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture, arguing that the award was being given by a ‘government that does not have the credibility to award it’. Several accounts have been given of the ceremony and of Ibrahim’s elaborately staged rejection of the prize, which essentially represented an indictment of Egypt and other countries in the Arab world for their obsequiousness towards the USA, and for their supine attitude towards the Israeli occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people. Perhaps the most graphic and accessible of these accounts is that published by Samia Mehrez shortly after the event;35 it is worth quoting from this account at some length, not only because the ceremony itself has acquired the status of a sort of locus classicus in the annals of

rebel wi th a pen | 29 contemporary Arabic literature, but also because it sheds considerable light both on the reputation that Sonallah had acquired through the course of his long career and on his view of the Egyptian cultural and political ‘establishment’ of the time. The event was held in the Small Hall of the Egyptian Opera House on 22 October 2003 at the end of a conference on the Arab novel that had been hurriedly dedicated to the late Edward Said, who had died on 25 September 2003 after a long battle with leukaemia. The chair of the panel of judges, the Sudanese writer Tayyeb Saleh [al-­Tayyib Salih], characterised the winner of the prize, before naming him, as a ‘guardian of the sacred temple of Art’, describing him as an ascetic and as a champion of justice and truth who had dedicated his life to writing. Sonallah Ibrahim’s speech in reply began in a fairly conventional way, with mention of other writers he considered more deserving of the award, but as it went on, became more passionate and angry, as he embarked on a ‘eulogy’ of the Arab world that ‘once upon a time was Arab’: he complained that ‘At this very moment Israeli forces continue to occupy what remains of Palestinian land (. . .) executing, with concise precision and method, a genocide against the Palestinian people (. . .) But the Arab capitals continue to receive Israeli leaders with open arms . . .’ and declared that ‘We have no theatre, no cinema, no research, no education. We only have festivals and conferences and a trunkful of lies.’ Concluding his speech, the author announced ‘I publicly decline the prize because it is awarded by a government that, in my opinion, lacks the credibility of bestowing it’, before leaving the hall with his wife, to be greeted with adulation by members of the audience, particularly the younger generation of Egyptian intellectuals, for whom his words carried a particular resonance. Explaining his action shortly after the event, Sonallah Ibrahim himself provided some background to his decision in an interview with Youssef Rakha as follows: When I was informed that I was selected to receive the award, I felt two things. First, that it was inappropriate to be joining in a festive Arab procession at a time when Palestinians were being massacred en masse and the Egyptian individual so horrifically dispossessed. Second, that there might be an attempt to undermine my credibility, knowing that I had . . .

30 | sonallah i b r a h im refused to participate in a novelists’ conference in Morocco and objected to the Higher Council for Culture’s conference on renewing religious discourse, which smacked too much of Washington’s decrees in the wake of the war on Iraq . . . I didn’t sleep for three days thinking, and discussing with my wife, the best way to make my refusal public, and then drafting and redrafting the speech to make it as accurate and precise as I could . . . I was expecting those present to respond to me with cold resentment, so it was somewhat surprising to be met, all of a sudden, with such joyful gratitude – hugs and tears, people kissing my hand and climbing over my shoulders.36

Sonallah Ibrahim’s own account of the event may perhaps be judged a trifle disingenuous, as (hardly surprisingly) his actions did not meet with universal approval, and in the debate that followed, he was criticised for hypocrisy, discourtesy and a whole lot more. Although the primary division was clearly that between the Egyptian intellectual as represented by Ibrahim, and the Egyptian cultural establishment (as represented most obviously by Gaber Asfour, the secretary-­general of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture), the debate also exposed serious contradictions in the positions adopted by several leading writers, both from Egypt and elsewhere, and caused serious embarrassment for Tayyeb Saleh, the chairman of the judges, who, ironically, was to receive the same award shortly afterwards, and who described it as ‘childish’ and ‘devoid of decorum, a stupid, theatrical act’.37 More recently, the fall of the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in the context of the so-­called ‘Arab Spring’ has highlighted further potential contradictions in the positions of numerous Arab intellectuals, including Sonallah Ibrahim himself. Asked in an interview by Robyn Creswell if he was writing anything about the 25 January 2011 uprising, which led to the fall of President Mubarak, Ibrahim demurred, explaining that ‘To write about Tahrir would require a great deal of research’, and putting forward the view that what had happened in Tahrir Square ‘certainly was not a revolution. A revolution has a program and a goal – a complete change of reality or the removal of one class by another. What happened was a popular uprising [whose] primary demand was “regime change,” though it was not clear what that was supposed to mean, except in the sense of removing the most

rebel wi th a pen | 31 prominent symbols of the old regime.’38 In another interview at about the same time with the Egyptian newspaper al-­Yawm al-­Sabiʿ, he appeared to suggest that he held Abdel Fattah el-­Sisi in high esteem, noting that he had ‘challenged America and the West for the first time since ʿAbd al-­Nasir’ and endorsing his candidacy for the Egyptian presidency – an office that el-­Sisi subsequently assumed in June 2014.39 And a few months later, on 6 October 2013, Ursula Lindsey came away from her own interview with Sonallah Ibrahim wondering whether she (and by implication, many others) had actually been misreading the author all along. As she wrote: But because he opposed Mubarak, I misread his politics, which are not the liberal ones of my Egyptian friends, of the journalists, activists, artists, lawyers, teachers and bloggers who all went to Tahrir nearly three years ago – and today feel as depressed as Ibrahim’s alter ego in That Smell, wondering whether everyone else really doesn’t notice that things stink.40

It is, of course, too early to tell what the longer-­term results of el-­Sisi’s assumption of power will be, or whether, and to what extent, the tumultuous events in Egypt and the Middle East over the last few years will affect our reading of Sonallah Ibrahim’s own works as we re-­read and re-­evaluate them in retrospect. We shall return to this question in the concluding chapter of this study, when we attempt an overall evaluation of the author’s novels in the literary and political context of their time; but first, it will be necessary to discuss each work individually – bearing in mind that, as well as being linked by common threads, and apparently held together by a set of common attitudes over four or more decades, each one also has its distinguishing features that make it an object of literary interest in its own right in the literary and political context of the time. Notes 1. Interview with Abdalla F. Hassan entitled ‘Black Humor in Dark Times’, available at http://www.worldpress.org/print_article.cfm?article_id=1317 (last accessed 3 January 2014). See also Youssef Rakha’s interview with Sonallah Ibrahim entitled ‘The Smell of Dissent’ in al-­Ahram, 27 November–3 December 2003, available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/cu1.htm (last accessed 4 April 2014).

32 | sonallah i b r a h im 2. On his childhood generally, see Sonallah Ibrahim, Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, introduction, pp. 7–17; this written account may be filled out by material on a number of websites based on interviews with the author, e.g. that by Abdalla F. Hassan, note 1 above. See also Ibrahim’s later novel, al-­Talassus, discussed in detail in Chapter 11 below. 3. Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, p. 8. 4. Ibid. p. 8. 5. Ibid. pp. 9–10. 6. Al-­Haraka al-­Dimuqratiyya li-­l-Taharrur al-­Watani (‘Democratic Movement for National Liberation’). 7. Also known as Black Saturday. For a brief account, see Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–90 (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 29–32. 8. I use the term ‘regime’ a little loosely. Mubarak was not part of the original Free Officers’ movement, being a child at the time. His rule, however, represented a direct continuation of that of his predecessors. 9. For example, Mother, translated from the Russian by Margaret Wettlin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957?). 10. Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, p. 14. See above, note 6. 11. Ibid. p. 14. 12. Ibid. pp. 15–16. 13. Ibid. p. 18. 14. For which, see Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society, pp. 60ff. 15. For which, see Marion Farouk-­Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, rev. edn (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990). 16. Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, p. 22. 17. Ibid. pp. 22–3. 18. Ibid. 18–31. 19. See Chapter 4. 20. Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, [2005]. 21. Robyn Creswell, That Smell (New York: New Directions Books, 2013), Introduction, p. 14. 22. Ibid. p. 13. 23. Yamwiyyat al-­Wahat, pp. 34–45. 24. Rakha, ‘The Smell of Dissent’. 25. Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, pp. 184–96. 26. Ibid. p. 196. 27. Najmat Aghustus (Beirut, 1980), pp. 222–3.

rebel wi th a pen | 33 28. Yawmiyat al-­Wahat, pp. 195–6. 29. For details, see Chapter 3 and Bibliography. 30. Interview with Youssef Rakha at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/cu1. htm. 31. Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2010). 32. See http://www.ibn-­rushd.org/English/PR-­E-04.htm (also available in German and Arabic). 33. On this, see Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, pp. 42–6, 86. 34. Rakha, ‘The Smell of Dissent’. 35. Samia Mehrez, ‘The value of freedom’, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg, subsequently reproduced and expanded in Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, pp. 72–88. 36. Rakha, ‘The Smell of Dissent’. 37. On this episode, see Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, pp. 72–88. 38. Interview with Robyn Creswell, 20 August 2013, available at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-­turner/sonallah-­ibrahim-egypts-­oracular-novelist. 39. See al-­Yawm al-­sabiʿ, 24 August 2013. 40. Interview available at http://www.madamasr.com/sections/culture/voice-­ dissent-joins-­nationalist-chorus.

3 Cairo Prison: Tilka al-raʾiha (1966)

W

e begin our exploration of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, then, with Tilka al-­raʾiha,1 perhaps the best-­known and arguably still the most controversial of the author’s works, not only for the heated reaction that it provoked in the censor’s office,2 but also for the controversy it aroused among the Egyptian literary establishment – the author Yahya Haqqi (1905–93), for example, a man previously known for his generally liberal views, remarking that he found one scene ‘absolutely disgusting’.3 The work not only marks a seminal moment in the development of contemporary Egyptian (and, more generally, Arabic) literature, but is also arguably unique among such works in that as much, if not more, discussion has probably taken place about the work’s circumstances of publication as about the literary qualities of the work itself. The Background The political and literary background to the publication of this work (which for the purposes of the present discussion we will categorise as a novel, though ‘novella’ might be a better description)4 has for the most part been covered in previous chapters. The work is clearly heavily dependent on the author’s own experiences of life in Cairo, both inside and outside of prison, and it reflects the stifling political atmosphere that had begun to envelop Cairo (and indeed, Egypt more generally) as the heady initial optimism of the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution wore thin, to be replaced by a mood of disillusion bordering on despair. The situation of the work’s narrator/ protagonist in turn reflects that of the author himself – the course of whose life, as an Egyptian Marxist and member of Haditu (Democratic Movement for National Liberation), had inevitably been dependent in the late 1950s

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 35 and early 1960s on the vagaries of the Nasserist regime’s relationship with the Egyptian Communist Party and its various factions. The attitude of these factions towards the regime was itself a fluctuating one. The communists had initially welcomed the Free Officers’ coup of 1952, but quickly broke with them following the hanging of the leaders of a strike at the Kafr al-­Dawwar textile factory later that year. For his part, Nasser’s own stance was dictated by a combination of internal and external factors. The refusal of the newly consolidated Egyptian Communist Party to dissolve itself to allow individual members to join the National Union provided the pretext for the mass arrests in 1959 in which Sonallah Ibrahim himself was caught up. At the same time, however, Nasser was beginning to play a leading role on the world stage: his pan-­Arab ambitions were gaining strength, and together with India’s Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Tito, he would shortly emerge as a leader of the Non-­ Aligned Movement, formally founded in Belgrade in 1961. Paradoxically, Nasser’s onslaught on the Egyptian communists coincided with a period when Egypt was increasingly being drawn into the Soviet orbit for arms supplies, finance and technical support of various kinds – a relationship that had been sealed when, following the withdrawal of American and British funding in 1956, the USSR had agreed to finance the building of the Aswan High Dam. With the Soviet leader Khrushchev due to visit Egypt in 1964 to mark the inauguration of the High Dam’s first phase, Sonallah Ibrahim, together with many other communists, was released from prison.5 Surprisingly, perhaps, there are no explicit references – barely any allusions, indeed – to any of these events in Sonallah Ibrahim’s novella. Indeed, with the exception of a rather mild, ‘off-­the-cuff’ remark by the narrator’s brother to the effect that ‘Everything’s gone to pieces . . . since the workers became members of Management Committees’,6 and a few odd references to Russia and America, the only explicit political intrusion into the book would appear to be the passing reference to the Egyptian involvement in Yemen. From a window seat in the metro at Midan Ramses, the narrator sees another train pull alongside ‘full of soldiers returning from Yemen . . . ­shouting from the windows and waving their hands’; while for their part, the other passengers ‘looked at them coldly, without interest, and slowly the soldiers became less and less excited . . . I saw one throw his cap on the ground’.7 This reference (almost certainly the only one of its kind in the book) does at

36 | sonallah i b r a h im least tie the text of the narrative to an identifiable episode in Egyptian history, though even here the timing is vague, as the Egyptian involvement in the (North) Yemen Civil War – commonly now identified as a disaster for Egypt – spanned a period from 1962, well before the publication of Sonallah Ibrahim’s book, to 1967, a year after its appearance. The coldness of the Egyptian onlookers’ reaction to the returning soldiers in Sonallah Ibrahim’s work is almost certainly a faithful reflection of the general attitude of the Egyptian people to the war, which had begun as essentially a struggle between Yemeni royalists and republicans, but assumed a wider international significance as the republicans acquired the support of Egypt and the Soviet bloc, while Saudi Arabia and the West supported the royalists. As the war proceeded, the Egyptians – who had begun to be seen as ­‘occupiers’ – became progressively more bogged down and, to the great relief of most Egyptians, withdrew from the country on the occasion of the Arab–Israeli War of 1967 (the so-­called ‘Six-­Day War’). Following their withdrawal, the republican regime headed by President al-­Sallal collapsed, opening the way for national reconciliation.8 Publication, Critical Reception and Translations As already suggested, it is probably safe to say that almost as much has been written about the publication of Tilka al-­Raʾiha as about the work itself. The publishing history of Sonallah Ibrahim’s first novel is indeed extremely complex, but it will repay a fairly detailed discussion, as the way the work was received provides an invaluable guide not only to the censorship constraints under which all Egyptian authors were writing at the time, but also to the changes of attitude that were beginning to become apparent between different generations of Egyptian authors. A detailed synopsis of the vagaries of the work’s publication has already been given by Marina Stagh in The Limits of Freedom of Speech: Prose Literature and Prose Writers in Egypt under Nasser and Sadat9 and in what follows I depend heavily on her account. The first edition of the book was published in Cairo in February 1966 by a small left-­wing publishing house called Maktabat Yuliyu, with an enthusiastic introduction by Yusuf Idris, in which he lauded the work as ‘not just a story, [but] a revolution, the beginning of which is the artist’s rebellion against himself’.10 Ironically, following the lifting of martial law in 1964, the book’s

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 37 publication had not been subject to pre-­publication censorship, but it was nonetheless immediately confiscated, thus earning a reputation for being ‘the first literary work to be banned by Nasser’.11 An incomplete edition (omitting some sections that had shocked the veteran Egyptian author and critic Yahya Haqqi) was published by the Lebanese poet Yusuf al-­Khal (1917–87) in Shiʿr (Poetry) magazine in 1968, and a second, heavily censored, edition was published in Cairo in 1969 by Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida, the successor to Maktabat Yuliyu. By this time, however, the author had left Cairo to work for the German News Agency ADN in East Berlin,12 and knew nothing of his book’s republication. It was not until 1986 that the complete, unexpurgated, Arabic text was published by Dar Qurtuba in Casablanca, Morocco; this was followed a few months later by the publication of identical editions in Cairo and Khartoum by a small publishing house called Dar Shuhdi, which subsequently went out of business. The new edition included not only the original introduction by Yusuf Idris but also a new introduction by Sonallah Ibrahim himself,13 reflecting on the atmosphere in the Egypt of the early 1960s, on the circumstances of the book’s publication and on Yahya Haqqi’s reaction to it. In this preface, he not only recounts the confiscation of the work’s first edition but also recalls the atmosphere of his time in prison when, with his fellow internees Kamal al-­Qilish, Raʾuf Musʿad, ʿAbd al-­Hakim Qasim and others, he would avidly follow not only the progress of the Soviet poets Yevtushenko, Vozninsky and Tufardovsky but also American experiments in automatic writing and ‘sound and light’, and the French nouveau roman.14 By this time, Naguib Mahfouz had begun to turn his back on the ‘Balzac-­style’ novel, and a new generation of authors had started to appear, including not only the Egyptians Edwar al-­Kharrat, Bahaʾ Tahir, Sulayman Fayyad and Ibrahim Aslan, but also non-­Egyptian writers such as the Jordanian Ghalib Halasa.15 For his own part, Sonallah Ibrahim had started to fall under the spell of the American writer Ernest Hemingway, whose economical style he first encountered through two books of criticism that somehow found their way into the Kharga [al-­Kharija] prison; under Hemingway’s influence, he began to write a children’s story, though this was never completed. Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1986 introduction also confirms the essentially autobiographical nature of the work. Renting a flat in Misr al-­Jadida (Heliopolis) after his release from prison in 1964, he took to keeping a diary each evening

38 | sonallah i b r a h im after the policeman had called to check on his whereabouts. One day, he was struck by the thought that his notes might form the raw material for a work of art. As he later recalled: There was a buried current running through that telegraphic style, a style that never stopped for self-­examination, didn’t bother to search for le mot juste, nor to make sure that the language was neat and tidy, nor that all ugliness such as might shock delicate sensibilities had been scrubbed away . . . Why is it stipulated that we write only about flowers and perfume when shit fills the streets, when sewage water covers the earth and everyone smells it?16

Having formulated his plan, Sonallah Ibrahim worked on his book for three months before handing it to a printer, paying him twenty Egyptian pounds to publish it – the revolutionary intentions of the work being confirmed by the short manifesto on the cover signed by his friends Kamal al-­Qilish, Raʾuf Musʿad and ʿAbd al-­Hakim Qasim, which began: If you do not like the novel now between your hands, the fault isn’t ours. It is instead the fault of our cultural moment, dominated as it has been for many years by works of shallowness, naïveté, and conventionalism. To shatter this climate of artistic stagnation, we must turn to the kind of sincere and sometimes agonized writing you find here . . .17

Possibly uniquely in the history of modern Arabic literature, by the time of the first appearance of the full Arabic text of Tilka al-­Raʾiha in 1986, an English version of the work by Denys Johnson-­Davies (widely regarded as the doyen of modern Arabic–­English literary translators) had already been available for a decade and a half – published in London by Heinemann in 1971, together with four short stories by Sonallah Ibrahim under the title The Smell of It, and Other Stories. It was Denys Johnson-­Davies also who was responsible for tracing the correct provenance of the quotation from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (‘This race and this country and this life produced me . . . and I shall express myself as I am’) that appears at the beginning of the work and that Sonallah Ibrahim had originally ascribed to Joyce’s Ulysses.18 In 2013, a second English translation by Robyn Creswell was published under the title That Smell and Notes from Prison; this edition also incorporated translations of Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1986 introduction and

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 39 selected passages from Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, in addition to a useful introduction by Creswell himself. Other translations of the work have appeared in French, German, and several other languages. Creswell’s retranslation was apparently prompted by a feeling that Johnson-­Davies had failed to capture certain elements of the original, most notably the novel’s ‘disturbing inelegance’; Creswell noted that in Johnson-­Davies’s version ‘the unbroken block of the original text – a layout that fits the stream-­of-consciousness narrative – is transformed into tidy paragraphs and indented dialogue’ and criticised Johnson-­Davies’s for making ‘Ibrahim’s lower-­middle-class characters speak a plummy version of English’.19 The censored passages of the novel itself, in Stagh’s analysis, fall into two main categories: sexual and political – to which we may perhaps add two passages relating to flatulence and incontinence.20 Of these categories, the sexual element is by far the most substantial, involving as it does passages and sentences relating to both male and female homosexuality, masturbation, heterosexual love and descriptions of the female body. It appears, however, to have been the masturbation scenes that particularly upset Yahya Haqqi, who in his weekly column in the Egyptian daily al-­Masaʾ condemned the author for his imprudence and lack of good taste. Not content to show us his hero masturbating (if the matter had ended there it would have been of little importance), he also described the hero’s return a day later to where the traces of his sperm lie on the ground. This physiological description absolutely nauseated me, and it prevented me from enjoying the story despite its skilful telling. I am not condemning its morality, but its lack of sensibility . . . The reader should have been spared such filth.21

For her part, and having taken into account material of a sexual nature published by other Egyptian authors such as Ihsan ʿAbd al-­Quddus (1919–90), Stagh concludes that ‘From the cuts in the sexual descriptions, I can only draw the conclusion that the censor is an extreme prude. Even kisses . . . and a statement from a husband that he wants to sleep with his wife, are suppressed. The word with is exchanged for in the room of.’22 If these omissions and changes (a number of which were also incorporated in the 1968 Beirut version) seem unduly prudish, the political ‘cuts’ made by the Egyptian censor for the most part strike one today as even more trivial.

40 | sonallah i b r a h im In addition to the reference to the war in Yemen already noted (from which the censor removed the statements about the crowd’s indifference and the soldier’s throwing his cap to the ground), the censor’s excisions seem designed primarily to remove any references to excessively harsh prison conditions or, more generally, to delete any statements he regarded as implying criticism of contemporary ‘society, government and bureaucracy’ (to use Stagh’s phrase).23 In so doing, Stagh notes, he demonstrates a crudeness and lack of sophistication that mark him as an ‘inexperienced reader, unfamiliar with modern literary techniques’ – a description that might doubtless be applied to other employees of the Egyptian censors’ office at the time, who for the most part were simple bureaucrats rather than literary critics or sophisticated readers. Summary After this brief introduction to the publishing history of the work, we turn to the text itself. We should first note the brevity of the work – no more than thirty-­six printed pages, or perhaps 12,000 words, in the full 1986 Arabic edition. The ‘plot’ (such as it is) of the work itself may also be summarised in no more than a few words. The work revolves around an anonymous young intellectual (the narrator/protagonist) who is released on parole from prison, but whose new-­found freedom in Cairo is circumscribed by regulations which require him to have his parole book signed at home every evening. Between these visits, his days are occupied in a largely joyless round of calls on friends and relatives, as he tries to pick up the threads of his past existence as a journalist. His attempts to write, however, come to nothing and his visits to cafés and the cinema fail to bring fulfilment. Towards the end of the work, he learns by chance of his mother’s death, but even at this point, he expresses no genuine emotion and the work ends as he returns home for his nightly appointment with the policeman. Structure, Themes and Technique The autobiographical basis for this work scarcely needs the author’s explicit confirmation, for, as previously noted, Sonallah Ibrahim had himself served something over five years of a seven-­year prison sentence for political activities between 1959 and 1964 – a period reflected in his memoir Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat already referred to above and in the previous chapter.24 Although

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 41 clearly based on his own experience, however, the work (as already noted) contains little by way of reference to the prevailing social or political circumstances within which the action takes place – the lack of external reference points being mirrored, as it were, by a sort of internal void in the narrator himself, who fails to exhibit over the course of the novel anything that might be regarded as ‘character development’ in the traditional sense of the term. Indeed, it is clear that, in this novel at least, Sonallah Ibrahim has little interest in such traditional facets of the novelist’s technique as ‘character’ or ‘plot’ as such, and appears to be deliberately unconcerned with them. Although the narrator of the novel finds himself in a particular social and political setting, his relationship with his environment is an almost totally mechanical, or mechanistic, one: events or actions that in a more traditional narrative style one might expect to be accompanied by emotional description or analysis are de-­emotionalised, and events are related in a temporal sequence with little regard to their relative value, or to their logical, as opposed to their temporal, dependence on one another. The effect is to give the narrator and principal character many of the characteristics of an ‘anti-­hero’ (‘a man or woman given the vocation of failure’, to quote a standard English dictionary of literary terminology).25 In this connection, we may perhaps anticipate the subsequent discussion by noting that in many respects the protagonist of Tilka al-­Raʾiha serves as a sort of ‘blueprint’ or template for the protagonists of future novels, and that only in a very few of Ibrahim’s works (most notably in Warda) do we encounter anyone with the characteristics of a ‘hero’ in the old-­fashioned or traditional sense – a ‘man or woman capable of heroic deeds, dashing, strong, brave and resourceful’.26 It is perhaps worth devoting a little more space to this point, for in many ways Sonallah Ibrahim’s protagonist seems almost the epitome of the classic ‘anti-­hero’. His failures are both professional and personal. He repeatedly tries to write but fails, and instead turns to masturbation, imagining the girl he had seen the previous day ‘with her white body on the bed, full and rounded’; then while I kissed every part of her . . . I put my hand down to my own thigh and began playing with myself. At last I gave a deep sigh. Tired, I sprawled back in my chair, staring vacantly at the paper in front of me.27

42 | sonallah i b r a h im Later, to the amusement of his colleague Ramzi, he finds himself unable to sleep with the prostitute that he had asked Hassan to find for him28 – a scene that caused particular difficulties for the author, when, following the book’s confiscation, he was contemptuously asked by a member of the Egyptian censorship department whether the hero was impotent.29 How, then, do these themes relate to the narrative techniques that the author has employed in Tilka al-­raʾiha? These techniques are worth noting in some detail, since they will provide us with a reference point for the development of the author’s technique in subsequent works. We may start by again noting that the work (like many, though not all, of Sonallah Ibrahim’s subsequent novels) is narrated in the first person – natural enough, one might think, given that the work is autobiographically based, but a technique that inevitably raises theoretical issues relating to authorial perspective. What we appear to be confronted with is an ‘anti-­hero’ narrator who may be assumed to be speaking at least partly with the author’s own voice; yet from beginning to end of the book, the newly released narrator/protagonist remains nameless, and the precise offence for which he had been arrested unspecified – even though, with most other possibilities ruled out,30 most readers are likely to quickly conclude that his offence is political. The theoretical issues relating to the narrative perspective of Tilka al-­ Raʾiha have been analysed in some detail on the basis of Genette’s categories of ‘voice’ and ‘focalisation’ by Ulrike Stehli-­Werbeck,31 who argues that, in Tilka al-­raʾiha, Genette’s ‘two main types of the “homodiegetic narrator” . . . are fused . . . the type of the “autodiegetic” narrator who is the protagonist of his own narration (Genette calls him the “hero” or “star”) and the type of the “witness” or “observer” who plays a secondary role.’32 Although arguably slightly over-­elaborate, Stehli-­Werbeck’s analysis is a useful one, as it suggests how the interplay of these two different conceptions of voice, in combination with the use of two narrative levels, helps to reinforce the impression of alienation that Sonallah Ibrahim is seeking to convey. We shall return to this categorisation at several points in the study in the context of other novels by Sonallah Ibrahim. As already noted, the narrative of the events described in Tilka al-­Raʾiha is in many respects curiously unspecific. The narrator remains anonymous and there are no dates given: even the mention of the troops returning from

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 43 Yemen is couched in vague and elliptical terms. If dates remain deliberately vague, however, the references to places (most obviously, streets and districts within Cairo) appear to become progressively more specific as the narrative progresses: the protagonist’s first port of call on release from prison is described as simply ‘my brother’s place’; having failed to find lodging with either his brother or an anonymous friend, however, the protagonist is taken by his sister to a ‘flat in Heliopolis’;33 he subsequently alights from a Metro train at the ‘First Aid stop’,34 and later finds himself successively in Ramses Square, Soliman Street, Tewfik Street, Fouad Street, Sherif Street, Adly Street, Soliman Street (again), ‘the Square’35 and Kasr El-­Nil Street. His recollections of his visits with his father to his grandmother’s house towards the end of the work are similarly described with considerable attention to topographical detail. It is also worth mentioning that, although the work has been described by almost everyone who has written about it as conveying a profound sense of alienation, a ‘census’ of the people mentioned in the work as friends or relatives of the protagonist includes a surprisingly large number of individuals. In addition to his own brother, sister and grandmother, we find mention of Mona, her mother and late husband; Sakhr; Nagwa; Sami; Husniyya and her uncle; Nihad, and her mother and father; Adel and his wife; Magdi; Husayn and his uncle, and several others. As Ali Jad remarks,36 however, the protagonist’s succession of visits to family and friends is ‘indicative of his uprootedness and restlessness rather than his sociability’. Only with Samiya, a former girlfriend, does he appear to feel any real closeness in the present, talking to her about books, remarking on her ‘simple and frank’ smile, and ‘ador[ing] her soft, confident voice and her gestures which were so unaffected’.37 Narrative Technique Turning in more detail to the narrative techniques employed, we should first observe that the work is presented as a continuous narrative, with no chapter subdivisions – a feature that was not repeated in any of the author’s subsequent works. Within that overall structure, we may note the author’s preference for short sentences and short clauses (often within long paragraphs), with a minimum of linguistic elaboration – a style that has been variously described as ‘spare’, ‘telegraphic’, and ‘iceberg’-like, and which is not only

44 | sonallah i b r a h im clearly designed to convey a sense of actions stripped of all but their barest essentials, but also to stand in stark and deliberate contrast to the ‘flabby eloquence’ and other attributes of traditional Arabic prose.38 The following few lines, taken more or less at random from the text, will serve as a good example of this technique: I left the house and went back to my room, I turned on the light. I put the police book back into my pocket. I sat down in a chair with my back to the door. I took up a book. After a while I got up and turned the chair around so that I faced the door. I went on with my reading. A moment later I glanced at the door from over the top of the book: the flat was immersed in darkness. To no avail I tried to go on reading. I got up and went out to the hallway. I turned on the light there. My neighbour’s room was in darkness. I moved into the kitchen where I lit the lamp.39

The effect of this style may be further enhanced when it is combined with dialogue, as in the opening of the novel: What’s your address? The officer said. I don’t have an address, I said. He looked at me, surprised. Then where are you going? Where will you live? I don’t know, I said. I don’t have anyone. He said, I can’t let you go like that. I used to live by myself, I said. We have to know where you’re living so we can come at night, he said. One of the policemen will go with you. And so we went into the street . . .40

Even more striking is the effect of this technique when used in the context of descriptions of sex – which in Tilka al-­raʾiha, as in many of the author’s later novels, is usually joyless, often solitary, and almost without exception unsatisfactory in some way or other. Almost invariably, we find a deliberate de-­emotionalisation of events and actions that in a more traditional narrative one might expect to be accompanied by description or comment by the narrator on his own feelings: I stretched out my hand to her breast, but she pushed it away and said ‘No’. I let her be and lay down beside her. I waited for her to turn round to me suddenly and hug me to her, but she didn’t. I remained awake. I had a feeling of pain between my thighs. I got up and went to the bathroom. Having

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 45 freed myself of my desire, I returned and stretched out beside her. I slept and awoke. I slept again.41

In all these passages, as in others, Sonallah Ibrahim’s use of short sentences and clauses has the effect of conveying a sense of actions stripped of all but a sort of mechanistic significance – giving the impression, insofar as they relate to the narrator/protagonist himself, not merely of an ‘anti-­hero’ (‘a man or woman given the vocation of failure’) but an ‘anti-­hero’ whose main interest for the reader lies not in the development of his own ‘character’ (for he has little or none) but rather in the relationship of himself to an environment that is entirely beyond his control. To many readers, of course, this technique will immediately suggest European influences or parallels, at least one of which is hinted at in the text itself when the narrator asks a former girlfriend, Samiya, whether she has read Camus’s La Peste42 – and it is perhaps symptomatic of the general tone of the book that the narrator should feel that ‘much depended upon the answer she gave. But she simply said: “No”.’43 Together with Freud, Van Gogh, Maupassant and Hemingway, this is one of a very limited number of explicit references in the work to Western writers and thinkers. As several commentators have already pointed out, however, the work carries another echo of Camus in that the narrator of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novella, like the hero of Camus’s l’Étranger, shows no emotion on learning of his mother’s death.44 One reading of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel would indeed see the work as primarily a sort of Arabic expression of a mood prevalent in much post-­ Second World War European fiction – a mood reflecting a perceived rootlessness and meaninglessness of life, which in Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel has been transposed, with a remarkable sureness and consistency of technique, to the oppressive, post-­revolutionary regime of contemporary Nasserist Cairo. Two other features of Sonallah Ibrahim’s technique in this work should be noted at this point. The first – the use of ‘intertextuality’ – though not a major feature of Tilka al-­Raʾiha itself, requires at least a brief mention, as it presages a technique that has not only been extensively employed by Sonallah Ibrahim in many of his later works, but has also been used by several other members of the so-­called ‘Generation of the Sixties’ (most notably, perhaps, by Gamal al-­Ghitani in his al-­Zayni Barakat, and in a number of works by Yusuf al-­Qaʿid).45 Although the use of this technique in Tilka al-­Raʾiha

46 | sonallah i b r a h im assumes an ‘unmarked’ form that is unlikely to be apparent to the reader, in a subsequent interview Sonallah Ibrahim confirmed that his fondness for the device did indeed start at this early stage in his career: The tendency to incorporate extraneous texts, word for word, into the body of the work . . . started in Tilka Al-­Raʾiha with the inclusion of a real-­life letter a fellow inmate had written to his wife. He wrote it in English. I translated it and inserted it into the text as it was . . . So this concept, along with many other aspects of my later work, was never entirely alien to my methods.46

The second feature is his use of flashback – or, to use Genette’s terminology, analepsis47 – as the narrator reaches back into his memory to recall events or emotions from the period before the event of his release from prison with which the work begins. For these passages, Ibrahim adopted the European convention of setting them in italics – a convention that he probably adopted from his reading in Hemingway, and which is also followed in both Denys Johnson-­Davies’s and Robyn Creswell’s English translations: I got on the bus to Mona’s house. Her mother met me . . . We sat down and talked. I had to ask her about her husband. I told her that I’d been with him until the last moment. I was sitting beside him, my hand manacled to his. We were at the back of the lorry and the other lorries were behind us . . . They began calling out our names. Then they called out his, and that was the last time I saw him. ‘Can you imagine,’ she said. ‘I got a letter from him before that. He said it wouldn’t last long.’48

These analepses, of which there are more than a dozen in total, are extensive, accounting in all for something approaching a quarter of the work’s entire length, and perhaps most significantly include material where the protagonist appears to be more emotionally engaged than in the passages relating to his present situation – creating the impression, intentional or not, that the past for him is in some sense more real than the present. The contrast, indeed, between the emotional and affective engagement of some of these passages and the detachment evident in the ‘first level’ narrative could not be more stark. Towards the end of the work, for example, when the narrator decides to

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 47 look for his old house, he decides to approach the house ‘from the direction of Faggala Street as we used to do, my father and I’ – a decision that sparks off in his mind a long and affectionate recollection of travelling there with his father by tram, listening to ‘the sounds of the trolley-­arm thrusting its way with difficulty between the branches overhead’, and watching the smoke of the trains coming from Bab al-­Hadid station, before catching the tram back: [And] ahead of us would stretch a vast dark void into which I was afraid to fall and I’d cling on to my father, and he would catch hold of me with his bare hand . . . I’d rest my head against the wooden partition at the rear so as to enjoy to the full the extraordinary speed of the tram and I’d catch sight of my father closing his eyes against the wind that violently assailed us.49

Passages like this, which can almost certainly be read as presaging Sonallah Ibrahim’s much later al-­Talassus (2007),50 suggest that, despite the bleakness of the ‘first level narrative’, it may be a mistake to regard the mood of Tilka al-­ Raʾiha as one of an entirely unmitigated gloom. We shall return to this point when we come to discuss al-­Talassus itself in Chapter 11; for the moment, we may simply note that – as we shall see in the intervening chapters – such passages are very much the exception rather than the rule in Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, and that the heroes and protagonists for whom the narrator of Tilka al-­Raʾiha provides a template, are for the most part characterised by disillusion and detachment rather than meaningful emotional engagement. Notes 1. For the complex publishing details of this work, see Marina Stagh, The Limits of Freedom of Speech. Prose Literature and Prose Writers in Egypt under Nasser and Sadat, Stockholm Oriental Studies 14 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993), pp. 184–210, and Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-­Ghitani (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994, 2005), pp. 39–46. References to the Arabic text in the present chapter are to Sonallah Ibrahim, Tilka al-­raʾiha wa-­ qisas ukhra (Cairo: Dar Shuhdi: Casablanca: Dar Qurtuba, 1986). For further details, see below. 2. For a more extended discussion, see Stagh, The Limits of Freedom of Speech, and Mehrez, Egyptian Writers.

48 | sonallah i b r a h im 3. Introduction to Tilka al-­raʾiha (Casablanca: Dar Qurtuba, 1986), p. 6. 4. In view of its short length, the work could even plausibly be described as an ‘extended short story’. 5. On this, see Alain Roussillon, ‘Republican Egypt interpreted: revolution and beyond’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt: volume 2, Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the end of the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 338–42. See also the Translator’s Introduction to That Smell, edited and translated by Robyn Creswell (New York: New Directions Books, 2013), pp. 4–6. 6. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 45; The Smell of It, p. 33. 7. That Smell, p. 42. As most of the present book was drafted before the appearance of Creswell’s translation, I have generally retained Denys Johnson-­Davies’s translation for quotations from Tilka al-­Raʾiha, but this is not intended to imply a preference for one version over the other. For my own review of That Smell, see Banipal 47 (2013), pp. 188–91. 8. For further details, see Paul Dresch, A History of Modern Yemen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9. See Stagh, Limits. 10. Yusuf Idris’s introduction, entitled ‘Laysat mujarrad qissa’ was subsequently reprinted in the 1986 edition, pp. 12–15. 11. The Smell of It, back cover. 12. See Chapter 2. 13. An English translation by Robyn Creswell is included in That Smell, pp. 65–75. 14. Introduction, p. 9. 15. For an introduction to the work of this generation, see Elisabeth Kendall, Literature, Journalism and the Avant-­Garde: Intersection in Egypt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006); see also Stefan Meyer, The Experimental Arabic Novel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 16. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, pp. 10–11; That Smell, p. 71. 17. As quoted in Creswell, That Smell, p. 72. 18. The Smell of It and Other Stories, translated by Denys Johnson-­Davies (London: Heinemann, 1971; reprinted 1978). 19. Creswell, That Smell, p. 67. 20. Stagh, Limits, pp. 190–209. 21. Creswell, That Smell, p. 67. 22. Stagh, Limits, p.197. 23. Ibid. p. 205.

c ai ro pri son: tilka al-ra ʾ iha  | 49 24. Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, c. 2005. 25. J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 46. 26. Cuddon, Penguin Dictionary, p. 46. 27. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; The Smell of It, p. 47. 28. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, pp. 48–9; The Smell of It, pp. 37–9. 29. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 6; That Smell, p. 66. 30. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 26; The Smell of It, p. 3. 31. Ulrike Stehli-­Werbeck, ‘The question of identity and the narrative concept of Tilka l-­rāʾiªa by Íunʾallāh Ibrahim’, Middle Eastern Literatures 9: 2 (2006), pp. 137–46. 32. Ibid. p. 140; Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. J. E. Lewin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 27. 33. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, pp. 25–7; The Smell of It, pp. 1–5. 34. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 28; The Smell of It, p. 6. The stop, in Arabic ‘Isʿāf’ [Isaaf] (translated by Creswell as ‘Emergency Station’ (p. 23)), is named after the hospital of that name located there. 35. Not identified in the text. 36. Ali B. Jad, Form and Technique in the Egyptian Novel 1912–1971, St Antony’s Middle East monographs 13 (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), p. 300. 37. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; The Smell of It, pp. 16–17. 38. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 10; That Smell, p. 70. 39. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; The Smell of It, p. 47. 40. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; That Smell, p. 19. This opening exchange well illustrates the difference of approach between Johnson-­Davies and Creswell in their respective English translations. Compare Creswell’s translation with Johnson-­Davies’s version, which starts as follows (original layout retained): ‘What’s your address?’ said the officer. ‘I haven’t got one,’ I said. ‘Where, then, are you off to? Where are you going to stay?’ He looked at me in amazement. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I have no one.’ . . . 41. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, pp. 34–5; The Smell of It, p. 15. 42. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; The Smell of It, p. 17. 43. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; The Smell of It, p. 17. 44. See, for example, M. M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 160; Jad, Form and Technique, p. 301. For

50 | sonallah i b r a h im the dissemination of Camus’s and Sartre’s ideas in the Arab world more generally, see Jad, Form and Technique, pp. 390–2. 45. For a general discussion of the Generation of the Sixties, see Kendall, Literature, Journalism and the Avant-­Garde. For al-­Zayni Barakat, see Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction, pp. 96–118. For a general introduction to the phenomenon of intertextuality in modern Arabic literature, see, Luc Deheuvels, Barbara Michalak-­Pikulska and Paul Starkey (eds), Intertextuality in Modern Arabic Literature since 1967 (Durham: School of Modern Languages and Cultures, 2006; reprinted Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), especially the introductory chapter by Roger Allen, ‘Intertextuality and Retrospect: Arabic fiction’s relationship with its past’, pp. 1–12. 46. ‘The Smell of Dissent’ [interview with Youssef Rakha], at http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2003/666/cu1.htm. The passage in question (unidentified by the author in the interview) is presumably that which appears at Tilka al-­Raʾiha, pp. 30–1; The Smell of It, pp. 9–10. 47. See Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 48–67. 48. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, p. 36; The Smell of It, p. 17. 49. Tilka al-­Raʾiha, pp. 57–9; The Smell of It, pp. 51–3. 50. Al-­Talassus (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2007). English translation by Hosam Aboul-­Ela (London: Aflame Books, 2010). For a discussion, see Chapter 11.

4 Michelangelo and the Dam: Najmat Aghustus (1974) The ‘Second-­work Crisis’

A

fter publishing Tilka al-­raʾiha, Sonallah Ibrahim, by his own admission, was in something of a dilemma as to what to do next. Speaking to Youssef Rakha in 2003, he explained that: There is such a thing as the second-­work crisis, when you’ve made a strong debut and you don’t know how to live up to it. People invariably expect something stronger. Maybe this explains the shift in focus after Tilka Al-­ Ra’iha . . . In 1967 I actually completed another novel, written in the same vein. It was never published. I was on my way to Germany and didn’t have time to look for a publisher. When I looked at it again I didn’t feel it was the kind of thing with which to present myself to the reader, having made an initial impression. Then I had a topic, the High Dam, which preoccupied me completely from 1967, even before 1967, I think, until 1970 . . .1

The work in question, entitled al-­Riwaya (Story), remained unpublished, but a xeroxed copy of the typescript (faded and difficult to read) survives in Oxford and was discussed by Ali Jad in his Form and Technique in the Egyptian Novel.2 Dated Beirut, 19 August 1968, the seventy-­one-page manuscript shows the author again employing the ‘telegraphic’ prose style of Tilka al-­Raʾiha in a first-­person narrative that, like his earlier work, to a considerable extent revolves around the narrator’s unsatisfactory sexual relationships – the most significant of which here takes the form of an affair with his brother’s wife. Although the work gives the impression of being perhaps a trifle less self-­centred than Tilka al-­raʾiha, however, and the relationships are less ephemeral and more sustained, al-­Riwaya nonetheless does not ­suggest

52 | sonallah i b r a h im any major development either in the author’s technique or in his use of thematic material, and several scenes suggest above all a desire to shock. All in all, it is hard to resist the conclusion both that the work is little more than a ‘rerun’ of Tilka al-­raʾiha, and that, in terms of the development of his literary career, Sonallah Ibrahim was right not to pursue the publication further. We therefore turn to Najmat Aghustus, Sonallah Ibrahim’s second published novel, which appeared in 1974. It is worth recalling that by this date, a radical change had begun to become apparent in the general mood and orientation of Egyptian literature (as, indeed, of Arabic literature more generally), following the Arab defeat in the Six-­Day War of 1967. The new mood was most obviously expressed through the pages of the short-­lived journal Gallery 68, founded and edited by the Egyptian writer Edwar al-­Kharrat, and which served as an outlet for a number of leading writers of the so-­called ‘Generation of the Sixties’. Although (in keeping with his general philosophy of ‘distancing’ himself from more general literary movements) Sonallah Ibrahim himself was not closely associated with the journal, and never published in it,3 it is a measure of the impact made by Tilka al-­Raʾiha that in practice it is almost impossible to discuss the Gallery 68 experiment without mentioning Sonallah Ibrahim’s own pioneering work. Before turning to Najmat Aghustus itself, we should also at this stage perhaps note that, for the purposes of analysis, we can broadly subdivide Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels in two main ways: by length and by narrative perspective – drawing a broad distinction in terms of length between those works that might be regarded as ‘novellas’ (Tilka al-­Raʾiha and al-­Lajna, together with the unpublished al-­Riwaya) and the rest; while in terms of narrative perspective, we may distinguish between those works where Sonallah Ibrahim relies mainly on the first-­person narrative technique of Tilka al-­Raʾiha (the ‘homodiegetic narrator’, to use Genette’s terminology), and those where his text uses mainly third-­person narrative (the ‘heterodiegetic narrator’). To the first group belong, in addition to the three ‘novellas’ already mentioned, Najmat Aghustus, Bayrut, Bayrut, Warda, Amrikanli, al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, al-­Qanun al-­Faransi and al-­Jalid, as well as the semi-­autobiographical al-­Talassus; by contrast, Dhat and Sharaf are narrated mainly either in the third person, or (as will be discussed later) in what might be termed a ‘mixed narrative mode’.4

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 53 Background Let us turn first then to Najmat Aghustus, which not only comes first in terms of its date of publication, but also in some sense appears to form a model for many of the author’s subsequent longer works. The work centres on the building of the Aswan High Dam, one of the ‘prestige projects’ of the Nasser era that acquired an almost overwhelming symbolic significance as a mark of the new regime’s determination to ‘modernise’ Egypt. The main stated purposes of the dam, which was constructed between 1960 and 1970, were, first, to control flooding and regulate irrigation water in the Nile valley and, secondly, to generate electricity for Egypt’s industrialisation programme. An earlier dam (now known as the Aswan Low Dam) had been built by the British between 1898 and 1902 as part of their policy of agricultural development, but despite being heightened in 1912 and again in 1933 it proved inadequate for the purpose. Preliminary proposals for a larger dam a short distance upstream had been drawn up in 1948, but it was not until after the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution that planning began in earnest. Funding for the dam’s construction, however, soon became the subject of Cold War rivalries. The US and Great Britain, together with the World Bank, had at first offered Egypt financial support for the dam’s construction, but the offer was withdrawn when Nasser accepted the offer of an arms deal from the Soviet bloc, and Nasser was forced to look to the USSR instead for support in financing and building the dam.5 In October 1958 an agreement was signed with the USSR, and construction of the dam began in January 1960 using Russian equipment and engineers. It was officially inaugurated in May 1964 during a visit by the Soviet leader Khrushchev to Egypt; work was substantially completed in 1970, and the dam was officially opened by President Sadat, Nasser’s successor, and USSR leader Nikolai Podgorny in January 1971. The construction of the High Dam entailed the presence of several thousand Soviet engineers and other personnel in Egypt for more than a decade – a cultural intrusion reflected in Sonallah’s novel itself. Large areas of land in Upper Egypt and Sudan were flooded during its construction to create an enormous lake, Lake Nasser, which stretches for some 550 kilometres southwards from the dam; the work also involved the resettlement of local

54 | sonallah i b r a h im populations and the re-­siting of several ancient Egyptian monuments, most notably the Abu Simbel temples. The ‘balance sheet’ of benefits and possible side-­effects of the dam is the subject of continuing debate. As previously noted, the subject of the novel had been a long time maturing in Sonallah Ibrahim’s mind, and the writing of it occupied him intermittently between at least 1965 and 1973. As was the case with Tilka al-­raʾiha, there is a strong and acknowledged autobiographical element, for the narrative is at least partly based on an actual journey made to the area by the author in the summer of 1965 in the company of his friends Kamal al-­Qilish and Raʾuf Musʿad – an account of their visit, as previously noted, being published in Cairo in 1967 under the title Insan al-­sadd al-ʿali.6 It is therefore possible to read and analyse Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel as an ‘intertextual’ reworking of Insan al-­sadd al-ʿali – as has indeed been done by Céza Kassem-­Draz, though without apparently using the term itself.7 In her study, Kassem-­Draz draws attention to the ‘familiarising’ devices adopted by the trio of travellers in Insan al-­sadd al-ʿali to reassure the reader about the nature of the dam, employing metaphorical devices: to transform reality from what it is to what it is not, mainly by changing what is not agreeable or not acceptable into something agreeable; by transforming a reality which is alien and novel into a reality which is familiar and everlasting.8

As Kassem-­Draz notes, this process is assisted by a number of other devices, which include the gradual replacement of ‘you’ by ‘we’, thus assimilating the reader to the vision of the small group of travellers. Thus, the writers’ vision of the world of the High Dam ‘as an ideal possible world, a utopia where man and machine live happily ever’ is, by a process of synecdoche, transferred to Egypt itself and an equation is created: al-­sadd al-ʿālī = al-­mathal al-­aʿlā (‘the High Dam = the Ideal’).9 Perhaps more remarkable than the derivation of the novel from the direct experience of the author, however, is the large number of sources, Egyptian and foreign, that Sonallah Ibrahim acknowledges in his afterword:10 these include not only material on the High Dam itself, but also publications about ancient Egypt, Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, and the letters of the Italian sculptor Michelangelo, as translated into English by Charles

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 55 Speroni.11 Sonallah Ibrahim’s approach to his written source material is accordingly both expansive and eclectic; and in this respect, Najmat Aghustus (to a far greater extent than Tilka al-­raʾiha) seems to serve as a sort of template for several of the author’s subsequent novels, many of which have (as we shall see) involved several years of intermittent literary and academic research – not infrequently combined with investigation on a more practical level in the form of travel, and often documented in more or less detail at the end of the book in question. Despite some obvious superficial similarities between Tilka al-­Raʾiha and Najmat Aghustus, however (both are narrated in the first person, for example; both employ bookish, intellectual narrators; and both are obviously partly autobiographically based), it is clear that Najmat Aghustus represents a sea-­change in the author’s approach to the form of the novel itself – a change acknowledged by Sonallah Ibrahim himself in his subsequent interview with Youssef Rakha: I had a topic, the High Dam, which preoccupied me completely from 1967, even before 1967, I think, until 1970. And it so happened that Najmat Aghustus . . ., the book that came out of this experience, was a different order of writing, a kind of panoramic articulation-­contemplation that adopted a more accurate approach to the choice of expressions and opinions – an expansive precision, if you like.12

It is against this background that we turn to a more detailed consideration of the work itself. Publication and Translations Initially banned in Egypt for its implied criticism of government policy, Najmat Aghustus was first published in Damascus under the imprint of the Ittihad al-­Kuttab al-ʿArab (Union of Arab Writers) in 1974. It was subsequently republished in Cairo by Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida (which was to become the author’s preferred Cairo publisher) in 1976, and in Beirut in 1980. There is no published English translation, but a French translation by Jean François Fourcade, entitled Étoile d’août, was published by Sindbad-­ Actes Sud in 1987.

56 | sonallah i b r a h im Summary As with Tilka al-­raʾiha, the ‘plot’ (if such it can be called) of Najmat Aghustus is extremely tenuous and can be summarised in no more than a few lines. In the first half of the novel, we find the narrator/protagonist (a journalist) leaving Cairo by train for Upper Egypt. There, he first spends several days in Aswan, ostensibly preparing material for publication about the Aswan Dam project and the people working on it. In addition to arranging interviews and visits to the site itself, the assignment also involves the narrator in a round of mundane and mostly frustrating activities, such as finding accommodation and arranging transport from place to place within the area – activities whose banal and often trivial nature seems to echo the humdrum existence led by the narrator of Tilka al-­raʾiha. In the second half of the novel, the narrator embarks on a trip to Abu Simbel, where in the company of the Egyptologist Khalil he gazes on temples and statues from the era of Ramses II (arguably the greatest of the Egyptian pharaohs); displaced by the construction of the dam, the temples were then in the process of reconstruction on their new site – a project almost as grandiose as the construction of the dam itself. These archaeological remains prompt reflections on past civilisations; but eventually the narrator decides that he has seen enough and as the work closes, he prepares to return to Cairo – a seemingly almost arbitrary ending that appears to resolve nothing, but which will be echoed in several of Sonallah Ibrahim’s subsequent works. Structure, Themes and Technique As already noted, Najmat Aghustus represents a major sea-­change in the author’s approach to novelistic construction, by comparison with both Tilka al-­Raʾiha and the unpublished al-­Riwaya. The difference of approach is most immediately apparent in the scale of the work, which occupies (in the 1980 Beirut printing) some 220 pages, or perhaps 70,000 words. As well as the difference of scale, the work represents an obvious expansion of the author’s horizons, for he has now liberated himself from the narrow confines of Cairo life, widening his cast of characters to include not only Egyptian workers but also Western tourists and Russian advisers. Unlike Tilka al-­Raʾiha also, the work is, at least on one level, tightly structured, albeit in an unconventional

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 57 way – Part 1 (al-­Qism al-­awwal) being divided into four chapters, numbered 1 to 4, while Part 2 (al-­Qism al-­thani) is likewise divided into four chapters, numbered 4 to 1, in reverse order. The two parts are separated by a passage of unpunctuated prose, written using a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, which though printed as the closing section of Part 1, in fact forms a separate section in its own right. This structure has been discussed at some length by Céza Kassem-­Draz, who envisages the novel’s structure as a sort of ‘step pyramid’, in which the first four chapters describe the steps of the High Dam’s construction, while the second part is a single chapter of 20 pages which has no paragraphs or sentences, an uninterrupted interior monologue, and the third part reproduces the four operations of the first part but in descending order.13

The ‘uninterrupted interior monologue’ to which Draz refers will be discussed further below,14 for the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique involved – while familiar from other authors writing in Arabic as well as other languages – seems totally unique in Sonallah Ibrahim’s own output. So far as the ‘outer sections’ are concerned, Draz’s analysis suggests a sequence of excavating → blasting → moving → dumping for the book’s first section, in which the construction of the dam itself is foregrounded – these categories being reversed in the second [third] part, which relates to the dismantling [deconstruction] of the Nubian temples. I will leave it to individual readers to decide how useful they find this analysis, which strikes me as a little forced, to say the least. Whatever our evaluation of Draz’s analysis, however, it is clear that, despite the almost total absence of ‘plot’ in the conventional sense, Najmat Aghustus is a work of considerable complexity in comparison with the author’s earlier novels; and it is also probably fair to say that not all its qualities necessarily reveal themselves at first reading. It will, however, be immediately obvious, even from the short summary above, that there is a profound contrast between the scale and grandeur of the engineering projects around which the novel revolves and the humdrum lives, not only of the narrator but of many of the workers and colleagues with whom he comes into contact. Much of the novel’s effect, indeed, arguably derives from this very contrast. At the same time, it

58 | sonallah i b r a h im will be immediately clear to the reader that we are not here simply confronted with the boredom, lassitude and frustration of Tilka al-­Raʾiha transposed to Upper Egypt, for in addition to boredom and frustration, Upper Egypt is home to very real physical dangers and unpleasantness that go well beyond the experience of life in urban Cairo, even at its worst: not only the often primitive living conditions and the unbearable heat from the ‘almost vertical’ rays of the sun,15 but also flies, scorpions and serious disease;16 and in this environment, it is almost inevitable that, despite the general boredom, we also encounter acts that might genuinely, in a general sense, be regarded as ‘heroic’. In the atmosphere of secrecy surrounding the dam’s construction, moreover, rumours of death and disease abound. When the narrator sits down at a restaurant table in Aswan, for example, it is not long before ‘I heard someone behind me saying that a worker had died of meningitis then someone else contradicted him saying it was cholera. Then silence fell again.’17 Given the real danger and hardships involved in the enterprise, it is perhaps not surprising that the narrator is forced to engage with reality, at least to a limited degree, and indeed, he has arguably begun to acquire some traces of what might be described as ‘character’. A bookish intellectual whose reading matter during his expedition extends to a work on Michelangelo, he seeks solace mainly in the traditional comforts of drink and women. A regular intake of alcohol certainly appears to be among the narrator’s favourite pastimes,18 and at times it gets quite out of hand: I carried on drinking. I sensed that Anwar was telling me important things, but I couldn’t comprehend them. I came to with Anwar practically carrying me on his arm. We were standing in front of a Jeep in the middle of the road . . . I leaned my head on the shoulder of the man sitting beside me and went to sleep. I woke when my friend shook me . . . I woke up bathed in sweat just before noon. I realised that I hadn’t turned on the air conditioning before going to bed. I immediately felt a violent headache.19

Of considerably more interest and complexity than the narrator’s drinking sessions, however, is the author’s treatment of sexual relationships in Najmat Aghustus. The atmosphere of sexual frustration that pervades the earlier Tilka al-­Raʾiha (as well as the unpublished al-­Riwaya) is certainly much in evidence here – unsurprisingly, perhaps, in view of the fact that

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 59 many workers on the projects are perforce separated from their families. At the same time, however, both the occasion for fantasy and the opportunity for seduction are more evident than in the Cairo of Tilka al-­Raʾiha – not only because of the presence of more Western tourists, but also because of the involvement of Russian women in the Aswan Dam project as secretaries and the like. European women indeed figure in the novel almost as an obsession from the second page of text, where the narrator makes his first, stereotypical, encounter on the train from Cairo: I moved along to the next carriage where there was a sprinkling of passengers in front of the corridor windows. As I passed through, I bumped into a blonde European girl wearing black trousers. I felt the touch of her soft body on my leg. I could still feel it as I neared the end of the carriage and passed into the restaurant car.20

The narrator’s largely voyeuristic obsession with Western women, and with Western sexual mores, finds frequent expression also in whispered, and not infrequently obscene, conversations with his colleagues;21 perhaps the most bizarre of these involves a commentary on the sexual habits of Swedish men, ‘who only sleep with their wives once a month, to conserve their strength for work’ – while Swedish girls, on the other hand, are free to invite lovers to their rooms ‘with their fathers’ full knowledge and consent’.22 Not all the sexual interest of Najmat Aghustus revolves around such fantasies of little-­known Nordic lands, however. A major contribution to maintaining the reader’s interest in the novel is undoubtedly made by the two Russian secretaries, Tanya and Ilyona, whom the narrator first encounters with a colleague in the course of arranging an interview with a Russian official. The narrator’s attempts to seduce Tanya are beset by difficulties, however: it is clear that close contact between Russians and Egyptians is not encouraged by the Russian authorities, and the narrator’s pursuit ultimately proves futile, ending in farce when, having been told that ‘Russian girls like to hear the word “marriage”’, he resolves to propose to her, only to find that he is too drunk to get up from his seat.23 In this sort of episode, we can detect a clear affinity between the narrator of Najmat Aghustus and the ‘anti-­hero’/narrator/protagonist of the author’s earlier Tilka al-­Raʾiha – as well (as we shall see) of subsequent works such as

60 | sonallah i b r a h im al-­Lajna, Dhat, and others – for all, in one way or another, seem condemned to impotence and failure. At the same time, however – and despite the fact that much of the narrative is couched in a similar ‘telegraphic’, deadpan style to that of his earlier work – we do appear in Najmat Aghustus to have finally entered a world where the narrator has acquired sufficient humanity to have some hope of engaging in meaningful relationships. Romance apart, the account of his abortive quest also allows the author opportunity to comment indirectly on the Russians, and on Russian-­ Egyptian relations, in a tone often tinged with sarcasm. When Tanya is asked by the narrator’s colleague how she came to be in Egypt, she first replies simply ‘By plane!’, before revealing that given the choice between India, Ghana and Egypt, she had opted for Egypt because she had previously seen some Egyptian films.24 In general, Sonallah Ibrahim’s Russians emerge as a somewhat sullen bunch of people, best typified perhaps by the humourless twenty-­five-year-­old Valerii, a member of the communist youth organisation Komsomol, who is writing a book about the dam project entitled Friendship in Work, Friendship in Life.25 A few accounts of Russian experiences suggest real sympathy on the part of the author, however: Tanya tells the narrator, for example, that her mother was killed by a German soldier a few months before the end of the Second World War during the German retreat, while her father (whom she never saw) had been imprisoned by Stalin and died in a concentration camp. Significantly, perhaps, Valerii disapproves of these revelations, believing that ‘these things should not be mentioned to foreigners’ – a remark that almost certainly faithfully reflects the instructions given to Soviet citizens working abroad at the time.26 Elsewhere in the novel, Soviet–Egyptian relations are characterised both by language problems and by a recurrent underlying question of whether the Russians are fair to the Egyptians, and whether the Egyptians could have built the dam without them. Sonallah Ibrahim’s references to contemporary Egyptian politics in Najmat Aghustus, as in Tilka al-­raʾiha, tend to be rather oblique. Though the reader is constantly aware of the presence, or possible presence, of the secret police, explicit political references are in general largely confined to allusions to Muslim Brotherhood activity and arrests, and occasionally (as in Tilka al-­ raʾiha) to the war in Yemen.27 Occasionally, there is an implicit comparison

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 61 between the Russian and Egyptian historical experiences.28 The setting of part of the work amid the monuments of ancient Egypt, however, allows the possibility of more elliptical references, and it does not take much imagination on the part of the reader to see in some of the descriptions of Ramses II a comment by the author on the contemporary Egyptian regime: Ramses escaped death in this battle because of his special guard, who surrounded him on every side. But the inscriptions make no mention of them. He poured all the blame for what had happened on his soldiers, describing them as cowards, despite the fact that the whole responsibility fell on himself . . . Seventy years of power – that is, of lies, profligacy, killing, propaganda, deception and deportation. And here he is, still alive until today. And we are now working night and day to immortalise his name. Just as he wanted.29

As will be apparent from some of the extracts quoted above, at least part of the narrative of Najmat Aghustus is couched in a similar deadpan, ‘telegraphic’ style to that of the author’s earlier work – a feature that, in juxtaposition with the lofty nature of the subject matter, does much to lend to the novel its at times powerfully ironic effect. As in Tilka al-­raʾiha, the author not infrequently employs a style of narration in which significant and apparently insignificant details are narrated in sequence without differentiation to produce a dehumanising effect. In Najmat Aghustus, this effect is in turn enhanced by the fact that similar language is employed by the author for a number of detailed technical descriptions of aspects of the dam’s construction that suggest close observation, if not necessarily a close interest, in the work involved: The bulldozer was coming and going between the pile of rocks and the continuous stream of lorries. Every time one of them had finished loading, the digger let out a loud blast then turned back on itself. Then the bulldozer would go quickly and nimbly back to its place among the rocks while the lorry would laboriously drive out of the depression. Then another lorry would immediately take its place. Sometimes the bulldozer would leave the mountain without getting completely full, or sometimes it would have dropped its load. Then it would go back again insistently. Other times, it

62 | sonallah i b r a h im would fail to empty its load onto the lorry and would return to the mountain to unload it there, and take on another one.30

In this sort of passage, the echoes of the deadpan, ‘telegraphic’ descriptions of Cairo life in Tilka al-­raʾiha have been transposed from Cairo to Upper Egypt, and from men to machines. As in the earlier novel, however, Sonallah Ibrahim again employs a number of devices to lend variety to his account, providing a ‘sub-­text’, as it were, to provide background to, or point up particular features of, his main narrative. Among the most conspicuous of these is again his use of analepses, or ‘flashbacks’, which not infrequently refer back to earlier experiences of prison or arrest, and are often introduced through an association of ideas or related experiences. Occasionally, this technique may be extended, as in the following example, where an analepsis occasioned by recollection of a previous ride on a lorry is further elaborated in a further analepsis designed to suggest historical precedents: We jumped up onto the edge of the truck. We couldn’t find a spare place on the two long benches facing each other, as they’d been taken by workmen, so we sat down on the floor. They ordered us to squat and to keep our heads down so that nobody would see us on the streets. At dead of night the convoy of lorries set out for the heart of Old Cairo, with the biting cold wind striking our ears . . . someone in the know said that in the Citadel there was a prison that the British had set up, which hadn’t been used since their time . . . we lay down in two lines facing each other looking at the high walls . . . Perhaps it was the Citadel that had witnessed the massacre of the Mamluks when they came in their official uniforms to drink coffee. When they were ready to leave to walk in the Sultan’s son’s procession, the doors were closed and they were all massacred, while on a corridor overlooking the scene of the massacre sat Muªammad ʿAli . . . We reached Aswan and got out of the lorry in front of the Grand Hotel . . .31

We shall return later in the book to this sort of temporal manipulation of the narrative, which has been used to good effect not only by Sonallah Ibrahim himself, but also by many other members of this generation of

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 63 Arabic novelists. For the moment, we may also note that a further dimension is given to the text, involving a different type of analepsis, by the fact that the narrator is reading a book about the Italian sculptor Michelangelo32 during his e­ xpedition – an activity that both provides a vivid contrast with the construction work on the dam, and also allows the author to introduce a further ‘sub-­text’, involving not only artistic activity and creativity but also classical allusion and scope for philosophical reflection. I flopped down on the low wicker chair. I rested my foot on the iron barrier that overlooked the Nile. I opened the book, whose cover was wrinkled from the sweat of my hands pressing on it. The burning desire to draw the naked body. Hadn’t the saints been naked when they were crucified? They said that their bodies were ugly, full of pimples and excretions. He said that he had to represent them in the form that God had created Adam.33

This ‘intertextual’ aspect of the novel’s construction is further exemplified towards the end of the work, when the scene shifts from Aswan to Abu Simbel and the narrator gazes on the temples and statues from the time of Ramses II, as he reflects on past civilisations in the company of the Egyptologist Khalil. Further information on the Egyptological aspects of the site is provided by the incorporation into the text of quotations or paraphrases from other sources, which Sonallah Ibrahim again marks off from the main narrative by using a different typeface from that of the main text: I asked Khalil: ‘Which temple did the people start their visit at?’ He replied: ‘Each temple had its own special festival, when people would come to it from the other bank.’ They would come in their hordes from everywhere for this purpose, to draw near to the deity and to ask him for help in their troubles. The king would approach on a litter made up of a large chair with side rests . . . The king and his attendants would enter into the presence of the deity while the ordinary people waited ­outside . . . when the religious festival was over and the king came out to the sacred procession that awaited him on the Nile, the real festival began and thousands of people would surrender to pleasure and imbibe large quantities of wine.34

64 | sonallah i b r a h im The most remarkable passage in Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel from a stylistic point of view, however, is undoubtedly the unpunctuated sentence in the middle of the work, which stretches over some twelve pages at the end of the first part,35 and which brings together the various strands of the novel using techniques that recall the ‘stream of consciousness’ passages of Naguib Mahfouz or Edwar al-­Kharrat.36 Here, boundaries of time and place are broken down, as the text meanders between the construction of the dam, the early Christians, the gods of ancient Egypt, characters from the Bible, Michelangelo, the suburbs of modern Moscow and the narrator’s own experiences of lovemaking. If this passage (unique in Sonallah Ibrahim’s writing, so far as I am aware) has a single identifiable theme or motif, it is perhaps that of power – a power that manifests itself equally in the might of the Egyptian gods, the might of the temples of ancient Egypt, and the might of the dam itself: the machine roared and its gears grated then the body stopped turning and the arm extended to the mountain becoming longer and longer until it collided with its granite surface the most common rock the foundation of all the continents formed from molten materials that rose up from the depths of the earth and solidified when exposed to the air and the metals crystallised and coalesced without leaving room for pockets of air and became the first pressure point in the construction of the dam after being used in building the [earlier]37 Aswan Dam and Mukhtar had carved from it his statue Egypt’s Renaissance and before that the Pharaohs had carved the sphinx and from the sediment was formed the sandstone from which Ramses II built his series of temples on the edge of the Nile . . .38

If this passage (which extends in total for a dozen or so more pages) seems odd in the context of the general picture of Sonallah Ibrahim’s style so far presented, a further intriguing puzzle is provided by the author’s choice of title for his work. No explanation, or even a hint, is given of any possible motivation or symbolic meaning for the star in question, which is neither mentioned nor discussed at all until near the end of the work. In the first reference to the ‘star’, it appears as a ‘solitary star’, dominating the sky, but attempts to identify it come to nothing, and with the various possibilities ruled out, Céza Kassem-­Draz concludes (not entirely convincingly) that it simply has no meaning.39 Later, however, it is joined by a group of smaller

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 65 stars, and when the narrator looks for it again, it appears small and faint40 – suggesting, to my mind at least, a possible allusion to the author’s disillusion with the Nasserist regime. Conclusion As will be apparent from the above discussion, Najmat Aghustus is in many respects a considerably more complex work than the earlier Tilka al-­raʾiha, posing certain challenges (not all of which appear to be easily soluble) for the reader or critic, and making it arguably among the more elusive and difficult to appreciate of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels. Although many of its features – most obviously, the use of a first-­person narrator/protagonist – are carried forward from Tilka al-­Raʾiha and serve as a sort of ‘template’ for subsequent works, for whatever reason the author’s experiment with the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique in the middle of the novel seems never to have been repeated. Perhaps most importantly, however, the novel invites reflection on the relationship between fact and fiction in the author’s novels – a topic which is given an additional ‘twist’ in the case of Najmat Aghustus by the existence of the prior publication of Insan al-­sadd al-ʿali. We shall return to this topic at several points in our subsequent discussion; for the moment, we should also note that, as Rasheed El-­Enany observes,41 the work represents a rare example of an Arab novel where the ‘other’ is represented by the Soviet Union rather than by Western Europe or the USA – a relationship that appears again (though without any significant thematic development) in the author’s later work Jalid, to be discussed in Chapter 13. Notes 1. Youssef Rakha, ‘The Smell of Dissent’, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/ cu1.htm (last accessed 4 April 2014). In the afterword to Najmat Aghustus (Beirut: Dar al-­Farabi, 1980), p. 222, Ibrahim in fact states that the work occupied him ‘at intervals between October 1966 and January 1973’. The work itself is dated ‘Moscow 24 January 1973’ (p. 221). 2. See Ali B. Jad, Form and Technique in the Egyptian Novel 1912–1971, St Antony’s Middle East Monographs 13 (London: Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1983), pp. 297–304. 3. On Gallery 68 and associated matters, see in particular Elisabeth Kendall,

66 | sonallah i b r a h im Literature, Journalism and the Avant-­Garde: Intersection in Egypt (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), passim. 4. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), especially pp. 243–53. This formulation is of course somewhat over-­simplified, as will be apparent from the discussions in subsequent chapters. 5. The withdrawal of funding was also the direct cause of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the Suez, or ‘Tripartite’, invasion of 1956 – crucial events in the evolution of modern Egypt, but only marginally relevant to the present discussion. For further details, see Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–1990, 3rd edn (London: HarperCollins, 1991), especially pp. 45–9 and 128–9. 6. Cairo: Dar al-­Kuttab al-ʿArab, 1967. 7. Céza Kassem-­Draz, ‘Opaque and transparent discourse: A contrastive analysis of the Star of August and The Man of the High Dam by Son’ Allah Ibrahim’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 32–50; reprinted in Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow (eds), The View from Within (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994), pp. 134–48. See also, http://arabartsblog. wordpress.com/2013/04/04/star-­of-august/. 8. Kassem-­Draz, ‘Opaque and transparent discourse’, p. 40. 9. Ibid. pp. 41–2. 10. Najmat Aghustus, pp. 222–3. 11. I, Michelangelo Sculptor: an autobiography through letters, edited by Irving and Jean Stone, from the translation by Charles Speroni (New York and London: Doubleday, 1962). 12. Rakha, ‘The Smell of Dissent’. 13. http://arabartsblog.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/star-­of-august/. 14. In the 1980 edition, this passage extends from p. 125 to p. 136. Note also that Draz’s reference to the ‘Second Part’ and ‘Third Part’ reflects her own analysis of Ibrahim’s structure rather than the arrangement of the material in the 1980 published edition, where the ‘single sentence’ is simply appended to (and flows directly from) the end of ‘Part One’. 15. Najmat Aghustus, p. 168. 16. Ibid. pp. 96–7. 17. Ibid. pp. 95–6. 18. See, for example, Najmat Aghustus, pp. 95–6. 19. Ibid. p. 142.

m ic h e l ang elo and the da m: najmat aghustus  | 67 20. Ibid. p. 6. 21. See, for example, Najmat Aghustus, p. 54: ‘hā hunā nafaq tatūh fīhi aʿÕam al-­ qu∂bān’, etc. 22. Ibid. p. 215. 23. Ibid. p. 142. 24. Ibid. pp. 104–5. 25. Ibid. p. 105. 26. Ibid. pp. 121–2. 27. See, for example, Najmat Aghustus, pp. 78–9. For the war in Yemen, see Chapter 3. For the regime’s dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood, see Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society, pp. 84–104; Alain Roussillon, ‘Republican Egypt interpreted: revolution and beyond’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt: volume 2, Modern Egypt, from 1517 to the end of the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 340 ff. 28. See, for example, Najmat Aghustus, p. 122, where, in a somewhat enigmatic exchange, Tanya asks the narrator: ‘Do you think you had to do anything to be imprisoned [by Stalin]?’ — to which the narrator replies: ‘Perhaps he was against socialism’. 29. Najmat Aghustus, pp. 197–8, 208. 30. Ibid. p. 35. 31. Ibid. pp. 36–7. The italics are taken from the original text; the bold font to mark the second analepsis is my addition. 32. The book in question is I, Michelangelo Sculptor (see above, note 11). 33. Najmat Aghustus, pp. 19–20. 34. Ibid. p. 214. 35. Ibid. pp. 124–36. 36. For which, see respectively Rasheed El-­Enany, Naguib Mafouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993) and Elisabeth Kendall, Literature, Journalism and the Avant-­Garde. For the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique generally, see Melvin Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 37. Najmat Aghustus, pp. 124–5. For the sculptor Mahmud Mukhtar (1891–1934), see Caroline Williams, ‘Twentieth Century Egyptian Art: the pioneers 1920– 52’, in Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy Johnson and Barak A. Salmoni (eds), Re-­ envisioning Egypt 1919–52 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), pp. 426–7. 38. Kassem-­Draz, ‘Opaque and transparent discourse’, p. 142.

68 | sonallah i b r a h im 39. Najmat Aghustus, pp. 163, 173, 183. 40. Rasheed El-­Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident: East-­West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), pp. 116–17.

5 CocaColaland: al-Lajna (1981)

S

onallah Ibrahim’s third published novel, al-­Lajna (The Committee; 1981), is regarded by many critics as his most successful work to date.1 In terms of length and overall conception, it has more in common with Tilka al-­Raʾiha than with Najmat Aghustus, being constructed on a rather small scale, with little, if any, of the expansiveness of the latter work. Indeed, it arguably has more in common with Tilka al-­Raʾiha than with any other of the author’s works, both because of its comparatively short length (it covers only a little over a hundred pages of print, or some 25,000 words) and also because of certain stylistic characteristics (as well as some of the general social and political ambience) that it shares with the earlier work. Publication and Translations

The first chapter of the novel, which describes the narrator’s initial confrontation with the Committee (‘lajna’) from which the book takes its name, originally appeared as a self-­contained short piece in the magazine al-­Fikr al-­Muʿasir (Contemporary Thought) in May 1979, some two years before the publication of the full work. The complete work was published in Beirut by Dar al-­Kalima in 1981 and reissued in Cairo the following year (1982) by Matbuʿat al-­Qahira; it has since gone through numerous editions, being reprinted or republished not only in Cairo and Beirut but also in Tunis and Marrakesh. In addition to the English translation by May St Germain and Charlene Constable,2 the work has been translated into French,3 German4 and a number of other European languages.

70 | sonallah i b r a h im Background As it is impossible to appreciate the thrust of Sonallah Ibrahim’s satire in al-­ Lajna without some knowledge of the Egyptian economic and political context, it will be necessary to sketch the background to the work in some detail. Thematically, the novel represents an important new stage in the author’s writing career, for the most conspicuous element is provided by the author’s comments on President Anwar Sadat [al-­Sādāt]’s policy of infitāª (‘opening [up]’) – the term used to designate the ‘open-­door’ economic policy of President Sadat, which, together with his policy of rapprochement with Israel, was to become one of the principal targets of political criticism not only for Sonallah Ibrahim but also for many other writers and intellectuals of his generation. Sadat’s policy of infitāª represented a dramatic break with the radical socialist orientation that had inspired the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952 and provided the inspiration for most of the economic and political policies of the late President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s untimely and unexpected death from a heart attack on 28 September 1970 – probably partly attributable to the strain of attempting to negotiate an end to the Palestinian/ Jordanian crisis earlier that month5 – brought to power a man who had been appointed as Vice-­President less than a year before and who was not at first widely known to the outside world. He had, moreover, inherited from his predecessor a mountain of economic and other problems: the Suez Canal remained closed as a result of the disastrous 1967 Six-­Day War with Israel, with the loss of some £100 million in annual revenues; the country had massive foreign debts; industrial output was rapidly declining; and per capita income was falling. Following his appointment as President, Sadat moved rapidly to consolidate his political position at home, through a series of purges of potential opponents in 1971 known as the ‘corrective revolution’.6 The true turning-­ point in the establishment of the new regime’s legitimacy, however, came with the October 1973 War, in which the Egyptian army recaptured part of the east bank of the Suez Canal, occupied since 1967 by the Israelis. Although no more than a partial victory in military terms, the legitimacy thereby acquired by Sadat – the ‘hero of the crossing’ – had important, and almost immediate,

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 71 ramifications. Within a week, diplomatic relations with the USA (which had been severed since the 1967 war) had been restored; diplomatic contacts, of a sort, were also quickly established between the Egyptians and Israelis; and these eventually led, after a series of interim withdrawal agreements, to Sadat’s dramatic initiative and speech to the Israeli Knesset on 20 November 1977, in which he put his case to Egypt’s historic enemy in person on the enemy’s home ground. Sadat’s visit to Israel (a symbol, in the eyes of many Egyptian intellectuals, of the President’s subservience to Western interests and betrayal of the Palestinians) was followed in due course by the so-­called ‘Camp David talks’, leading to the signing of a peace agreement, with American assistance, between Egypt and Israel in March 1979 – an agreement that was to have major implications not only for the two countries most immediately concerned, but also for Egypt’s relations with the rest of the Arab world, most of which now regarded Sadat as a traitor to the Arab cause. The interplay between Sadat’s Middle East initiatives and his economic policies was by no means a straightforward one. Already, in 1971, he had moved to try to alleviate some of his inherited economic problems with a law designed to encourage foreign investment, but the results of this initiative were decidedly limited and it was not until after the October 1973 War that his policy of infitāª could begin to be implemented in earnest, in tandem with his foreign policy initiatives. The main plank of the initial infitāª reforms, which came into operation in June 1974, was a law on Arab and foreign investment known as Law 43, primarily designed to end the public-­sector monopoly on banking activities in the country, and to provide incentives for joint ventures between foreign investors and Egyptian public sector organisations. The results of Sadat’s ‘twin track’ approach to economic and foreign policy were not entirely negative. Progress on the Arab–Israeli front enabled him to reopen the Suez Canal to shipping in June 1975, with immediate positive results for the Egyptian economy in terms of revenue. But overall, the results of infitāª were disappointing: to quote Roussillon’s blunt evaluation, ‘it did not work – or at least not in the way the regime had hoped it would’.7 Rather than investing in joint undertakings with Egyptian public sector enterprises, as had been hoped, most investors preferred to put money into tourist ventures, hotels, office and apartment buildings, and banking. A

72 | sonallah i b r a h im report by the National Democratic Party in 1980 stressed the importance of a private sector working within the framework of the national development plan, and defined the policy of infitāª as: neither a return to capitalism and the principles of economic freedom held prior to the revolution nor a shift from the social democratic direction emphasized by the public sector’s control of the basic sources of production.8

Although in May 1980 Egyptians approved the formula that ‘Egypt is a democratic socialist state with a mixed economy’, most intellectuals (as well as many members of the general public) perceived the main results of the policy to have been an increase of corruption and a loss of public sector effectiveness, leading to a drastic increase in a ‘get rich quick’ mentality, and a surrender of Egyptian economic sovereignty to outside interests, most notably those of the United States. Combined with the widespread view that Sadat’s peace accord with Israel represented a ‘sell out’ both of Egyptian and of wider Arab interests, the antipathy engendered by the reaction to the policy of infitāª was a major factor in fomenting a mood of public disillusion – a mood of disillusion that arguably helped clear the way for the growth of Islamic terrorism in Egypt and lead indirectly to Sadat’s assassination in 1981. Summary As in the case of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous works, the ‘plot’ of al-­Lajna is fairly tenuous and the essential points may be summarised in no more than a few lines. The narrator/protagonist is summoned before a Committee of Investigation to answer questions on topics for which he has been attempting to prepare himself intellectually for a full year but about which he has received no firm information. After being quizzed about a report on his impotence and subjected to a humiliating physical examination in an attempt to prove that he is a homosexual, he is first asked to suggest what the present century will be most remembered for in the future. He muses on various possibilities, including Marilyn Monroe, Arab petroleum, Vietnam and the conquest of space, but rules them all out, settling instead for ‘Coca-Cola’, [which] is found everywhere, from Finland and Alaska in the north to Australia and South Africa in the south. Its return to China after an absence

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 73 of thirty years was one of those resounding news items that will go to make up the history of this century.9

Still with his trousers down, the narrator proceeds to give a history of the development of Coca-Cola, which he clearly views as a symbol of world domination. Asked to expound his views on a historical topic, he launches into an exposition of the purpose of the pyramids and the role of the Israelites in building them, which seems to please the Committee; but his interrogation is then suspended and he hears nothing for several months, until suddenly he receives a telegram informing him that the Committee is ‘awaiting a study of the most prominent [almaʿ] contemporary Arab personality’.10 Various possibilities occur to the narrator before he finally settles on the cryptically named ‘Doctor’, whom he sees in a picture accompanying an advertisement for a new Arab-­American bank. A frantic round of research follows this selection, as the narrator feverishly attempts to put together a dossier on the man, but it soon becomes clear, following a visit from the Committee to the narrator’s flat, that this choice has not met with their approval. The next set of events is implied rather than narrated, for although the transition from the end of chapter 4 to the beginning of chapter 5 strongly implies that the narrator has killed the Committee member who has been ‘shadowing’ him in his flat, the deed itself is not explicitly described. At all events, the narrator is summoned to appear again before the Committee (now in mourning), where he is accused of being part of a conspiracy and invited to reflect on his position. When he returns to the Committee room and announces that the has nothing to add to his previous statements, the Committee unanimously sentences him to the harshest possible punishment available to them and the book ends with the narrator, following a night spent listening to recordings of classical music, settling down to the punishment decreed by the Committee – to eat himself.11 Structure, Themes and Technique As previously noted, al-­Lajna is a relatively short work by comparison with Najmat Aghustus – its estimated 25,000 or so words falling somewhere between the author’s two previously published novels in terms of its length.

74 | sonallah i b r a h im In terms of its layout and formal organisation, it at first sight appears entirely conventional, being divided into six chapters, arranged (unlike those of Najmat Aghustus) in a straightforward logical sequence. Like both Sonallah Ibrahim’s earlier published novels (as well as the unpublished Riwaya), al-­ Lajna is related in the first person, employing a ‘homodiegetic’ narrator12 whose intellectual make-­up and frame of mind appear to owe a considerable amount to the author himself. (Particularly noteworthy, perhaps, is his taste in Western classical music, as revealed at the very end of the work, which extends not merely to well-­known composers such as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky but to César Franck, Carl Orff and Shostakovich.)13 Unlike Tilka al-­Raʾiha and Najmat Aghustus, however (both of which may be regarded as ‘semi-­autobiographical’, as previously discussed), the circumstances in which the narrator finds himself in al-­Lajna (with the possible exception of some incidents related in chapter 6) clearly situate the narrative in the realm of fiction/fantasy rather than that of ‘real life’. At the same time, the narrator of al-­Lajna clearly shares with the narrators of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous works many of the features of the archetypical ‘anti-­hero’; indeed, the narrator is here condemned not simply to impotence and failure, as in Tilka al-­raʾiha, but actually to self-­annihilation – the work finishing with the narrator/protagonist sitting down to the punishment decreed by the Committee appointed to examine him, namely, to ‘consume himself’. The final words of the work, ‘Then I lifted my arm to my mouth and began to consume myself’,14 if taken literally, are most naturally to be read, like the final words of Tayyeb Saleh’s drowning narrator in Mawsim al-­hijra ila al-­shimal (Season of Migration to the North), as a literary conceit – a lapse into unconsciousness that subverts the narrative of the entire preceding work; against that, Cachia’s alternative, and less dramatic, interpretation – that the phrase ‘taʾkul nafsak’ is to be interpreted metaphorically, as in the Egyptian dialect, to mean ‘to brood ineffectively in solitude’ – has always seemed to me something of a red herring, in view of the evident physicality of the novel’s last sentence, though it has recently gained some credibility from remarks apparently made in an interview by the author himself.15 At all events (and however we are to interpret the closing scene), the sequence of events that has meanwhile unfolded in the body of the novel presents a vivid picture of a world in which the individual is entirely at

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 75 the mercy of the state. Not infrequently categorised by commentators as ‘Kafkaesque’, it moreover demonstrates Sonallah Ibrahim’s use of irony and sarcasm at its most graphic. The author’s ‘deadpan’ narrative tone has much in common with that of Tilka al-­raʾiha, but the work clearly represents a considerably more complex literary construction than that of the earlier work, for although the narrator remains essentially ‘characterless’, as well as powerless with regard to his own fate, he has also begun to play the role of social critic – as his treatment of the Coca-Cola theme and his choice of the ‘Doctor’ demonstrate. As in Tilka al-­raʾiha, the overall effect is enhanced by the author’s apparent preoccupation with sexual impotence and deviant behaviour, which is here however combined with an element of what might almost be regarded as farce. The Committee’s physical examination of the narrator is recounted in almost clinical detail, to the insertion of the Committee member’s finger into his anus, but the feeling of disgust that this episode is likely to induce is quickly dispelled by the incongruity between the narrator’s lengthy and eloquent exposition on the most significant developments of the twentieth century and his trouser-­less state – a state which, as he himself observes, made him feel that he was ‘completely naked before the Committee, not just in the physical sense, but also figuratively, too. I was entirely at their mercy.’16 This combination of indignity and farce is continued later in the work, when the Committee leave one of their members alone with the narrator in his flat, ostensibly with the purpose of helping him to complete his task. Not content with following the narrator to the toilet, the Committee man actually sleeps beside him in the same bed. Unsurprisingly, in light of the previous ‘inspection’, the narrator is somewhat apprehensive of this arrangement, and his apprehension is redoubled when he glimpses an enormous bulge between the man’s thighs – a bulge that is subsequently revealed, in an inverted Freudian twist, to be a machine gun.17 It hardly needs to be spelled out that the narrator’s sense of impotence and powerlessness before the Committee echoes the power relationship that is implied by his choice of Coca-Cola as the most significant development of the century – a product that the narrator sees as perhaps the ultimate symbol of US domination and imperialism. The sense that US–Egyptian relations have in some way become distorted and that the Committee may actually be

76 | sonallah i b r a h im a symbol of US domination is increased when the narrator, again summoned before the Committee, finds the hall decorated with flowers in honour of a deceased Committee member – in whose death, as previously noted, the narrator is implicated, despite the fact that his supposed crime is nowhere explicitly described; in Genettian terms, there is a temporal ellipsis between the end of chapter 4 (which ends with the narrator making coffee for himself and the Committee member) and the beginning of chapter 5 (where he re-­enters the hall to resume his hearing) – his involvement being strongly suggested, however, by the fact that when, in the presence of the Committee member, he opens a drawer in the kitchen, ‘My eyes went right to the butcher [sic] knife, that large, shiny blade with a tapered tip’, following which – having removed the coffeepot from the heat – ‘For the first time in ages, I felt strength and purpose pervade my being’.18 Be that as is may, not only is the hall now decorated with flowers, but the wreaths are accompanied by messages of condolence from an elaborate array of world dignitaries, from US President Carter and his wife down; the list includes, among others, the US Vice-­President, a number of former US Presidents, the bosses of several international corporations (including those of Coca-Cola!), and the leaders of the military regimes in Chile, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bolivia and the Philippines – not to speak of the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, together with Moshe Dayan and Chaim Weizmann, and various luminaries from the Arab world itself.19 While the pages that follow on one level represent a continuation of the narrator’s earlier interrogation, the focus – both of the Committee (now one person short) and of the narrator/protagonist himself – now inevitably shifts in the light of the ‘attack on our comrade’, which the Chairman attributes to ‘destructive elements’, claiming that ‘All the evidence confirms that we are facing a great conspiracy’.20 A number of points may be noted in relation to the development of this chapter. The first is that the language used by the Committee chairman has become increasingly more elusive, convoluted and engmatic, reflecting the fact that – the loss of the Committee member excepted – the connection of the work of the Committee with any tangible reality has become even more tenuous than in previous chapters. Addressing his colleagues, the Committee chairman notes that ‘the departed [Committee member] played an impres-

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 77 sive role in devising most of the impressive transformations that have taken place around us and in molding the form in which they materialized’, and goes on to summarise the present situation by saying that: In all our dealings we have been careful to remain dissociated from any direct connection to official bodies and executive authorities, in spite of the rumors that have clung to us and that on several occasions have had a basis in reality . . . Now we are faced with a similar situation whose seriousness forces us to attend to . . . What compounds the delicacy of the situation is the anguish and distress you are now subjected to, through being directly confronted by the pair of hands stained with the blood of your comrade.21

At this point, we may note that the enigmatic nature of the Committee’s hearings extends even to the language being used: when the narrator tries for the first time to reply to the Committee chairman’s statement, he asks to be allowed to speak Arabic, ‘in order to better express myself’. This is, to say the least, a somewhat enigmatic request as there has been no previous discussion of the appropriate language for communication.22 The point is not pursued, however, and when the narrator is finally allowed to speak in his own defence, he in effect acknowledges his crime but adopts a tone that might best be characterised as apologetic, rejecting any suggestion of a conspiracy and, in an ironic twist, consigning to the realm of fiction the sort of violent and daring act he imagines the Committee to be accusing him of: I am telling the truth in saying that when I came today, I did not plan to defend myself. I acknowledge what I did and am willing to face the ­consequences . . . I believe you know very well that I have never before committed a violent act. I’m just an ordinary man who prefers as much peace and quiet as possible. The daring acts others speak of and brag about have no connection with me other than as the stuff of stories and novels . . . What I did to your colleague, or to be more accurate, to his chest, was only the natural reaction of a simple person in a situation of self-­defense.23

Space forbids a detailed analysis of the succeeding pages of this chapter, which see a return to the familiar subject of Coca-­Cola, to ‘rumours’ and ‘conspiracies’, and to the ‘Doctor’, whose distinctions, so the narrator informs us, included ‘participation in the development of the Arabic

78 | sonallah i b r a h im l­anguage by coining new meanings from common words, among them the term “diversification” [tanwīʿ]’24 – a suggestion that seems to hint at an Alice-­ in-Wonderland world, in which, to echo Humpty Dumpty, ‘words mean what I want them to mean’.25 At all events, after listening for some while to the narrator’s explanations in his own defence, the Committee Chairman invites him to ‘[withdraw] for a little to consider the matter’; when the narrator returns a little later with the message that ‘I don’t have anything to add’, his fate is sealed, and he is informed that in that event: Your intransigent attitude leaves us unable to find any rationalization for mercy or for granting your petition. Because of that – in our opinion – you deserve the harshest punishment on the books. This is our unanimous decision.26

The final chapter of the novel, bringing Sonallah Ibrahim’s savage satire to a close, deserves perhaps a little more attention than it has received from previous commentators, for it contains a number of twists and turns that call into question Badawi’s characterisation of the work as a ‘story progressing in a straight line, uninterrupted by flashbacks or stream-­of-consciousness devices’.27 It may first be noted that, despite the chairman’s statement about the ‘harshest punishment’ quoted above, the precise punishment to which the narrator is sentenced is nowhere defined by the Committee itself: the narrator receives the definition of the punishment not from the Committee but from the porter (a character who has hovered in the background since the book’s opening paragraph), who, after noting that ‘The Committee isn’t a court’, explains to the narrator that the nature of ‘the harshest punishment’ depends on the particular situation, although in his case, ‘there is no punishment more severe or rigorous than consumption’.28 This conversation marks the end of the narrator’s direct dealings with the Committee – the obscurity of the circumstances of his ‘dismissal’ echoing those of his initial dealings with the Committee in the opening chapter, where his attempts to prepare himself for his initial appearance by contacting others who had appeared before it are hampered by the fact that: Most denied ever having gone before the Committee, or even denied all knowledge of its existence. The rest used the excuse that they had forgot-

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 79 ten the details, so their reports were vague and contradictory . . . The only thing I came up with was that there was no set method to the Committee’s work.29

At all events, having received notice of his sentence in this ‘second-­hand’ fashion, the narrator decides to leave the Committee’s place of work, and sets out to wander ‘aimlessly’ through the streets. Although the succeeding pages preserve much of the savagely satirical tone that has marked the narrator’s dealings with the Committee, there is at this point a significant change in the focus of the text, for in place of the tortuous relationship with the members of the Committee, the author now leads us on a tour of Cairo, involving some fairly straightforward passages of social criticism in which the narrator’s situation as an object of the Committee’s attention appears to play comparatively little part. Although the narrative voice of the ‘homodiegetic narrator’ is here preserved unchanged and undisturbed, in terms of the main preoccupation of the novel these pages might almost be regarded as ‘free standing’; while looking ahead to Sonallah Ibrahim’s future publications, we may perhaps see in them a sort of experimental draft for the sort of social criticism that was to come to fruition most obviously in Dhat.30 At all events, having quit the Committee’s place of work, the narrator first stops to slake his thirst on (inevitably!) a bottle of warm Coca-Cola, which he purchases at double the listed price ‘on the pretext of . . . imaginary ice’ from a vendor whom the narrator clearly identifies as another potential beneficiary (albeit a rather more lowly one) of Sadat’s policy of infitāª: [He] was moving energetically and somewhat aggressively. I guessed he would attain his ambition quickly; the store would soon be filled with foreign cigarettes and candy, then with other imported commodities, including cassettes, tape recorders and canned goods.31

His thirst quenched, the narrator boards one of the fleet of ‘Carter’ buses32 (quickly renamed ‘Tartar’ buses by the travelling public), where a scuffle develops between a large man and a woman, in which the narrator attempts to intervene. His principled stand, however, comes to an abrupt end when the man involved throws him ‘a knockout punch’, followed by a further shove, which causes the narrator to lose his balance; seeing that he will fall

80 | sonallah i b r a h im on his face, he stretches out his right hand, and his weight lands full on it as he hits the floor. Sonallah Ibrahim’s account of this incident is reminiscent of Yusuf Idris’s short story ‘Snobbism’, in which a certain Doctor ʿUways similarly attempts to intervene in an incident of supposed sexual harassment on a Cairo bus;33 but in Sonallah Ibrahim’s case the satirical account of his adventure is extended by an account of the narrator’s subsequent attempts to obtain medical treatment for his injury – involving delays, arguments, overcharging and barbed comments on a medical profession that has been ‘the ruin of public hospitals to the advantage of private shops’.34 Both the tone and the content of this passage in particular will strike an immediate chord with readers familiar with Dhat. If this passage represents a shift in narrative tone, the book’s conclusion emerges as arguably even more enigmatic than the main part of the narrative, bringing together as it does not only the course of the Committee’s deliberations, but also a number of other concerns that recur elsewhere in the author’s work. Most commentators have predictably focused mainly on the work’s final sentence (‘Then I lifted my wounded arm to my mouth and began to consume myself’),35 but the final few pages deserve closer attention. Returning to his apartment with sufficient food for several days, the narrator first instructs the doorman to tell any enquirers that he is away, then settles down to put his affairs in order – the prevailing mood being clearly that of a man conscious that death is imminent, running over his past life, ‘looking one last time for where things had gone wrong’. He lingers over documents and pictures, including a picture of his father – the only individual specifically identified in this passage, and who thus (as in the closing section of Tilka al-­raʾiha) assumes a somewhat unexpected importance. More predictable, perhaps, given the recurrent preoccupations of Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrators, are the pictures of women with whom he has been associated and whose recollections prompt the narrator to turn to pornography, seeking to live again ‘those charged moments, during which life floods every cell of the body and a caress anywhere arouses waves of ecstasy that inevitably crest’.36 Among the quotations that leap out at him from his jottings, and which he spends several hours contemplating, are some lines by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, most likely composed shortly before he shot himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-­six:37

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 81 I hope I trust [sic] the day shall never dawn when I stoop to the shame of being sensible . . . It’s then that one wants to rise – rise and address time, time and history, and all creation . . . [Mayakovsky’s] fate reminded me of my tragedy.38

This apparent self-­identification of the narrator with a Soviet author who, like not a few others, killed himself during the worst years of Stalin’s terror, is a powerful reminder of the considerable influence exerted by Soviet writers on Sonallah Ibrahim already noted in Chapter 2 above – though to what extent (if at all), the reader may be intended to read into it a comparison between the circumstances of Stalin’s Soviet Union and those of republican Egypt seems considerably less certain. At all events, reminded by Mayakovsky’s lines of his own ‘tragedy’, he begins to wish that he was standing before the Committee again. Standing before his tape recorder in the empty room, he declaims his confession, using the words that he now feels he should have used at the time, and acknowledging that ‘I committed – from the beginning – unpardonable errors. I shouldn’t have stood before you, but against you. Every noble effort on this earth should be aimed at eliminating you.’39 From his historical investigations, however, the narrator concludes that ‘your group will gradually lose what authority it has, while the power of those like me to confront and resist it will grow.’ Comforted by these reflections, the narrator feels a ‘strange peace of mind which filled my heart with a tranquility I had rarely known’, and he proceeds to listen to his final selections of music before consuming himself – his reasons for his choice of composers being spelled out in detail as a guide to his mood: Mozart, Grieg and others are ruled out for their ‘delicate, pleasant melodies’ or other reasons, and his choice finally comes to rest on ‘Cesar Franc [sic], in whom the splendor of doubt evolves into the bliss of certainty, Carl Orff, who erupts with vigor and conflict, Beethoven, who sings of victory and joy after pain, and Shostakovich, who blended all of this with mockery’40 (and who was also, one might add, a near-­ contemporary of his fellow countryman Mayakovsky!).

82 | sonallah i b r a h im Let us then attempt to sum up some of the main preoccupations of this fascinating work, described by Badawi as ‘one ironic statement’, but arguably considerably more complex. It is clear that the author’s overriding concern is with the theme of economic globalism and imperialism, as reflected in the narrator’s choice of the ‘Doctor’ as the most prominent contemporary Arab personality, for the ‘Doctor’s’ CV is that of a corrupt economic opportunist, involved not only with arms dealing and with the Israeli enemy, but also (of course!) with the formerly blacklisted Coca-Cola itself, for which he has secured the Egyptian concession. As an obvious beneficiary of President Sadat’s policy of infitāª – a policy almost universally rejected by the writers of Sonallah Ibrahim’s generation – the ‘Doctor’ (who had already gained considerable wealth even before the October War with Israel in 1973) has consolidated his personal political and economic position through a series of arms deals and construction projects, as well as by marrying off his daughter to an Arab president thirty years older than herself.41 His achievement is perhaps best summed up in the narrator’s withering justification for choosing him as his outstanding personality: he has succeeded in doing what has never been achieved before – uniting the Arab world through the ‘foreign commodities used by everyone’.42 In penning such a portrait, Sonallah Ibrahim has presented the reader with what Roger Allen has well described, in his Afterword to the English translation, as ‘a stinging indictment of the values of an entire class in Egypt that has chosen to enrich itself at the expense of its fellow citizens’.43 As Allen notes, Sonallah Ibrahim’s views are by no means unique among Egyptian writers, echoing – among others – those of Naguib Mahfouz in such novels as Malhamat al-­Harafish (1977; The Harafish (1994)) and Yawm qutil al-­ zaʿim (1985; The Day the Leader was Killed (1989)). The sarcastic tone of Sonallah Ibrahim’s text, however – exemplified by the narrator’s justification for his choice of the ‘Doctor’ already quoted – gives his work an entirely distinctive flavour, and is indeed perhaps one of al-­Lajna’s most distinctive features, extending from the narrator’s initial appearance before the Committee – which, ‘as everyone knows, is not compulsory’44 – through the appearance on the streets of Cairo of the so-­called ‘Carter buses’, which begin to disintegrate almost as soon as they have taken to the streets,45 to the final pages, with their frightening contrast between the narrator’s relaxed

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 83 state and the gruesome self-­punishment to which he has been sentenced by the Committee.46 Most commentators on the work have at some stage or other used the term ‘Kafkaesque’ to describe al-­Lajna, a categorisation that does indeed seem apt, particularly in light of the enigmatic ending. However one is to interpret the closing pages, there can be little doubt about the powerfulness of Sonallah Ibrahim’s writing in this work – a work in which few contemporary personalities or institutions, whether Egyptian or foreign, are spared the venom of the author’s pen. In this respect, it is hard overall to disagree with Badawi’s judgment that ‘[t]he intensity and savagery of this political satire, the dead-­pan style of writing is worthy of the pen of Jonathan Swift’,47 and it remains, in my view, one of the most powerful and successful expressions of the political and social attitudes of Sonallah Ibrahim’s generation of writers. As we shall see, subsequent novels by the same author have developed a number of the themes of al-­Lajna, but without necessarily improving on the forcefulness and vigour of the attitudes expressed, or of the conciseness of expression employed. Notes 1. See, for example, M. M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 162, who describes it as his ‘most powerful’ novel. 2. English translation as The Committee, trans. May S. St Germain and Charlene Constable, afterword by Roger Allen (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002). 3. Le Comité, traduit de l’arabe par Yves Gonzalez-­Quijano (Arles: Actes Sud, 1992). 4. Der Prüfungsausschuss: Roman aus Ägypten, translated into German by Hartmut Fähndrich (Basel: Lenos, 1988). 5. See Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–90 (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 82–3. 6. In Arabic, thawrat al-­ta‚ªīª. 7. Roussillon, ‘Republican Egypt interpreted’, pp. 361–2. See also Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society, pp. 131–2. 8. As quoted in Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society, p. 131. 9. al-­Lajna, 6th edn (Cairo: Dar Sharqiyyat, 1991), pp. 15–20.

84 | sonallah i b r a h im 10. Ibid. p. 30. The interpretation in this context of the Arabic words for prominent/most prominent (lamʿān/almaʿ) is, not surprisingly, a source of some puzzlement for the narrator himself. 11. Ibid. pp. 34–121. 12. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 245. 13. al-­Lajna, p. x; The Committee, pp. 157–8 (where César Franck rather curiously appears as ‘Cesar Franc’). 14. The Committee, p. 158. 15. al-­Lajna, pp. 120–1. See also Pierre Cachia, Arabic Literature – An Overview (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), p. 141. For an extended discussion of the work, including the final scene, see also Stephan Guth, Zeugen einer Endzeit. Fünf Schriftsteller zum Umbruch in der ägyptischen Gesellschaft nach 1970, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 160 (Berlin: Schwarz, 1992), pp. 114–49. For the author’s own remarks, see http://www.librarything.com/topic/13575: ‘I had the honor of speaking to Mr. Ibrahim yesterday and he pointed out that there is an Egyptian expression, intending to express a feeling of impotent anxiety and frustration, “I am eating myself”. So that helps – the narrator is sentenced to a life of insurmountable frustration, failure, etc.’ 16. The Committee, p. 24. See also Guth, Zeugen, pp. 17–27. 17. al-­Lajna, pp. 64–82; The Committee, pp. 78–105. 18. al-­Lajna, pp. 83–4; The Committee, pp. 106–7. 19. al-­Lajna, pp. 85–6; The Committee, pp. 108–9. 20. al-­Lajna, pp. 90–92; The Committee, pp. 115–19. 21. al-­Lajna, p. 89; The Committee, pp. 113–14. 22. al-­Lajna, p. 89; The Committee, p. 114. 23. al-­Lajna, p. 91; The Committee, p. 117. 24. al-­Lajna, p. 96; The Committee, p. 124. 25. See Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Chapter VI. 26. al-­Lajna, pp. 102–3; The Committee, pp. 132–4. 27. Badawi, A Short History, p. 162. 28. al-­Lajna, p. 105; The Committee, pp. 135–6. 29. al-­Lajna, p. 11; The Committee, pp. 6–7. 30. For which, see Chapter 7. 31. al-­Lajna, p. 107; The Committee, pp. 137–8. 32. After the US President James (‘Jimmy’) Carter, who held office 1977–81, and hosted the Camp David discussions that led to the signing of the controversial

cocacolala nd: al-lajna  | 85 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty in 1979. The signing of the treaty was followed by a substantial increase in American aid to Egypt. 33. In Yusuf Idris, Bayt min Laªm (Cairo: ʿAlam al-­Kutub, 1971), pp. 99–118; English translation by Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar in Journal of Arabic Literature 28 (1987), pp. 88–101. 34. al-­Lajna, p. 116; The Committee, p, 151. 35. al-­Lajna, p. 131; The Committee, p. 158. 36. al-­Lajna, p. 118; The Committee, p. 154. 37. His suicide was disputed by his daughter. See Victor Terras (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 38. al-­Lajna, p. 119; The Committee, p. 154. The English version of these lines does not seem entirely satisfactory; a more literal version of the Arabic (‘uqsim alā ataªaddath baʿd al-­ān bil-­lisān al-­mushīn lil-­taʿaqqul wa-­al-ªa‚āfa’) would be ‘I swear that after today I will not speak with a tongue that shames intelligence and sound judgement’. 39. al-­Lajna, p. 119; The Committee, p. 156. 40. al-­Lajna, p. 121; The Committee, p, 158. 41. al-­Lajna, p. 49; The Committee, p. 58. 42. al-­Lajna, p. 58; The Committee, p. 71. 43. The Committee, p. 163. 44. al-­Lajna, p. 12; The Committee, p. 9. 45. al-­Lajna, pp. 107–8; The Committee, pp. 138–9. 46. al-­Lajna, pp. 120–1; The Committee, pp. 157–8. 47. Badawi, A Short History, p. 3.

6 War in Lebanon: Bayrut, Bayrut (1984)

S

onallah Ibrahim’s next novel, Bayrut, Bayrut (Beirut, Beirut), published in 1984, picks up and develops, in the context of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, a number of themes and techniques that had been hinted at in his previous works. The geographical setting of the work is itself of some interest, for Egyptian writers in general have not been notable for their interest in other parts of the Arab world. Indeed, it is probably little exaggeration to say that, with the conspicuous exception of the Palestine-­Israel dispute, Arab writers in general have shown a marked reluctance to interest themselves in the problems of the region outside their own particular countries. Although the Lebanese war itself provides a proportion of the material for the novel, however, this is by no means the only theme running through the work, and problems of publishing in the Arab world (a subject on which the author could bring to bear significant personal experience) clearly emerge as one of the narrator’s other main preoccupations. Publication and Translations The novel was written during the period April 1982 to December 19831 and first published in Cairo in 1984 by the author’s favourite Cairo publishing house, Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi; it was subsequently reprinted in 1988 and on several subsequent occasions. An English translation by Chip Rossetti was published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing in September 2014 under the title Beirut, Beirut; to my knowledge, there are no other foreign-­language translations.

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 87 Background Sonallah Ibrahim’s interest in the Lebanese Civil War appears to have been initially sparked by the difficulties of publishing his work in Egypt – a situation that had plagued him since the writing of Tilka al-­raʾiha, and which prompted him to visit Lebanon in 1979. Then as now, the country enjoyed a reputation as one of the most liberal publishing centres in the Arab world, but for some four years had been in the grip of a complex civil war that was to last until 1990. Finding himself in the middle of the conflict, and in an attempt to understand what was happening, the author began to research and document the events around him, and it was this research that formed the basis for his subsequent novel. The background to, and events of, the Lebanese Civil War itself are somewhat difficult to untangle, being rooted in the complex and delicately balanced religious and ethnic divisions of the part-­Muslim, part-­Christian country. The modern state of Lebanon, with its current borders, is a comparatively recent creation. From 1516 to 1918, like much of the rest of the Arab world, the area had formed part of the Ottoman Empire, and for much of that period appears to have enjoyed a fairly tranquil existence, being in many ways something of a ‘backwater’; this calm was shattered during the nineteenth century (most notably in the early 1840s and in 1860), however, by major outbreaks of inter-­communal strife that also extended to Damascus and other areas of modern Syria.2 Following the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations in 1920 granted the mandate for Lebanon and Syria to France as part of the post-­war settlement, paving the way for the creation of the modern state of Greater Lebanon from the former provinces of Mount Lebanon, north Lebanon, south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. The administrative arrangements for the new state were formalised during the succeeding years, which saw a preliminary constitution drawn up in 1926; in 1943 a new unwritten National Constitution was agreed, which distributed seats in parliament on the basis of the 1932 census results, with a ratio of six-­to-five in favour of Christians. Major public offices were subsequently also allocated to specific communities, on the basis that the president should be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the Speaker of the Chamber of

88 | sonallah i b r a h im Deputies a Shia Muslim. These arrangements were carried forward into the period of independence, following French agreement to a transfer of power on 1 January 1944. A reminder of the inherent fragility of the new state and a foretaste of events to come was provided in 1958, when divisions in the country developed into a short-­lived civil war and, following a request from the Lebanese president, the US sent marines to preserve Lebanese independence. The major catalyst for the war of 1975–90, however, was developments in the ongoing Arab–Israeli dispute, in particular the changing fortunes of the Palestinians themselves. Although Lebanon had played little or no active part in the so-­ called Six-­Day War of 1967, the country was drawn progressively further into the conflict with the presence of an increasing number of Palestinians in the country after the expulsion of the Palestinian leadership from Jordan in the wake of the so-­called ‘Black September’ of 1970. The presence of increasing numbers of Palestinians began to upset the ethnic and political balance of the country, particularly when Palestinians began to use Lebanon as a base for attacks on Israel;3 matters came to a head in April 1975, when Christian Phalangist gunmen ambushed a bus in the ʿAyn al-­Rummana district of Beirut, killing twenty seven of its mainly Palestinian passengers; the Phalangists claimed that guerrillas had previously attacked a church in the same district. Events thereafter escalated rapidly, complicated by the direct involvement of Syria and Israel and by the multiplicity of changing alliances within the country itself, as well as the indirect involvement of several other external parties. In June 1976, Syrian troops entered Lebanon to restore peace and to curb the Palestinians, but the massacre of several thousands of Palestinians a few months later in a siege of the Tel el-­Zaatar camp led by Syrian-­allied Christian militias provoked widespread outrage and led to a temporary curb on Syrian influence. Direct Israeli involvement in events increased in 1978, when, in response to a Palestinian attack, Israel launched a major invasion of southern Lebanon, though it subsequently withdrew from all but a narrow border strip, which it handed over not to the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) but to its proxy, the mainly Christian South Lebanon Army militia. Events reached a new low – from an Arab viewpoint, at least – when in 1982, following the attempted assassination by a Palestinian splinter group

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 89 of the Israeli ambassador to the UK, Israel launched a full-­scale invasion of Lebanon, leading to the occupation of West Beirut. In September 1982, Christian Phalangist militias, under the eyes of the Israelis, committed what is now regarded as one of the major atrocities of the war, when they killed a total of perhaps 3,000 people, mainly Palestinians and Lebanese Shia, in the Sabra and Shatila camps4 – an event that was widely interpreted as revenge for the assassination of Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel. Following the election of Bachir’s elder brother, Amine, as president, a peacekeeping force, comprising mainly US, French and Italian troops, was despatched to Beirut, but after a series of suicide attacks in 1983, in which several hundred US and French troops were killed, US troops were withdrawn in 1984. The remaining events in the war, which extend beyond the date of publication of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel, may be dealt with more summarily as they are not immediately relevant to the work itself. In brief, 1985 saw the withdrawal of most Israeli troops from Lebanese territory, with the exception of the so-­called SLA (South Lebanese Army) ‘security zone’ in the south. The crucial event in the ending of the war, however, took place in 1989, when, following failed attempts to form a unified government the previous year, the Lebanese Parliament met in Taif, in Saudi Arabia, and reached agreement on a Charter of National Reconciliation, which incorporated some modest changes to the ‘confessionalist’ principles on which the Lebanese state was predicated. The war formally ended in October 1990 when, following an attack by the Syrian air force, the Maronite commander General Aoun fled, clearing the way for elections in 1992, and the appointment of the wealthy businessman Rafic Hariri as Prime Minister; Hariri’s assassination in 2005, the responsibility for which is still unresolved, is a useful reminder that the ending of the civil war itself did not bring to an end the tensions that had originally sparked it. Despite the obvious centrality of the Lebanese Civil War to the events of the novel, it is important also to note that the period under discussion also saw crucial developments on the Egyptian political scene, particularly in the field of foreign relations, and these indeed also figure at some length in the work – the narrator of which clearly retains a strong sense of his Egyptian identity. In brief, following the 1973 war between Israel and the Arab states, in which the Egyptians had succeeded (at least to a limited degree) in redeeming their

90 | sonallah i b r a h im honour following their crushing defeat in the so-­called Six-­Day War of 1967, President Sadat embarked on a policy of accommodation with Israel, which resulted – following several shuttle missions by Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary of State – in the signing of the Israel–Egypt Disengagement Treaty of 1974, followed by the Sinai Interim Agreement of 1975. The purpose of these agreements, from an Egyptian viewpoint, was to secure the withdrawal of Israel from the Suez Canal and as much of the Sinai Peninsula as possible through diplomatic means, and to secure the reopening of the Canal, the closure of which had had major economic consequences for Egypt. Events on the international front moved rapidly during this period: US–Egyptian diplomatic relations, severed in 1967, were restored in 1974; the Sinai oilfields were returned to Egypt; and, following a partial Israeli withdrawal, the Canal, blocked since 1967, was cleared and reopened in 1975, President Sadat leading the first convoy through the canal aboard an Egyptian destroyer. At this point, domestic events again came to the fore when, following the ending of subsidies on a range of basic foodstuffs, and the cancellation of bonuses and pay increases, heavy rioting broke out on 18 and 19 January 1977 in towns and cities throughout the country, with a serious loss of life. Although the government quickly rescinded the measures, which had been imposed at least partly at the behest of the World Bank, the riots did much to erode the position of Sadat, who had for several years enjoyed an extended period of domestic popularity as the ‘hero of the crossing’. From this point on, he became increasingly isolated, both at home and abroad, as he embarked on policies that failed to command the support either of the Egyptian people (particularly, though not merely, of the intellectuals) or of the leaders and peoples of the rest of the Arab world. His most dramatic gesture came on 19–20 November 1977 when he visited Jerusalem for talks with the new Israeli hard-­line Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and to address the Israeli Knesset. Sadat’s visit to Israel was followed by a visit by Begin to the Egyptian Canal city of Ismaʿiliyya (the so-­called ‘Ismailia summit’)5, and the ensuing talks marked the beginning of a process, facilitated by the USA, that led eventually to the Camp David agreement of March 1979. Sadat’s efforts for peace made him popular in the West, and he and Begin were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, but popular opinion in the Arab world held that he had betrayed the Palestinian cause

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 91 by concluding a separate deal with Israel that made no serious attempt to secure justice for the Palestinians. Egypt was expelled from the Arab League, and the League’s headquarters moved to Tunis.6 Increasingly unpopular at home and isolated in the Arab world, Sadat reacted by tightening censorship and imprisoning his opponents, but on 6 October 1981 he was assassinated by Islamist extremists while watching a military parade commemorating the anniversary of the 1973 crossing of the Suez Canal. Summary As with Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous works, the ‘plot’ of Bayrut, Bayrut in a conventional sense is extremely thin. The events of the work essentially revolve around the experiences of an Egyptian writer who travels to Beirut towards the end of 1980 in the hope of finding a publisher for his controversial latest book. Arriving in the city on 7 November 1980, the writer meets an old friend from his revolutionary student days and is introduced to two fascinating, though very different, women: the idealistic film-­maker Antoinette, and Lamyaʾ, the seductive wife of his would-­be publisher, ʿAdnan al-­Sabbagh. The narrator’s search for a publisher involves him in a series of meetings and other encounters, which expose some of the complexities of the Beirut publishing scene, currently exacerbated by the civil war, as well as publishing problems in the Arab world more generally. At the same time, the writer also becomes involved in a second literary enterprise – the writing of a film commentary on the civil war itself – that draws him in a still more immediate way into the turmoil of current events in the region. After a series of generally frustrating encounters, on both a professional and a personal level, the book closes with the narrator preparing to return to Cairo, his novel still unpublished. Structure, Themes and Technique Like the earlier Najmat Aghustus, Bayrut, Bayrut is narrated by a homodiegetic journalist narrator, who clearly incorporates many of the characteristics and preoccupations of the author himself. Like Najmat Aghustus also, the work has an at least partly autobiographical basis, as the author himself is known to have visited Beirut during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War in 1979. Both of the two main literary foci of the work – the search for a s­ uitable

92 | sonallah i b r a h im ­ ublisher and the writing of a screen play – are also clearly derived from p Sonallah Ibrahim’s own experience, at least in part, for, as already noted, he had both already encountered significant difficulties in publishing at least one of his works,7 and had also had some direct experience of film-­making while studying cinematography on a government scholarship in Moscow.8 The parallels with the earlier Najmat Aghustus do not end there, indeed, for like the earlier work, Bayrut, Bayrut both opens with the narrator leaving Cairo and ends (in a somewhat inconclusive fashion) with his return there. On this occasion, however, his point of departure is not the railway station but Cairo airport, from where he is to fly to Beirut in the hope of finding a publisher for his latest book. In terms of overall structure too, the two works now begin to diverge, for whereas the earlier work is formally structured in two parts (with a long single sentence of several pages at the end of the first part and a slightly curious system of ‘reverse numbering’ in the second part),9 the ‘experimental’ structural aspects of Bayrut, Bayrut take a rather different form. Within a conventionally numbered sequence of twenty-­seven chapters, six full chapters (together with some preliminary material) – the results of the narrator’s involvement in the second of his two enterprises – are presented as film scenes, set in a different size font. The reader is thus effectively faced with two intertwined narratives in which the narrative ‘voices’ are radically different from each other, the first being mediated by a homodiegetic narrator similar in kind to those of Sonallah’s earlier three novels,10 while the second consists of fragments of screen play in which descriptions of the visual material are interspersed with captions, themselves not infrequently taken from Lebanese or other newspapers (including Israeli papers); in these sections, the narrator effectively has no voice. Links between the two levels of narrative are provided at the start of the first few sections of film material – ‘I got out my paper and pen and started work at once’ and ‘We carried the film containers to the editing room . . . and started work’,11 for example – but this technique is not applied in every case. It should also be noted that chapter 7, which precedes the first of the film sequences, comprises an account of the narrator’s preliminary researches on the background to the Lebanese Civil War. This account is clearly designed to serve as background material for the information of the reader,12 and in this respect recalls the passages in al-­Lajna13 in which the narrator researches the information requested by the committee. In

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 93 Bayrut, Bayrut, however, the information researched is presented in a generally totally straightforward manner, with none of the sarcasm of the earlier novel. In addition to the product of the narrator’s researches presented in chapter 7, the author also provides a list of sources used in writing his work (they include, in addition to a range of material in Arabic, Jonathan Randal’s Tragedy of Lebanon and an issue of the National Geographic magazine) and maps of Lebanon and Beirut for the reader’s convenience.14 A few examples from chapters 8 and 10 (the latter subtitled ‘The first scene of the film’) will illustrate the technique employed by Sonallah Ibrahim in these passages, which can be regarded as the author’s first substantial deployment of the ‘intertextual’ techniques foreshadowed in Tilka al-­Raʾiha and subsequently further developed in Dhat and elsewhere:15 [1] She [Antoinette] handed me some white sheets of paper and switched off the light after putting on her glasses. I drew up a seat beside her and took my pen out of my pocket. The first few dark, hazy frames appeared, one after the other. Then the name of the film appeared. I put the tip of my pen on the paper without lifting my eyes from the small screen and began to record what I was seeing: General shots of nature. Snow covering a mountain peak. Cedars appearing from beneath the melting snow . . . Fairuz singing ‘I loved you in summer, I loved you in winter’ . . . a poster fills the empty screen with the words: ‘Lebanon Tourist Restaurant offers the finest mezze and best oriental dishes every evening . . .’ Another poster: ‘Lebanon: Oasis of Freedom’.16 [2] First scene of the film Formations of warplanes with the Star of David on their sides. The planes swoop time and again over low houses and extensive fields. Bombs explode in the fields. The houses collapse. Caption: In the first few hours of 1975, Israeli incursions into the south of Lebanon grew more intense. A circle around a paragraph from the Israeli newspaper Maʿarev dated 31 January 1975. Mordechai Gur, Israeli Chief of Staff: ‘We need to construct a new geo-­political reality in the region.’17

94 | sonallah i b r a h im [3] A medium-­sized bus with no passengers. Traces of bullets having been fired at its sides and windows. Caption: On the afternoon of Sunday 13 April, this bus was returning from a commemoration of the Deir Yassin18 massacre, with a number of Palestinian and Lebanese residents of the Tell al-­Zaatar camp. When it reached the ʿAyn al-­Rummana district, it was fired on by the Phalangists, who killed 26 of its passengers (mostly children) and wounded 29 others.19

The events covered by this commentary cover the period from the beginning of 1975, as described above, to the withdrawal of the Israeli army from south Lebanon in 1978. As the film progresses, political elements begin to dominate the images, and a picture emerges of a chaotic country at the mercy of a plethora of largely uncontrollable outside forces. Lebanon’s tragedy is that, in addition to the almost incomprehensible manoeuvrings of the various factions and leaders within the country itself, it has become a pawn in a game of ‘big power politics’, in which the Syrians and Israelis play a leading role under the watchful eyes of President Carter and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Frequent use is made of unspoken sarcasm and irony, not least through the juxtaposition of contrasting images: the poster advertising Lebanon as the ‘Land of welcome and tolerance, the meeting place of civilisations’ is followed by a picture of youths in black military uniforms marching along a street shouting ‘Un, deux, un, deux’.20 Not all of the material is exclusively concerned with the Lebanese Civil War, however, and one senses that the narrator’s homeland and its leader, Anwar Sadat, Sonallah Ibrahim’s bête noire, is never far from the narrator’s, or the author’s, mind: the ‘Sixth and final scene’, for example, laconically and sarcastically records President Sadat’s arrival in Jerusalem on 19 November 1977 in an act regarded by Sonallah Ibrahim and many other Egyptian intellectuals of his generation as their then president’s supreme act of betrayal. Sonallah Ibrahim’s account acquires additional force through its juxtaposition with other news items recording Israeli aggression against Lebanon – a technique that again presages that of later novels, in particular Dhat:

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 95 Jerusalem airport: President Sadat descends the steps of his private plane (cost: 12 million dollars paid for by Saudi Arabia), with Yitzhak Navon, the Israeli President beside him. Caption: With the first visit of its kind by an Arab President, under the slogan ‘Lasting Peace at any Price’, and under the protection of American power, Sadat acknowledged the historical right of the Jews to Palestine and to the Holy City, not to speak of the right of Zionist colonizers to exist. This acknowledgement shifted the parameters. Begin began to speak of the right to self-­government for those Palestinians remaining under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while those who were not under Zionist occupation administration had no right to Palestine but were to be absorbed in whichever state they were living in. The Israeli Knesset: Sadat proclaims: ‘There will be no further wars . . . between Egypt and Israel.’ Caption: A few days later . . . Israel tested Kfar aircraft, produced in its own factories, in a surprise raid on the village of al-ʿIzya in southern Lebanon. Headline from the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth: Kfar squadron commander announces that the operation was unparalleled and that the advanced equipment functioned perfectly.21

Subsequent scenes record the Israeli Prime Minister Begin and his wife being received by Sadat and his wife in the Canal city of Ismaʿiliyya on Christmas Day 1977, when Sadat again declares at a press conference (with Moshe Dayan’s black eye patch visible directly behind him) that the October (1973) war will be the last war between Egypt and Israel. In a further example of Sonallah Ibrahim’s skilful juxtaposition of news items, however (a technique to be further refined in his subsequent novel, Dhat), we learn that only a matter of weeks later, the rural environment of southern Lebanon is again to be plunged into chaos when Israel launches what subsequently came to be called the ‘Litani operation’, as thirty thousand soldiers, reinforced with aircraft, tanks and ships, invade the south of Lebanon with the declared intention of creating a ten-­kilometre wide ‘security zone’.22 The political bias of the narrator becomes particularly apparent in the discussion that follows the

96 | sonallah i b r a h im showing of the film’s final scene, which shows the Israelis withdrawing from southern Lebanon, leaving the United Nations to take their place. Antoinette accepts the narrator’s suggestion that this scene should be cut, leaving the film to end with the Israelis occupying the Litani river, on the basis that: This would raise the film from the level of a mere documentary to a futuristic vision. Israel was brought into existence to grow, expand and swallow others up. Even if Israel did leave Lebanon in 1978, three months after the invasion, she left behind in her place ‘NATO forces in blue berets’, in the words of the Israeli leaders themselves. And there is nothing to stop her returning at any moment.23

The writing of a commentary on the Lebanese Civil War as discussed above forms a sort of counterpoint to the original main focus of the narrator’s visit to Beirut – finding a publisher for his latest novel. Indeed, the problems of publication in the Arab world run like an undercurrent through the whole of the novel, and much of the ‘action’ of the remainder of the novel revolves around the narrator’s performance of this task, which has been extensively discussed by Samia Mehrez in an article entitle ‘Sonallah Ibrahim and the (Hi)story of the Book’.24 The omens for the success of the enterprise are not good: for in addition to the routine frustrations of attempting to circumvent the restrictions on subject matter acceptable for distribution, and of attempting to negotiate with greedy publishers exemplified by the ‘Taqaddum’ publishing house,25 the home of the narrator’s main potential publisher has also become a target for one of the numerous factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War. Speculating on who might be responsible for the explosion at the publishing house owned by ʿAdnan al-­Sabbagh, the narrator’s Egyptian colleague Wadiʿ provides an early introduction to the complexities of the current Lebanese political situation, suggesting that the explosion might have been caused by any one of ‘the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Shiʿites, the Israelis or the Libyans etc.’ and adding that ‘the time has passed when people owed their allegiance to a particular faction: now they vary their allegiances as a precaution against surprises.’26 Further speculation on the identity of the perpetrators includes the possibility that the explosion may actually have been caused by the ‘Deuxième Bureau’ themselves.27

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 97 Whatever we are to make of this sort of passage, Sonallah Ibrahim’s analysis of the internal politics of contemporary Lebanon is unlikely to strike the reader as particularly profound, and is clearly of less interest than his narrator’s experiences of his attempts to publish his book – experiences which, as Mehrez has pointed out, closely mirror those of Sonallah Ibrahim himself. The nature of the book to be published is not elaborated in detail, but from the opening chapter, in which the narrator converses with a Saudi passenger on the plane to Beirut, we learn that the reason for his failure to find a publisher for his book in Egypt is not that he is a first time author, nor that his work is political, but that it is ibāªī, a term rendered by Mehrez as ‘indiscreet’, but which frequently also has sexual connotations; the dual nature of the reasons for the novel’s unacceptability – which clearly echo the censor’s concerns about Tilka al-­raʾiha, for example28 – is subsequently confirmed when Lamyaʾ tells him that it will be impossible to distribute because ‘you have not left a single Arab regime without attack. Plus, there is a lot of sex.’29 More generally, Sonallah Ibrahim is clearly concerned in Bayrut, Bayrut both to expose the shallowness of the popular view of Beirut as a liberal centre for Arab publishing, and more generally, to unmask the extent to which political concerns in the Arab world inhibit the free publication and distribution of literary material. On a superficial level, Beirut, for a while at least, appears to live up to its reputation as a place where the reader can purchase items not available in other parts of the Arab world. Taking a stroll with Wadiʿ along the street, for example, the narrator buys a copy of the Arabic translation of Miles Copeland’s The Game of Nations, several books about the October War and the Camp David Agreement prohibited in Egypt, and some sex magazines (including one in Arabic), before Wadiʿ draws his attention to copies of books by Naguib Mahfouz and Jurji Zaydan. Wadiʿ explains that the books are pirate editions, and when the narrator expresses surprise, gives an explanation that provides the narrator with his first introduction to the idea that publishing in Lebanon is by means as straightforward as it may appear to the outsider: They are photocopies of the original edition. Publishing here is not subject to any regulations or conventions. Most publishers are thieves. They make an agreement with you to print three thousand copies, for example, then

98 | sonallah i b r a h im secretly print five thousand. Then they duck out of paying you royalties with the excuse that only a few copies of your book have been distributed.30

As the novel progresses, distribution – along with the straightforward greed of the publishers, and political constraints imposed by the manifold Arab regimes – emerges as one of the central problems of book publishing from Beirut. Sonallah Ibrahim’s opportunities for exploring these questions are considerably extended by the device of casting his narrator not only as an author seeking a publisher in his own right but also as the bearer of a letter from an Egyptian colleague seeking to collect royalties for an already published book.31 Needless to say, the narrator is unsuccessful in these attempts, for the publishers concerned are adept at manipulating the numbers and percentages concerned in such a way as to ensure that authors are constantly unable to secure what they consider themselves entitled to. In the end, however, it is politics that emerges as the determining factor, as Lamyaʾ suggests to the narrator his alternative options for the publication of his book, should he not wish to accept her husband ʿAdnan’s terms: ‘There’s another idea. A Swiss firm is interested in publishing the book.’ ‘In Arabic?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘I didn’t know that the Swiss read Arabic.’ ‘It will distribute it to Arab readers.’ ‘In Switzerland?’ ‘No, you idiot! Use your brain. The book hasn’t left a single Arab regime without attack. And then, there is the sex. Where is the only place it can be distributed freely?’ ‘Lebanon’, I said. ‘Lebanon isn’t a distribution centre’, she said. ‘It’s just a production centre. No publisher in his right mind would rely on the Lebanese reader alone. Where is the only place it could be distributed freely?’ ‘Where?’ I asked, bewildered. ‘I didn’t think you were that stupid. Israel, of course. There are more than a million and a quarter Palestinians desperate to read a word in Arabic.’32

So much for the narrator’s ‘twin track’ literary endeavours. As in Najmat Aghustus, however, what we may perhaps call the ‘frame story’ of Bayrut,

w ar i n leba non: bayrut, bayrut  | 99 Bayrut also includes a substantial ‘romantic’ element – for the narrator, like the author’s previous protagonists, again appears to suffer from the sort of sexual frustration that leads him to regard any available and reasonably attractive woman he may encounter as a potential target for his affections. At the same time, he clearly suffers from a sexual problem, the precise nature of which is never specified but which appears to inhibit orgasm. When a friend of the narrator commends Antoinette to him, for example, as a ‘wonderful girl . . . an uncomplicated woman, who goes to bed quickly’, the narrator responds that that ‘is precisely the opposite of what I am wanting’.33 It is not Antoinette, however, but Lamyaʾ, the wife of the publisher ʿAdnan Sabbagh, who provides the main focus for the narrator’s romantic attentions. Though their relationship starts on a professional basis, the sexual chemistry between Lamyaʾ and the narrator becomes evident at an early stage as they banter light-­heartedly about their differing Lebanese and Egyptian accents. The course of romance, however, runs no more smoothly here than in Najmat Aghustus. As in the earlier novel, alcohol plays a considerable part in the narrator’s social life, and his first attempt at seducing Lamyaʾ ends in failure, complicated by an almost ludicrous additional disaster: ‘The day had been full of mistakes. I’d begun to drink early. Then I’d mixed my drinks. And now, when I wanted to tell her something, I called her by my former wife’s name.’34 A subsequent attempt at seduction is interrupted when Israeli warplanes fly overhead breaking the sound barrier. It is indeed arguably only in the last few pages of the novel that the book’s three main strands are integrated, albeit in a rather tangential manner. As already noted, the narrator’s conversation with Lamyaʾ quoted above is a crucial one in relation to the literary context, for it not only serves to debunk the popular conception of Lebanon as a liberal haven of Arab publishing, but also creates an ironic link between the narrator’s publishing endeavours and the wider geo-­political context that informs his film commentary. Following this conversation, Lamyaʾ suggests to the narrator that he writes a mandate for her and her husband to undertake negotiations on the narrator’s behalf for the publication of his book; but events soon take a more physical turn when she leans over him, rests her cheek on his, and whispers to him in English: ‘You know you haven’t slept with me yet?’35 The narrator begins by pressing gently on her neck, but in a state of extreme arousal, the pressure

100 | sonallah i b r a h im of his fingers on her neck muscles and prominent veins increases; he moves on top of her and appears to be on the edge of finding fulfilment, either by seducing her or by strangling her, but at the last moment she summons all her reserves of strength and pushes him off her – thus, as it were, pulling together the three main strands of the work, as in a single act the literary and political frustrations that have beset the narrator’s efforts of his last few weeks are compressed, and dismissed, in a few short phrases that seem almost to belong to the author’s most laconic style as employed in Tilka al-­raʾiha: I didn’t choke her and I didn’t have my orgasm. She gathered her strength and roughly pushed me off her. She was able to free her neck from my fingers. She jumped up and stared at me in alarm, while I collapsed into my chair, breathing heavily, my limbs quivering. She raised her hands to her neck and moved her lips, but her voice was stuck in her throat. Without caring about her appearance, she grabbed her coat and bag, and hurried to the apartment door. She opened it and rushed outside.36

Add to all this that in the meantime Lamyaʾ has emerged from a conversation between the narrator and Jamila as a presumed bisexual, and it is perhaps little wonder that the narrator’s reaction to the immediately preceding events is to walk to the library, where ‘I picked up the bottle of whisky, tore off the cap, and took a swig directly from the bottle, [then] looked for the pack of cigarettes and found it on the ground beside the chair. I lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and went back to my seat.’37 In this closing scene, the lack of fulfilment that has characterised the narrator’s literary efforts appears to be precisely mirrored in his personal and sexual life as well. And so, after another swig of whisky and another cigarette, he packs his manuscript, checks that he has his passport and plane ticket, and leaves the building to catch a waiting taxi to the airport. Conclusion It is difficult to know quite how to evaluate this work, which continues the pattern established by Najmat Aghustus of combining fictional narrative with an often meticulously researched factual element – a pattern that we shall see further developed in several of the writer’s succeeding novels. Few are likely to argue that Bayrut, Bayrut is one of the author’s most successful works,

w ar i n lebanon: bayrut, bayrut  | 101 and it has attracted none of the superlatives that have at various times been attached to Tilka al-­raʾiha, al-­Lajna or Dhat, for example. Despite that, it constitutes an important milestone in the development of the author’s oeuvre as a whole. In his 2013 profile of Sonallah Ibrahim, Robyn Creswell noted that ‘Ibrahim’s fictions are full of real or invented documents [that] stick out of the surrounding text like exposed structural beams, as if he were purposefully drawing our attention to the archival labor involved in writing’.38 In the case of Bayrut, Bayrut, the results of this ‘archival labor’ (which here, exceptionally, take the form of a film commentary rather than a straightforward text, and which are documented at the conclusion of the book itself) offer us an ‘outsider’s window’ into a historical event that has been well described by Chip Rossetti as: at once very familiar and increasingly distant. On the one hand, the web of political relationships that launched and prolonged the Lebanese Civil War – a pattern of internal sectarian divisions manipulated by regional and international powers for their own ends – is a familiar one in our time. At the same time, the geopolitical alignments of late 1980 (the period when the novel is set) seem quite remote: the left/right affiliations of the various factions, for example, reflecting an overarching Cold War reality that no longer sets an agenda for global politics. At the same time, Islamist political groups are notably absent among the factions the narrator describes and encounters.39

Informal conversations with Lebanese colleagues have suggested that they have been sometimes less than impressed by Sonallah Ibrahim’s attempts to unravel the complexities of ‘their’ civil war. More problematic and disturbing, however, from the point of view of the ordinary reader is perhaps the unconvincing nature of sections of the fictional narrative, which occasionally – most obviously in certain ‘romantic’ scenes – descend into farce. We shall observe this characteristic again in some of the author’s succeeding works. Notes 1. Bayrut, Bayrut (Cairo, 1984), p. 264. 2. On this, see Leila Tarazi Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994).

102 | sonallah i b r a h im 3. On this, see, for example, Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon (London: Hutchinson Education, 1985), and Helena Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4. On these events, see Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organisation. 5. Referred to in Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 200–2. 6. See Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–90 (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 107–11. 7. See Chapter 2. On this theme, see also Yusuf al-­Qaʿid’s novel Shakawa al-­Misri al-­fasih (Cairo, 1981–85), discussed in Paul Starkey, ‘From the City of the Dead to Liberation Square’, Journal of Arabic Literature 24 (1993), pp. 62–74. 8. See Chapter 2, p. 25. 9. See Chapter 4, pp. 56–7. 10. Or four, if we include al-­Riwaya, for which see Chapter 3. 11. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 98, 110. 12. Ibid. pp. 57–70. 13. For which, see Chapter 5. 14. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 4–5, 261. 15. Ibid. pp. 98ff. For Tilka al-­raʾiha, see Chapter 2, and for Dhat see Chapter 7. 16. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 78–9. 17. Ibid. p. 98. 18. For which, see Nur Masalha, ‘On recent Hebrew and Israeli sources for the Palestinian exodus, 1947–49’, Journal of Palestine Studies 18: 1, Special Issue: Palestine 1948 (1988), pp. 121–37. 19. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 98–100. 20. Or rather, explained in the text itself, ‘han duy, han duy’ (‘un, deux . . . ’ in Lebanese ‘street French’); Bayrut, Bayrut, p. 82. 21. Ibid. pp. 199–200. 22. Ibid. pp. 200–2. 23. Ibid. p. 209. 24. Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994), pp. 39–57. 25. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 44–66, 132. 26. Ibid. pp. 29–30. 27. Ibid. p. 42. 28. See Chapter 3. 29. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 10–11, 132; Mehrez, Egyptian Writers, p. 55.

w ar i n lebanon: bayrut, bayrut  | 103 30. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 30–1. 31. Ibid. pp. 44–5. 32. Ibid. p. 260. See also Mehrez, Egyptian Writers, pp. 56–7; rather oddly, Mehrez’s quotation of this crucial passage omits the reference to Lebanon, crucially upsetting the balance of Sonallah Ibrahim’s juxtaposition of the two states. 33. Bayrut, Bayrut, pp. 92–93. 34. Ibid. p. 139. 35. Ibid. p. 261. 36. Ibid. p. 262. 37. Ibid. p. 262. 38. Robyn Creswell, ‘Sonallah Ibrahim: Egypt’s Oracular Novelist’ [Interview with Sonallah Ibrahim], 20 August 2013, available at http://www.newyorker.com/ books/page-­turner/sonallah-­ibrahim-egypts-­oracular-novelist (last accessed 31 July 2015). 39. Beirut, Beirut, translated by Chip Rossetti, p. 344.

7 Consumer Society: Dhat (1992)

A

fter his brief foray into the wider Arab world in Bayrut, Bayrut, Sonallah Ibrahim’s next novel, Dhat, published in 1992, returns to contemporary Egypt as the focal point of the narrative, picking up and developing a number of themes already evident in the author’s earlier novels. Publication and Translations The novel was first published in Cairo by Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi in 1992, and has been reprinted several times since. A French translation by Richard Jacquemond was published in 1993 as Les Années de Zeth, and an English translation by Tony Calderbank appeared in Cairo in 2001, published by the American University in Cairo Press under the title Zaat. The work was enthusiastically received and was nominated for the official novel prize due to be awarded at the Cairo International Book Fair in early 1993, but the nomination was withdrawn when it was pointed out that it would be incongruous for a state award to be awarded to a work that deliberately set out to subvert and discredit it. Background The political development of Egypt was arguably only briefly interrupted by the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Although still held in favour by the West, Sadat had become progressively isolated domestically, as well as in the wider Arab world, most particularly because of his policies towards Israel; and in contrast to that of Nasser, his death was generally viewed with indifference by his fellow countrymen. Khalid al-­Islambuli, the leader of the Islamist plot to kill Sadat, remained unrepentant to the end, and together with a number of other conspirators, was executed in April 1982.

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 105 Despite the dramatic nature of Sadat’s demise, the transfer of power to his successor, Husni Mubarak, was a smooth one. Husni Mubarak had not been a member of the original Free Officers’ Movement and, despite having served as Vice-­President under Sadat since 1975, was not well known to the Egyptian public. The initial impression he gave to his fellow countrymen was, however, a favourable one – his seemingly modest nature presenting a stark contrast to that of Sadat, who had begun to suffer from a growing megalomania in the final months of his rule, as he became increasingly out of touch with the real needs of the Egyptian population. In his first major speech to the People’s Assembly in November 1981, Mubarak stressed his intention to continue both with Sadat’s domestic policy of infitāª1 and with his rapprochement with Israel; at the same time, however, he emphasised that the purpose of infitāª should be to bring benefits to all Egyptians, not just the rich few, and declared that essential food subsidies, the withdrawal of which had led to serious rioting under Sadat, would remain. He also made conciliatory overtures to other Arab states, most of whom had severed relations with Egypt following the Camp David agreements. Mubarak’s policies – which arguably constituted a sort of ‘middle way’2 between those of his two predecessors, Nasser and Sadat – undoubtedly yielded some dividends in the early years of his rule, most notably in Egypt’s relations with the other Arab states. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 (for which, see the preceding chapter) had proved a humiliation for the Egyptian policy of rapprochement with Israel, and led to a cooling of relations between the two states. Paradoxically, however, this process arguably helped to ease tensions between Egypt and its Arab neighbours: diplomatic relations between Egypt and the other Arab states were gradually restored, and the headquarters of the Arab League – which had been moved from Cairo to Tunis in 1979 following Egypt’s suspension from the organisation on the conclusion of the Camp David agreement – returned to Cairo in 1989. On the domestic front, Mubarak’s accession was also followed by some initially encouraging developments. Tentative moves were made towards a more democratic system, and a number of political parties and independent newspapers were permitted to operate. Hundreds of political prisoners jailed under Sadat were also released. But the new President’s ‘honeymoon period’ did not last long. The democratic process was from the beginning tightly

106 | sonallah i b r a h im circumscribed, and as both the Communists and religious groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood continued to be outlawed, the new parties could in no sense be called representative. More fundamentally, the Egyptian economy, crippled by massive foreign debts, continued to suffer from an ongoing and serious balance of payments crisis, exacerbated by a continuing population explosion. Mubarak’s early tentative moves towards greater democracy were quickly offset by an expansion of the internal security apparatus, which appeared to be particularly targeted at religious fundamentalists. Meanwhile, political and economic corruption remained on the rise. Tensions came to a head in 1986, when, following price rises and a series of workers’ strikes, a violent mutiny broke out among the Central Security Forces, who had been built up following the bread riots of 1977. Thousands of ill-­paid troops now rampaged through the streets of Cairo and other towns and cities in the ­country – their particular targets being nightclubs, luxury hotels, and other symbols of a luxurious lifestyle far beyond the means of the average Egyptian.3 Despite the precarious basis of the regime exposed by the 1986 riots, Mubarak was elected president for a second six-­year term in 1987, and although his election was at first declared invalid by the courts in 1990, a change in the electoral law allowed his election to be confirmed. He was subsequently again re-­elected in referenda held in 1993 and 1999 and in the presidential election of 2005, and served as president until February 2011, when he resigned following widespread protests against his rule in Cairo and elsewhere. Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel, published in 1992, therefore reflects roughly the first third of his presidency. Summary The ‘plot’ of Dhat, like those of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous novels, is again rather thin. It essentially consists of a chronicle spanning several years in the life in contemporary suburban Cairo of a fictional lower-­middle class woman called Dhat, told against the background of the increasingly frustrating, corrupt and inefficient society that had emerged in Egypt during the 1970s and 1980s. It is against the background of this ‘new Egypt’ that the humble life-­story of Dhat unfolds in alternate chapters – a life-­story that the author, after some consideration, begins not with her birth but with her wedding night, a ‘natural opening, laden with a large quantity of drama, not to say

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 107 melodrama’.4 Sonallah Ibrahim’s account involves a variety of characters, including not only Dhat and her husband, Abdel Meguid [ʿAbd al-­Majid], but also their growing family of two daughters and a son, as well as neighbours, friends, relatives, work colleagues, and a range of others whom Dhat and her husband encounter in the course of their everyday lives. As the narrative proceeds, Dhat’s efforts to make a success of her modest life in suburban Cairo seem inevitably doomed to frustration and ultimately to failure, and by the conclusion of the novel she has emerged as arguably a classic ‘anti-­hero’: ‘incompetent, unlucky, tactless, clumsy, cack-­handed, stupid [and] buffoonish.’5 Her status is most graphically illustrated, perhaps, by the closing scene of the book where, in sheer frustration at her attempts to deal with Egyptian bureaucracy, we find her retreating from the kitchen to cry in the lavatory.6 Structure, Themes and Technique Sonallah Ibrahim’s Dhat is a full-­scale novel of some 350 pages, conceived and executed on a similar scale to the earlier Najmat Aghustus and Bayrut, Bayrut. The title of the novel is somewhat enigmatic, for Dhat, the name of the female protagonist (who, as already mentioned, falls squarely into the category of ‘anti-­hero’), is not a ‘regular’ female name either in Egypt or in other parts of the Arab world: its most common meaning as a straightforward noun is ‘nature’, ‘self’ or ‘soul’ (in which sense, as Calderbank notes, it frequently appears in metaphysical or mystical discourse), though in modern Arabic it is probably more frequently found as the first term of an i∂āfa construction in phrases such as Dhat marratin (‘once’) and Dhat al-­shayʾ (‘the same thing’).7 In addition, however – as has already been noted by more than one ­commentator – the name as used by Sonallah Ibrahim for the title and eponymous ‘hero’ of his novel undoubtedly carries overtones of Dhat al-­Himma, the legendary heroine of Umayyad and/or early ʿAbbasid times,8 who, in the words of the Egyptian critic Ibrahim Fathi, ‘fought against the Romans and defended the forts during the early Abbassid [sic] period – a period characterized by negligence on the part of the rulers and the rise to power within the court of corrupt officials, thieves and frauds.’9 This classical allusion aside, the concerns and preoccupations of the work are firmly anchored in the Egyptian society of the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the allusion to the legendary Dhat al-­Himma is clearly intentional, as confirmed by the

108 | sonallah i b r a h im inclusion of another character called Himmat; at the same time, it is both ironic and subversive, since, as Samia Mehrez points out, although Dhat, like Dhat al-­Himma, tries to resist, her resistance collapses in the face of the general tide of social reality. Unlike the princess, Dhat al Himmah, our Dhat’s ultimate heroic deed in the text is to try to report the greengrocer who sold her an olive can with an expired date of consumption. She goes through the ordeals of the Egyptian bureaucracy, aided by her friend Himmat, to no avail, and fails to accomplish her heroic deed.10

In terms of technique, Dhat in some respects represents a break in Sonallah Ibrahim’s novelistic development, for here for the first time he abandons the distinctive use of a first-­person ‘homodiegetic’ narrator that had characterised his previous novels, opting instead for the more traditional perspective of the ‘all-­seeing’, or ‘omniscient’, third-­person narrator who relates the progress of his protagonist through a series of events that are, for the most part, ordered sequentially. In addition, and significantly, the novel differs from the author’s earlier works in that for the first time he employs a woman as his protagonist — a device that has the effect of creating a certain distance between himself as author and the text as his creation, since unlike in his previous novels, it is here impossible to identify the protagonist with the narrator. That said, in most other respects the structure of the novel represents a natural development of that of the author’s previous works. Like Najmat Aghustus, Dhat follows a carefully planned symmetrical construction, its nineteen chapters alternating between odd-­numbered chapters chronicling the life of an ordinary Egyptian family (what we might call the ‘microcosm’) and even-­numbered chapters dealing with the wider context (the ‘macrocosm’) – contemporary Egypt as viewed at a national and international level. In the even-­numbered chapters, Sonallah Ibrahim further develops the intertextual technique already employed in Bayrut, Bayrut of using written documents from outside the text of the novel itself as a means of advancing the narrative. In Dhat, these documents almost exclusively take the form of quotations from the Egyptian press, some of which have apparently been reworked by the author to a greater or lesser degree – the work being preceded by a rather disingenuous disclaimer on the part of the publisher, which reads as follows:

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 109 The events to be found in some of the chapters of this novel are taken from the Egyptian and national press. Republishing them does not imply confirmation of their accuracy, nor any attempt to discredit the people with whom they deal. The author has merely sought to reflect the general media climate that surrounded the lives of his characters and influenced them.11

It is difficult to do justice to the scenario of bureaucracy, corruption, injustice, intrigue and inefficiency that Sonallah Ibrahim paints in the even-­ numbered chapters on the basis of these quotations. While making full use of the techniques of juxtaposition noted in the previous chapter, he here adds a new one – the inclusion of blank rectangles to indicate pictures that have been ‘omitted’ from the text, while retaining the picture captions themselves. The topics covered range widely across the national and international scene and, as in the earlier al-­Lajna, the impression is given that no one is to be spared. On the international front, Egypt is depicted as a country that has sold out to the Israelis, is in thrall to United States interests, and exists at the mercy of Saudi financiers. The author’s preoccupation with ‘big money’ is echoed in his choice of quotations dealing with domestic issues, which paint a picture of a society in which public office and private business interests are inextricably intertwined, and in which everyone is out to ‘get rich quick’ with as little effort as possible. Meanwhile, the public infrastructure collapses, road deaths rise, sewage is pumped into the sea unchecked, contaminated food is let into the country, students cheat freely in examinations, kidneys are stolen from hospital patients, and a trivial dispute over a traffic accident leads to the storming of an entire village by the security forces.12 In this satirical sketch of contemporary Egyptian society, housing, employment, transport, health, religion, education, commerce and administration are all grist to the author’s mill. His main domestic target, however, clearly emerges as the modern ‘consumer society’, which has led to deep-­ rooted changes in attitudes, best summed up, perhaps, in the author’s quotation from the journalist Salah Muntasir: Only a few years ago . . . love was a commodity to be found in every household and in nearly every heart . . . but the world has changed . . . instead of a feeling of love, we have started to live feelings of greed . . . we all envy

110 | sonallah i b r a h im what other people have, instead of praising God for what is on our own plate.13

For all the complexity of the text, it is this rather simple quotation that seems to me to represent most clearly and directly the main thrust of the novel – a thrust that bears an obvious relationship to the picture of the ‘Coca-­Cola society’ so eloquently delineated in the earlier novel, al-­Lajna, and one that is graphically illustrated on the cover designed by Muhyi al-­Din Labbad, which features, between an image of Dhat and a price-­tag bearing her name (her name being also the name of the book: could it be the ‘self’ for sale?), a shelf full of consumer goods.14 For the most part, however, the author employs a somewhat different technique, preferring to let the ‘facts’ as recorded in the sources speak for themselves rather than commenting on them, either himself or (as above) through a third party. Particularly effective in this context is his technique of quoting reports involving large sums of money (or, in some cases, quantities of goods) that could have little meaning for the average Egyptian. Thus: Confiscation of the assets of the Alex Shopping Complex Company after its owner, Mahmud Ismaʿil, drew down loans of 17 million pounds from Bank Misr, another 17 million from the Bank of Cairo and 2.4 million from the International Arab Bank, then fled the country. The al-­Shaʿb newspaper accuses [. . .], Minister of Petroleum, of responsibility for the petrochemical complex project costing 1,000 million pounds, which is making an annual loss estimated at 70 million pounds, not taking into account the loss of machines and equipment worth ten million dollars. Theft of 400 kilos of lead from the protective covering of a radiation device left outside the store room in the Science Faculty of the University of Cairo.15

Among the author’s most outspoken (and arguably most daring) attacks are those on religious financial institutions. ‘In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate’, begin the advertisements, to be followed by details of financial schemes that represent a blatant attempt (backed up by Qurʾanic

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 111 quotations where appropriate) to subvert orthodox Islamic doctrine on interest: ‘They are guided by their Lord, and they are they that shall prosper’ (God’s word is true) Al-­Hoda, Egypt for financial investment God has permitted sale and forbidden interest Invest your money well, honestly and with blessings, God willing, through the profit-­sharing system at a return of 2% monthly on account of yearly profits.16

Or again: In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate ‘Who is better, then: the man who founded his building on piety and approval from God, or the man who laid the foundations for his building on the edge of a precipice which collapsed and carried him down to the fire of Hell. God leads not the people of transgressors.’ (God’s word is true.) The al-­Hoda, Egypt group of companies extends its thanks to His Excellency Shaykh Muhammad Mutawalli al-­Shaʿrawi for his graciously consenting to inaugurate the first stage of the company’s administration building.17

The shortest of this series of ‘even’ chapters, chapter 10, is also the most concentrated, revolving as it does around the grievances of police and military conscripts employed in the most miserable of living conditions on a salary of only a few Egyptian pounds a month. The incident to which it refers (the 1986 riot by the conscripts of the Central Security Forces)18 is also both one of the easiest in the novel to ‘place’ chronologically, as well as the one likely to be best known to non-­Egyptian readers. Faced with the contrast between their own salaries and the luxury enjoyed by residents of the Jolie Ville Hotel, which faced their barracks, it is hardly surprising that the anger of the conscripts spilled over into a series of riots that eventually left 150 dead and 500 wounded.19 In this instance, the contrasts cited in the novel appear as a direct cause of a historical event rather than simply an artful juxtaposition of the

112 | sonallah i b r a h im author – though it has to be said that by the end of the chapter, normality has been restored: ‘Visit the Modern Equipment Exhibition: Dual System National Video, only 1428 pounds’, proclaims the advertisement. So much for the ‘even’ chapters of Ibrahim’s novel, which form a sort of socio-­political ‘frame’ for the adventures of Dhat and her humble companions. Before we turn to these, it is perhaps first worth noting that if Dhat’s character demonstrates an almost uncanny resemblance to Cuddon’s definition of the anti-­hero as a man or woman ‘given the vocation of failure’,20 this was not apparently the author’s original intention. In an interview published soon after the novel had appeared, Sonallah Ibrahim suggested that his original intention was in fact to ‘write a modern novel, with a character that would overcome all the existing deteriorating circumstances. But when I started writing, the situation changed. The character was transformed into a completely crushed one.’21 We shall return to this remark in a subsequent chapter, since it seems not unreasonable to speculate that one factor leading the author to locate Warda, his only genuine Arab ‘heroine’, in a different period and a country outside Egypt was his failed attempt to devise such a character in the context of the contemporary Egypt of Dhat. Be that as it may, however, and before turning to the themes of the ‘odd-­numbered’ chapters, we should perhaps also note that the ‘telegraphic’ style in which Sonallah Ibrahim’s first novels had been written had by this stage of his career become largely a thing of the past, and that the author’s style in this novel is characterised by a far more expansive approach both to sentence structure and to his narrative more generally: in place of the ‘minimalist’ sentences of earlier novels (in particular, Tilka al-­ raʾiha), the sentences to be found in Dhat are frequently long and complex, with the frequent use of relative and subordinate clauses of various kinds – a style which, as Richard Jacquemond has noted in a perceptive article, has more in common with the narrative style of European languages than with that of traditional Arabic, where coordination rather than subordination is the norm.22 It is worth adding that Jacquemond also notes in his essay the author’s propensity for the use of foreign (mainly English and French) vocabulary in Dhat – a feature that mirrors one of book’s main themes, the domination of contemporary Egyptian society by Western consumer culture; this trait finds expression not only in the frequent appearance of borrowed

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 113 words to describe objects and other phenomena of Western origin, but also in the fondness of certain characters for foreign expressions, the most obvious example being Dhat’s husband Abdel Maguid’s persistent use of the English phrase ‘of course’. Although this particular feature is by no means uncommon in contemporary Egyptian (and other Arabic) writing by a wide range of different authors – a particularly striking contemporary example being the Egyptian Youssef Rakha’s Kitab al-­Tughra (‘the Book of the Sultan’s Seal’), the Arabic edition of which features a glossary of such expressions – two more distinctive features of Sonallah Ibrahim’s use of vocabulary in Dhat may also usefully be noted. The first is the appropriation of items from what Jacquemond terms the ‘politico-­administrative vocabulary’ for use in a domestic context: particular phrases employed include the ‘march of destruction and construction’ (masīrat al-­hadm wa-­al-bināʾ), ‘boycott’ (muqā†aʿa) and a range of military vocabulary to describe the ‘war of attrition’ (ªarb al-­istinzāf ) waged between Dhat’s neighbours, al-­Shinqiti and his wife Samiha. The second (and, arguably, rather odd) feature is the author’s use of a set of vocabulary items connected with communication as an aid to describing aspects of Dhat’s character and relations with the outside world, most particularly her work colleagues. In this connection, her situation and predicament are well described by Calderbank: Zaat is tied to the human beings around her by lines of communication . . . Conversation, chitchat, gossip, argument, and friendly banter flow incessantly from the mouths of the characters . . . Zaat would love to swim through it like a fish but at best often struggles to stay afloat and keep her tender sanity afloat . . . Even the government participates in this carnival of rhetoric with its own centralized transmission [bathth] mouthpiece, the television. In Zaat’s world people are valued for the quality and originality of their transmission material [mawā∂iʿ al-­bathth] and life is a constant struggle to find something fresh and exciting with which to accost one’s ­listeners . . . but Zaat’s sensitive nature and her desire to perform as a first-­class transmitter together with her limited social skills cause her no end of angst and upset as she finds herself suffering boycott [muqā†aʿa] after boycott.23

At this point, however, having noted these oddities of expression and imagery, we should return to the themes of the novel themselves. We may

114 | sonallah i b r a h im first observe that the author’s apparent preoccupation with sex (for which he has been criticized on more than one occasion) here takes a new turn, for his concern in Dhat is at least as much with the female sexual function as it is with that of the male. Indeed, on one level, it is arguable that the entire novel is structured around the reproductive organs and functions of the female. The opening of the book provides an excellent illustration not only of this preoccupation on the part of the author, but also of the satirical tone that marks much of the work, as well as some features of the author’s narrative technique that he uses to ‘play games’ with the reader – in particular, devices related to anachrony and to the ‘speed’ or ‘pace’ of the narrative.24 As already noted, the novel begins with Dhat’s wedding night; but before commencing his account, the author has reviewed and ruled out three other possible starting-­ points, or ‘initiatory moments’: the moment of Dhat’s birth, when ‘she slid into our world bespattered with blood, and the shock, the first of many she would endure, as she was lifted feet first into the air and given a slap on the backside’;25 the moment ‘she discovered that what she thought was a passing wound was in fact a new property that her body had acquired, and that she was now capable of discharging liquid of a color other than the usual gold’;26 and finally, the moment when ‘in a particularly unique modification of the prevailing custom . . . they held her down, forced open her thighs, and tore out that little protuberance that has so disturbed the Egyptians since ancient times’.27 Not content with this veiled allusion to the practice of female circumcision, however, Sonallah Ibrahim proceeds to use it as an occasion for comment on Dhat’s parents’ individual attitudes towards the practice, in terms that do little to reassure the reader about the likely course of Dhat’s subsequent sexual relationships: The mother, who had herself been relieved of the offending organ at an early age, was – contrary to what one might expect – keen that her daughter did not enjoy the opportunity of diversion (before marriage) and then the compensation (after it) that she had been denied. The father, on the other hand, contrary to what one might also expect, was desirous to spare his daughter the traditional operation, imagining (rightly or wrongly) that it was responsible for the problems he had encountered with his own personal protuberance. In the end . . . it was necessary to reach a compromise. Thus

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 115 he permitted a part of the illustrious protuberance to remain, which had the opposite of the desired result, for instead of compensating for the lost part, it became a constant reminder of it.28

Having thus in quick succession enumerated three possible starting points for his novel only to reject them all (as well as compressing more than two decades of Zaat’s life into a couple of pages in the process), Sonallah Ibrahim announces that his ‘natural starting point, charged with much drama, indeed melodrama’ will be Zaat’s wedding night; rather than lead to a description of that night’s events, however, the announcement is followed at once by an analepsis, in which the author recounts the courtship of Zaat by her future husband, Abdel Meguid Hassan Khamees – a courtship in which the television begins to play the role it would continue to play in their relationship, ‘until it became the only tie that held them together’.29 Returning to the wedding night itself, Sonallah Ibrahim now indulges in another narrative trick (a paralipsis, as Genette would term it),30 for having enticed the reader with the prospect of a description of this momentous event as the logical start of his narrative, the author now explains that ‘The current conditions of publishing prevent us from going into detail’, and that: For this reason we shall leave them awhile, with Abdel Meguid busy emptying a bottle of whisky to calm the terror that had seized him, and return after about an hour to find them sitting on the edge of the bed completely naked, the two of them in tears.31

The reason for Abdel Meguid’s distress is not simply wedding-­night nerves, but rather that Zaat – whose recurrent crying, incidentally, provides one of the abiding images of the book – has discovered (in a further allusion to Egyptian female circumcision practice) ‘that the thing she had so long struggled to preserve had not been there in the first place’.32 Rather than elaborate, however, Sonallah Ibrahim again indulges in a narrative trick – a temporal ellipsis, or rather a series of ellipses33 – as he again rules out a number of succeeding events as possible subjects of the next part of his account of Zaat’s life; we should note, first, that these events are a mixture of the personal and the public, thus providing a link between what I have earlier labelled the ‘microcosm’ and the ‘macrocosm’ as two contrasting aspects of the novel,

116 | sonallah i b r a h im and secondly, that, taken together with the novel’s opening, they suggest the emergence of a more complex narrative structure than we have seen in the author’s previous works: We shall now jump several important moments in Zaat’s life, each of which could have provided a suitable opening to our story: the sad days when it became clear that the Egyptian army was not advancing northeast through the Sinai, but southwest; the dramatic withdrawal performed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and then Farid El Atrash, Umm Kalsoum, and Abdul Haleem Hafez after him; the moment she first set eyes on the gorgeous naked thighs of her young neighbour; the one when she became, or thought she became, a communist; and the other when she discovered her own new way of making ‘dressing’ for the cake from cheap local materials. We will put all these historical moments aside . . . and stop at one no less important than any of them . . . Zaat, who was preparing to take the first-­year exam of the Media Faculty for the second time, had announced that she wanted to continue her studies so she could work after graduation for a newspaper, or, if she was lucky, in television.34

I have quoted this passage at some length not only because it illustrates aspects of Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrative technique that will be used extensively in the ‘odd’ chapters of the novel, but also because it introduces two further sub-­themes that will play a significant part in his narrative – first, Dhat and her husband’s relations with their neighbours, and second, her employment; in addition, of course, we may note the sarcastic reference (echoing comments in the author’s previous writing)35 to the ‘disinformation’ spread at the time of the 1967 Six-­Day War, as it gradually became clear that what was being portrayed by the Arab media as a victory was in fact a catastrophic defeat. Although limitations of space preclude a detailed discussion of how each of the narrative features discussed above is played out as the story advances, it will be obvious, even from this brief account of the book’s first few pages, that, as Richard Jacquemond observes, Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel falls squarely into the tradition of the Western satirical novel, ‘from Don Quixote to Tom Jones or Tristam Shandy, or even, for that matter, Madame Bovary.’36 As the work proceeds, Dhat and her husband acquire a family of two daughters and

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 117 – eventually – a male heir, but the sexual and emotional relations between the couple, never entirely satisfactory even at the start, have by this stage progressively deteriorated. By the end of the book, it is implied, Dhat has become pre-­menopausal, even if ‘the spot of blood she espied in the crotch of her knickers was not sufficient to confirm or deny what the doctor of Hawa magazine had mentioned pertaining to the end of that business (the thought of [which] inspired both gratitude and panic at the same time).’37 In the meantime, relations between Dhat and her husband have become progressively entangled with those of their neighbours, Samiha and El Shanqeety, as the two couples lapse into a lifestyle (described somewhat allusively by Sonallah Ibrahim, with considerable resource to the ‘transmission’ vocabulary discussed above) in which the two men develop a growing attachment to each other, videos and pornography begin to find their way into the couple’s flats, and sexual relations between husbands and wives become increasingly unsatisfactory. The neighbour, El Shanqeety, had previously spent several years of his life training to erect bridges on the Suez Canal (‘Seven years of my life wasted in the trenches on the canal, from the middle of 1967, just after the defeat, until October 1974, just after the victory’);38 and the so-­called ‘War of Attrition’ (ªarb al-­instinzāf ) with Israel in which he was previously caught up now finds a domestic equivalent in his relations with his wife, who suffers from repeated haemorrhaging and who accordingly ‘adamantly evaded the performance of that nuptial duty that El Shanqeety (together with the vast majority of religious scholars, doctors, and editors of readers’ letters) considered to be sacred.’39 Both women experience night-­time ‘visitations’, though of different kinds. For while Samiha’s fantasies and ‘nocturnal visits’ revolve around Egyptian film stars, Dhat’s fantasies are by contrast rooted in the political and economic situation of Egypt, being focused on the contrasting policies of different Presidents: [She] had her eyes fixed on the kitchen walls, and the ghost of Gamal Abdel Nasser appeared to her, busily smashing them up, while behind him Anwar El Sadat, with great care and attention, was fixing up colourful high-­quality ceramic tiles.40

This motif of the succession of Egyptian presidents recurs periodically through the novel, returning at the end in the form of a sarcastic,

118 | sonallah i b r a h im and ­deliberately disrespectful, comparison that the author uses to implicitly satirise the course taken by Egypt following the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952: The modern Egyptians used to date their history according to the revolutionary calendar (pre- and post-­1952) before moving over to the calendar of the presidential trinity who have ruled Egypt in succession since the revolution (Abdel Nasser, El Sadat, Mubarak). Zaat, on the other hand, had her own calendar according to the trinity of Umms who followed her in her domestic service: Umm Afkar, Umm Atef, and Umm Waheed.41

The author’s explication of this comparison between the presidents and Dhat’s maids continues this sarcastic tone, for in light of the general stance of the work towards the presidents of the Egyptian republic it is clear that we are not intended to take quite at face value ‘the three who served the Egyptians, and were sincerely loyal to them alone, never absent from their posts for a single day thus providing no one else with the slightest justification to vie with them for their position at the service of the nation’ – a commitment which, in contrast to that of Dhat’s maids, ‘lasts forever, and does not end until the servant himself passes on to celestial realms.’42 At this point, however, we should perhaps return to the other main focus of Dhat’s life, her employment, which allows the author an opportunity for satire in a different setting – even if the objects of his satire to some extent overlap. Through the connections of her banker husband, Abdel Meguid, and despite her lack of qualifications, Dhat has secured a job in the monitoring department of a daily newspaper – a job that ‘did not require any talent whatever’, consisting as it did of checking for errors and compiling reports on the paper’s published material, and comparing them with other newspapers. These reports, needless to say, serve no purpose whatever, since they are ultimately destined to be thrown into the bin by the managing director, and in any event all the daily papers derive their news from the same source.43 The department is run by a kindly Copt called Aminophis, who has devised a system whereby he periodically resubmits the same reports, thereby allowing himself time to devote to his own pet project – an encyclopaedia of luminaries who have visited Cairo as the capital of Third World liberation movements. Her employment here coincides, however, with Sadat’s assassination and the

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 119 appointment as his successor of the almost unknown Hosni Mubarak, whose policies at this stage remain almost unknown and whose initial pronouncements are largely confined to the statement ‘My name is Hosni Mubarak’.44 In the subsequent debate about which presidents’ portraits should remain on the office wall (which was not large enough to accommodate all three), Dhat is for once bold enough to express her own view (‘If someone has to go, then let it be Sadat’), but her view is overruled in favour of the removal of Nasser, and Dhat finds herself transferred to the gloomy environment of the archives, at the top of an old neighbouring building up a dark miserable staircase. For the most part, life in the archives is devoted to gossip and ­‘transmission’ – an activity in which the humble Dhat again finds some difficulty keeping up, as ‘[her colleagues’] voices were loud and powerful, dripping with health and vitality. They did not recognize periods of silence or rest. They were tied by unseen threads of familiarity and animosity which excluded strangers like Zaat, who suddenly felt the urge to burst into tears . . .’45 In order to secure acceptance by her colleagues, and to avoid ‘boycotts’, Dhat has abandoned the miniskirts that she was wearing at the start of the novel, in favour of the by now obligatory Islamic headscarf – a clear comment on the shifting ­orientation of Egyptian society, and the growing influence of Islam on ­‘ordinary’ Egyptians during the period covered by the book.46 When the headscarf proves insufficient to secure her colleagues’ approval, Abdel Meguid suggests that she will have to wear full hijab and finds his wife immediately receptive: for Zaat had been pondering the same idea for some time: if the voracious and greedy machines were not convinced that the current state of her headgear showed what a deeply religious Muslim woman she really was, then she would give them what they wanted and throw in the rest of her body.47

In general, it is probably true to say that Dhat is the first of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels in which religion as such plays any significant part: we have already noted that the ‘odd’ chapters include scathing attacks by the author on Islamic banking and other religious institutions, and in addition to the evolution in Dhat’s costume, this interest is reflected also in the ‘even’ chapters in a number of contexts – from Dhat’s efforts to provide for her son’s future education at the Islamic University, where ‘[t]he door opened onto a room

120 | sonallah i b r a h im containing a wide table and the word “Reception” written in English on a neon sign shining down on a young muhaggaba who accosted the two visitors with the password in one breath: “As salaamu aleykum wa rahmatu llaahi wa barakatu can I help you?”’48 to Abdel Meguid’s visit to El Shanqeety’s acquaintance – ‘a giant of a man in a gallabiya, who, with his ascetic’s beard and dervish prayer beads, was clearly one of the faithful’, and whose office walls ‘were covered with wooden panels that had all but disappeared behind Quranic verses, and a bookcase with one shelf dedicated entirely to the Holy Book . . . What did the gentleman do? He was in the market.’49 Space forbids a fuller discussion of the multiple themes of this complex novel, whose humorous depiction of the life of an ordinary, if socially slightly inadequate, woman in the Cairo suburbs is clearly the outcome of a process of sustained, acute observation on the part of the author not always reflected in his previous works. The tone and mood of some passages recall those of Yusuf al-­Qaʿid’s Shakawa al-­Misri al-­fasih (The Eloquent Egyptian’s Complaints),50 but Sonallah Ibrahim’s technique is more assured, and his grasp of contemporary Egypt’s ‘shifting economic and social turmoil’ (to use Calderbank’s phrase)51 seemingly more acute. Always anxious to ‘do the right thing’, but held back by her clumsiness and awkward personality, Dhat’s destiny on the closing pages of the novel is to throw a rotten packet of herrings into the rubbish bin and retreat towards the lavatory to cry.52 It would be hard to think of a more poignant commentary on the hopelessness of much lower-­middle-class life in contemporary Cairo. Notes 1. For which, see Chapter 6. 2. To use Hopwood’s phrase. See Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–1990 (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 182–94. 3. The episode forms the subject of most of chapter 10 of the novel; see Dhat, pp. 169–72; Zaat, trans. Anthony Calderbank, pp. 161–4. 4. Dhat, p. 10; Zaat, p. 2. See Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers Between History and Fiction (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994), pp. 134–5. For another, contemporary example of an author’s introspective soul-­searching as to the best way of beginning his novel, cf. the opening to Yūsuf al-­Qaʿīd’s Shakāwā al-­Mi‚rī al-­Fa‚īª (Cairo: Dār al-­Mustaqbal, 1993–7).

consumer soci ety: dhat  | 121 5. J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 46. 6. Dhat, p. 352; Zaat, p. 345. 7. Hans Wehr’s A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Arabic–English), 4th edn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1971), p. 363, lists the primary meaning of Dhat as ‘being, essence, nature; self; person, personality; the same, the selfsame; self’. As the dictionary entry makes clear, however, the word is also used in a wide range of collocations, in some of which the primary meaning has been modified. See also Calderbank, Zaat, p. v. 8. For whom, see Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v.; Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, s.v.; Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction, pp. 130–1. 9. As quoted in http://www.patheos.com/blogs/mmw/2012/04/shahrazad-­ anddhat-­al-himmah-­epics-storytellers-­and-warrior-­women/. 10. Mehrez, Egyptian Writers, p. 131. 11. Dhat (Cairo: Dār al-­Mustaqbal, 1992), p. 7; these words do not appear in Calderbank’s translation (Zaat). 12. Dhat, pp. 305–6; Zaat, pp. 299–300. 13. Dhat, p. 301; Zaat, p. 295. 14. On this, see also Mehrez, Egyptian Writers, pp. 133–4. 15. Dhat, p. 136; Zaat, pp. 125–6. 16. Dhat, p. 255; Zaat, p. 249. 17. Dhat, pp. 256–7; Zaat, p. 250. 18. For which, see also note 3 above. 19. Dhat, pp. 169–71; Zaat, pp. 161–3. 20. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms. 21. Hala al-­Badri, ‘Dhat Íunʿ Allāh Ibrahim’, Majallat al-­idhaʿa wa-­al-tilifizyun (3 October 1992), p. 36, quoted in Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction, p. 130. 22. See Richard Jacquemont, ‘Sonallah Ibrahim’s Les Années de Zeth, or the exportability of contemporary Arabic literature’, in Marlé Hammond and Dana Sajdi (eds), Transforming Loss into Beauty: Essays in Honor of Magda Al-­Noweihi (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2008). 23. Calderbank, Zaat, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, pp. v–vi (I have added the Arabic terms in square brackets). 24. For these, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 35–6, 87–8. 25. Dhat, p. 9; Zaat, p. 1.

122 | sonallah i b r a h im 26. Dhat, p. 10; Zaat, p. 2. 27. Dhat, p. 10; Zaat, p. 2. 28. Dhat, p. 10; Zaat, p. 2. 29. Dhat, pp. 10–11; Zaat, pp. 2–3. 30. Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 31–2; the device might alternatively perhaps be regarded as a ‘summary’, for which see Genette, pp. 95–6. 31. Dhat, p. 16; Zaat, p. 8. 32. Dhat, p. 16; Zaat, p. 8. 33. Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 42–3. 34. Dhat, p. 16; Zaat, pp. 8–9. 35. See Chapter 5. 36. Jacquemond, ‘Sonallah Ibrahim’s Les années de Zeth’. 37. Dhat, p. 351; Zaat, p. 343. 38. Dhat, p. 87; Zaat, p. 77. 39. Dhat, p. 89; Zaat, p. 79. 40. Dhat, pp. 62–3; Zaat, p. 55. 41. Dhat, p. 323; Zaat, p. 315. 42. Dhat, pp. 323–4; Zaat, pp. 315–6. 43. Dhat, p. 18; Zaat, p. 10. 44. Dhat, pp. 22–3; Zaat, pp. 15–16. Sadat was assassinated on 6 October 1981, the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973 (see also Chapter 6.) The new president became known for deflecting questions about whether his own policies would be nearer those of Nasser or Sadat with the words ‘My name is Hosni Mubarak’, which Ibrahim transcribes in his novel in Arabic script. 45. Dhat, p. 25; Zaat, p. 18. 46. See, for example, Dhat, pp. 201, 203; Zaat, pp. 195, 197. 47. Dhat, pp. 218–19; Zaat, pp. 213. 48. Dhat, p. 203; Zaat, p. 197. 49. Dhat, p. 210; Zaat, pp. 205. 50. Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 3 vol., 1981–5. For a discussion, see Paul Starkey, ‘“From the City of the Dead to Liberation Square”: the novels of Yūsuf al-­Qaʿid’, Journal of Arabic Literature 24 (1993), pp. 62–74. 51. Zaat, Translator’s Introduction, p. vi. 52. Dhat, p. 352; Zaat, p. 345.

8 Prison of Dishonour: Sharaf (1997)

F

ive years separate the publication date of Dhat (1992) from that of Sonallah Ibrahim’s eagerly-­awaited next novel, Sharaf, completed at the end of 1996 and published in 1997. The novel, which occupies some 470 pages in the Arabic edition, returns us to the prison environment of Tilka al-­raʾiha with which the author had begun his novelistic career to develop a number of disparate themes encountered in his previous works, including those of corruption, hypocrisy, sexual deviancy and globalisation. At the same time, the work carries forward and further develops the novelistic techniques already noted in previous chapters, most obviously in Dhat. Although several of the themes of Dhat find an echo in Sharaf, and the protagonists of the two works are linked by their humble backgrounds, however, their situations are quite different: for unlike Dhat (whose social status and situation as an Egyptian housewife is a wholly unexceptional one) that of the protagonist of Sharaf (an Egyptian youth consigned to prison for killing a foreigner who has tried to rape him) is both extraordinary and desperate –much of the narrative, indeed, being occupied with his discussions with his lawyers in an attempt to find a way of escaping from his predicament. Publication and Translations

The full text of Sharaf was published in Cairo in book form by the state-­run Dar al-­Hilal in 1997, as part of the long-­established Riwayat al-­Hilal literary series, which had been founded in 1949. This represented a departure from Sonallah Ibrahim’s normal publishing practice. Unusually also, some material from the opening chapters had already been serialised in the Egyptian literary weekly Akhbar al-­Adab, edited at the time by the equally eminent Egyptian novelist Gamal al-­Ghitani,1 who contributed an editorial entitled

124 | sonallah i b r a h im ‘Sharaf Íunʿ Allāh’ in which he summed up Sonallah Ibrahim’s career as marked by dedication and asceticism and characterised Sharaf as perhaps his chef d’oeuvre, where he represents a whole age towards which he feels total estrangement: an estrangement that he audaciously and astutely expresses artistically and creatively . . . with techniques which characterise his work alone, especially the documentary level which he transforms into pure creative energy, replete with black humour.2

The work also received advance publicity of a less welcome kind when Fathi Fadl, the author of a memoir entitled al-­Zinzana (Prison Cell), published in 1993, accused Sonallah Ibrahim of extensively plagiarising his work: although Fadl’s work is in fact duly recognised in the complete Dar al-­Hilal edition – being listed in an acknowledgements section at the end of the work in accordance with the author’s standard practice3 – no such acknowledgement had accompanied the Akhbar al-­Adab extracts. Despite these complications, the novel was awarded the official ‘Best novel of the year’ prize at the 1998 Cairo Book Fair. There is no complete English translation, though a ‘short extract’ is said to have been translated into English by Samia Mehrez.4 A French translation by Richard Jacquemond was published in 1999 as Charaf ou l’honneur.5 Background In general terms, the years 1991–7 were characterised by a continuation of the policies of the first decade of Mubarak’s rule, involving a substantial dependency on US financial and other forms of assistance. Although Egypt’s participation in the 1991 Gulf War as an ally of the US brought substantial financial benefits to the country in the form of debt relief, the succeeding period was marked by a deterioration in Egypt’s internal security situation, largely due to the activities of the group known as al-­Gamaʿa al-­Islamiyya, who embarked on an extended campaign of violence involving the murder and attempted murder of prominent writers and intellectuals, as well as the repeated targeting of tourists and foreigners. On 8 June 1992 the writer Farag Foda6 was assassinated in Cairo, and in 1994 Islamic extremists almost succeeded in assassinating the 82-­year-old Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz by stabbing him in the neck outside his Cairo home. On 26 June 1995 the

prison of di shonour: sharaf  | 125 Egyptian President himself was the victim of an assassination attempt in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The campaign reached its climax on 17 November 1997, when members of al-­ Gamaʿa al-­ Islamiyya machine-­ gunned and hacked to death fifty eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians at the Temple of Hatshepsut (Deir el-­Bahri) in Luxor. In all, it is estimated that a total of some 1,200 people were killed during the period 1992–7, and serious damage had been done to tourism, the major source of Egypt’s foreign exchange earnings. By this point, 20,000 Islamists were in custody in Egypt, thousands more had been killed by the security forces, and the movement was effectively paralysed; and with the Egyptian public in revulsion at the bloodshed, a deal was brokered between al-­Gamaʿa al-­Islamiyya and the Egyptian government in July 1997, whereby the movement formally renounced violence. Summary The ‘plot’ of Sharaf, like those of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous novels, is again rather thin, when viewed in conventional terms. The work revolves around the experiences of the eponymous ‘hero’, Sharaf, a young Egyptian who finds himself imprisoned for the accidental murder of a homosexual tourist (thought to be Australian, but subsequently discovered to be British)7 who had attempted to rape him. The book recounts his experiences in prison as he progresses from the ʿanbar miri (military wing) to the ʿanbar malaki (civilian wing), where he encounters the novel’s second main character, Dr Ramzi Butrus Nasif, a pharmacologist who has been ‘framed’ by his colleagues for attempting to expose the iniquities of multinational corporations. In an attempt to educate his fellow inmates on this and related matters, Dr Ramzi stages a puppet show in the prison, but the performance degenerates into a riot and Dr Ramzi is placed in solitary confinement. Here, he continues to collect newspaper cuttings to illustrate his concerns, but his attempts to induce his fellow inmates to rebel meet with no response, and the work closes with Ramzi shouting from his cell as Sharaf shaves his body hair in the shower. Structure, Themes and Technique As already noted, Sharaf is a lengthy work of some 470 pages – at the time of its publication, the longest novel the author had so far produced. Like

126 | sonallah i b r a h im that of the earlier Dhat discussed in the previous chapter, its title clearly requires comment, for there is an obvious connection between the name of the protagonist/anti-­hero, Ashraf ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Sulayman (‘or “Sharaf”, as his mother always called the apple of her eye’8) and the idea of sharaf (‘honour’). But while Ashraf’s initial action may be clearly read as an attempt to defend his honour (sharaf ), his subsequent actions – which include a willing participation in a homosexual relationship with a fellow inmate – appear to belie his initial stance. The implications of this development have been analysed in some detail by Joseph Massad in his work on Arab attitudes to sexuality;9 for present purposes, however, we may content ourselves with the obvious point that the attempted rape of a young Egyptian by a Westerner is an obvious metaphor for the rape of Egypt by the West, either in the context of colonialism in its historical sense, or as part of the process of globalisation that Sonallah Ibrahim would regard as the modern face of colonialism proper. Let us return, however, to the structure of the novel. We may first note that the work, like Dhat (and certainly not coincidentally), is constructed in nineteen chapters and employs a variety of differing narrative modes, its chapters alternating in a deliberate pattern (for two of the work’s three parts, at least) between, on the one hand, the first-­person narrative that we have frequently seen Sonallah Ibrahim using in his earlier novels, and, on the other, a third-­person, ‘omniscient narrator’ mode of the type employed in Dhat – what Genette might call ‘nonfocalized narrative’ or ‘narrative with zero focalization’.10 Thus, chapter 1 starts in ‘omniscient narrator’ mode (‘It certainly wasn’t the shoe that was responsible for Ashraf ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Sulayman’s eventual fate . . .’); chapter 2 switches to first-­person narrative, of the ‘homodiegetic narrator’ variety, to use Genette’s terminology11 (‘The sergeant handed me over in silence to a guard who signed in a notebook that he had received me, and I followed him down a long corridor . . .’); chapter 3 reverts to ‘omniscient narrator’ mode, and the same alternating arrangement is preserved as far as chapter 12 (which concludes Part One of the novel); it is then resumed in chapters 16–19, which comprise Part Three. This pattern is both disrupted and complicated, however, in Part Two of the novel, the chapters of which are centred on Dr Ramzi rather than Sharaf, and which – unlike the chapters in the other two parts – have individual headings of their own, as follows: ‘13: Papers of Ramzi Butrus Nasif (clippings)’; ‘14: Papers of

prison of di shonour: sharaf  | 127 Ramzi Butrus Nasif (draft defence memo)’; and ‘15: Puppet show presented on the occasion of the anniversary of the great victory in the October War of 1973, prepared and produced by Dr Ramzi Butrus Nasif’. It is perhaps worth noting that in terms of their presentation, the ‘clippings’ of chapter 13 have more in common with certain sections of Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat than with the even chapters of Dhat – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that both sets of documents represent compilations of material assembled in (in one case a real, and in the other, a fictional) prison. The interruption of the main narrative flow and structure generated by what we might term the ‘Ramzi chapters’ may perhaps recall the lengthy lyrical passage in the centre of the earlier novel Najmat Aghustus, though both the nature and the purpose of the interruptions (as well as their length) are of course quite different. It is also, of course, self-­evident that, despite the superficial similarity between the alternating narrative modes of Parts One and Three and the alternating pattern of Dhat, the techniques employed by Sonallah Ibrahim in Sharaf are both different from, and more complex than, those to be found in the earlier novel. Whereas Dhat employs a pattern of alternation between an omniscient narrator and documentary material extracted from newspapers and other external sources – material in which the question of ‘voice’ is, at least at the most straightforward level, irrelevant – the predominant pattern in Sharaf consists of an alternation between a first-­ person, ‘homodiegetic’, narrator (Sharaf himself) and an omniscient author (Sonallah Ibrahim himself), the latter of whose narrative is concerned, at least in part, with the actions of Sharaf himself. Thus, the conclusion of chapter 1 – a description of Sharaf’s accidental killing of the ‘Australian’ John – merges almost seamlessly into the opening of chapter 2, despite the change in narrative perspective, and the added complication of a temporal ellipsis,12 since the process of Ashraf’s actual arrest is not described, either by the omniscient narrator of chapter 1, or by Ashraf himself as the narrator of chapter 2: [Chapter 1] Sharaf was sure he had lost the battle. Then out of the corner of his eye he noticed a bottle of wine. He struggled to bring his fingers nearer to the neck of the bottle then took hold of it, raised it into the air, and brought it down on his attacker’s temple. John couldn’t avoid the bottle. The blow

128 | sonallah i b r a h im knocked him out and he stopped moving. Sharaf didn’t notice the blood that was pouring down his face; he didn’t notice anything at all, not even that his hand that was holding a jagged splinter of glass from the remains of the bottle was still moving up and down over the blond head that was smeared with blood. [2] The sergeant handed me over in silence to a guard who signed in a notebook to confirm that he had received me . . .13

It is perhaps scarcely necessary to add that, although Sonallah Ibrahim’s use of the homodeictic narrator in alternate chapters of Parts One and Three of Sharaf reflects a preference for this narrative mode that we have already observed in all his previous novels except Dhat, the relation between the narrator and the author himself is in Sharaf radically different from that between the narrator and author in any of his previous novels. Tilka al-­raʾiha, Najmat Aghustus and Bayrut, Bayrut are all, to an extent, either autobiographical, or at least draw heavily on the author’s own experience; while al-­Lajna, if not autobiographical as such, is certainly narrated by a character who shares many of the intellectual and other attributes of Sonallah Ibrahim himself. By contrast, in the first-­person narratives of Sharaf, no such identification between the narrator and the author would appear to be possible. Ashraf’s words are his, not Sonallah Ibrahim’s: as we shall see, if any parallels are to be suggested, they are likely to be between the author and the intellectual Ramzi rather than the ill-­educated Ashraf. After these observations concerning the narrative structure, we should at this point, however, revert to a discussion of the story itself, and the main themes that emerge from it. The first chapter, the only one to be set outside prison, introduces us to the young Ashraf ʿAbd al- Aziz Sulayman – a high-­ school drop-­out born in 1974 – and provides an account of the attempted rape and accidental killing that leads to his detention. Wandering aimlessly one evening in downtown Cairo, the young man is ‘picked up’ in front of a cinema by John – a British man passing himself off as Australian – who takes him home and attempts to rape him; in the subsequent struggle, in which the young man attempts to preserve his honour (‘sharaf ’), John is killed and Ashraf, unsurprisingly, finds himself in prison.14 Although the

prison of di shonour: sharaf  | 129 primary purpose of this introductory chapter is clearly to provide a credible basis for the subsequent prison narrative, it is also worth noting that, in addition to the obvious symbolism, already noted, of this peculiarly unpleasant cross-­cultural encounter, the opening pages provide a first, admittedly ‘low-­key’, hint, through the repeated occurrence of Western brand names and the like (Gucci, Adidas, Nike, Silvano, Pierre Cardin . . .) that economic ­globalisation – a recurring preoccupation of the author in previous publications, as we have seen – will also feature strongly in Sharaf.15 More subtle than this perhaps rather obvious symbolism is the fact that, as Samia Mehrez pertinently notes,16 when crossing Talaʿat Harb Square, he has his back turned to the statue of Talaʿat Harb – a leading Egyptian pre-­1952 nationalist and economist, who in 1920 founded Banque Misr, the first bank established with Egyptian capital.17 Once arrested and ‘signed for’, Ashraf is delivered into a bureaucratic system that will be already familiar to most readers from Tilka al-­raʾiha and Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, discussed in previous chapters. At an early stage, prisoners are divided into two groups, mirroring (one must suppose) Ibrahim’s vision of Egyptian society more generally: After the haircut came the photograph, then squatting again, for the quartermaster’s turn to begin. He was a middle-­aged man with an enormous belly, who was called, for some unknown reason, ‘ʿAtra’. He started to divide them into groups according to what they were charged with, using a thin wooden stick for the purpose. Having concluded that operation, he stirred them up again to divide them again in another way: ‘Those who want to go into the military wing, to the left; those who want the civilian wing, to the right.’ He stopped for a short moment then deigned to explain what he meant by the two terms: the ‘civilian’ means that you can eat and wear what you like; the ‘military’ means wearing prison clothes, eating bread and cheese, and working every day for the people in the civilian wing . . .18

In the prison itself, Ashraf makes the acquaintance of a variety of fellow inmates, whose cases encompass a wide variety of crimes, from petty theft to murder, as well as corruption of various kinds. In due course, as a result of

130 | sonallah i b r a h im his mother’s interventions, he is transferred from the ‘military’ (miri) to the ‘civilian’ (malaki) wing, a liminal moment that Sonallah Ibrahim describes in typically sarcastic terms. Much of the text of the remaining chapters of Part One (narrated, as already noted, in alternating narrative modes) is occupied with the not infrequently trivial details of day-­to-day life in the prison – an environment that recalls that of Tilka al-­raʾiha, even though the larger canvas employed by Sonallahin Ibrahim in Sharaf obviously allows the author scope for a more extensive development of his material. There are detailed descriptions of living conditions – eating, defecating and the like – of relations with the prison guards, of visits by relatives, of torture and ill-­treatment, and of the progress of the various prisoners’ cases; factual description is mingled with gossip, and shifting alliances and hostilities between the prisoners themselves lend additional colour to the narrative. As in Tilka al-­raʾiha, sexual frustration manifests itself in a variety of ways. In this environment, the basic unit of currency is the cigarette, and the key to survival lies in mastering the system of petty bribes. Two particular features of the Part One narrative (which occupies almost exactly half the total length of the book) are worth highlighting. The first is the increasing ‘visibility’, as the narrative proceeds, of religious fundamentalists: led by Shaykh ʿI‚ām, the multaªīn19 appear to enjoy certain privileges inside the prison, and have a certain influence over the conduct of business in the prison – including, for example, the right to censor magazine pictures or object to TV programmes on moral grounds.20 An unsuccessful attempt is made to ‘recruit’ Sharaf to their cause;21 more dramatically, as Part One draws to a close, amid gossip about the activities of the fundamentalists in various parts of Egypt, violence breaks out leaving three people dead and a hundred injured, leading to punishments, the rationing of cigarettes and withdrawal of privileges, and a number of people being taken to hospital.22 The second development as the narrative proceeds is the emergence of Dr Ramzi himself, who first makes a somewhat inconspicuous debut in chapter 7, shortly after Sharaf’s transfer from the miri to the malaki wing;23 significantly, perhaps, his appearance is quickly followed by what appears to be a subtle and nuanced set of discussions about issues considerably wider than the immediate prison environment – discussions that range over topics as diverse as phone-­tapping and the proper use of evidence; corruption and the

prison of di shonour: sharaf  | 131 taking of bribes for extensions to buildings; smuggling, security issues, taxes, and comparisons of various kinds between Egypt and Europe and the USA. These discussions presage the intellectual tone of subsequent sections of the book, as Dr Ramzi’s character gradually emerges as that of a highly educated Coptic intellectual, with a qualification in pharmacy, who reads books and newspapers; is a Scrabble enthusiast; is well informed on matters of politics and policy, both at home and abroad; and whose conversation is, unsurprisingly, not occasionally above the heads of the other prisoners. Most relevant to the subsequent development of the novel, perhaps, is that he is a theatre enthusiast, who comes across Tawfiq al-­Hakim’s play Rasasa fi al-­qalb (A Bullet in the Heart)24 in the prison library (a play that appeals to Sharaf, who had not yet forgotten his girlfriend, Huda), though his request to perform it is unsurprisingly turned down by the authorities.25 Dr Ramzi quickly gains a reputation as a colleague that other prisoners are able to consult for opinions and advice, not least on sexual matters, and we begin to learn a little of the story of Ramzi’s early life.26 The flow of events of Part One, which – with its carefully balanced alternation between first- and third-­person prison narrative – at first appears to promise the reader a structure akin to that of Dhat, is however abruptly broken halfway through the novel, when Sonallah Ibrahim embarks on a variation of the intertextuality techniques that he had already employed in Dhat and elsewhere, to express (through the persona of Dr Ramzi) his outrage at aspects of the globalisation that had already preoccupied him in al-­Lajna, Dhat and elsewhere.27 The newspaper and magazine cuttings, some of them underlined in red pen, and supplemented with handwritten material, extend to some twenty-­five pages and range widely, covering similar ground and with a similar slant to those in Dhat, but with a slightly tighter focus, which reflects the particular concerns and interests of Dr Ramzi’s training and experience. Among his central concerns are issues of meat and cheese contamination, polluted water supplies, the loss of specialists from the Third World to Europe and the USA, and the general exploitation of the Third World by the West in the realm of food production – the literary proclivities of the cuttings collector being foregrounded by the ending of the chapter, which closes with a reference to Antoine de Saint-­Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes.28

132 | sonallah i b r a h im If the newspaper and magazine clippings of chapter 13 both echo the techniques of Dhat and directly reflect a long-­standing practice of the author himself, chapter 14, headed ‘Papers of Ramzi Butrus Nasif (draft defence memo)’, takes us onto different territory, comprising as they do some sixty pages of material that not only fills out Dr Ramzi’s intellectual orientation as expressed in the previous chapter but also, by providing the reader with his life-­story as told by himself, puts his views into a biographical context. His early life, in fact, for the most part appears to have been unremarkable: born and brought up in comfortable circumstances, he generally enjoyed his schooling; liked the theatre and acted in a Shakespeare play; and conceived an early ambition to be a pharmacist. Only as being a Copt in a predominantly Muslim society could he in any sense have been regarded as being something of an ‘outsider’.29 Following Pharmacy School, he found employment with Koch, a major international pharmaceutical company, married, and after a brief period in Switzerland was transferred to Latin America, where he spent the majority of his professional career. Dr Ramzi’s postings in the Third World have given him a particular ‘take’ on the activities of the big pharmaceutical companies and their policies in Third World countries, and although his papers also cover personal matters, including the virtual breakdown of his marriage, the main focus of his papers (echoing one of the central concerns of al-­Lajna and Dhat) is rather on the exploitation of the developing world by the richer nations (of which, the USA is clearly the main culprit), on the policies of the large multinationals, and on the ruthlessness with which they wield their power in the pursuit of profit at any cost. Returning to Egypt after a long period of working abroad, Dr Ramzi is put in charge of a facility in 6 October City,30 but is shocked to discover how much Egypt has changed since he left; spurred on by his idealistic attitudes, he devotes too much of his attention to safety issues, and is eventually dismissed on clearly spurious grounds, only to find himself in the same prison as Sharaf. The following chapter (‘15: Puppet show presented on the occasion of the anniversary of the great victory in the October War of 1973, prepared and produced by Dr Ramzi Butrus Nasif’) represents one of the most distinctive – one is tempted to say ‘oddest’ – passages in any of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, extending as it does over almost exactly a hundred pages and containing the text of a play that, despite its title, is in fact designed to subvert rather than cel-

prison of di shonour: sharaf  | 133 ebrate the event in question.31 The participants in this drama – which reflects Dr Ramzi’s enthusiasm for the theatre already noted and which is introduced by Ramzi himself – include not only puppets but also a variety of onlookers, war veterans and others, who while brought together ostensibly to celebrate the anniversary of Sadat’s crossing of the Suez Canal, in fact present a damning review of recent Egyptian history, in which the ideals of the 1919 Revolution and of the early years of the Free Officers’ regime have been apparently corrupted beyond repair. Strongly anti-­Israeli and anti-­Zionist in tone, the text presents a picture of the Egyptians (and the Arab world more generally) as the victims of US political and economic domination in a world where small companies can be taken over or sold off indiscriminately to fuel the ambitions of the multinationals, where ‘consumption’ represents the only enduring value, and where any degree of corruption and hypocrisy can be tolerated in the name of profit. Sonallah’s writing is here powerful and heartfelt, though unfortunately (if unsurprisingly) for Dr Ramzi, his performance eventually collapses in chaos, and it is perhaps inevitable that the short third section of the book (which reverts to the format of Part One, and in which we find Dr Ramzi in solitary confinement) represents something of an anti-­climax. Conclusion As will be clear from the above discussion, in many respects Sharaf stands in a direct line of development from Sonallah Ibrahim’s earlier works, further illustrating and developing the idea of an ‘anti-­hero’ central character ‘given the vocation of failure’.The main location of the work – an Egyptian prison – provides an ideal setting for the author to bring together themes of corruption, hypocrisy and sexual frustration conspicuous in his earlier novels, together with a new emphasis on religious fanaticism that almost certainly reflects a shift in contemporary Egyptian society itself; while the introduction of Dr Ramzi as a second, contrasting, character allows him to further develop the less localised themes already apparent in al-­Lajna, Dhat and elsewhere. The additional structural complexity that characterises the work, however, may or may not be judged effective according to the reader’s taste, and despite – or perhaps because of – its imaginative construction and the vein of bold literary experimentation that runs through it, Sharaf is arguably one of the hardest of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels to evaluate.

134 | sonallah i b r a h im Notes 1. For whom, see Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1994), pp. 58–77, 96–118. 2. Originally published in Akhbar al-­Adab, 5 January 1997; English translation by Samia Mehrez, in Egypt’s Culture Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 253–4. 3. Sharaf, p. 471. On this episode, see Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, pp. 35–7. 4. See http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/490722-­2011-stop-­2-nile-­valleyand-­the-horn-­of-africa. I have not been able to trace this translated extract. 5. Charaf ou l’honneur, trans. Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). 6. Also variously spelled Faraj Fawda or Fouda in English. 7. Sharaf, p. 23. 8. Ibid. p. 7. 9. Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 376–85. 10. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 188–9. 11. Ibid. pp. 244–5. 12. Ibid. p. 43. 13. Sharaf, pp. 19–20. 14. Ibid. pp. 8–19. 15. Ibid. pp. 7–9. 16. Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, p. 34. 17. Sharaf, p. 8. 18. Ibid. p. 57. 19. Literally, ‘those with beards’, a term commonly used to refer to Muslim fundamentalists. 20. Sharaf, p. 149. 21. See Sharaf, chapter 11, pp. 173ff. 22. Ibid. pp. 198–205. 23. Ibid. pp. 118–21. 24. For which, see Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower (London: Garnet, 1987), p. 196. 25. Sharaf, pp. 149–50. 26. Ibid. p. 151. 27. See above, particularly Chapters 5 and 7.

prison of di shonour: sharaf  | 135 28. Sharaf, p. 232. 29. Ibid. pp. 233–9. 30. On the outskirts of Cairo. 31. Sharaf, pp. 293–391.

9 Widening Horizons (1): Sex, Memory and Revolution: Warda (2000)

S

onallah Ibrahim’s next full-­length novel, Warda, published in 2000, continued the trend established in several of the author’s previous works of merging a clearly fictional ‘frame’ narrative with real or fictional documents of one sort or another, a technique for which the term ‘docu-­fiction’ has sometimes been used. The mixture of fact and fiction is explicitly acknowledged by the author in a statement preceding the text, which concludes that: ‘for this reason, they [i.e. the following pages] are better read as . . . fiction’.1 The work also continued a line of development established in Bayrut, Bayrut, in that it was set largely outside Egypt, though despite certain similarities with the earlier work, it represents a considerably more complex literary endeavour than Bayrut, Bayrut, both structurally and in geographical terms. Like many of the author’s previous novels, the work – which is an attempt to portray and understand the so-­called Dhofar rebellions of the 1960s and early 1970s – is the product of a considerable amount of original research. The subject matter may strike some as surprising, for notwithstanding Nasser’s intervention in Yemen, the history of the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula during that period had not been (and, one may confidently say, is still not) a subject of major interest to most Egyptian intellectuals, let alone the general population; the choice of subject may therefore be taken as another example of the author’s determination to follow his own path rather than be swayed by current trends and fashions. Sonallah Ibrahim himself described the book as ‘an attempt to understand what happened over 30 years throughout the entire region’, and as the product of ‘five entire years [of] reading and meeting people and looking for anything, however small, about the [Omani] Êufār revolutionaries’,2 adding that, in attempting to recapture the events of the politically charged atmos-

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 137 phere of the late 1950s and early 1960s – events through which he himself had lived – he had tried to avoid becoming nostalgic. Publication and Translations The novel was completed in May 2000, following several years of research on the author’s part, and was published later the same year in Cairo by the author’s preferred publishing house, Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi. A French translation by Richard Jacquemont under the same title, Warda, was published in 2002, and an Italian translation by P. Zanelli (also under the same title) in 2005. To my knowledge, there are to date no English or other foreign-­language translations of the work. Background The background to the events with which the novel is concerned is arguably even more complex than the structure of the work itself. The geographical setting of the main set of events comprises the southernmost part of the Arabian Peninsula, a region that contains the modern states of Yemen, Oman and part of Saudi Arabia, and more specifically the Dhofar [Zufar] region of Oman. At the beginning of the 1960s – the start of the period spanned by the events of the novel – Oman was one of the least developed countries in the Middle East, ruled by an absolute monarch, Sultan Saʿid bin Taimur [Taymur], who relied on the British to maintain him in power. The province of Dhofar, which consists of a narrow coastal plain backed by a rugged range of hills known as the Jebel Dhofar that slope down into the Empty Quarter (al-­Rubʿ al-­Khali) to the north, had been particularly heavily exploited by the ruler. Following a number of earlier failed insurrections, a major rebellion began in Dhofar in 1962 with the formation of the Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF), which received support from the Saudis as well as other external parties. Sabotage operations against the British air base in the provincial capital of Salalah (located on the coastal plain) began in December 1962, and the insurrection intensified in 1964, when the DLF began a campaign of hit-­ and-run attacks on oil company installations and government posts. A key turning-­point came in April 1966, when members of the ‘Dhofar Force’, a unit hitherto loyal to the sultan, attempted to assassinate the ruler, who retired to his palace and never appeared in public again.

138 | sonallah i b r a h im From an early stage, the Dhofar rebellion had attracted a good deal of attention in the outside world, both in the Middle East and beyond. Following the Six-­Day Arab–Israeli War of 1967, and more particularly with the establishment of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) in 1970, the rebels found it increasingly easy to attract support from left-­wing regimes in the Middle East, as well as from China and the Soviet Union. In 1968 the DLF renamed itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (al-­Jabha al-­Shaʿbiyya li-­Tahrir al-­Khalij al-ʿArabi al-­Muhtall; PFLOAG) and the movement became increasingly radicalised and drawn into the mainstream global Marxist-­Leninist movement – a development that did not always sit easily with the more limited local aspirations of the original leaders of the rebellion. By 1969 well-­armed DLF and PFLOAG fighters had overrun much of the Jebel Dhofar, and by 1970 the communists controlled the entire Jebel. A terror campaign ensued, with the aim of breaking up the traditional tribal structure, and a new organisation, the National Democratic Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (NDFLOAG), was formed in 1970. The next decisive step in the history of the rebellion came on 23 July 1970, when the ageing sultan, Saʿid bin Taymur, was deposed in an almost bloodless coup, bringing to power his British-­educated son, Qaboos [Qabus] bin Saʿid, who immediately set in train a series of major social, educational and military reforms.3 The most important of these were embodied in a five-­ point plan, which involved: • A general amnesty for those of his subjects who had opposed his father; • An end to the archaic status of Dhofar as the sultan’s private fief and its formal incorporation into Oman as the ‘southern province’; • Effective military opposition to rebels who did not accept the offer of amnesty; • A vigorous nation-­wide programme of development; • Diplomatic initiatives with the aim of having Oman recognised as a genuine Arab state with its own legal form of government, with an end to support for the PDRY from other Arab states. The new ruler also quickly secured the assistance of the British SAS in his struggle against PFLOAG, adopting a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign as part

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 139 of the effort to win over the local population. The first results of the new strategy were seen in October 1971, and over the next few years the sultan’s forces, aided by the British, gradually succeeded in reasserting their authority over an opposition that was increasing riven with splits and defections. In January 1974, the rebel movement renamed itself the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman – a move that coincided with a reduction in the support they received from the Soviet Union and China, and with an increase in Iranian support for the efforts of the new sultan. The beginning of the final offensive came in July 1975, after which most of the remaining rebel fighters surrendered or sought sanctuary in the PDRY. The rebellion was finally declared to be defeated in January 1976 (although a few isolated incidents took place as late as 1979), crushed by the combined influence of the United States, Britain and pre-­revolutionary Iran. Summary The novel, the narrative of which is intimately bound in with the events outlined above, revolves around the quest of an elderly Egyptian narrator, named Shukri, who embarks in 1992 on a visit to Muscat in the hope of finding out the fate of ‘Warda’ – the alias of a young revolutionary Omani girl, now dead, who had herself studied at Cairo University in the late 1950s, and with whom the narrator had at that time been infatuated. With her brother Yaʿrub, Warda had played a prominent part in left-­wing activities in Cairo, but had then left for Beirut and from there made her way to Dhofar, where she had become involved with the Dhofar revolutionaries; originally named Shahla, she assumed the name ‘Warda’ (Arabic for ‘rose’) – as her diary entry for 12 April 1965 makes clear – as a ‘nom de guerre’ or code name following her decision to journey to Dhofar to take part in the struggle as a guerrilla. The story of the revolutionary struggle in Oman itself is told largely through Warda’s diaries, which the narrator acquires through a young man acting as intermediary, and which extend as far as 1975, some five years after the coup that brought Sultan Qaboos to power in Oman. In the course of his quest for information – which is hampered by what appear, superficially at least, to be the same sort of obstructions and difficulties faced by the narrator of Bayrut, Bayrut – the narrator enjoys an unlikely affair with Waʿd, Warda’s daughter. The book ends, like many of the author’s novels, in a somewhat abrupt and

140 | sonallah i b r a h im inconclusive manner – the narrator having effectively been forced to leave the country and return to Cairo. Structure, Themes and Technique In several respects, Warda continues the novelistic techniques employed by the author in previous works, most obviously Najmat Aghustus and Bayrut, Bayrut – with the latter of which it also shares the obvious characteristic of being set largely outside Egypt. In terms of its construction, however, it is arguably considerably more complex than anything Sonallah Ibrahim had attempted before, both in its geographical reach and in its formal structure. Unlike Bayrut, Bayrut, for example, which is entirely set in the Lebanese capital, the events of Warda not only weave their way back and forth between the various regions of South Arabia but also involve Cairo and Beirut; while structurally, the novel not only combines a (generally straightforward) primary narrative on one timeframe with diary extracts on a different (secondary) one, but also includes, in chapter 3, an extended anachrony4 set in a period preceding both the primary narrative and the diaries – an anachrony that plays a crucial role in linking the two main narrative timeframes, and indeed in explaining the genesis of the narrator’s obsession with Warda. As in Bayrut, Bayrut, Sonallah Ibrahim has included maps (in this case, of Oman, Dhofar and Salalah) for the reader’s convenience.5 Before considering the themes and other characteristics of the novel, it will be useful to set down the arrangement of the chapters in a little more detail, in order to show the overall structure more clearly. The work is divided into eighteen main chapters, some consisting of narrative and some of Warda’s diary entries, arranged according to the following pattern (narrative chapters are shown in roman: diary chapters are shown in italics):   1 (pp. 9–10) Cairo, September 1992   2 (pp. 11–53) Muscat, December 1992       3 (pp.  55–71) Cairo, 1957–1959   4 (pp. 73–83) Muscat, December 1992     5 (pp. 85–114) Beirut, 1960–1965   6 (pp. 115–22) Muscat, December 1992     7 (pp. 122–81) Dhofar, 1965–1968

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 141   8 (pp. 183–90) Muscat, December 1992     9 (pp. 191–229) Dhofar, 1968–1970 10 (pp. 231–7) Muscat, December 1992 11 (pp. 239–71) Salalah, December 1992     12 (pp. 273–303) Dhofar, 1970–1972 13 (pp. 305–9) Salalah, December 1992     14 (pp. 311–42) Dhofar, 1972–1975 15 (pp. 343–58) Salalah, December 1992     16 (pp. 359–404) Rubʿ al-­Khali, 1975 17 (pp. 405–12) Salalah, 1992 18 (pp. 413–48) Muscat, December 1992–January 1993 Epilogue (p. 449) Thus, of the total text, twelve of the eighteen sections – accounting for some 200 pages, and including some eleven pages of ‘flashback’ (‘analepsis’) – belong to what we might call the primary narrative, while six of the eighteen sections – around 238 pages – are accounted for by Warda’s diaries; it will be noticed that, following the introductory chapters, there is a certain amount of alternation in the order of material, but this is not so regularised as in Dhat, where the regular alternation of narrative modes is followed meticulously. The primary narrative mode of Warda follows that of several of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous novels, in that, although it does not constitute an autobiography as such, the author employs a first-­person, ‘homodiegetic’ narrator/ protagonist who clearly exhibits some of the characteristics of the author himself, not least in terms of his age: he records, for example, that ‘I am hastening towards the sixth, and perhaps the final, decade of my life.’6 Unlike previous works, however, in which the first-­person narrator has generally remained anonymous (with the exception of Sharaf, which constitutes a more complex case in a number of respects), the narrator/protagonist of Warda is named as Shukri – a name that we shall find the author using again in Amrikanli, al-­Qanun al-­Faransi and Jalid. The use of the diary form for the secondary narrative also clearly implies the existence of a second, distinct, first-­person narrator of a somewhat different kind (and with none of the characteristics of the author himself), and in this respect also the novel may be distinguished from the earlier Sharaf, where the first-­person narrative mode

142 | sonallah i b r a h im was combined with other sections written by an ‘omniscient author’. From the very beginning of the work also, it is clear that the emotional involvement of the narrator with his subject promises to be of a somewhat different order from that of other works, for in place of the usual ‘deadpan’ openings of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels describing the protagonist’s journey from Cairo to the setting of the novel’s action (a sort of ‘liminal’ experience that one might perhaps read as an echo of the move from prison to the outside world at the opening of Tilka al-­raʾiha), we find instead a lyrical passage that seems almost as out of place in the context of the author’s usual style as the middle section of Najmat Aghustus. Headed simply ‘Cairo, September 1992’, the first section starts as follows: When I decided to travel, she stopped coming into my dreams. She had been haunting me continually recently. I would always be coming across her amid a crowd of people reclining on sofas, like in Roman pictures or in paradise. Sometimes in a vast hall, at other times on a ship’s deck. Each time she would turn towards me with a mysterious look in her eyes, part question, part conspiracy, part seduction. I would approach her, astonished at her complicity; I’d draw closer until I was touching her, my leg against hers . . . This vision of her was always powerful, quite overwhelming in its clarity and effect on me. It would pursue me even after I woke, so that I remained under her influence. I had lost all sense of reality, no longer able to distinguish it from fantasy.7

The almost lyrical mood of this opening, unusual if not unique in the author’s works, is abruptly broken at the start of the second section, headed ‘Muscat, December 1992’,8 where we find the narrator in the Omani capital embarking on his quest for news of Shahla (Warda’s real name) and her brother Yaʿrub. This chapter provides a convenient introduction to many of the preoccupations of the work (as well as anchoring it in the present as much as the past), for although at a rather superficial level, the frustrations of this search recall those of the narrator of Bayrut, Bayrut, the setting and context are of course quite different: contemporary Omani society is in many respects a world away from that of Cairo and Beirut, as the narrator begins to discover even while being driven away from the airport in the unanticipated heat by his relative and fellow countryman Fathi:

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 143 ‘Put on your seatbelt, my friend, or we’re done for. The traffic department here is strict, not like in your place!’ I was about to say that it wasn’t our place any more, but I didn’t want to start a futile argument, so I did as I was told as he drove away from the airport. I fumbled as I tried to fasten the belt, though, giving him the chance to make fun of me.9

It does not take long for the narrator to discover that in the country to which he has come, everything – main road, port, new town – bears the name ‘Qaboos’ – a situation no different from that in Egypt, admits Fathi, though in the case of Oman, it is justified, ‘because this country was nothing before he assumed power’.10 When the television is switched on for the news, a portrait of the sultan can inevitably be seen hanging behind the newsreader – recalling those of the Egyptian presidents in Dhat, perhaps – but even the main news item itself is centred on Qaboos: the naming of a new variety of rose after the Omani ruler in recognition of the part he has played in furthering international relations.11 It is not long, however, before this picture of paradise is somewhat sullied, as the narrator makes new acquaintances and observes different aspects of the country, and talk turns to the contradictions in the country’s recent development and in its contemporary situation. The country’s revolutionary phase is indeed never far from the surface, albeit occasionally in somewhat cryptic terms: at one point, the narrator encounters a copy of a magazine entitled Sawt al-­thawra (Voice of the Revolution), in which it is announced that the magazine has decided to finally cease publication, after twenty years of the ‘phase of resistance’, in order to make way for a new voice, expressing the ‘new phase of the struggle’; a large part of the magazine is devoted to the 4th Congress of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman, which had been held at the beginning of June, a little more than six months previously, following what it described as ‘difficulties and differences during the previous four years.’12 At the same time, the element of contemporary social criticism that has formed such an important element in the author’s output is also prominent in the narrative – here transported, of course, to an alien, yet still distinctly Arab, environment. Noting how clean everything seems, for example, the narrator observes that:

144 | sonallah i b r a h im ‘So far, I haven’t seen a single scrap of paper or pile of rubbish like we have at home.’ ‘First of all,’ he replied, ‘the number of inhabitants is not large. Oman has a population of only two million, for an area of 300,000 square kilometres. Less than half a district in Cairo. Second, it is the Indians that do the cleaning.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. He laughed sarcastically as we approached a new two-­storied building. ‘Don’t think that the Omanis do the cleaning themselves. It’s the Indians that do all the menial tasks and there are as many of them as you could want.’13

Migrant labourers perform other functions too. ‘The Filipino barber here is a pimp’, explains Fathi; ‘he uses unemployed Filipina girls or shop assistants, who charge between twenty and fifty riyals a time.’ Taken to a nearby bar, the narrator is served a glass of beer and a plate of green olives by a rather ordinary-­looking Filipina girl and observes that ‘most of the customers are Omanis, with the exception of two Europeans, with whom Fathi exchanged greetings’.14 Such implicit and explicit criticism of aspects of Omani society, even following the coup by Sultan Qaboos in 1970, is a recurring feature of the work, and the author seems particularly alert to the abuse of Filipino servants, whom at one stage he describes as being ‘treated like slaves’ in contemporary Oman.15 Meanwhile, the narrator’s efforts to track down the two Omanis he had known at university in Cairo more than three decades previously have been slow to progress – unsurprisingly, perhaps, in view of the fact that he appears uncertain even of their names: ‘My memory has become weak’, he explains to a sheikh at one point, ‘but his name was perhaps Yaʿrub’ (a very common name in Oman, as the sheikh observes), and ‘I think [his sister’s name] was Shahla.’16 It is, indeed, not until the end of the fourth section of the work that the narrator acquires the first tranche of her diaries, handed to him in a plastic bag by an anonymous intermediary, with the words ‘You will find here photocopies of some documents that will interest you. You will find your own name here’, before adding: ‘I don’t need to warn you about letting them fall

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 145 into the hands of the authorities.’ Emptying the plastic bag, the narrator finds two sets of photocopied papers, each pinned together to form a notebook. I flipped quickly through them, and it was clear that they were diaries written in a clear, bold hand, the words faded in a few places. Each set had a date written in red ink on the first page: the smaller of the two was labelled 1960–65, so I decided to start with that.17

On one level, the diaries so unceremoniously presented to the narrator represent a continuation of the ‘flashback’ (anachrony) comprised by chapter 3 (‘Cairo, 1957–1959’), in which Sonallah Ibrahim evokes the revolutionary spirit of Cairo in the second half of the 1950s, during which he had made the acquaintance of Yaʿrub and his sister Shahla. This was a heady period in the development of the modern Arab world – not least for Egypt, which was recovering from the aftermath of the so-­called ‘Tripartite Aggression’ of 1956;18 succeeding years saw an abortive move towards Arab unity expressed in the brief union with Syria in the ‘United Arab Republic’ of 1958–61, with further plans for a union with Iraq; meanwhile, the ramifications of the gradual unfolding of the British Empire continued to create tensions in the Arab Gulf and elsewhere. In Egypt itself, support for Nasser’s nationalistic initiatives sat uneasily with the regime’s opposition to Marxism, driving much ‘revolutionary’ activity underground, and creating a split between communists and ‘nationalists’ – a split that resurfaces in the book as Yaʿrub and his sister’s political orientations begin to diverge. Ibrahim’s narrative successfully evokes this atmosphere, both in the local context of Cairo and in its wider global setting, and the chapter closes in a way that, at this point at least, clearly points to an identification of the narrator with the author himself: The iron handcuffs to which [Muhammad Hasanayn] Heikal had alluded in a threatening way in his weekly article [in al-­Ahram] made no distinction between left and right. In the early hours of the first day of the New Year, 1959, all [the Egyptian communists], myself included, were arrested and sent on their way to prisons and camps. That was the last I saw of Yaʿrub and his sister.19

The friendship that developed between the narrator and the two Omanis in question was a somewhat furtive one, for in a further reflection of the

146 | sonallah i b r a h im extraordinarily complex political manoeuvrings of the time, their passage to Cairo (together with that of many other young Omanis and Yemenis) had originally been arranged by the Egyptian secret service, for the purposes of fomenting revolution against the British, and they continued to receive a monthly allowance from the Egyptian government.20 At all events, the narrator quickly finds in Yaʿrub’s apartment the sort of family atmosphere he had never enjoyed himself, with home cooking prepared by an Egyptian maid; the main attraction, however, appears to be Yaʿrub’s sister who, although two years younger than her brother, seems the more mature of the two, and clearly makes the greater impression on him: My friend and I would pretend to be listening to the political and intellectual discussions, but our real interest was focused on his sister: she was perhaps the first girl we could sit with so freely and intimately. I was filled with happiness whenever I saw her and overcome by despair when I didn’t find her.21

Already at the end of the fourth section hints have been given that Yaʿrub and his sister do not altogether see eye to eye with regard to the complex and uneasy relationship between nationalism and the communist movement. From this point on, however, it is Warda rather than Yaʿrub who is the main focus of the narrator’s attention, as he struggles to discover what has become of her, while observing at second hand in roughly alternating chapters the progress of the Dhofar revolution some thirty years earlier. As in several of the author’s earlier works,22 both the appeal and the power of Sonallah Ibrahim’s writing arguably derive from the interplay between the everyday (the ‘micro’) aspects of the narrative and the wider (‘macro’) context in which the everyday aspects of life are situated – an interplay that is conspicuous both in the ‘frame narrative’, as conveyed to us by the elderly narrator, and in Warda’s diaries themselves, to which we should now turn. The first tranche of these diaries, ‘Beirut, 1960–65’, constitutes a sort of transitional phase between Warda’s early life and her subsequent career as a guerrilla in the struggle to liberate Dhofar. Installed as a student in the American University of Beirut (AUB) girls’ hostel, she shares a room with Mai [Mayy], whose Arabic is poor despite the fact that her father is a well-­ known Lebanese writer, ‘who never leaves his house in the mountain’. ‘I love

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 147 this city’, she opines in her first diary entry, dated 5 September 1960. ‘Is it because I feel free here? To this day, I don’t understand how Yaʿrub managed to persuade my father to abandon the idea of marrying me off to my cousin, enrol us both at the AUB and give us each a thousand dollars a year. Perhaps it’s a pang of conscience.’23 Subsequent entries suggest a life not dissimilar to that of any rebellious left-­leaning student of the time in sixties’ Beirut: she wears mini-­skirts, makes friends of both sexes, acquires a lover and worries that she may be pregnant; she frequents cafés like the Elissar on Bliss Street (known by students as the ‘café of the left’), and indulges in wide-­ranging political and intellectual discussions, of the sort already familiar from her friendship with the narrator in Cairo. The intellectual life of Beirut indeed makes Cairo seem like a village, despite the Egyptian capital’s great size.24 Her diary entries – daily at first, then somewhat more erratic, in the normal fashion of most writers – are full of references to contemporary, voguish writers, film-­makers and intellectuals, foreign as well as Arab – Nazim Hikmet, Truffaut, Elvis Presley, Hitchcock, Jean-­Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir rubbing shoulders, as it were, with Layla Baʿlabakki and Suhayl Idris. Not all of life in Beirut is, of course, so idyllic: Warda comments on the prostitutes available in Burj Square or by telephone on Hamra Street, and relates how the caretaker of the building where Yaʿrub is living killed his unmarried sister when he discovered that she was pregnant. Meanwhile, her quest for personal freedom continues: on 3 December (1960), for example, she records that ‘I have discovered a hypersensitive spot on my back. When Shihab touches it, I dissolve completely. Now there is something to compete with my breasts.’ In these circumstances, it is perhaps hardly surprising that relations between the siblings, and between her brother and Shihab, become strained: ‘6 December. Yaʿrub’s relationship with Shihab is tense. Because of me? I can’t explain Yaʿrub’s behaviour towards me. And Mai can’t stand Shihab either!’25 But beyond and behind these personal trials there always lurks the shadow of politics. She reads Karl Marx, and in December 1961 records that she aspires to become the ‘Djamila Bouhired26 of the Arabian Peninsula’; and from then on, her progress towards direct involvement in the revolutionary struggle in her homeland seems to acquire a momentum of its own. There are an increasing number of references to contemporary political developments in the Arab world, including the celebrations of Algerian independence and

148 | sonallah i b r a h im the Yemeni coup of 1962, as well as to developments in her own country and in the wider world. The names of Castro and Che Guevara clearly inspire her. In December 1963, she records that ‘I have requested to go to Aden to take part in the armed struggle’ – immediately following this with the remark that ‘Tony Richardson’s film Tom Jones is more than amazing . . . Three meetings in a week. I am responsible for the cells in the Lebanese University and also the section in the University of Alexandria.’27 On 8 January 1965 she notes that ‘There is a need for political and military action in Dhofar, especially among women’, further explaining that Dhofar ‘suffers exploitation twice over, for while Oman is a British colony, Dhofar is an Omani colony . . .’ In April 1965, having split from Shihab, she declines a proposal of marriage from another admirer, declaring that ‘love is the last thing I am thinking of right now’; and on 12 April – two days after dreaming that she is in the mountains with Guevara – she makes her preparations to travel to Dhofar to begin her part in the armed struggle, and chooses her ‘nom de guerre’, ‘Warda’. The succeeding portions of Warda’s diaries detail a way of living totally at odds with the rather pampered lifestyle she had enjoyed in Beirut. Seasick during the passage to the Gulf, and with Yaʿrub having gone his separate way, she finds herself quickly drawn into the daily, often unglamorous, grind of revolutionary life, with its primitive living conditions, not to speak of the inevitable friction between colleagues, problems of organisation and of relations with the local population (many of whom speak not Arabic but Jibbali)28 – all inevitably made more complicated by the fact that she is a woman in a male-­dominated society. On 23 May she records that: My leg muscles are hurting from yesterday’s march. I had a difficult night, unable to sleep. I recalled the faces of the combatants and recalled my conversations with them. Again and again Bakhit’s naked chest would appear before me, along with Suwayd’s contemptuous face. As I emerged from my sleeping bag, I was attacked by mosquitos, lit a candle and was attacked by flies. I got out Mao Tse Tung’s book on guerrilla warfare, as well as books by Che Guevara and General Giap. I started to flick through them as I brushed away the flies, a single question revolving in my head: how to transform these valiant Bedouin into revolutionary fighters?29

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 149 As the above quotation shows, Warda remains acutely conscious, even after her return to her homeland, of the wider global context in which she is pursuing her personal, more local, struggle – a global context that includes, in addition to the many turbulent developments in the Arab world, such traumatic episodes as the American involvement in the Vietnam War.30 About all these events, Warda appears remarkably well informed, keeping in touch with world developments by radio between guerrilla operations, and peppering her diaries with references to contemporary political developments that rocked the countries of the region (Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Palestine) in the 1960s and 1970s, and which brought to power, among others, Muʿammar Qaddafi [al-­Qadhdhāfī], Hafez al-­Asad and Saddam Hussein. In the local context, the question of her status as a woman inevitably rears its head on more than one occasion (‘20 September [1968]: important resolution: the achievement of equality between men and women’),31 as do questions of religion. On 21 September 1968, she records a discussion that suggests a considerable degree of sophistication on her part, as well as illustrating the intellectual gulf that almost inevitably exists between the leadership and the participants in any revolutionary movement: I had a long discussion with someone, who asked me: ‘Are you a Muslim?’ I answered him with another question: ‘What difference would it make if I was a Christian, or a Jew, or even an atheist?’ Someone else chipped in: ‘Do you believe in God?’ I wanted to tease him, so I replied: ‘Which one? There are many gods. Every religion has a different concept of God.’ ‘Stop dodging the question’, he shouted at me. ‘Do you believe in the Muslim God? Are you a Muslim?’ ‘I think I’m a real Muslim’, I replied. ‘That is, I believe in the God of truth and justice. Perhaps I look at the problem from a particular angle. You, for example, conceive of God in a male form, in heaven above. But God is everywhere, and has no particular sex, because he is made of a different substance from ourselves . . .’ He didn’t appear to understand what I was saying. The first one asked me if I prayed. ‘The Qurʾan excuses a Muslim from the obligation to pray if he is travelling’, I replied. ‘I think that that applies to us here. It’s better to concentrate on what can help us. Better, for example, for you to ask me whether I believe in the rights of the people, in the revolution, and in whether we shall achieve victory . . . we are

150 | sonallah i b r a h im not against religion, but against those who try to exploit it to oppress people and justify their exploitation.’32

Succeeding instalments of the diaries follow the same general pattern, weaving together the ups and downs of the campaign on the ground against a background of continuing turbulence in the wider world. A continuing, if intermittent, theme, is the conflict between local nationalism and the universal Marxist struggle. On 26 July 1970, the new Omani Sultan Qaboos takes power and a new era begins in the development of the country – an event recorded by Warda with the words ‘The tyrant has fallen’, followed by a quotation from the new ruler himself: ‘I have observed with increasing unease my father’s inability to take charge of affairs. Now that my family and my armed forces have sworn allegiance to me, I shall devote myself to the rapid formation of a modern government.’33 The news quickly evokes a perhaps predictable reaction from the rebels, whose first statement describes the ‘coup d’etat’ (inqilāb) as a ‘predictable farce’, while the second speaks of ‘this pampered child who has led a life of luxury . . . this weak personality who has nothing to offer his country . . . the revolution rejects this wretched creature!’34 Though Qaboos’s coup clearly changes the immediate political landscape, Warda’s progress continues to be punctuated by news of momentous events elsewhere, for Qaboos’s succession to power is quickly followed by ‘Black September’ – which witnessed some 20,000 killed or wounded in Amman in fighting between Palestinians and Jordanians – and shortly afterwards by the death of Abdel Nasser. Her diaries briefly record the progress of the Yom Kippur (October) War of 1973, and a short trip to Moscow the following month. By now, however, it is clear that things are closing in on the rebels and that their position is becoming increasingly unsustainable: Yaʿrub – who has dropped in and out of the narrative at intervals – appears to be losing heart; Warda, by now pregnant, tries to conquer her hunger by reading, but finds herself thinking of kebabs and other nice food, and dreams that she is opening her refrigerator in Beirut. Confident that her child will be a girl, she spends many hours imagining what may be her fate: ‘will she be a revolutionary like me?’35 On 24 June 1975, the diaries come to an abrupt end on a miserable note, which sounds like a premonition:

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 151 A miserable, dusty day, laden with clouds. Will the rain fall here or just on the mountain slopes of Dhofar? I covered my face with a kaffiya. We walked beside the camels in low spirits. What would happen if we didn’t find pasture? The Bedouin weren’t afraid of hunger or thirst. They could stay on camel-­back for seven days without food or water. What frightens them is that the camels themselves might collapse. If that happens, death is certain. I felt that our camels didn’t have another day left.36

Less needs to be said, perhaps, about the remainder of the ‘frame’ story related by the narrator himself, which, as previously noted, bears at least a superficial resemblance to the scenario of Bayrut, Bayrut, in that the narrator, having embarked on a journey abroad in the hope of acquiring information or making arrangements of one kind or another, finds his quest frustrated by problems. Like many previous works, these parts of the novel are marked by a characteristically explicit concern on the part of the author with encounters (not infrequently sordid ones) with the opposite sex, beginning with Julia at the start of the sixth part of the work.37 The strangest, and most unlikely, twist of this sort, however, arguably comes at the end of the eighth part, when the narrator, seeking further instalments of Warda’s diaries, is informed that they are in Salalah,38 and that instructions have been given by Warda’s daughter, Waʿd (of whose existence he was previously unaware), that they should be handed over to him. Sonallah Ibrahim’s choice of name for the girl (Waʿd = ‘promise, pledge’) is clearly deliberate (even though its precise implication is less clear), and perhaps gives a hint that the revolution is to continue in the younger generation. If this development may perhaps be accounted a useful way of reinforcing the connection between the two strands of the narrative, the subsequent love-­scene between the narrator and the seventeen- or eighteen-­year-old Waʿd – who reveals that she never knew either her mother or father, and has never met Yaʿrub – seems almost too contrived. When Waʿd quizzes the narrator on whether her mother was prettier than she is (How could I reply when I’d only seen Warda’s face?) and whether he had loved her (‘I think so!’) or slept with her (‘No!’), one is tempted to suggest that the author is stretching the reader’s credulity a little.39 There is, however, one final twist in store, for when the writer is on the point of leaving the country, he encounters Yaʿrub, whom he has not seen for thirty-­four years,

152 | sonallah i b r a h im now t­ransformed into a government official with the name of Harith bin ʿAysha – a member of the new, ‘nationalist’ establishment able to grant the narrator a last favour before handing him back his passport. Conclusion As the discussion above should have made clear, not only is Warda a complex work from both a structural and a thematic viewpoint, it is also somewhat difficult to ‘place’ in relation to the author’s other works. In terms of structure, although it clearly has affinities with many of the author’s earlier novels (most notably, in its employment of a homodiegetic narrator with obvious affinities with the author himself), the complexity of the work’s structure is – with the possible exception of Sharaf – arguably of a different order from anything the author had written previously. In terms of its general outlook and political orientation, the left-­wing, revolutionary tenor of the work is clearly of a piece both with the author’s other writing and with the course of his own life, even if both the geographical and historical settings – essentially part of the universal Marxist-­Leninist struggle played out in the wake of the disintegration of the British Empire – seem a world away from the problems of fundamentalism, democracy and human rights with which the Middle East is currently riddled. In the overall context of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, however, the most outstanding feature of this novel is that, despite the occasional oddity or inconsistency of tone, the author has given us in the person of Warda, for the first and perhaps the only time, a character who seems genuinely to have something of the ‘heroic’, as opposed to the ‘anti-­hero’ about her. Courageous and intelligent as well as beautiful, Warda is a woman in search of personal and political freedom, who wants to change the world. It is surely no accident that in order to find such a character, Sonallah Ibrahim has been obliged not only to leave his native Egypt but also to return to the heady days of the 1960s, when revolutionary ideals still flourished, and globalisation and the consumer society had not yet taken hold. Notes 1. Or ‘as a novel’ (riwāya): Warda, p. 6. 2. See the author’s interview with Wael Abdel-­Fatah in Akhbar al-­Adab, 11 June

w ideni ng hori zons (1 ): warda  | 153 2000, quoted by Youssef Rakha, ‘An odd assortment’, at http://weekly.ahram. org.eg/2000/487/cu2.htm. 3. For which, see Fred Halliday, Mercenaries: Counter-­ insurgency in the Gulf (Nottingham: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation for Spokesman, 1977), and Francis Owtram, A Modern History of Oman: Formation of the State since 1920 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). As in some other works, Sonallah Ibrahim usefully appends a list of his own sources to the novel: see Warda, p. 413. 4. For which, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 35ff. 5. Warda, pp. 4–5. 6. Ibid. p. 7. 7. Ibid. p. 7. 8. Given in Jacquemond’s translation as ‘Septembre 1992’. 9. Warda, p. 9. 10. Ibid. p. 10. 11. Ibid. p. 11. 12. Ibid. p. 31. 13. Ibid. pp. 16–17. 14. Ibid. pp. 26–7. 15. Ibid. p. 215. 16. Ibid. pp. 44–5. 17. Ibid. p. 77. 18. Better known in Britain as the ‘Suez Crisis’; for a brief account, see Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 45–57. 19. Warda, p. 65. 20. Ibid. p. 54. 21. Ibid. p. 56. 22. Most obviously Dhat, perhaps – for which, see Chapter 7. 23. Warda, p. 79. 24. Ibid. p. 80. 25. Ibid. p. 83. 26. A noted Algerian freedom fighter, imprisoned by the French in 1957 and sentenced to death, but later released. 27. Warda, pp. 93–4. 28. A modern South Arabian language, for which see Aaron D. Rubin, The Jibbali Language of Oman: Grammar and Texts (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 29. Warda, p. 124.

154 | sonallah i b r a h im 30. See, for example, Warda, pp. 136–43, 148–9. 31. Ibid. p. 167. 32. Ibid. pp. 168–9. 33. Ibid. p. 214. 34. Ibid. p. 257. 35. Ibid. p. 363. 36. Ibid. p. 368. 37. Ibid. pp. 106ff. 38. The capital of Dhofar province. 39. Warda, pp. 326–7.

10 Widening Horizons (2): In the Land of the Capitalists: Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li)1 (2003)

A

s had already been the case with the appearance of Warda only three years after that of Sharaf, the publication of Amrikanli in 2003 appeared to confirm two trends in Sonallah’s output. The first was a reduction in the intervals between the publication dates of his major, full-­length novels; the second was a continuing enthusiasm for longer works – Amrikanli, with its 480 or so pages, being a work of almost exactly the same length as Sharaf and Warda. Although the geographical setting represents a major (and at first sight, unlikely) innovation in the author’s novelistic career, both the themes and the techniques of the novel clearly build on those of earlier works – though the fact that the novel is set not in the Middle East but rather in the USA, following a period of residence there, is presumably at least partly responsible for the fact that the author here takes what has seemed to me (though not necessarily to everyone) to be a slightly more measured approach to his criticism of globalisation and Western culture than in some previous works. Publication and Translations The full text of Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li) was first published in Cairo in 2003 by Sonallah Ibrahim’s preferred publishing house, Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, which had already published al-­Lajna, Bayrut, Bayrut, Dhat and Warda. A corrected edition was issued in 2004, and a French translation by Richard Jacquemond appeared in 2005 under the title Amrikanli: Un automne à San Francisco.2 To the best of my knowledge, there are to date no translations into other languages.

156 | sonallah i b r a h im Background Amrikanli took about two and a half years to write. Like several of the author’s previous novels, though not an autobiography, it is based at least partly, and closely, on the author’s own experience – in this case, his experience as a visiting associate professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of the University of California at Berkeley in 1998/9. Although required to devote some of his energies to teaching literature during his period of appointment, the idea of writing about his experiences was also clearly on his mind, as he explained in an interview with Youssef Rakha for Al Ahram Weekly: ‘I spent seven months in America in 1998[–1999], and from day one steadfastly took notes of my impressions and read the newspapers with the vague idea that I was collecting material for a novel.’3 Interestingly, Sonallah Ibrahim had previously turned down an invitation to visit the USA in the 1980s because the American ambassador had insulted the Egyptian president and the author had felt that this was a humiliation. As discussed in Chapter 1, the idea of a novel based on an Arab traveller’s experiences in the ‘West’ is a fairly conventional one, and indeed, the Arab (often a student) returning to his homeland and writing about his experiences in the West had already become a sort of ‘topos’ in modern Arabic literature several decades ago. Given the course of historical developments in the nineteenth century – most obviously, the crucial role played by Middle Eastern baʿathāt (‘educational missions’) to Europe (usually France) – most of these accounts relate to Europe rather than to the USA, but there are a number of accounts of visits to the USA, from at least the 1890s onwards: Kamal Abdel-­ Malek’s anthology of extracts from such accounts4 begins with the Lebanese Mikhail Asad Rustum’s Kitab al-­Gharib fi al-­Gharb (A Stranger in the West: the trip of Mikhail Asad Rustum to America, 1885–95), published in New York in 1895,5 and includes extracts from accounts by such distinguished writers and scholars as Philip Hitti (1886–1978), Yusuf Idris and Mahmud Taymur (1894–1973). More recently, in addition to Sonallah Ibrahim himself, accounts have been written by Halim Barakat (1936– ), Layla Abu Sayf (1940?– ) and Radwa ʿAshur (1946–2014), among others.6 The main context for Arab acquaintance with American, as opposed to European, life, however, came not through baʿathāt but through emigration, particularly

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 157 as a result of the series of intercommunal disturbances that shook parts of Syria and Lebanon in the mid-­nineteenth century;7 the resulting exodus of émigrés to Egypt and to North and South America included many writers and intellectuals and helped to stimulate the search for new forms of literary expression – thus playing a vital part in carrying forward the movement of cultural regeneration and renewal that later came to be known as the nah∂a.8 The relationship of these Mahjari writers – who included such luminaries as Mikhaʾil Nuʿayma (1889–1989), Jibran Khalil Jibran (1883–1931) and Iliya Abu Madi (1889–1957) – to their American cultural and everyday environment, however, was rather different from that of the ‘mission students’ or other short- or medium-­term visitors; and their contribution to the evolution of the modern Arabic literary tradition constitutes a field of study of its own, with few connections to the political or cultural context in which Sonallah Ibrahim and other contemporary writers have produced their works. Sonallah Ibrahim’s own visit to the USA, undertaken at the age of over sixty, has of course to be interpreted in the light of the trenchant opinions already expressed in a number of works already discussed about the spread of influence of American capitalism through globalisation and about the baleful effects of American foreign policy in the Middle East, not least through its support for Israel. In terms of US–Egypt relations themselves, however, the decade preceding his visit had been generally fairly harmonious. The 1990s opened with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, prompting widespread alarm in the Arab world as well as elsewhere; and in the subsequent Gulf War, which commenced with an extensive aerial bombing campaign in mid-­January 1991, Egypt joined the United States and some thirty other countries in an international coalition, which by the end of February 1991 had swiftly effected the liberation of Kuwait. For Egypt (which had been regarded by many in the US as a moderate influence in Middle Eastern affairs), the rewards for participating in the alliance were both financial and political: the US wrote off some $7 billion of Egyptian debt and encouraged oil-­rich Gulf Arab states to write off a similar amount; while on a political level, the US took advantage of the momentum generated by US–Arab cooperation during the Gulf War to revive stalled Israeli–Arab peace negotiations through the Madrid Peace Conference, held in October–November 1991 under the joint sponsorship of the US and the Soviet Union (then in the

158 | sonallah i b r a h im last months of its existence). The Madrid Peace Conference was followed in succession by the Oslo Accords of 1993, in which the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) and Israel for the first time granted each other mutual recognition, and the 1994 Gaza–Jericho agreement (also known as the 1994 Cairo Agreement), which brought into existence the Palestinian Authority. Although these developments subsequently proved largely fruitless, at the time they appeared to much of the outside world to have the potential for promoting Middle Eastern peace and regional stability, and all involved close US–Egyptian cooperation. In the meantime, on an economic level, Egypt continued to cooperate closely with the US in an attempt to stimulate domestic economic growth; and after three years of tough negotiations, with the support of the US, the country signed an accord with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ease some $40 billion of foreign debt, while embarking on an IMF-­inspired ‘structural re-­adjustment’ of its national economy.9 Meanwhile, however, on a domestic level, the country had seen an increase in tension and security concerns sparked by an increasing Islamist insurgency, involving attacks on intellectuals such as Farag Foda and the Nobel-­laureate Naguib Mahfouz; the increasingly fundamentalist atmosphere was also reflected in the notorious Nasr Abu Zayd (1943–2010) affair, in which a liberal Qurʾanic scholar was declared to be an apostate by an Egyptian court, and consequently deemed to be divorced from his wife under shariʿa law on the basis that it is not permitted for a Muslim woman to be married to a non-­Muslim man.10 Meanwhile, on the domestic US front, the Republican George Bush Senior, who had coordinated the US-­led coalition to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, had been replaced in January 1993 by the Democrat Bill Clinton, who subsequently won a second term in office and served as president until replaced by George Bush Junior in January 2001. Sonallah Ibrahim’s US visit coincided with the early part of President Clinton’s second term in office – a period dominated by the scandal over the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which had broken earlier in 1998. Clinton initially denied that he had had sexual relations with ‘that woman’ (Monica Lewinsky), but later, following the disclosure of a blue dress of Lewinsky’s showing a semen stain, as well as testimony from Lewinsky that Clinton had inserted a cigar tube into her vagina, Clinton admitted having ‘a relationship

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 159 with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate’ – though he denied having committed perjury on the basis that the legal definition of oral sex was not synonymous with that of ‘sex’ per se. Given Sonallah Ibrahim’s apparent predilection for this sort of topic, it is perhaps unsurprising that both the Clinton–Lewinsky relationship and related matters (including the Paula Jones case, in which a former Arkansas state employee had sued Clinton for sexual harassment) figure prominently in certain sections of Sonallah Ibrahim’s book. Summary As with most of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous works, the ‘plot’ of Amrikanli may be summarised in no more than a few lines. An Egyptian history professor named Shukri (the same name we have previously encountered in Warda) is invited to spend some months at a university in California. The novel follows his progress while there: we see him settling into his new environment, with the frustrations inevitable in any such process; making the acquaintance of neighbours, students and colleagues; planning and delivering a course on comparative history for a small group of students; taking part in an international conference; and getting to know the various neighbourhoods in the vicinity – actions that inevitably bring him into contact with, and allow him to comment on, different facets of American life. Many of his day-­to-day encounters involve frustrations of a similar nature to those found in previous works; and as is the case with most of his earlier works also, the ending of the novel is a rather low-­key one: having abandoned the prepared paper he was due to give at the conference in favour of an ‘off-­the-cuff’ presentation, which falls completely flat, Shukri declares that he has no intention of staying for another semester, and as the novel closes, we find the narrator engaged in the rather humdrum task of marking his students’ essays. Structure, Themes and Technique Before discussing the novel’s structure and themes, a word on the title itself will be in order, since Amrikanli is not a form regularly encountered in contemporary Arabic, in either its formal or Egyptian colloquial varieties, the standard adjectival forms of the adjective for ‘American’ being Amriki and Amrikani (the latter derived from ‘Amrikan’, which is used as a collective

160 | sonallah i b r a h im noun for ‘Americans’).11 Samia Mehrez has suggested that Sonallah Ibrahim’s title Amrikanli, which has a Turkish ring to it (the Turkish suffix ‘li’ denoting ‘belonging to a place or institution’, as in ‘İstanbullu’, ‘citizen of Istanbul’),12 might perhaps be translated as ‘Americanish’ or ‘American-­like’;13 at the same time, and perhaps more importantly, it allows the author the luxury of a pun, which is made explicit in the work’s subtitle, Amri kan li (i.e. Amrikanli printed as three separate words), which might be roughly rendered in English as ‘my affairs used to belong to me’ or ‘my affairs were once in my own hands’ – it being strongly implied that they no longer do so. As Rasheed El-­Enany notes, when read together with the main title, this can be interpreted as ‘a thinly disguised jibe . . . at American control of the Middle East and indeed the whole world, as the author sees it’,14 a sentiment that in general terms clearly agrees closely with the views expressed in previous novels about the effects of globalisation; the more particular implications in the context of the present work will be further discussed below. Moving on from the title of the work to its structure, we may first note that the author again reverts to what has clearly emerged as his most favoured narrative mode, namely that of the first-­person, homodiegetic narrator, with characteristics closely based on those of the author himself. At the same time, as the author himself made clear in the interview with Youssef Rakha already referred to,15 some aspects of the character and circumstances of the protagonist have been deliberately changed. Most obviously, the narrator of the novel is named Shukri rather than Sonallah or Ibrahim, and his discipline is that of a history rather than a literature professor. As he recounts the thread of his professional development during the work’s early chapters, it is clear that while in some respects based on the author’s own life, the work is in no sense an autobiography, and that we are here faced with the same sort of subtle mixture of fact and fiction that we have encountered elsewhere (and will encounter again). In this respect, Sonallah Ibrahim’s interview with Youssef Rakha on the occasion of the publication of Amrikanli is worth quoting at some length, both because some of the points he makes about the relationship between his characters and reality are clearly applicable not merely to Amrikanli but to other works as well, and also because it provides a useful insight into one of the central questions motivating his entire output – a question that indeed

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 161 seems to echo one of the central dilemmas confronting many Arab intellectuals from the period of the nah∂a onwards:16 With Amrikanli the personal experience was my interaction with American society on the inside, plus the question that always comes up when I’m out of the country and I see order where chaos reigns here [i.e. in Egypt], or civilisation where we are backward: what makes us the way we are? Why can’t we be that other way? It [Amrikanli] was written following my term teaching literature at the University of California at Berkeley. And I made the protagonist a history professor rather than a writer because I wanted the text to be a kind of answer, proposed on the occasion of my close encounter with America, to the overriding question mentioned before, which has to be on every Egyptian’s mind: how did we reach our present state? Why do we accept humiliation and oppression? So I set out to study the Egyptian character through the ages in an attempt to locate the moment at which that character was broken. There are real-­life details but the characters aren’t real. Rather, they are convenient conglomerates of the types one encountered there. You don’t write out of nothing, inevitably you will draw on types you have encountered to create characters and on your own experience to describe feelings. Whether you like it or not a piece of yourself is firmly lodged in the work. But though my books benefit a lot from my private experience they should not be read as autobiography. Any literary text is a lie; hence the idea of fiction. I too lie, I lie in favour of the text.17

In general terms, the narrative style and structure of Amrikanli is unremarkable; the work has none of the complex structural patterning of Dhat or Sharaf, and many of its more obvious features echo those found in Sonallah Ibrahim’s earlier works. Only in chapter 32, headed ‘Muqtatafat min film “Arbaʿ nisaʾ min Misr”’ (Clips from ‘Quatres Femmes d’Égypte’) – an award-­ winning, vaguely feminist, Canadian-­Egyptian documentary film by Tahani Rached [Tahani Rashid], produced in 1997, and which revolves around four female friends from Egypt with opposing religious, social and political views on modern-­day Egypt18 – do we find anything that might be regarded as innovative or ‘experimental’ against the background of the author’s p ­ revious

162 | sonallah i b r a h im work. The introduction of this filmic material – ­sandwiched between a request to one of his students at the end of the previous chapter to turn out the light, and a slightly less predictable sentence at the beginning of the succeeding one, ‘When the light came back on, I found myself holding tight onto Shirley’s hand’19 – is, however, unique; for while the author continues to display a partiality for a range of intertextual devices by introducing material (sometimes in sizeable chunks) from sources extraneous to his main text, either as part of the narrative itself or as explanatory footnotes, the techniques employed are in general straightforward. Chapter 13, for example, includes as footnotes both a lengthy extract about sexual fantasies and sado-­ masochism from the 6 October 1998 edition of the Daily Californian,20 and an even longer quotation (of nearly two pages) from the same publication of 12 October 1988 on gay sexuality centred on the Castro district of San Francisco;21 while much of the main narrative of the chapter itself is based on a report about the Clinton affair from the British Guardian Weekly dated 20 September (1988).22 Most of the other devices employed will already be familiar to the reader and require little comment. Readers will already have encountered as early as Tilka al-­Raʾiha the use of italics to indicate ‘flashbacks’ (analepses),23 for example, as when the narrator’s visit to a clinic in California for an ear problem prompts a recollection of a previous visit to a clinic in Egypt for a similar purpose: ‘Did you visit a doctor in your own country for your ear?’ I indicated that I had. There were two of them in adjacent rooms. The first was short and fat and crouched behind his desk like a hyena waiting for his prey. He asked me to have my hearing measured in the room next door . . . [The second] measured my hearing, wrote down the result, gave me some explanatory drawings, told me that I needed an operation to repair my nose, and advised me to act on the advice of the first doctor . . . to have ear surgery to insert a tube to drain off accumulated fluids . . . She said she would prescribe some medicine for me, and if it didn’t produce any result in a month, she would refer me to a surgeon or specialist.24

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 163 The narrative of Amrikanli itself begins, not in the fashion of several of the author’s previous novels, with the narrator’s departure from Cairo, but with the narrator already in California, trying to find his bearings in his new surroundings. Much of the early part of the book is indeed taken up with the sort of day-­to-day, and often frustrating, matters that occupy anyone in such a situation: sorting out one’s personal and office accommodation; making the acquaintance of one’s new colleagues and neighbours; getting to know the neighbourhood; and trying to find solutions to incompatible computer and email systems. In some of these matters, the narrator finds some assistance from his fellow-­Egyptian colleague Mahir, who has been in the country already for some time, and who serves as a sort of intermittent mentor to the slightly naive Shukri. Meanwhile, on a professional level, the narrator’s time is split between two main activities: preparation for a cultural conference (involving, as a diversion, a short visit to New York); and preparation for, and delivery of, a course in comparative history for a small group of assorted and at times seemingly rather ill-­matched students from different backgrounds, whose outlooks vary from liberal to deeply conservative, and with some of whom his relationship can at times only be described as distinctly ‘edgy’. The interplay between the regular nature of these classes and the less predictable patterns of the narrator’s activities outside the classroom helps to shape the pace of the narrative, which thus proceeds along a number of parallel strands. The classes themselves comprise a mixture of lectures, discussion and student presentations; but the texture is complicated by the fact that, in addition to lessons and reflections on comparative history per se, the narrator’s addresses to his class also contain a further strand: a quasi-­autobiographical account of his own intellectual formation and personal development during his period growing up in Egypt, much of it geared to his own early sexual experiences. In terms of structure, this provides a second, quasi-­independent, level to the narrative: on the first level, we have a homodiegetic narrator who relates an account of his stay in California; while at a second, ‘deeper’ level, his account of his stay itself includes an account (by himself) of his own formation in Egypt at an earlier period. There is a clear parallel here with the underlying structure of Warda, as discussed in the previous chapter – though with the obvious difference that in the case of Amrikanli, the protagonists of both the primary and secondary narratives are the same person.

164 | sonallah i b r a h im Turning from the underlying structure of the work, it will come as little surprise, in light of the author’s earlier novels, to oberve that the prevailing mood of this quasi-­autobiographical account of his sexual formation is primarily one of frustration and failure. The preoccupation with sex in various forms (for which the author has been not infrequently criticised) is also apparent in other ways, however – most obviously, in the heavily sexualised descriptions of his female students, in at least two of whom he develops an interest that goes well beyond what would normally be regarded as acceptable in a tutor/student relationship. His relationship with Shirley (described by one of her fellow students as a ‘man-­eater’) indeed occupies a pivotal place in the book, as it rapidly progresses from a mere classroom acquaintanceship to one involving shared meals and some physical intimacy – though not, it has to be said, actual sex: When we reached the garage, I suddenly turned to her, put my hand on her head, and pulled her towards me. She didn’t resist. I kissed her on her cheek, and I buried my head in her hair, breathing deeply in spite of myself. It was something I hadn’t done for a long time. I also had a powerful e­ rection – which was something else that hadn’t happened for a long time. Then I felt my cheek against hers, as I smelled her fragrance, still with a hint of a light perfume. She stayed there, still and submissive, until we pulled apart and headed for the car, where we embraced again, one beside the other, then she turned a little and our thighs touched.25

The narrator’s preoccupation with sex that we have come to expect from the author’s previous works is of course given an additional impetus by the fact that, as already noted, his stay in the USA coincided with the Clinton/ Lewinsky ‘scandal’ – which for a brief period gripped not only the USA but much of the rest of the world – and also with the fact that his stay took place in San Francisco, well known for being one of the most liberal and diverse cities in the US. Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrative contains numerous references to, and accounts of visits to, different San Francisco neighbourhoods, including Haight-­Ashbury, Castro and Tenderloin – the last two of which are characterised on the city’s website as respectively ‘the universally agreed Mecca of gay life’ and ‘a rag tag San Francisco neighbourhood . . . attract[ing] brunch brats and (in the evening) all manner of debaucher’.26 In the course of these

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 165 visits, and associated conversations, the narrator becomes acquainted with a wide range of sexual tastes and practices, in which homosexuality figures prominently, and in one of which he ends up apparently about to be seduced by Fitz, his guide to the neighbourhood: Fitz was studying carefully the young man tying his ponytail. He noticed my interest in the two men and turned his body towards them until they went away. Then he turned towards me, and opened his legs as far as they would go, staring at me intently. I kept my eyes at the level of his blue eyes, my heart racing, a little afraid. At that moment, I realised what the prey feels in front of the hunter.27

It is tempting to venture the thought that, although Sonallah Ibrahim was willing to depict a superficially similar situation in Sharaf, it is only the American environment that has allowed him the possibility of depicting such an incident involving a narrator with obvious similarities to himself, and that such a ‘risqué’ account would be unlikely to have been cast in quite this form if set in Egypt or the Arab world. That is not to say, of course, that the entire narrative is obsessed with sex. The novel also includes many passages that suggest that the author’s assertion that he ‘took notes of my impressions and read the newspapers with the vague idea that I was collecting material for a novel’28 is in fact somewhat disingenuous. Aptly described by Samia Mehrez as ‘ambitious and painstakingly researched and documented’, the work – far from being a ‘vague idea’ – in fact provides plentiful evidence of more detailed observation than possibly any of the author’s previous works. Particularly in evidence – as perhaps might be expected – are observations of and comments on the seamier side of American life, on American customs and festivals foreign to the narrator such as Halloween and Thanksgiving, and on the contrasts between, on the one hand, the apparently widespread poverty and high levels of unemployment to be found in the area and, on the other, the high proportion of wealth owned by a minority of Americans such as Bill Gates. Particularly poignant perhaps (if a touch over-­sentimental) is a scene where the narrator is introduced by a colleague to the sight of drug-­addicts begging in the streets:

166 | sonallah i b r a h im She pointed to the young man with the spiked hair: ‘How old do you think he is?’ He looked about thirty to me. ‘He’s no more than twenty’, she told me. ‘And underneath his sweater he’s got needle marks on his neck and arms. He injects himself four times a day with a filthy mixture of cocaine, heroin and water. A fix costs 15 dollars. That’s why he deals in marijuana.’ ‘Is she his girlfriend?’ ‘You mean, does he sleep with her? He’s not interested in sex, he’s incapable of it.’ ‘But how do you know all this?’ ‘She’s my daughter!’ she replied, turning the engine on and looking in the wing mirror.29

Further twists in the narrator’s relations with his colleagues and students at different levels are provided by a series of emails from an unnamed and unidentifiable source, and by the fact that he shares a room at the university with an Israeli Jew named Esther – through whom he is brought into contact with Israelis and Zionists for the first time, and with whom his dealings are again predictably tense. In the meantime, the classes themselves have, through a combination of student presentations and lectures proper, been covering an intellectual landscape that takes us from the ancient Egyptians to the contemporary world, and as such can only be described as ‘vast’, if not, in principle, ‘universal’. Prominent among the themes covered – as indeed might be expected from an Egyptian delivering a comparative history course in the USA – are the course of Egyptian history itself, from ancient times, through the period of Islam, the era of Muhammad ʿAli, Western colonialism, the Dinshaway incident, and the encounter with Zionism to the present; the place of ‘free thought’ in the Islamic context, as exemplified by Muslim Egyptian ‘liberal’ thinkers such as Taha Hussein; changes in contemporary Egyptian society in the light of encroaching Islamisation and the rising influence of the Gulf; and the reinterpretations of recent Middle East history by scholars such as Mattityahu Peled. Moving away from Middle Eastern history per se, comparisons are drawn between the development of Cairo and San Francisco; considerable attention is paid to the history of the American

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 167 Indians, or ‘Native Americans’; relations between the native Americans and white Americans are discussed, and questions are raised about possible parallels between the native Americans and the populations of ancient Egypt. Although the emphasis given to topics such as Western colonialism and Israeli aggression is perhaps fairly predictable, parts of the discussion appear considerably more sophisticated, and indeed provide evidence of considerable academic research, for the ‘comparative history’ topics explored here extend well beyond the obvious Egypt/USA parameters, to include at one point a discussion of the comparative history of Japan, Paraguay and Egypt. Of particular interest, perhaps, is chapter 31, where, in an attempt to find an answer to the age-­old question ‘why did what happened happen, and why have we reached the point that we have?’ the narrator discusses the factors that in his view have formed the ‘Egyptian character’, and notes that: In addition to extreme centralisation since ancient times, and continuous oppression at the hands of the foreigner, there was a pivotal moment at which what we may call a ‘personality change’ occurred, when the language changed. For language is not simply letters and words but it is the ‘black box’ that everyone carries within him, containing the ‘collective heritage’.30

Space forbids a more detailed analysis of the succeeding debate, the tone of which will be familiar to anyone who has ever conducted a seminar class for Masters-­level students. In terms of academic and public presentations, the two seminal moments in the narrative may in any event probably best be regarded as the two lectures given by the narrator to wider audiences – the second of which, in particular, has been read by some commentators as a sort of ‘prologue’ to the author’s refusal of the State Novel Prize in 2003 (as discussed in Chapters 2 above and 14 below). In the first of these lectures, narrated in chapter 25, the protagonist is invited to address a meeting of the American–Egyptian Association (‘Jamʿiyyat al-­Misriyyin al-­Amrikiyyin’), and duly embarks on an irreverent historical resumé of the more recent history of Egypt, which culminates in an attack on President Anwar Sadat, whom he characterises in the words of Naguib Mahfouz as having ‘Hitler’s clothes and Charlie Chaplin’s walk’ – by which point, as he prepares to move on to the subject of Sadat’s successor, he suddenly observes that the hall has become almost empty, as the

168 | sonallah i b r a h im a­ udience walks out and a commotion ensues at the hall entrance. The chapter ends with his being congratulated on the lecture by a man who disarmingly proceeds to explain in English that ‘I’m sure that what you had to say was valuable but unfortunately I didn’t understand a single word of it because I don’t know Arabic!’31 In the second of the two lectures, the narrator, faced with a crowded lecture hall, departs from the text of the speech he has prepared, having decided instead to give an improvised address, which takes as its starting point the recent award of a state prize to the avant-­garde Egyptian poet Ahmad ʿAbd al-­Muʿti Hijazi (1935– ). The narrator’s supposedly improvised address ranges widely across questions of culture, power, and the place of the intellectual in society (questions that acquire an added immediacy by the fact that the conference is funded by an Arab prince), concluding with the proposition that ‘we must not expect from them [the intellectuals] any outstanding deeds, for their performance is dependent on the laws of nature and – how shall we say? – the law of the sea, which is never still but is ruled by storms and tempests and the ebb and flow of the waves’. At this point he stops, looks around him and ends by saying ‘our problem is that we can only place our great hopes in them’; but what he has said has fallen completely flat, and his speech, unlike that of any other speaker, is greeted not with applause but with total silence.32 The reception of his talk provides the cue, as it were, both for the ending of his stay in San Francisco and for the ending of the novel; asked whether he will be staying on a further semester, he replies simply ‘I don’t think so!’; his ‘romance’ with Shirley comes to a frustrated conclusion, and the work (like some other novels of the author’s) ends rather flatly, as the narrator completes the marking of his students’ coursework and prepares to leave for home. As noted before, it was a similar reaction that the author expected at the end of his speech when, in what appears to be an instance of ‘life imitating art’, he publicly refused the award of a State prize for fiction in a ceremony at the Cairo Opera House on 22 October 2003. The ensuing enthusiastic reaction, most obviously on the part of the younger generation of writers present, not only came as a personal surprise, but also, in Samia Mehrez’s words, ‘placed him squarely at the very heart of Egyptian and Arab politics’,33 and led to a vigorous debate between supporters of the author and those who

w id e n i ng hori zons (2 ): amrikanli  | 169 considered his actions, or his motives, to be, for one reason or another, suspect or unworthy. We shall return to the implications of Sonallah Ibrahim’s rejection of the prize when we come to attempt an overall evaluation of his achievement in the final chapter of this book. Notes 1. For a discussion of this ‘double form’ of the novel’s title, as it appears on the cover and title page, see below. 2. Amrikanli: Un automne à San Francisco, trans. Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud; [Paris]: Sindbad, 2005). 3. See http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/cu1.htm. 4. Kamal ʿAbdel-­Malek, America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1895–1995 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 5. Mikhaʾil Asad Rustum, Kitab al-­Gharib fi al-­Gharb (New York, 1895). 6. On this, see also Rasheed El-­ Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), especially chapter 5, ‘The encounter with America’, pp. 153–84. 7. For which, see Leila Fawaz, An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860 (London: I. B. Tauris; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 8. On this, see Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 23–41. 9. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/920/sc99.htm. 10. For further details, see George N. Sfeir, ‘Basic freedoms in a fractured legal culture: Egypt and the case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd’, Middle East Journal 52 (1998), pp. 402–14. 11. In Syria and Lebanon, the ‘r’ and first ‘ī’ are usually reversed; thus Amīrkī rather than Amrīkī. 12. For the change from ‘li’ to ‘lu’ in accordance with the rules of vowel harmony in Turkish, see, for example, Geoffrey Lewis, Turkish Grammar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 60. 13. Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p.83. 14. El-­Enany, Arab Representations, p. 179. 15. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/cu1.htm. 16. For a discussion of which, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798–1939 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

170 | sonallah i b r a h im 17. http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/cu1.htm. 18. For a discussion, see Margot Badran, ‘Speaking straight: four women of Egypt’, in Al Jadid Magazine 4: 24 (Summer 1998), available at http://www.aljadid. com/content/speaking-­straight-four-­women-egypt (last accessed 12 September 2014). 19. Amrikanli, pp. 411, 427. 20. Ibid. p. 166. 21. Ibid. pp. 176–8. 22. Ibid. p. 169. 23. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 48–67. 24. Amrikanli, pp. 167–8. 25. Ibid. p. 355. 26. See http://www.sanfrancisco.com/neighborhoods/. 27. Amrikanli, p. 273. 28. See above. 29. Amrikanli, p. 250. 30. Ibid. p. 407. 31. Ibid. p. 325. 32. Ibid. pp. 453–7. 33. Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars, p. 84.

11 Return to Childhood: Al-Talassus (2007)

T

he appearance of al-­Talassus in 2007 represented something of a shift in direction in Sonallah Ibrahim’s sequence of novels. Generally regarded as one of the least political and most personal of the author’s novels, it is set not in post-­revolutionary Egypt, as most of its predecessors had been, but in the dying days of the Egyptian monarchy, towards the end of the 1940s – a time when Sonallah Ibrahim himself was some ten or eleven years old. Publication and Translations

The text of al-­Talassus was published in Cairo in 2003 by Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, the house that had published the majority of the author’s novels first released in Cairo, with the exception of Sharaf. An English translation by Hosam Aboul-­Ela entitled Stealth (a somewhat controversial rendering of the title, for a discussion of which see below) was published in London by Aflame in 2010, but the company went bankrupt in 2012; the English translation was subsequently republished in the USA by New Directions in 2014. A French translation by Richard Jacquemond under the title Le Petit Voyeur was published by Actes Sud in 2008.1 To my knowledge, there are to date no translations into other languages. Background In terms of the author’s relation to the events described, the background to al-­ Talassus needs little elaboration: we are clearly faced with an attempt to recreate, at both a personal and a national/societal level, a period of the past through which the author lived. The work is labelled riwāya (‘novel’) on the cover, but like many of the author’s previous novels, though not an autobiography in the strict sense of the word, it is clearly closely based on the author’s own experience.

172 | sonallah i b r a h im The relationship between the work itself and the author’s own life has been made quite explicit in interviews by the author himself, who in 2013, for example, noted that ‘Stealth is not a memoir, it is fiction based on some facts’.2 As an example of the way in which fact has been transformed into fiction, he explains that: We had a servant at home, a girl. My father was treating her nicely and I was jealous. Reaching the same age as my father at the time, I understood his situation. My mother was not there, he was about 65 or 70 and I could imagine how he felt and this explained to me certain incidents that confused me as a child. So I invented the details of my father’s relationship with the servant according to my new understanding. When you remember things at my age the past takes on a new aspect.

Elsewhere, he elaborated that he had first thought of writing Stealth over four decades previously, and had been turning the subject over in his head ever since: ‘What really decided the matter is that I reached the age of my father . . . So I was able to understand him, what kind of motives, what kind of feelings [he had].’3 In fact, Stealth may safely be regarded as the final, definitive expression of the novel Khalil Bey, which Sonallah Ibrahim had first envisaged in his time in prison in the 1960s4 but which until this point had never seen the light of day. As already noted, in terms of the pre-­revolutionary Egyptian social and political environment in which it is set, Stealth represents a radical break with all of the author’s previous novels. The author’s interest in the history of Egypt, and the evolution of the Egyptian character from its earliest days, will already of course have become clear from the discussion of Amrikanli, but the present work is written in an entirely different spirit, being based on the author’s direct experience as a child of a society that, though now past – and indeed long past at the time of the novel’s publication – remains within the memories of a substantial number of people in Cairo, and indeed of Egypt more generally. The ‘modern’ history of Egypt has traditionally been regarded, from the perspective of Western historians at least, as dating from the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 – an invasion that brought the population of Egypt into contact with Westerners in substantial numbers for the first time. The cir-

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 173 cumstances of this invasion, and its consequences, were to form the subject of the next two of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, and as such will be discussed in the following chapter. In terms of the background to al-­Talassus itself, it will for the moment suffice to recall that the French occupation lasted for only three years (though the cultural side-­effects of the invasion were considerably longer lived); that in the wake of the French occupation a dynasty was established by the ethnic Albanian Muhammad ʿAli that survived, in one form or another, until 1952; and that from 1882 or thereabouts the leading Western colonial role in Egypt (if one may speak of it in such terms) had been played by Britain rather than France. The immediate cause of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 had been a financial one, attributable not least to the ambitions of the Egyptian khedive5 Ismaʿil (r. 1863–79), whose ambition to develop Egypt on European lines had led to an accumulation of foreign debt, on the repayment of which he had by 1876 begun to default. A European Debt Commission was accordingly established, and two Commissioners, one British, one French, were appointed to oversee the economic and financial affairs of the country. Deposed by the Ottoman sultan, Ismaʿil went into exile and was replaced by his son Tawfiq in 1879, but events were quickly given a new twist by the rise in influence of Ahmad ʿUrabi, an army officer of peasant origins, as spokesman for the growing mood of national opposition to European influence over the development of the country. The British now regarded direct intervention as essential to preserve the stability of the country and to ensure the continued viability of the Suez Canal, which had been opened in 1869. Accordingly, in July 1882 a British fleet bombarded Alexandria, and units from the British army quickly defeated ʿUrabi and his nationalist supporters at the battle of Tel el-­Kebir (al-­Tall al-­Kabir). The episode both consecrated Ahmad ʿUrabi as the first modern Egyptian nationalist hero, and marked the start of a British occupation of Egypt that was to last, in one form or another, until 1956, when the last British troops left the country. The period between 1882 and the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952 was dominated by a complex series of power struggles between the three main centres of power in the country – the British, the palace, and Egyptian politicians. In such an unstable situation, governments changed in rapid succession. Resentment at the British occupation came to a head on a number

174 | sonallah i b r a h im of occasions, most notably the so-­called Dinshaway incident of 1906, in which an altercation between some local Egyptian villagers and a group of British officers out pigeon-­shooting led to savage reprisals; anti-­British feeling further increased during the First World War, culminating in the 1919 revolt led by Saʿd Zaghlul, and continued until the signing of the Anglo-­Egyptian Treaty in December 1936, which limited British forces (in theory, at least) to the Suez Canal and to the naval base in Alexandria – though despite this, many groups (including the Muslim Brothers) continued to press vigorously for full independence. In the meantime, the economic progress of the country had been hampered by the British policy of discouraging industrialisation; inequalities between the large landowners and the Egyptian peasantry had grown at an alarming rate, in parallel with an alarming increase in the population itself; and the privileged position of foreigners continued to cause resentment.6 Matters came to a head in the aftermath of the Second World War, during which the country had effectively been used as a British base for its activities in North Africa. King Farouk, who had come to the throne in 1936, had quickly become discredited as a result of the corruption surrounding him, as well as his increasingly scandalous private life. In addition to the mainstream political parties, of which the Wafd (founded by Saʿd Zaghlul) was the most prominent, a number of more radical movements were however coming to prominence during this period, including the right-­wing Young Egypt (Misr al-­Fatah) group, and the Society of Muslim Brothers (Jamaʿat al-­Ikhwan al-­Muslimin), which had been founded in 1928 by Hasan al-­Bannaʾ (1906–49). (The communists, with whom Sonallah Ibrahim was to be associated some years later, remained fragmented and generally weak – the appeal of the party being limited by its European roots and atheistic orientation.) The final element in this heady pre-­revolutionary mix was, however, an external rather than an internal one: the termination by Britain of the Palestinian mandate that it had accepted from the League of Nations in 1919; the subsequent Partition Plan devised by the United Nations was rejected by the Arabs, and when David Ben-­Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, proclaimed the independence of the new State of Israel on 14 May 1948, Egypt – together with Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – sent troops into Palestine to attack the new Jewish state. Despite the

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 175 founding in 1945 of the League of Arab States to co-­ordinate Arab policies, the Arab armies were however both ill-­prepared and uncoordinated, and the humiliating defeat in what was to become known as the ‘First Arab–Israeli War’ (or ‘War of Independence’ as the Israelis term it) had serious repercussions not only in Egypt but in other Arab countries also. In Egypt, there were violent disturbances directed against Jews and foreigners, which the Muslim Brotherhood encouraged; when the then Prime Minister Mahmud al-­Nuqrashi outlawed the Brotherhood in December 1948, he was assassinated; and Hasan al‑Bannaʾ, the founder of the Brotherhood, was himself in turn assassinated the following year. Meanwhile, thousands of communists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been interned in prison camps – a process that was to be periodically repeated over the succeeding years, and which takes us full circle, as it were, to the setting of Tilka al-­raʾiha, Sonallah Ibrahim’s first novel, with which the discussion in this book began.7 The definitive break in Egypt’s history came in 1952, when the Free Officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser [Jamāl ʿAbd al-­Nā‚ir] seized power and set Egypt on the road from monarchy to republic – a process that takes us somewhat beyond the setting of al-­Talassus. Summary The ‘thinness’ of Sonallah Ibrahim’s plots has been a recurring theme in previous chapters, and al-­Talassus is no exception: indeed, it arguably has even less in the nature of a ‘plot’ than almost any of his other works. Essentially, the novel follows the progress of a young boy (who remains anonymous) through several months of his life in a city whose decaying physical and social structures are echoed by the dysfunctional nature of his own family life – a life in which, in the absence of any mother figure, his aged, ailing father, Khalil Bey, plays a dominant role. As Robyn Creswell has observed, however, the real drama of the novel lies not in the unfolding of its plot (for essentially, there is none) but ‘in its attempt to reconstruct the everyday life – sights, sounds, and smells – of pre-­revolutionary Cairo’;8 and in this, the author may be regarded as having been singularly successful.

176 | sonallah i b r a h im Structure, Themes and Technique The novel takes up some 280 pages in the Arabic version, and is divided in the conventional manner into chapters, which remain unheaded. Before elaborating on this structure, however, it will be useful to consider the work’s title, since al-­Talassus does not at first sight seem the most obvious choice for what is essentially a Bildungsroman – albeit one of a very distinctive kind. Defined in one dictionary as ‘to become a thief; to act stealthily; to peek covertly, secretly (e.g., . . . through a keyhole)’,9 the verb tala‚‚a‚ embraces a range and variety of actions performed in the book by the anonymous child-­narrator aged ten or eleven, whose curiosity about the various facets of the adult world – not least, that of sex – is beginning, so it appears, to overwhelm him. For such a range of actions, Richard Jacquemond’s French title Le Petit Voyeur is arguably a more successful equivalent than Hosam Aboul-­Ela’s Stealth (for which Dalia Mostafa suggests Sneaking as a possibly better alternative);10 Sonallah Ibrahim is said to have suggested Peeping as a possible alternative English equivalent, though whether that would work any better as a title than the published one would seem to me a moot point. Be that as it may, in formal terms the novel follows the same general pattern as the majority of the author’s previous works – a first-­person, homodiegetic narrator with characteristics clearly related to those of the author himself. Indeed, had it not been for the author’s explicit statement to the contrary,11 it would be tempting to read the work as autobiography – albeit a very partial one. The difference from the previous works is to be found primarily in the age of the supposed narrator, who is, essentially, the author as he was (or as he envisages himself to have been) some sixty or so years previously. The ‘childlike’ viewpoint of the narrator is reinforced by the fact that, unlike (almost) all Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous ‘homodiegetic’ novels, al-­Talassus is narrated in the present rather than the past tense – to the extent that, even when indulging in his favoured narrative device of analepsis (marked in the Arabic text, here as elsewhere, by the use of italics), the present tense is preserved, as in: My left hand feels warm in my father’s strong grip. Tram number 22 with its open cars and wooden benches. I race beside the tramcar with the children

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 177 running along its left side. I jump on it at the last second to show we can escape the ticket collector, almost falling underneath its rows of metal wheels. We board the second car, and he squeezes me down in the corner so I’ll look younger than I am. He pulls eight millemes out of his breast pocket for the ticket . . .12

In terms of spatial context, the novel is both detailed and precise, and the text abounds in references to particular streets and buildings: the first short chapter alone, for example (no more than five pages long in the original Arabic, four in the English translation) includes mention of Sayyida Square, Al-­Zahir Square, the Cinema Miami, and the ‘open-­air Cinema Valery [which] has closed for winter.’13 A similar level of detail extends to names of films and film-­stars, which were clearly a major source of entertainment for those in the narrator’s circles at the time – the opening pages of the novel, for example, informing us that ‘The film Hassan the Brave is playing in living color [and] The Black Knight is playing at Cinema Miami, with Arabic subtitles.’14 Later, the narrator stops ‘in front of a poster advertising a special screening for students of the film The Conquest at the Cosmo cinema. The Rich and the Famous at the Majestic. Starring Mohamed Abdel Mutlub, Ali al-­Kissar, Haggir Hamdi, Abdel Fatah al-­Qusari, and Ismail Yasseen.’15 This delight in detail on the narrator’s part – a delight that occasionally recalls that of the somewhat older writer Edwar al-­Kharrat16 – extends not only to descriptions of people, scenes and actions but also to other senses such as sounds and smells, and plays a crucial role in the evocation of the atmosphere of pre-­revolutionary Cairo to which Robyn Creswell refers:17 We stop in front of the only grocer that is open. Boxes of dried cod for Eid are stacked up in front of it. They are wide and painted snow white. Stacks of watermelon and cantaloupe melons. Some crates of grapes and figs. Father buys one oka of binali grapes and another of faiyyumi figs. He chooses the figs that have just opened up and leaves the ones that are still closed. He carries them in two bags that he clutches to his chest, one in each arm. We go back to the house. There are two cars in front of it, a Skoda and a Chrysler with a bubble shaped bonnet. The front entrance is paved with colored tiles.18

178 | sonallah i b r a h im Smells play a particularly important part in evoking the atmosphere of the child’s environment. Walking with his father behind ‘a woman wrapped up in a wide black sheet’, the narrator recalls: Narrow crowded alleyways. Old doors and stone benches in front of tiny shops. Smells of mud, decay, and axle grease. She stops until a vegetable cart passes, pulled along by a horse. She stretches the black sheet around her body, making its shape more clear. A beautiful perfume comes from her body.19

When Uncle Kareem, the constable, comes to visit, he sits down on the bed with his back to the narrator, who ‘can smell that odor of his military overcoat that I like so much’.20 By contrast, the precise political context of the narrator’s experience is nowhere explicitly specified in the text: there are no dates mentioned, and – as in Tilka al-­Raʾiha – readers are left to work out for themselves the actual year being described. Fortunately, this is not difficult, for despite the absence of dates, the work abounds in references to contemporary events of one kind or another, which enable the reader to progressively hone down the possibilities to the span of a mere few months in 1948. The general context of pre-­revolutionary Egypt is quickly established when, shopping with his father, ‘We enter Hajj Abdel ʿAlim’s shop and find him at a desk in the back, sitting under a big picture of the king.’21 Returning from their shopping trip, his father ‘takes off his overcoat and hangs it on one of the rails of the coat rack. Then he hangs his suit coat. On its button-­hole, there is a round patch that is bronze-­colored and has the word “Quit Egypt!”’ (‘al-­Jalāʾ’ – a word specifically associated in Egypt with the British evacuation) written on it.22 As is apparent throughout the book, the fez (a distinctively pre-­revolutionary item of clothing) is still the normal headgear for men of a certain class. There are frequent references to the ‘Jewish school’; but the legacy of the Second World War is also still much in evidence (‘I remember my father’s warnings about bombs that explode at no more than a touch and that look like a medicine bottle’;23 ‘In front of [the house] there’s a big crater dropped by German planes’). More specifically, the narrator has acquired the nickname ‘Gandhi’ (assassinated in early 1948) by virtue of his glasses. By the time we have reached the third chapter, indeed (‘A flier calls for aid for Palestinian

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 179 refugees. A black banner reads: “No negotiations without complete British withdrawal!”’),24 the chronology of the piece will have been more or less established in the mind of any reasonably well-­informed reader. This chronology, as well as the general political and social environment in which the narrator is living, is confirmed and reinforced by a number of subsequent references to contemporary or near contemporary events; space forbids a complete list, but the following will serve to give the flavour of the environment in which the narrator’s tale is played out. First, we may note a number of references to the aftermath of the 1947 Egyptian cholera epidemic, in which at least 10,000 people died:25 ‘She says because the women who volunteer with the cholera service stopped her on her way and took her to the inoculation center.’26 Further references to the royal family clearly show the disjuncture between the way in which they were officially portrayed (‘A picture of King Farouk when he was young and pretty, with short trousers and a fez. Another picture shows him in a convertible with his three beautiful sisters. Another shows him next to his father, King Fuad, with his pointy moustache and its long handlebars curving upwards’)27 and the increasingly widespread, though still concealed, gossip about the king’s private life (‘Then he lowers his voice and adds that the university students tore up the king’s picture and made fun of his fooling around. They chanted that he was “Ruler of Egypt, Sudan . . . and the dancer Samia Gamal!” Sheikh Fadhl says that the king dumped Samia Gamal long ago and replaced her with Um Kalthoum . . .’).28 There are several further references to the Arab/ Israeli War and associated events: Father says that he reads the paper at the shoeshine shop, ‘and anyway, today’s news is the same as yesterday’s.’ Rafaat Effendi says: ‘You can say that again. Look at the story today about the Yemeni Jews and how the English are smuggling them into Palestine. Ever since the partition, ships have kept coming and going, gathering them up from near and far.’29

Further references to the current political environment include mention of the Deir Yassin massacre – which took place on 9 April 1948, and is described in some detail by one Ali Safa, a friend of his father’s; to the king’s divorce

180 | sonallah i b r a h im from Farida on 19 November 1948 (‘Uncle Fahmi . . . says the whole country is in an uproar over the divorce between the king and Queen Farida, and that the students at the high school for girls marched in protest and chanted: “Farida’s left the brothel. She’s sworn off all betrothal!”’); the current activities of the Muslim Brotherhood (‘Ali Safa asks himself: “I wonder who the Muslim Brothers are planning to assassinate now that they’ve done the secretary for the appeals court.”’), and the closure of the Cairo brothels – a move associated with the popular demand for the removal of the British, who were often blamed (rightly or wrongly) for the immorality that the brothels were held to represent.30 Although many of these references are presented to the reader in an entirely straightforward manner in the course of conversation between the various characters in the novel, at times a hint is given that the narrator, by virtue of his age, is too young, and accordingly too marginal, to fully appreciate all the subtleties of what is being said. The tension between the young narrator’s apparently faultless recall and his failure to grasp the innuendos of adult conversation is particularly apparent, perhaps, in the following passage, which combines a sophisticated literary reference with gossip about the king’s private life and a suggestive joke: A fat priest wearing black robes comes up and joins us. His head is covered with something that looks like a plate with dark cloth wrapped tightly round it. He asks Refaat: ‘Has anyone read the new poem by al-­Aqqad?’ Father asks: ‘What’s it about?’ ‘He sings the praises of the lips of the actress Camilia, the one that Akhbar al-­Youm calls “the warm mouth.”’ Dr. Aziz says that she has become the king’s mistress. Hajj Abdel ʿAlim says: ‘Poor Queen Farida.’ Refaat says that there was a watermelon seller calling out to the passers-­by: ‘Royal water-­melons!’ Someone buys one, and the seller splits it open for him, it turns out to be a pumpkin, at which the seller explains: ‘Royal! – King Farouk – watermelons.’ Everyone laughs and I realize that it’s a joke.31

The natural curiosity of the young narrator – poised as he is between childhood and adolescence, eager to break into the secrets of the adult world – is enhanced by his dysfunctional family situation, which gradually becomes more evident as the work progresses; this situation not only clearly reflects fea-

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 181 tures of Sonallah Ibrahim’s own childhood, but also to an extent mirrors the obvious decay of Cairo and Egyptian society of the time, as discussed above. The dominant family relationship of the narrator is with his father, Khalil Bey, who appears in the first line of the book (‘yatamahhal abī . . .’/‘My father stops for a second . . .’)32 and who is an almost constant, often stifling, presence until the very last page of the novel; in addition to other extended family members, friends and acquaintances, prominent roles are also played by the narrator’s half-­sister, Nabila, together with her husband, Fahmi, and their family, whom the narrator and his father visit from time to time. Khalil Bey himself is an elderly man, whose first wife has died, and whose remarriage to a younger woman (the narrator’s mother) has caused a certain amount of family friction. Eavesdropping on a conversation between his father and Nabila on a visit to Nabila’s family, the narrator overhears the following conversation: Father’s voice: ‘Do you see your brother?’ My sister’s voice: ‘Rarely? [sic] You?’ ‘He’s cut me off ever since your blessed mother died and he found out that I remarried.’ ‘How’s Rowhaya doing?’ Father’s voice: ‘Same as always.’ ‘And the Turkish woman? What’s her name? Basima?’33

The dysfunctional nature of the narrator’s family is confirmed by the clear difference between the economic circumstances of Khalil Bey, who has been forced to move house with his son to a rather humble apartment, and those of Nabila and her family, who live in Heliopolis and appear to enjoy an extremely comfortable lifestyle. The precise reasons for Khalil’s change of circumstances are not spelled out in detail, but are clearly of major significance for both him and his immediate family. The differences in circumstances between the different parts of his family (which the young narrator not unnaturally finds difficulty in making sense of) serve to reinforce his natural curiosity, and the eavesdropping evinced by the foregoing scene as a means of seeking or obtaining information is repeated in the narrative in a variety of different forms – amply justifying the title al-­Talassus for the book. Indeed, the episodes of eavesdropping and peeping recur to such an extent that they might almost be regarded as pathological. On his first visit to Nabila’s house, for example, the narrator records that: ‘I steal away to the door leading out of the room . . . I walk around the table to the guest room. Its door is closed. I peek through the keyhole . . .’, and

182 | sonallah i b r a h im so on through a variety of rooms, carefully examining their contents, before eavesdropping on the conversation already quoted. Towards the end of the book, as his father has a delicate personal conversation with Uncle Fahmi, the narrator demonstrates even greater persistence. [My father] turns to me and I pretend to be absorbed in my reading . . . I lift my head up from the book and prick up my ears. Father turns toward me. I put my head back down . . . Uncle Fahmi leans his head toward my father. I prick up my ears. Father turns towards me. He orders me to go study in the hall, I pick up my notebook and open up the door that has been left open a crack.34

Later, returning home from school, he finds his father standing on the balcony in a miserable mood: As soon as he sees me he goes back in. I go up the stairs. I open the door with my key. I go into the room . . . I watch him from the corner of my eye . . . He turns around . . . I steal a look through the crack in the door. I can hear him making dinner in the kitchen. I take the key to our room out of my pocket, and push it into the keyhole . . .35

The narrator’s discovery on this occasion that his father has been consulting a booklet entitled Full Male Potency may perhaps be regarded as a logical follow­on from his previous discovery of his father in bed with Fatima, the maid – a discovery that has again commenced with the narrator putting his eye to the keyhole, then pressing his ear against it, before turning the doorknob, to be confronted with the sight of ‘my father’s bare bottom between the raised up, naked legs of Fatima’, with whom he is unable to perform.36 Given the litany of unsatisfactory sex in the author’s previous novels, it is perhaps no surprise that this episode (which ends with the narrator looking through the keyhole, to find his father sitting on a couch ‘sobbing like a child’)37 should not be the first occasion on which the subject has made an appearance in Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrative. Indeed, there is a sense in which the entire novel might almost be read as an account of the misery of sexual frustration in a crumbling, dysfunctional society. At the same time, the narrative clearly reveals the complex nature of the father/son relationship. Having been widowed once, and with his second wife mysteriously absent, Khalil Bey appears to be

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 183 open to the possibility of marrying again: ‘If only I could find a nice young lady that could put up with my crustiness and raise the boy for me. I’m tired of the maids and cooking ladies’, he tells ‘Uncle Kareem’, a neighbour in his new apartment block.38 At one point, the narrator is almost pushed out of bed by an Umm Muhammad, who has been brought back to the apartment by his father, and who takes over his place next to the wall, until the child moves away toward the edge of the bed and finds some comfort; then ‘Father turns off the light and lies down next to me. I cling to him, surrounding him with my arms.’39 On another occasion, he is awakened by his father’s movements to find: ‘Father’s scratching between his legs. I sleep. I wake up again. He’s still scratching. His hand’s still moving faster. He’s panting. He turns toward me. I close my eyes and fall deep into sleep.’40 In the meantime, the narrator, on the threshold of adolescence, has received permission from his father to spend the night with their neighbour, Mama Tahiya and her two boys – a stay that clearly involves a sort of sexual initiation: [I] lie down on the bed. I stretch out beside the wall. She takes off her robe. The light goes out. She lies down next to me. She pulls me to her chest. My head snuggles against her breast . . . She spreads her blanket over us. I fall asleep. Suddenly, I am awake again. I can’t move. I realize I’m in her grasp and my leg is between her thighs. I hear her panting. I say to her: ‘Mama, do you want something?’ She doesn’t answer. I move my leg out from between her thighs but she hangs on to me. She moves away a moment later. Her snoring rises up over us.41

For all the attractions of Mama Tahiya, however, it is not her but the narrator’s absent mother who is in a sense the dominant female figure in his life. Precisely what has happened to her is never spelled out explicitly, and the narrator’s attempts to elicit details of her fate are usually met with short shrift. As already noted, when he asks his father, ‘How old is mama?’ his father answers him sharply and without further elaboration: ‘Twenty-­six.’42 But if his mother is essentially absent from his present life, she remains a constant presence in the narrator’s memory, as evidenced by the numerous ‘flashbacks’ (analepses) involving her. Not infrequently, as in Amrikanli,43 the memory may be set off by a similar incident in the narrator’s present life, as in the following example from early in the work:

184 | sonallah i b r a h im Again, we take the tram with the open car. We go to the back and ride the covered car at the end with the single bench facing backwards . . . We rumble slowly into Al-­Zahir Square. The open-­air Cinema Valery has closed for winter. My mother is in a colored dress. Her head is covered by a silk sash that wraps around her face . . . A hawker passes by wearing a clean gallabiya and carrying a basket covered with a cloth . . . the hawker gives us each a slice of Egyptian Romano cheese in a bite-­sized wrapper. The covered car rocks back and forth. My father pulls me to him to protect me from the cold wind . . .44

Unsurprisingly also, it is in the moments between sleep and wakefulness that his mother’s memory is most easily evoked: [My father] climbs next to me. He tucks himself under the sheets and blankets, and rolls over to me to make sure that I’m also covered. His hand stays there on top of me. My mother’s round face draws near. She rocks me while she sings the song coming out of the radio: ‘Sleep o love of my soul.’45

Despite the hints given earlier in the book, however, it is only with the final one of this series of flashbacks that it becomes clear that his mother has in fact been confined to a mental hospital, having become (or being well on the way to becoming) insane: He walks along seriously until he gets to the door of the house. We pass out of the big iron gate . . . We come to a one-­story house. Nurses with huge bodies . . . A large hallway with rows of shut doors on both sides. Some of them have iron doorknobs. Behind them are women wearing strange looks. One of them laughs with loud peals of laughter. She points to a woman who is pale and fat with a face full of pimples, whispering: ‘Come here.’ I grab hold of my father’s hand. An open hall with many beds. Mother is lying on one. She smiles quietly. My father holds the bag of apples out to her. She takes one of them. She wipes it off with her hand and nibbles at its side. She feels my face with her fingers. She asks me about school but doesn’t seem to care . . .46

As has been noted by other commentators (and as will also have become evident from the above discussion), al-­Talassus is a novel that marks a departure from Sonallah Ibrahim’s earlier work, both in its use of the perspective of a child coming of age as narrator, and in its historical setting in the

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 185 pre-­revolutionary period in Egypt. It also differs from the author’s earlier ‘first-­person’ novels in that (as in Sharaf ) the author appears to have relaxed his attitude towards the use of the colloquial Egyptian dialect, with the result that many passages of dialogue (usually quite short) appear in colloquial Arabic rather than fusha: thus we find, in the first few pages, ªa-­nmurr w-­iªna ragʿīn; inta ruªt feen?; iwʿa yikūn rāª yishrab il-­hibāb illi biyʾarbaʿu; mish fā∂ī; iddīhā gineeh; and so on.47 In other respects, however, both the technique and the mood of the work have clear links with at least some of the author’s earlier works – most obviously, perhaps, Tilka al-­Raʾiha itself. The tram rides of the first chapter of al-­Talassus, for example, immediately evoke the narrator’s recollection of the tram rides with his father towards the end of Tilka al-­raʾiha. In terms of language also, we may note that many sections of the book are written in the same ‘deadpan’, mechanical style that marked the narrative of the author’s first novel. The technique of the following passage, for example, is essentially the same as that of Tilka al-­raʾiha, albeit that the tense employed in al-­Talassus is the present rather than the past, and that, because of the different contexts, the effect is arguably somewhat less sinister: [My father] washes off the meat well. He walks to the kitchen at the end of the hall. He enters with me hanging on his clothes from behind. He picks up a box of matches and lights one of them. The light falls on the side of the wall covered in water . . . He presses on the primus lamp several times, then lights a match and moves it close to the opening that lets the fumes out. The flame flickers. I grab on to him and blink.48

More generally, we may also note that although al-­Talassus has (rightly) been described as ‘the most personal and autobiographical of Ibrahim’s novels’,49 the author has insisted that, like the earlier works already discussed, it is a riwāya, not a sīra dhātiyya – though clearly the balance between fact and fiction must be accounted somewhat different from that of al-­Lajna, for example. In this respect, we would perhaps be justified in viewing al-­Talassus as occupying a place at one end of a fact/fiction spectrum (at the other end of which stands Dhat), but not as radically different in kind in this respect from the remainder of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels. In other respects also, al-­Talassus exhibits clear links with the author’s earlier novels. In terms of theme, it is not surprising that in a work written

186 | sonallah i b r a h im from the viewpoint of a child on the verge of adolescence, the sort of barbed political comments that we see in other novels are largely absent. Political commentary, in so far as there is any, is largely conveyed at second hand, through the comments of the adults around him – the young boy’s vision of the decaying society around him (mirrored in his own family situation) being essentially a social rather than a political one. That said, it is notable that we find in al-­Talassus much the same preoccupation with sex (usually unsatisfactory sex) as we have seen in other novels – the difference being that it is here expressed through the recollections of a child, much of whose information and suppositions about such matters comes from the ‘peeping’ that gives the book its name. Unique it may be, but the novel also clearly fits into the overall sequence of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, at the same time as providing a unique perspective on an Egypt on the point of social collapse. Notes 1. Le Petit Voyeur: roman traduit de l’arabe (Égypte) par Richard Jacquemont (Arles: Actes Sud, 2008). 2. See www.pwf.cz/rubriky/pwf-­2013/authors/interviews/sonallah-­ibrahim-you-­ have-to-­decide-what-­is-valuable-­and-fight-­for-it_9591.html. 3. See http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/sonallah-­ibrahim-closure-­by-stealth. 4. For this, see Chapter 2. 5. To use the title granted to the Sultan Pasha Ismail and his successors in 1867 (though used informally before that date). 6. On this period, see Derek Hopwood, Egypt: Politics and Society 1945–90 (London: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 10–19. 7. Ibid. pp. 20–9. For a discussion of Tilka al-­raʾiha, see Chapter 3. 8. See http://www.ndbooks.com/book/stealth. 9. Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Arabic–English), 4th edn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1971), pp. 1016–7. 10. Dalia Said Mostafa, ‘Sonʿallah Ibrahim’s al-­Talassus: the politics of modernity in Egypt through the child-­narrator’s lens’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47: 4 (2011), pp. 416–27. 11. See above, p. 172. 12. Stealth, translated by Hosam Aboul-­Ela (New York: New Directions Books, 2014), p. 4.

re t u rn to chi ldhood: al-talassus  | 187 13. al-­Talassus, pp. 7–11; Stealth, pp. 3–6. 14. al-­Talassus, p. 8; Stealth, p. 4. 15. al-­Talassus, p. 101; Stealth, p. 79. 16. See (for a fairly random, though apposite, example), Edwar al-­Kharrat, Stones of Bobello, trans. Paul Starkey (London: Saqi Books, 2005), p. 44. 17. See above, p. 175. 18. al-­Talassus, p. 208; Stealth, p. 172. 19. al-­Talassus, p. 46; Stealth, p. 33. 20. al-­Talassus, p. 30; Stealth, p. 20. 21. al-­Talassus, p. 13; Stealth, p. 8. 22. al-­Talassus, p. 18; Stealth, p. 12. 23. al-­Talassus, p. 29; Stealth, p. 19. 24. al-­Talassus, p. 30; Stealth, p. 20. 25. For the epidemic, see, for example, George C. Kohn (ed.), Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence: From Ancient Times to the Present (New York: Facts on File, 2008), pp. 96–7. 26. al-­Talassus, p. 35; Stealth, p. 24. 27. al-­Talassus, p. 37; Stealth, p. 26. 28. al-­Talassus, p. 52; Stealth, p. 38. 29. al-­Talassus, p. 52; Stealth, p. 38. 30. al-­Talassus, pp. 110, 284–5, 107, 62–3; Stealth, pp. 87, 235–6, 85, 46. 31. al-­Talassus, p. 91; Stealth, p. 70. 32. al-­Talassus, p. 7; Stealth, p. 3. 33. al-­Talassus, p. 61; Stealth, p. 45. 34. al-­Talassus, pp. 286–7; Stealth, p. 237. 35. al-­Talassus, pp. 296–7; Stealth, p. 245. 36. al-­Talassus, pp. 290–1; Stealth, p. 240. 37. al-­Talassus, p. 297; Stealth, p. 245. 38. al-­Talassus, p. 72; Stealth, p. 54. 39. al-­Talassus, p. 84; Stealth, p. 65. 40. al-­Talassus, pp. 239–40; Stealth, p. 201. 41. al-­Talassus, p. 143; Stealth, pp. 115–16. 42. al-­Talassus, p. 54; Stealth, p. 39. 43. See Chapter 10. 44. al-­Talassus, pp. 10–11; Stealth, pp. 5–6. 45. al-­Talassus, p. 25; Stealth, p. 16. 46. al-­Talassus, pp. 299–300; Stealth, p. 248.

188 | sonallah i b r a h im 47. al-­Talassus, pp. 7–15; Stealth, pp. 3–9. 48. al-­Talassus, p. 20; Stealth, p 13. 49. See, for example, the back cover of the English translation – echoing sentiments expressed by several other commentators.

12 The French Connection: al-ʿImama wa-al-Qubbaʿa (2008) and al-Qanun al-Faransi (2008)

E

xceptionally, this chapter will consider not one but two of Sonallah Ibrahim’s works, al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa (The Turban and the Hat; 2008) and al-­Qanun al-­Faransi (The French Law; 2008), which appeared in close succession, and are not only linked by their thematic material but also provide a new twist to the intertextual thread that runs through the author’s works. Publication and Translations

The first work, al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, was completed in December 2007, the same year that marked the publication of al-­Talassus and around four to five years after the publication of his last major novel, Amrikanli; the work was published in Cairo the following year, 2008, by the author’s favourite publishing house, Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi. The second work, al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, appeared shortly afterwards from the same publishers. A French translation of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa by Richard Jacquemont was published in 2011 as Turbans et Chapeaux;1 to my knowledge, there are no English or other foreign-­language translations of either work. Background The main historical background to the two works is centred on Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the subsequent three-­year French occupation, which for many Egyptians represented their first opportunity to become acquainted with European civilisation at first hand; the date has traditionally, at least until recently, been used as a starting point for accounts

190 | sonallah ib r a h im of both ­general and literary histories of the modern Middle East.2 As already remarked, although the French invasion was essentially an episode in French–British imperial rivalry and the subsequent occupation short-­lived, it undoubtedly marked a turning-­point both in cultural relations between Europe and the Arab world and in the political development of Egypt itself. More particularly, on a cultural and educational level, the occupation saw a number of developments that laid the groundwork for significant innovation during the nineteenth century. These included the importation of a printing press; the publication of a newspaper, Le courier de l’Égypte, and a journal, La décade égyptienne; and the founding in Cairo of a scientific institute, together with a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the country, subsequently published as the multi-­volume Description de l’Égypte. A number of these developments are referred to, explicitly or implicitly, in Sonallah Ibrahim’s two novels under discussion. On a political level, the invasion marked the beginning of the end of Ottoman, and Mamluk, influence in the country, for although Egypt remained nominally a part of the Ottoman Empire for most of the nineteenth century, from 1805 it effectively functioned as a separate state – ruled until 1952 by the dynasty founded by Muhammad ʿAli [Mehmet Ali], with varying (at times overwhelming) degrees of foreign involvement, particularly following the British occupation beginning in 1882.3 As the diary entries of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa are effectively co-­ terminous with the French occupation, it may be helpful first to give a brief summary of the main sequence of events of the occupation. The French expedition – conceived as a challenge to the British in India, and whose original purpose included not only the permanent occupation of Egypt but also the capture of Malta – was prepared in considerable haste and secrecy, and included not only the usual military components but also a team of 167 savants with a remit to document all aspects of the country and to establish an Academy in Cairo. The French expedition sailed from France on 20 May 1798, reached Malta on 9 June 1798, and arrived at Alexandria on 1 July 1798; by the following day, the city was in French hands. On 13 July 1798, the French defeated a force under the command of Murad Bey at the battle of Shubrakhit, consolidating their victory on 21 July 1798 at the so-­called battle of the Pyramids, where the Mamluks suffered heavy losses; Ibrahim Bey

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 191 escaped to Palestine, while a larger Mamluk force under Murad Bey retreated to Upper Egypt. Despite these initial successes, the French quickly suffered a major setback, when on 1 August 1798 the British fleet under Nelson reached Alexandria and destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of Aboukir Bay.4 On 9 September 1798, the Ottoman Empire declared war on France, and by October 1798, Cairo had been rocked by repeated rioting. Threatened by the combined forces of Britain, Russia and the Ottomans, Napoleon decided to launch a pre-­emptive strike by marching northwards into Palestine and Syria, and after assembling a field army some 13,000 strong, he set out on 6 February 1799; the subsequent campaign, which figures prominently in Sonallah Ibrahim’s al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, was marked not only by major sieges at al-ʿArish, Jaffa and Acre, but also by French atrocities (including the massacre of some 3,000 prisoners in Jaffa) and outbreaks of plague. The campaign finally came to an end when Napoleon was forced to abandon the siege of Acre on 20 May 1799. Napoleon’s last victory in Egypt was won at the first battle of Aboukir on 25 July 1799, when the French scored a decisive victory over the Turks. At this point, Napoleon returned to France, where he arrived on 9 October 1799, seizing power a month later. His successor in Egypt was General Kléber, who quickly opened negotiations with the Ottomans. On 24 January 1800, the Convention of al-ʿArish was concluded, by which the Ottomans agreed to the safe return of the French troops to France in return for the French evacuation of Egypt, but the agreement was not implemented as the British did not accept its terms. With the French troops becoming increasingly restive, a period of confusion followed, which was further compounded when Kléber was assassinated on 14 June 1800, to be succeeded by General Menou, who had converted to Islam and married an Egyptian. The final stages of the French occupation began when a British force under Lord Abercromby, which had already recaptured Malta, arrived in Egypt, and in conjunction with Ottoman forces succeeded in permanently expelling the French – key battles being the second battle of Aboukir (8 March 1801), the battle of Mandora (13 March 1801) and the battle of Alexandria (21 March 1801). The British and Ottoman armies reached Cairo 21 June 1801, and after a short siege the French garrison of 13,000 troops surrendered on 27 June 1801. The French evacuated Cairo on 30 July 1801;

192 | sonallah ib r a h im after a period of resistance, Menou’s force in Alexandria surrendered on 30 August 1801, and embarked for France some two weeks later. Unsurprisingly, the events noted above are well documented in Western, and especially French, sources. Material relevant to the political and military aspects of the expedition began to be published as early as 1798; Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans la basse et haute Égypte5 – sometimes regarded as the foundation of modern Egyptology – was published in 1802, and the mammoth Description de l’Égypte itself began to appear in 1810;6 since then, the subject matter has been seemingly endlessly discussed and re-­interpreted. Unsurprisingly, the episode has also claimed the attention of many Arab (particularly Egyptian) authors – novelists and other imaginative writers, as well as historians – a useful list being provided by Sonallah Ibrahim himself in an appendix to al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa.7 For present purposes, however, by far the most important writer of relevance – not only for his intrinsic value as a historian but also because of the pivotal role that he plays in the narrative of Sonallah’s two novels – is ʿAbd al-­Rahman al-­Jabarti (1753–1825), whose accounts of the French occupation contained in his three works Taʾrikh muddat al-­Faransis bi-­Misr, Mazhar al-­taqdis bi-­zawal dawlat al-­Faransis and ʿAjaʾib al-­athar fi al-­tarajim wa-­al-akhbar mark him, in Shmuel Moreh’s words, as ‘the first Arab thinker who was aware of the spirit of the French revolution and its slogan of “liberté, égalité, fraternité”, even though he rejected it on the basis that it opposed Islam.’8 Having summarised the main events that provide his historical context, we shall now turn to an analysis of Sonallah Ibrahim’s two works separately before considering the relation between the two. al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa Summary As with almost all Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, the ‘plot’ of this work is extremely thin: indeed, it is doubtful whether it makes sense to speak in terms of a ‘plot’ at all. The work essentially consists of observations on life under the French occupation of Egypt made by a (fictional) young man from Upper Egypt, who has come to Cairo and who now serves, in effect, as an ‘apprentice’ to the historian and biographer al-­Jabarti, the chronicler of the French occupation from the Egyptian standpoint, as described above. The

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 193 work introduces us to a number of the young man’s Egyptian friends and colleagues, including al-­Jabarti himself, as well as to members of the French occupation with whom he has dealings, most notably Pauline Fourès, who served as Napoleon’s mistress, and with whom the young man himself has an affair. In the course of the work, the young man also joins the French expedition to Palestine and Syria, and a substantial portion of the middle part of the book is devoted to his account of his adventures there. Towards the end of the work, he makes the acquaintance of Sulayman al-­Halabi, who assassinated General Kléber in 1800, and there is a lengthy account of the events that followed. The work ends with al-­Jabarti dictating to him a revised account of the French occupation that will clear him ‘of the charge of collaboration with the French’.9 Structure, Themes and Technique Al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa is a full-­length work, which occupies over 300 pages of Arabic text, and which is divided into seven chapters in the conventional manner. Its title immediately suggests that a leading theme of the work will be a meeting – harmonious or otherwise, as the case may be – between the European and Islamic traditions, as exemplified by the different headgear worn by the various communities. In terms of structure and technique, the work continues the use of Sonallah Ibrahim’s preference for using a first-­person narrator, while at the same time breaking new ground, for, unlike any of his previous works, it is entirely cast in the form of a diary,10 the entries for which are dated (unlike those of al-­Jabarti himself) according to the Western (ad/ce) calendar. The entries run from Sunday, 22 July 1798 (noon) to Monday, 31 August (1801), and are thus, as already noted, almost exactly co-­terminous with the French occupation itself, but as in most diaries, entries are not found for every day – the presumption being that, in general, and like most diarists, the writer only recorded entries for days on which events occurred of significance on either a personal or a wider national level. In practice, this means that, in terms of a historical record, the book is inevitably somewhat incomplete – though it should hardly need to be said that, as an imaginative work of fiction (marked as a riwāya on its title page), this is not, of course, its main purpose.

194 | sonallah ib r a h im Despite the author’s use of his favoured first-­person narrative mode – inevitable, given the use of the diary format – the narrator/diarist clearly differs from the author’s previous earlier first-­person narrrators, in that he is a historical (or quasi-­historical, rather) figure, aged only nineteen, and with few if any of the characteristics of the author himself beyond the fact that both are engaged, in one way or other, with the practice of writing. The background of the young man and his relationship to the historical Jabarti emerge in stages during the first few chapters of the book but may most conveniently be summarised in the terms used in al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, the other work here under consideration, as follows: The manuscript11 contains the diary of one of al-­Jabarti’s students, whose name we do not know, from the south of Egypt. He came to Cairo to escape from the plague, entered the service of a French merchant, then took lessons at the Azhar with al-­Jabarti, who took him into his household as a student after becoming aware of his great promise . . . then it describes how al-­Jabarti decided to write a book entitled Muddat al-­Faransiyyin fi Misr. The student decided to imitate al-­Jabarti and recorded his diaries as well.12

The statement of the status of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa as an ‘imitation’ of al-­Jabarti’s work immediately introduces into the discussion the element of intertextuality – which, as we shall see, will be further refined when we come to consider the ending of the book, as well as the relationship between al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa and the second novel under discussion here, al-­ Qanun al-­Faransi. For the moment, we may simply note, first, that although Sonallah Ibrahim makes occasional use of the direct and explicit inclusion into his narrative of external texts (most obviously, Napoleon’s famous proclamation to the Egyptians in which he declared that the French were true Muslims and it was a lie to think he had come to put an end to the religion of the Egyptians),13 this is not a major feature of the work; and second, that the style and language of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa is to some extent modelled on the prose style of al-­Jabarti himself, which – in the manner of the time – is generally structurally straightforward, favours co-­ordination over subordination, and retains the fondness for hendiadys and parallelism that has been a feature of Arabic prose style since the medieval period. The effect of a ‘dated’

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 195 text is reinforced by the use of a vocabulary which, while readily intelligible by a modern readership, clearly belongs to a higher ‘register’14 than that of much contemporary Arabic fiction, as well as by the use of forms such as Farans⁄s, Faransāwiya and ʿUthmānlī that are no longer in common use. At the same time, the frequent use of asyndeton at times produces an effect that is similar to the ‘telegraphic’ style of the author’s earlier works (most obviously, Tilka al-­raʾiha) – a style that had become a progressively less prominent feature of the author’s later novels, at least until he returned to it to some extent in al-­ Talassus. Space forbids an extended discussion of this topic, but the following two brief quotations may serve to give the flavour of these two features: [1] He thought a bit then added: May God have mercy on him [Ayyub Bey al-­Daftardar]. He was cunning and devious, made a show of standing up for the truth and of loving noble and learned men, bought Qur’ans and books, and prayed constantly in the community. He generously fulfilled the needs of beggars and seekers, and was inclined to depravity and listening to songs and music . . . [2] I noticed a paper lying on one of the couches. I took off my shoes at the edge of the carpets and put the lamp on the ground. I picked up the paper. A copy of the French proclamation which the Maltese had brought from Alexandria. I knew its contents but I held it close to the light and ran my eye over its lines.15

In terms of their approach to their subject matter, the main difference between al-­Jabarti and his protégé in their attitudes to their recording of events may be summarised in words drawn from the novel itself, as the narrator/diarist records that al-­Jabarti (who appears displeased when the young man informs him that he has resolved to imitate his diary-­keeping) concentrates on public events and ‘avoids talking about personal matters’. By contrast, the young man has no hesitation in recording his sexual and other personal experiences, beginning with his distinctly mechanical lovemaking with al-­Jabarti’s slave-­girl, the aptly-­named Sakita (= ‘silent, still, reticent’); the fact that he does not dare go to her when his master is in the house is an

196 | sonallah ib r a h im indication of the slightly ‘edgy’ relationship that he has with his distinguished employer.16 Sex with Sakita, however, soon pales into insignificance when the young man, who has started to work in a library, is drawn into a circle of the French occupiers and, in a somewhat unlikely twist, makes the acquaintance of Pauline Fourès, one of Napoleon’s courtesans, with whom he quickly starts an intermittent but passionate affair. It is here that the author’s partiality for merging fact and fiction can perhaps be seen most clearly, for while the details of the affair are clearly fictitious, in other respects Sonallah Ibrahim appears to adhere scrupulously to historical fact: mention is made at various points in the narrative of the circumstances of her coming to Egypt with her cavalryman husband (from whom she subsequently secured a divorce); of her residence in a villa near Ezbekiyya Square, in which Bonaparte had installed her; and of her frustrated attempts to return to France to re-­join him. The narrator also comes into close contact with a group of Coptic collaborators intent on securing independence from the Ottoman/Mamluk stranglehold, and befriends the Syrian student Sulayman al-­Halabi, who on 14 June 1800 assassinated the French General Kléber, a crime for which he was subsequently tortured before being impaled on a stake. More generally, the young man’s narrative succeeds in giving a vivid and convincing picture not only of everyday life in Cairo under the French occupation, but also of the French expedition to Syria and Palestine, where the expected horrors and deprivations of any large-­scale military expedition are compounded by the outbreak of plague. In sum, despite the occasional bright spot such as the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, the picture that emerges from al-­ Jabarti’s student’s ‘manuscript’ of Egypt under the French occupation is one of almost constant chaos, compounded by the frequent shifts in the influence of the different groups involved – French, British, Ottomans and Mamluks, as well as various groupings of native Egyptians. By far the most imaginative ‘intertextual’ twist to Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrative, however, comes at the end of the book, in the entry dated 31 August (1801), when the narrator/diarist finds his master sitting over a bundle of papers that includes not only the results of his own attempts to ‘imitate’ al-­Jabarti’s writing, but also the writings of al-­Jabarti’s friend and contemporary Hasan al-ʿAttar (d. 1834–5).17 The resulting conversation, which shows al-­Jabarti apparently ‘bending with the wind’ in his attitude to the external

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 197 powers vying for influence in Egypt, raises issues that appear to go beyond the mere relationship between al-­Jabarti’s different accounts of the French occupation (explored in more detail in al-­Qanun al-­Faransi) and touches on the writer’s moral duty vis-­à-vis the ruling or occupying power: ‘He asked me to bring him pen, ink, and an empty sheet of paper and asked me to write what he dictated to me. He took the first sheet of paper and read it carefully. He said: “Write: The year 1213. The first of the years of great battle, weighty events . . .”’ Hearing these words, the student recalls them as being the opening words of Muddat al-­Faransis fi Misr and thinks that al-­Jabarti must be wanting him to make a copy for a friend or purchaser. Instead, however, al-­ Jabarti tells him to write at the top of the sheet ‘Mazhar al-­taqdis bi-­dhahab dawlat al-­Faransis’. ‘A new book?’ I asked. ‘New and old’, he replied. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘Do you imagine that the Ottomans will accept what I wrote when I praised the French and blamed the Turks? The Turkish minister has asked me to write for him the history of the period when the French were in Egypt. I also want to clear myself from the charge of cooperation with the French . . . a new book, which will be the same as the old one, after we have removed from it anything that might anger them. And then we will give it to the Turkish minister Yusuf Pasha.’

So the work ends, with al-­Jabarti’s young student first wondering whether he should do the same thing with his own composition, before settling down to take dictation from his master: He started to dictate to me: ‘I had already recorded the events that happened since the start of the French occupation of the land of Egypt until the arrival of our Master the vizier . . . but it had often occurred to me . . . to bring them together . . . to make a history that would inform the mind about wondrous reports and strange events (ʿajāʾib al-­akhbār wa-­gharāʾib al-­āthār), a reminder for every generation after us.18

So ends al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, with al-­Jabarti’s student/scribe apparently taking dictation of his master’s second book on the French occupation,

198 | sonallah ib r a h im Mazhar al-­taqdis bi-­dhahab dawlat al-­Faransis, but in terms that contain an obvious allusion to the title of al-­Jabarti’s later, longer work, ʿAjaʾib al-­athar fi al-­tarajim wa-­al-akhbar – a work that contains a more comprehensive history of Egypt covering the period 1688/9–1806, thereby extending beyond the French occupation itself.19 The ending, which provides a neat and unexpected ‘intertextual’ twist to Sonallah Ibrahim’s narrative while at the same time raising potentially important questions about the relation between writer and state, may perhaps be accounted one of the author’s more successful endings; for while, on the one hand, it leaves unresolved questions in the reader’s mind, it also conveys a sense of the importance of the young narrator’s endeavours in the larger historical context. al-­Qanun al-­Faransi (2008) The second novel to be discussed, al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, approaches the subject of the French occupation in a more elliptical way, albeit one that stands in a more obvious line of development than al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa does in relation to the author’s earlier works. Summary The novel revolves around two fictitious conferences held in late 2005 in Poitiers and Paris respectively, the first intended to reassess the brief French occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801, the second to discuss a French law, number 158, promulgated on 23 February 2005, dealing with aspects of the French colonial legacy. The conferences thus coincided with a period of intense civil unrest, which began in October 2005 and involved a series of riots instigated by mainly Arab, North African and second-­generation immigrants in the Parisian suburbs and other French cities; many cars and buildings were burned, and as the situation escalated, a state of emergency, which was to last several months, was declared on 8 November 2005. These events provide both a backdrop to the conferences, and an occasion for frequent comment by the participants. The proceedings of the conferences themselves are observed through the eyes of an Egyptian professor, who has travelled from Cairo for the purpose of attending the first conference to make a presentation about a recently discovered manuscript by one of al-­Jabarti’s pupils – his invitation to the second conference being effectively an afterthought. The book describes

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 199 his journey from Cairo to France, and includes not only the various intellectual debates in the conference halls themselves, but also his interactions with other conference participants, which end with a rejection from his colleague Céline, with whom he had clearly been hoping to conduct an affair. Structure, Themes and Technique In terms of its construction, al-­Qanun al-­Faransi may be regarded as a far more ‘conventional’ work than al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, repeating many of the features of Sonallah Ibrahim’s previous works with only a few significantly novel features. Like Amrikanli – indeed, like most of his novels from Tilka al-­Raʾiha onwards – the work is narrated in the first person by a protagonist who, while fictitious, clearly resembles the author in important aspects, not least in his age and general intellectual attitudes. In this respect, the work can be clearly differentiated from al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, whose youthful narrator from a previous age bears little resemblance to Sonallah Ibrahim himself. The fact that the narrator is attending the first conference to discuss the fictitious manuscript already published by Sonallah Ibrahim as al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa provides a new ‘intertextual’ twist to the events recorded at the end of the earlier novel. But the ‘intertextual’ aspects of the work do not end there. First, the narrator of al-­Qanun al-­Faransi quickly emerges as none other than Professor Shukri, the professor of comparative history who had previously served as the narrator/protagonist of both Amrikanli and Warda, thus creating for a second time an explicit link between the narrators of more than one of the author’s works. Events at the conference itself, however, take an even more unexpected turn when, following the narrator’s exposition of the content and merits of the manuscript – whose chief importance he sees as providing a description of contemporary daily life different from that of conventional accounts20 – his interpretation is denounced by a professor from Aix named Ladeaux(?),21 who had borrowed a copy of Shukri’s manuscript from him the previous evening. The French professor explains that when he heard that Shukri’s manuscript was to be discussed at the conference, he had succeeded in contacting a relative of Pauline, Napoleon’s lover (whom he describes as the ‘heroine of the manuscript under discussion’), who had, in her collection of books and manuscripts, come across another manuscript,

200 | sonallah ib r a h im which he regarded as ‘the true manuscript’ of al-­Jabarti’s pupil.22 He continues: ‘the importance of this matter is that the manuscript I acquired from Pauline’s relation contains no reference to any sexual relationship between Pauline and al-­Jabarti’s student, nor to the alleged massacres by the French army in Syria.’23 A heated series of exchanges follows, in which the narrator suggests that the young man may have rewritten the diaries, removing passages that might have embarrassed Pauline, as well as ‘any reference to the French massacres in Syria, in case it fell into another French hand, and so expose him to harm.’24 In essence, this argument could well be interpreted as a ‘replay’, in relation to the manuscript of al-­Jabarti’s student, of the question raised at the end of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa regarding al-­Jabarti’s own accounts of the French occupation more generally: namely, to what extent can we trust historians not to ‘tailor’ their accounts to the exigencies of those in positions of power or influence? Not all of the conference (which is billed as ‘Bonaparte in Egypt: new Arab insights’),25 is of course occupied with the narrator’s fictitious manuscript and its competitor, but in general, it has to be said that many of the other conference discussions seem rather conventional – turning essentially (when not dominated by procedural issues such as the presence of a delegate from the Israeli embassy) on a re-­evaluation of Napoleon’s expedition in terms of its military versus cultural aspects and on the state of Egypt before the arrival of the French. In these circumstances, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that the narrator/protagonist at times appears at least as interested in pursuing opportunities for liaisons with other conference participants, or indeed, in watching porn on TV.26 The juxtaposition of this first conference (which has a clear relationship with al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa) with the second conference (which does not) is arguably less than satisfactory from a structural point of view – though it is worth remarking that far from playing down the division of the novel into two halves, Sonallah Ibrahim actually appears to play it up by giving each part its own title page, labelled ‘Poitiers’ and ‘Paris’ respectively. Be that as it may, the second conference (and the one which indeed gives the whole volume its title) revolves around the controversial law number 158, passed by the French National Assembly on 23 February 2005, and which, as the author explains in his afterword,27 required high-­school teachers to teach the positive

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 201 role played by the French presence overseas; the law, which unsurprisingly evoked widespread opposition (particularly from the French Left) was subsequently partially repealed the following year. Although there is a tenuous connection between the subject of the conference and Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, it will be obvious that, compared, for example, with the French occupation of Algeria – which lasted from 1830 to 1962 and ended only after some eight years of bloody warfare – the brief French occupation of Egypt is somewhat tangential to much of the discussion of the conference, which touches on basic issues such as the dichotomy between colonialism and the basic principles of the French revolution, as well as issues more particular to the North African environment, such as the relations between Arabs and Berbers, and the conduct of the Algerian revolutionaries themselves towards the French settlers. The arrival of a Palestinian delegation from Ramallah prompts a debate about the virtues of ‘martyrdom’ (istishhād),28 on which Professor Shukri, interestingly, notes that: ‘The Palestinians have the right to choose whatever means of resistance they like . . . [though] I personally have no enthusiasm for “martyrdom” as a means of resistance. The battle between the forces of good and evil is a long-­term one.’ Several participants raise their hands to comment on Shukri’s statement, but as on several occasions during the two conferences, a potentially interesting discussion is prematurely brought to an end by the chairman of the session, who notes simply that ‘No one would deny the injustice that Palestinians are subject to, but we need to avoid violence affecting civilians’ – a chapter ending that may well strike the reader as rather unsatisfying, given the centrality of the issues under discussion to the problems of the contemporary Middle East.29 In the meantime, outside of the conference hall itself, the narrator/ protagonist has been mixing intellectual discussion with colleagues with a sometimes less than subtle attempt to start an affair with one of the conference participants called Céline. He establishes with her a rapport that at first seems both emotionally and intellectually promising; but she finally rejects his advances, and the book ends with his discovery of a note from her under his door describing him as a ‘simple, primitive man’. On a personal level, this outcome appears simply to echo the themes of failure and frustration that characterise several of the author’s earlier novels; on a wider cultural level, however, it raises the question, as Rasheed El-­Enany has suggested,30 of

202 | sonallah ib r a h im whether the author is implying that little has changed in the French view of the Egyptians since Napoleon’s invasion two centuries ago.31 Despite the intriguing multiple aspects of Sonallah Ibrahim’s intertextual approach exemplified by the two works discussed in this chapter, from a structural point of view al-­Qanun al-­Faransi in particular may well strike the reader as lacking some of the qualities that have characterised his earlier works. It is far from clear, for example, what prompted Sonallah Ibrahim to extend his narrative to include the second conference, which the narrator appears to attend almost as an afterthought, and whose theme, although not entirely irrelevant to that of the first one, is certainly not closely connected with it. That said, the publication of this pair of novels has prompted some interesting critical reflections, not least on the part of the younger Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, who in an article entitled ‘Tractatus Franco-­Arabicus’, notes that Sonallah Ibrahim’s political reflections in al-­Qanun al-­Faransi are far more ‘resonant’ than those expressed through the narrator of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, instancing in this regard Dr Shukri’s blunt statement that The reasons for all the problems we suffer in the Arab world . . . is that we did not manage to establish an advanced national industry. At the beginning the Ottomans divested us of the kind of human and material resources that go into the accumulation necessary for the move into the age of the machine, and after them came the French and the English. Every attempt we made, the West immediately aborted.32

On a more theoretical level, Rakha also uses the example of Sonallah Ibrahim’s two novels to suggest ‘an early Wittgenstein-­style formulation of the kind of literary problem Bonaparte’s Campaign to Egypt might present.’ Starting from the most basic of propositions – that ‘An Arab novel can be written about Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign (1798–1801)’ – Rakha argues that ‘an Egyptian novelist writing about the Egyptian Campaign is, by definition, responding to a particular colonial legacy from the position of the colonised’; he then notes that ‘it is likely that he will seek historical counsel with Abdel-­Rahman Al-­Jabarti’, and goes on to suggest, first, that ‘an Arab novel about the Egyptian Campaign is likely to be written from a Generation

al- ʿ imama wa-al-qubba ʿ a a nd al-qanun al-faransi  | 203 of the Sixties standpoint’; and secondly, that ‘only a “postcolonial novelist” like Sonallah Ibrahim is likely to write such a novel.’ Although it is arguable that Rakha’s ‘Wittgenstein-­style proposition’ (or rather, sequence of propositions) is not totally persuasive in its entirety (particularly in its ending), his article offers a fresh and distinctive perspective on Sonallah Ibrahim’s writing that might usefully perhaps be extended to some of the author’s other works. In the meantime, we may perhaps simply note that, even though the intertextual experiment is perhaps not wholly successful, the use of one novel to comment on another in this way is, to say the least, unusual, if not unique, and is a further indication that Sonallah Ibrahim had not lost his taste for experimentation even past the age of seventy. Notes 1. Turbans et Chapeaux, trans. Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011). 2. For this, see Chapter 1. 3. See further Chapter 11. For this period generally, see Darrell Dykstra, ‘The French occupation of Egypt, 1798–1801’, in M. W. Daly (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 113–38. 4. Also known, less correctly, as the Battle of the Nile. 5. Voyage dans la basse et la haute Égypte, pendant les campagnes du Général Bonaparte, avec 141 planches (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de P. Didot l’Aine, 1802). 6. On this, see Dykstra, ‘The French occupation’, pp. 113–15. 7. al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, pp. 319–22. 8. Shmuel Moreh, ‘al-­ Jabartī, ʿAbd al-­Raªmān’, in J. S. Meisami and Paul Starkey (eds), Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, vol. 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 403–4. 9. al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, p. 328. 10. And thus differs from Warda (for which, see see Chapter 9), in which the diaries are embedded in a ‘framing’, narrative text. 11. See further below for the status of al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa as a ‘manuscript’. 12. al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, p. 59. 13. al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, pp. 15–16. 14. For a discussion of ‘register’ in modern Arabic, see Clive Holes, Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions, and Varieties (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004).

204 | sonallah ib r a h im 15. al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, pp. 11, 15. 16. Ibid. pp. 20, 46. 17. For whom, see Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1979). 18. al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, p. 328. 19. On al-­Jabarti generally, see David Ayalon, ‘The historian al-­Jabartī and his background’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 23 (1960), pp. 217–48. 20. al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, pp. 59–62. 21. I presume this to be a playful reference to Richard Jacquemond, who is thanked in an afterword by the author (p. 230) for his ‘valuable comments on the manuscript’. 22. al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, p. 63. 23. Ibid. p. 65. 24. Ibid. p. 70. 25. Ibid. p. 39. 26. Ibid. p. 76. 27. Ibid. p. 230. 28. By which is meant, in the context, the phenomenon usually referred to in the West as ‘suicide bombing’ – both the Arabic and the English terms being heavily charged with connotations beyond their obvious denotative meaning. 29. al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, pp. 171–2. 30. Personal communication. 31. al-­Qanun al-­Faransi, pp. 227–8. 32. Youssef Rakha, ‘Tractatus Franco-­ Arabicus’, Al-­Ahram Weekly 960 (13–19 August 2009), available at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009.960.cu3.htm.

13 Filling a Gap: al-Jalid (2011)

S

onallah Ibrahim’s most recent full-­length novel, al-­Jalid (Ice), was published towards the end of January 2011, at the precise moment of the mass protests centred on Cairo’s Tahrir Square that forced the resignation of the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 – a move that prompted the transfer of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and everything that has followed since. According to the author’s note at the end of the work, the novel had been completed in Heliopolis (Sonallah Ibrahim’s home) in December 2010. Publication and Translations

Al-­Jalid was published in Cairo by Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida and in Beirut by Dar al-­Adab in January 2011. To my knowledge, there have so far been no foreign-­language translations of the work. Background The work, which contains an opening page reading simply ‘Moscow 1973’, clearly derives from Sonallah Ibrahim’s own stay in Moscow during that same period, the circumstances of which were described in Chapter 2 above. As is the case with many of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels, few specific dates are given in the text, but there are discussions about, and occasional references to, a number of significant (mainly external) political events, enabling the reader to establish an at least approximate chronology in his or her mind; the novel closes with a New Year party, which provides a firm closing date for the work. The external events referred to include significant developments in a number of different parts of the world, including US involvement in Vietnam, and the overthrow of the Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende on

206 | sonallah i b r a h im 11 September 1973; but from the viewpoint of an Egyptian spending the period in question abroad, the most significant is unsurprisingly the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War (also known as the Ramadan, or Yom Kippur, War), which began on 6 October 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched surprise attacks on Israeli positions in the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights. In the ensuing fighting, Arab armies to some extent redeemed the reputations they had lost in the disastrous defeat of 1967, earning Sadat the sobriquet ‘Hero of the Crossing’; the aftermath of the war saw the use of the Arab ‘oil weapon’ in a bid to influence Western attitudes, and the subsequent period saw major shifts in the Middle Eastern political landscape as Egypt, under President Sadat, moved towards the conclusion of a peace treaty with Israel, and progressively distanced itself from the sphere of Soviet influence – a move already foreshadowed by the expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt in 1972. These latter developments, however, take us beyond the period covered by Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel. Summary As with many of the author’s earlier works, there is almost no ‘plot’ to speak of in the conventional sense. Narrated in the first person, the novel revolves around the experiences of a 35-­year-old Egyptian PhD student, once again called Shukri, who is spending a period in the Soviet Union in Moscow as part of an exchange programme. Housed for most of the time in student accommodation, he there comes into contact with a varied assortment of international students, Soviet and non-­Soviet, as well as with ordinary Russians, Egyptian embassy staff and others. The novel describes incidents from his daily life (in which both sex and alcohol play a prominent part), and documents the beginning of his habit of research by collecting cuttings from Egyptian newspapers. The novel concludes with a disastrous New Year party in which a fellow student is beaten up amid accusations of perversion and unfavourable comments on the sexual proclivities of the Arabs. Structure, Themes and Technique Al-­Jalid is a full-­length novel, extending to nearly 250 pages of Arabic text. Unlike any of the author’s previous works, however, it is structured as a series of short chapters – 126 in all – which range in length from less than half a page

f i lli ng a g a p: al-jalid  | 207 to around a dozen pages. With the exception of this feature, however (which had been used before by other Arab writers, including Naguib Mahfouz in his al-­Maraya (Mirrors; 1972),1 but never by Sonallah Ibrahim himself), the work in most respects follows the author’s favoured structural preferences established in previous works, employing a first-­person, homodiegetic narrator who clearly embodies some of the characteristics of the author himself, albeit at a rather younger age. The work’s title, al-­Jalid, is most obviously a reference to the bleak Moscow weather, which at times reaches a temperature low of -30˚C, though it may also arguably be read in a more metaphorical way as a reference to the sharp, cold, social and political atmosphere in which the actions of the novel (such as they are) take place. As already noted, despite its chronological displacement, the author immediately sets the work in the same context and sequence as Amrikanli and al-­Qanun al-­Faransi by giving his narrator/protagonist the name Shukri.2 As in most previous novels, however, few of the remaining characters – who for the most part comprise a variegated collection of international students of both sexes (the girls’ quarters being located on an upper floor of the same building in which the narrator is residing) – are portrayed in any depth, and the narrators’ interactions with them (with the possible exception of the German Hans) are for the most part superficial. None of the characters exhibit anything that might be regarded as ‘character development’ in the conventional sense. So far as the narrator himself is concerned, his character and preoccupations recall those of the protagonists of several previous works, being largely centred on sex (his experience of which, as in earlier novels, is more often than not unsatisfactory) and on alcohol (available almost without limit in the Moscow of the time, most often in the form of vodka) – to which may be added an obvious, more intellectual, interest in politics, particularly left-­wing politics (sharpened on this occasion by the seismic events taking place in Egypt at the time), as well as an interest in classical Western music that recalls that of the narrator of al-­Lajna. As usual in Sonallah Ibrahim’s works, the narrator’s attempts at finding sexual and emotional satisfaction for the most part end in frustration rather than fulfilment – an outcome that is perhaps made almost inevitable by the fact that not only is the narrator/ protagonist considerably older than most of his fellow students, but is also in less than perfect health, being afflicted with a recurrent prostate condition in

208 | sonallah i b r a h im addition to occasional, and apparently less serious, problems with his heart and breathing.3 This does not, however, stand in the way of (indeed, it may actually encourage) his almost obsessive interest in the opposite sex – to the extent that the narrative at times appears to revolve around who is sleeping (or would like to sleep) with who. In its preoccupation with young sex, the work would appear to reflect a student environment that is presumably to a large extent ‘authentic’; at the same time, on a slightly different level, the preoccupation with sex and alcohol reflects a society in which there is for much of the time little else to do. As a result – and despite the almost cosmopolitan social setting in which the action takes place – the overall impression that the reader is likely to derive from the work is of a sense of rootlessness and ennui not far removed from the atmosphere of Tilka al-­raʾiha. In al-­Jalid, the narrator is surrounded by a large number of fellow students, who parallel the circle of friends and family ‘enjoyed’ by the narrator of the earlier novel. Despite a few passages of comparative tenderness,4 however, in neither case do they appear to bring him much, if any, emotional satisfaction, and his relationships with them are for the most part both superficial and ‘hollow’ – a situation that is compounded in al-­Jalid by the fact that the narrator’s Russian language capabilities are rather weak. These parallels with Tilka al-­Raʾiha extend to the laconic, deadpan style in which parts at least of al-­Jalid are written. The point is well illustrated by the opening of the short chapter 15, in which matters of major international significance are reduced to the same level as those of the narrator’s daily life: In the morning Hans knocked on the door of my room and asked me if I’d seen the girl. No, I said. He said he’d seen a packet of Egyptian cigarettes on her. He’d turned her away yesterday and thought she might have come to complain to me. I said: I’m a generous man. He laughed. I went to the Institute to retrieve my passport and find out what had happened about the Leningrad trip. Farid said there was an agreement to end the Vietnam War. I asked myself: how will the world look, after we’ve got used to news of the war every day? He said Israel had annexed the Syrian Golan Heights. I stole a glance at the second floor and saw tables, sandwiches, beer, apples, tomatoes, and some unfamiliar people. Farid said it was a congress for local Communist Party members . . .5

f i lli ng a g a p: al-jalid  | 209 The political commentary that both underlies and from time to time interrupts the narrative is for the most part unremarkable. There are occasional references to events within the Soviet Union, but in general the narrator seems more concerned with global events and developments ‘back home’ than with the political scene within the USSR itself – though some attention, naturally enough, is also given to the state of USSR/Egyptian relations, which were at that time in a transitional phase (as noted by a Moscow taxi driver, who complains to the narrator about Sadat’s expulsion of Soviet advisers from Egypt).6 It is difficult at times to determine whether the way in which information is presented is deliberately contrived or simply wayward – as when a report of an Israeli raid on Syria is followed immediately by the announcement that Sadat is at that moment building gaols for 1,300 prisoners in the oases, and that communists in Iraq and Syria are collecting donations for their comrades expelled from the Socialist Union in Egypt.7 Entirely distinctive in Sonallah Ibrahim’s work, so far as I am aware, is the short chapter 124,8 involving a reflection on the concept of miracles in Islam and Christianity. The precise motivation for the inclusion of this chapter is unclear, as the author has, to my knowledge, never demonstrated any comparable interest in theology in any of his other writings, and one can only presume that it perhaps represents a passing youthful interest that was never pursued. Also distinctive in al-­Jalid are the author’s references to other Egyptian writers. The importance of Naguib Mahfouz as a sort of mentor to Sonallah Ibrahim’s generation had already become apparent from the time of his imprisonment, when opportunities to read Naguib Mahfouz’s latest works were eagerly seized on by the inmates. At one point in al-­Jalid the narrator engages in a conversation with the Lebanese Haydar about Mahfouz’s collection of short stories entitled Tahta al-­Mizalla (Under the Bus Shelter), though the tenor of the discussion is not described in detail. More noteworthy, perhaps, is that reference is twice made to Tawfiq al-­Hakim’sʿAwdat al-­Waʿy (The Return of Consciousness), a work not published in its definitive form until June 1974 (beyond the period encompassed by al-­Jalid) but which had been circulating in manuscript in incomplete printed versions for some time before that. The main theme of ʿAwdat al-­Waʿy is the gradual decline in the high hopes that al-­Hakim and others had had in the period immediately following the 1952 Free Officers’ Revolution; lent the book by a colleague,

210 | sonallah i b r a h im the narrator underlines the following passage, thus presumably marking it out as representing an approximation of his own views: But he (Nasser) submerged us in his magic or dream. Perhaps it was his personal magic, as they say, or perhaps it was the dream that we started to live in, with all those hopes and promises. Those wonderful pictures of the revolution’s achievements that he executed for us. The instruments of an all-­encompassing propaganda – with its drums and pipes, its songs and films – that made us see ourselves as a great industrial nation, a world leader in agricultural reform and the strongest power in the Middle East.9

As for the picture presented of Russia itself, rather little needs to be said. Sonallah Ibrahim makes a modest attempt to convey a degree of ‘local colour’ by the inclusion of a few basic Russian words and phrases in Arabic ­transliteration – beginning with (‫ تفاريش (رفيق‬and (‫ الشابكا (القبعة الصوفية‬on the first page, but these are in general few and far between. Unlike in Amrikanli or Warda, neither the author nor the narrator appears to make any serious attempt to delve below the surface of local life; even the narrator’s apparent indifference to its inner workings, however, cannot disguise the picture that emerges of a dour and in many ways highly conventional and conservative society that has singularly failed to achieve the promises and expectations of the Communist Revolution. In this respect, the parallel with the narrator’s home country, Egypt, as exemplified in the short passage from Tawfiq al‑Hakim’sʿAwdat al-­Waʿy quoted above, is almost too obvious to need pointing out. The fact that the publication of al-­Jalid coincided with the protests leading to the ousting of President Mubarak (a sequence of events that Sonallah Ibrahim could obviously not have foreseen while writing it) clearly lends a new perspective to the comparison of the Egyptian and Soviet experiences that is prompted by the book. That apart, it has to be said that in many respects, the work does not appear to offer much that is new in terms of the development of the author’s novelistic oeuvre as a whole – relying as it does on already well-­tried narrative techniques, and featuring as it does a narrator/ protagonist partly modelled on the author himself, and who exhibits, like most of his predecessors, many of the features of a classic ‘anti-­hero’ – ‘a man

f i lli ng a g a p: al-jalid  | 211 or woman given the vocation of failure’.10 The reader in search of additional background material to underpin the narrative of the earlier novel Najmat Aghustus is also likely to be disappointed. Nonetheless, the work represents an interesting attempt to ‘fill a gap’ by covering in fictional form a period of Sonallah Ibrahim’s life that had not previously featured in any of his major novels, and in its portrayal of a revolution that – like its narrator – has clearly encountered some difficulties in finding its own fulfilment. Notes 1. English translation by Roger Allen as Mirrors (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999). 2. al-­Jalid, p. 7. 3. Ibid. p. 213. 4. See, in particular, al-­Jalid, chapter 66, pp. 135–9. 5. Ibid. p. 44. 6. Ibid. p. 192. 7. Ibid. p. 63. 8. Ibid. p. 245. 9. Ibid. pp. 148–9. On Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ʿAwdat al-­Waʿy, see Paul Starkey, From the Ivory Tower (London: Garnet, 1987), pp. 180–2. 10. J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd edn (London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 46.

14 Epilogue 

Alexander Tvardovsky – ‘The hero of my tale, whom I love with all my heart, whom I have tried to depict in all his beauty, who was, is, and will be beautiful, is the truth.’ Tolstoy (as quoted by Sonallah Ibrahim in his Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat, 2005)

I

t is now time to draw together some of the main threads of this study, and to attempt a brief, overall summary and evaluation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels to date. (I use the words ‘to date’ advisedly, as Sonallah Ibrahim is still writing and undoubtedly still has it in his power to surprise us – even though, realistically speaking, it may be doubted whether any future novels would be likely to radically change our overall evaluation of his work.) We may first observe, by way of background to the forthcoming discussion, that if there is one single value that he himself regards as having dominated the whole of his literary activities, it is the devotion to ‘truth’ (‚idq), as exemplified in the quotation from Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat at the head of this chapter. As Samia Mehrez observes, it was the question of ‘truth’ in relation to the writer that formed the central underlying theme of the George Antonius Lecture that he delivered in Oxford in April 2005;1 and it also figures prominently in the acceptance speech that he gave on receiving the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for the year 2004 in Berlin2 – a speech that stands in marked contrast to the words with which he had rejected the Egyptian State novel prize the previous year. This devotion to ‘truth’ as the artist’s prime motivation has also been clearly linked in the case of Sonallah Ibrahim himself with a strong and explicit political commitment, carried through into his writing career from his early years as a member of the

epi log ue   | 213 Egyptian Communist Party – a motivation that forms a mirror image, as it were, to the ‘negative characteristics’ that he applied in Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat to his definition of the role of the writer in contemporary Egypt as follows: Not to write something enjoyable merely for its aesthetic value. Not simply to lose oneself in philosophical and intellectual issues. Not to live captive to one’s individual experience.

Before we return to the question of Sonallah’s political commitment, however, it will be as well first to attempt to summarise some of the main features of his novels and of the course of their development through a writing career that has to date spanned nearly half a century. We should first, perhaps, note that, despite the impressive length of his writing career, in terms of volume Sonallah Ibrahim’s novelistic output is not a particularly large one, amounting to a dozen or so novels (roughly one every four years, on average), of which two (Tilka al-­raʾiha and al-­Lajna) are probably better classified as novellas. The extended intervals between the publication of successive novels – which have not infrequently evoked a sense of eager anticipation on the part of the Egyptian literati – may be attributed to two main factors: the first, the substantial amount of meticulous research that has been required to bring a number of his works to publication (in which respect, we may instance, in particular, Warda); the second, the fact that unlike most of his Egyptian fellow writers – many of whom have accepted government-­funded positions that in some cases appear to have involved comparatively little work – Sonallah Ibrahim has, throughout his literary career, consistently attempted to keep his distance from ‘official’ literary institutions and other manifestations of state sponsorship, preferring as a matter of principle to supplement the meagre income of a novelist by activities such as the writing of children’s books, translations and the like. It hardly needs to be said that this stance has been by no means easy to maintain in the Egyptian literary climate of the last fifty years or so; equally obviously, however, it has served to mark him off from fellow writers such as Gamal al-­Ghitani, who have been happy to accept (and, in al-­Ghitani’s case, at least, to perform with distinction) a number of such roles. As a result, Sonallah Ibrahim has acquired, and to a large extent, retained, a reputation for independence and detachment – a detachment that found its most obvious manifestation in his public rejection of the Egyptian

214 | sonallah i b r a h im State Prize for Literature in 2003 on what were essentially political rather than literary grounds. Turning to the characteristics of the novels themselves, we may note the groundbreaking nature of the ‘telegraphic style’ of Tilka al-­raʾiha – a work that has to a large extent maintained its reputation, both as reflecting the dominant mood of disillusion that had begun to overtake the Arab world even before the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, and as heralding a new stage in the development of modern Egyptian (and Arabic) literature. The series of novels that have followed Tilka al-­raʾiha, with its disturbing depiction of a man attempting to pick up the threads of his life after his release from prison, have been characterised by an intriguing mix of constancy of vision combined with a significant, and apparently unremitting, development of literary technique, albeit within a fairly closely defined set of parameters. Most obviously, from the first tentative beginnings of Tilka al-­raʾiha, which ran to no more than forty or so pages, and with the obvious exception of al-­ Lajna, his subsequent works have been conceived on an altogether different scale: Warda (2000), for example, runs to over 400 pages, while the slightly later Amrikanli (Amri Kan Li) (2003) runs to nearly 500. At the same time, the increase in scale has been accompanied by a growing complexity of construction, involving, first, a deliberate patterning of different narrative perspectives (most obviously, in Dhat and Sharaf, but also, for example, in the central section of Najmat Aghustus), and secondly, the frequent use of intertextual devices of various kinds. The latter characteristic – shared with many other authors of his generation, including most obviously Gamal al-­Ghitani and Yusuf al-­Qaʿid – has indeed become one of the author’s hallmarks, involving the creation of a distinctive mix of fact and fiction (sometimes described as ‘docufiction’); the technique may be seen at perhaps its most effective in the ‘documentary novels’ Dhat and Warda, albeit that the intertextual material incorporated in Warda is of a markedly different nature from that of the earlier work. Certain themes and preoccupations – not least, a concern with homosexuality and sexual inadequacy – may also be observed throughout the sequence of novels. We may also note that, in general, Sonallah Ibrahim has continued to show a preference for an intellectual, ‘literary’, first-­person narrative (which he employs in nearly all his works, with the exception of Dhat and Sharaf ),

epi log ue   | 215 giving many of his works a partly autobiographical flavour that has in some cases (Najmat Aghustus, for example) been explicitly confirmed by the author; the most extreme example of this characteristic is al-­Talassus, the most personal and least political of the author’s novels, which may essentially be accounted a childhood memoir. A further notable characteristic of the series of full-­length ‘first-­person’ novels is that their geographical horizons expand progressively through the sequence: from Upper Egypt (Najmat Aghustus), to Beirut (Bayrut Bayrut), to the Arabian Peninsula (Warda) and America (Amrikanli) – the sequence being completed by excursions to France (al-­ Qanun al-­Faransī) as well as, retrospectively, to the Soviet Union in al-­Jalid. Additional complexity is introduced, in the case of Warda, by the fact that the work not only ranges widely geographically but also involves a complex series of chronological leaps backwards and forwards between past and present, and in al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa, by its unique historical setting. In the light of this variety of approaches, it is perhaps significant that the only major character in any of the author’s novels who could reasonably be described as a ‘hero’ rather than an ‘anti-­hero’ should not only not belong to Egypt but should also belong to the past rather than the present. It only remains to add that, with the future political direction of Egypt currently hanging in the balance, though Sonallah Ibrahim’s enduring literary reputation seems assured, a verdict on the consistency of his political stance must be deferred for the time being at least. Some recent pronouncements, in which he has apparently given his blessing to the ousting of President Morsi and the assumption of power by Abdel Fattah el-­Sisi raised eyebrows in some quarters as they appeared to imply support for a system of government that many observers – both inside and outside the country – would regard as essentially little different from that of Sadat and Mubarak. At this juncture, and particularly in light of the current turmoil throughout much of the Middle East, the likely political development of the country remains unclear, and so too does the ongoing, longer-­term reaction to it of Egypt’s writers and intellectuals. In the meantime, we may content ourselves with the observation that despite the seemingly ambiguous nature of some of his recent pronouncements (like those of many of his colleagues),3 Sonallah Ibrahim retains his reputation as one of the most consistent advocates for the cause of personal freedom against the excesses of totalitalian rule, and that

216 | sonallah i b r a h im as a beacon of integrity in the sometimes muddy waters of recent Egyptian history, his continuing reputation seems assured. Notes 1. Samia Mehrez, Egypt’s Culture Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 75. I have been unable to obtain a copy of the complete text of this lecture, which does not appear to have been retained in St Antony’s Middle East Centre. 2. For which, see http://www.ibn-­rushd.org. 3. On this, see, for example, http://www.madamasr.com/sections/culture/voice-­ dissent-joins-­nationalist-chorus.

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A. Novels by Sonallah Ibrahim al-ʿImama wa-­al-Qubbaʿa (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2008). Amrikanli (Amrī Kān Lī) (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2003; al-­tabʿa 2. (musahhaha), Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2004). Bayrut, Bayrut (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1984; reprint 1988). Dhat (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1992). al-­Jalid (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2010). al-­Lajna (Beirut: Dar al-­Kalima, 1981; Cairo: Matbuʿat al-­Qahira, 1982; Beirut: Dar al-­Kalima, 1983; Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1998; Cairo: Dar Sharqiyyat, 1991). Najmat Aghustus (Damascus: Ittihad al-­Kuttab al-ʿArab, 1974; Cairo: Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida, 1976; Beirut: Dar al-­Farabi, 1980; Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1987). al-­Qanun al-­Faransi (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2008). Sharaf (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 1997). al-­Talassus (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2007). Tilka al-­raʾiha (Cairo: Maktabat Yuliyu, 1966 (confiscated); Cairo: Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­ Jadida, 1969 (incomplete); Beirut: Majallat Shiʿr, 1969; Cairo: Kitabat Muʿasira, 1971). Tilka al-­Raʾiha wa-­qisas ukhra (Cairo: Dar Shuhdi; Casablanca: Dar ʿUyun, 1986). Warda (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2000). B. Other Works and Translations by Sonallah Ibrahim al-ʿAduw [The Enemy], by James Drought, trans. Sonallah Ibrahim (Cairo: Dar al-­ Thaqafa al-­Jadida, 1975). al-­Barakat fi Daʾira Mustamirra (Beirut: Dar al-­fata al-ʿArabi, 1980, 1983, 1986). Cairo From Edge to Edge, photographs by Jean Pierre Ribière (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000).

218 | sonallah i b r a h im ‘Cairo from Edge to Edge’, in John Rodenbeck (ed.), Reading Egypt: Literature, History, and Culture (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), pp. 130–7. al-­Dilfin yaʾti ʿinda al-­ghurub (Beirut: Dar al-­fata al-ʿArabi, 1983, 1986). al-Óayah wa-­al-Mawt fī Bahr Mulawwan (Beirut: Dar al-­fata al-ʿArabi, 1983, 1986). al-Óimar [Brudians Esel], by Günter Braun, trans. Sonallah Ibrahim (Beirut: Dar Ibn Rushd, 1977). ʿIndama jalasat al-ʿankabut tantazir (Beirut: Dar al-­fata al-ʿArabi, 1980, 1983, 1986). Insan al-­Sadd al-ʿAli (bil-­ishtirak maʿa Kamal al-­Qilish wa-­Raʾuf Musʿad) (Cairo: Dar al-­Katib al-ʿArabi, 1967). ‘Kayfa aktub?’, Mawaqif 69 (1992), pp. 17–25. Maʿuna am istiʿmar jadid, by Arnold Anukhkin, trans. Sonallah Ibrahim (Cairo: Dar al-­Thaqafa al-­Jadida, 1980). al-Saqr al-­Aswad yatalaqqa indharan, in press. Wa-­Anqadhat al-­Fila Radiʿaha, in press. Walad la yaʿrif al-­khawf, by the Grimm Brothers, trans. Sonallah Ibrahim (Cairo: al-­Warsha al-­Tajribiyya li-­Kutub al-­Atfal; Beirut: al-­Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-­ Dirasat wa-­al-Nashr, 1981). Yawm ʿAdat al-­Malika al-­Qadima (Beirut: Dar al-­fata al-ʿArabi, 1980, 1983, 1986). Yawmiyyat al-­Wahat (Cairo: Dar al-­Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 2005). Zaʿnafat al-­zuhr yuqabil al-­fakk al-­muftaras (Beirut: Dar al-­fata al-ʿArabi, 1980, 1983, 1986). C. Translations of Works by Sonallah Ibrahim 1. English Beirut, Beirut, trans. Chip Rossetti (Qatar: Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2014). The Committee [al-­Lajna], trans. May S. St Germain and Charlene Constable, Afterword by Roger Allen (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002). ‘Diaries of Oasis Prison’, excerpts trans. Elisabeth Jaquette and Sally Gomaa, Banipal 50 (2014), pp. 52–66. The Smell of It and Other Stories [Tilka al-­raʾiha wa-­qisas ukhra], trans. Denys Johnson-­Davies (London: Heinemann, 1971, 1978). That Smell, and Notes from Prison, ed. and trans. Robyn Creswell (New York: New Directions Books, 2013). Stealth, trans. Hosam Aboul-­ Ela (New York: New Directions Books, 2014). [Originally published London: Aflame Books, 2010.]

bi bli og raphy   | 219 Zaat [Dhat], trans. Anthony Calderbank (Cairo and New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2001). 2. Catalan Mirades furtives, traduït de l’àrab per Jaume Ferrer Carmona (Barcelona: Edicions de 1984, 2010). 3. French Amrikanli (Un automne à San Francisco), traduit de l’arabe par Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 2005). Cette odeur-­là, traduit de l’arabe par Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 1992). Charaf ou l’honneur, traduit de l’arabe par Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). Etoile d’août, traduit de l’arabe par Jean-­François Fourcade (Paris: Sindbad, 1987). Le Comité, traduit de l’arabe par Yves Gonzalez-­Quijano (Arles: Actes Sud, 1992). Les Années de Zeth, traduit de l’arabe par Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 1993). Turbans et Chapeaux, traduit par Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011). Warda, traduit de l’arabe par Richard Jacquemond (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002). 4. German Der Prüfungsausschuss, trans. Hartmut Fähndrich (Basel: Lenos, 1993). 5. Italian La commissione, trans. P. Viviani (Rome: Jouvence, 2003). Quell’odore, trans. T. Di Perna (Catania: De Martinis, 1994). Warda, trans. P. Zanelli (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2005). 6. Spanish El comité, trans. Almudena García Algarra (Madrid: Libertarias Prodhufi, 1991). A escondidas, trans. M. Luz Comendador Pérez (Madrid: Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 2013). Ese olor, trans. Antonio Galán Sánchez (Madrid[?]: Libros de la Ballena, 2014). D. Other Works ʿAbdel-­Malek, Kamal, America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature, 1895–1995 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).

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224 | sonallah i b r a h im Starkey, Paul, ‘“Heroes” and characters in the novels of Íunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’, Middle Eastern Literatures 9 (2006), pp. 147–57. Starkey, Paul, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Stehli-­Werbeck, Ulrike, ‘The question of identity and the narrative concept of Tilka l-­rāʾiªa by Íunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’, Middle Eastern Literatures 9: 2 (2006), pp. 137–46. Stehli-­Werbeck, Ulrike, ‘Referenz und Selbstreferenz: Strategien des Erzählens in Íunʿallāh Ibrahims Tilka l-­rāʾiªa’, in Verena Klemm and Beatrice Gruendler (eds), Understanding Near Eastern Literatures: a Spectrum of Interdisciplinary Approaches (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2006), pp. 203–14. al-­Tahtawi, Rifaʿa Rafiʿ, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric (1826–1831), translated and introduced by Daniel L. Newman (London: Saqi Books, 2004). Wehr, Hans, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Arabic–English), 4th edn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1971). Williams, Caroline, ‘Twentieth century Egyptian art: the pioneers 1920–52’, in Arthur Goldschmidt, Amy Johnson and Barak A. Salmoni (eds), Re-­envisioning Egypt 1919–52 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), pp. 426–7. F. Websites http://www.ibn-rushd.org/English/SonallaCV-E.html http://www.worldpress.org/print_article.cfm?article_id=1317. June 19, 2003; Abdalla F. Hassan, Black Humor in Dark Times (last accessed 3 January 2014). http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/666/cu1.htm. ‘The Smell of Dissent’ [interview with Youssef Rakha] (last accessed 4 April 2014). http://arabist.net/blog/2010/6/25/sonallah-ibrahim-taking-stock.html http://www.youm7.com/%D8%A3%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B9%D8%A7%D8%AC%D9%84%D8%A9-65 http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1811/the-imagination-as-transitive-act_ an-interview-wit [interview with Elliot Colla] (last accessed 25 October 2015). http://www.pwf.cz/rubriky/pwf-2013/authors/interviews/sonallah-ibrahim-youhave-to-decide-what-is-valuable-and-fight-for-it_9591.html [interview with Maria Golla] https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/robyn-creswell-arabic-rhetoric-gets-an-acidbath/ [Robyn Creswell on translating That Smell]

Index ʿAbath al-Aqdar, 8 al-ʿAbbasiyya, 18 ʿAbd Allah, Yahya al-Tahir, 11 ʿAbd al-Quddus, Ihsan, 18, 39 ʿAbd al-Rahman, Jili, 18 Abdel Nasser, Gamal, 12, 18, 19, 20–1, 31, 35, 37, 65, 70, 104–5, 118–20, 136, 145, 150, 175 ʿAbd Rabbihi, Husayn, 22 Abercromby, Lord, 191 Aboukir, 191 Aboul-Ela, Hosam, 176 Abu Madi, Iliya, 157 Abu Sayf, Layla, 156 Abu-Zaʿbal, 20, 24 Abu Zayd, Nasr, 158 ADN (East German News Agency), 25, 37 Age of Depression, 3 The Agony and the Ecstasy, 54 Ahl al-Kahf, 7 ʿAjaʾib al-athar fi al-tarajim wa-al-akhbar, 192, 198 Akhbar al-Adab, 123–4 ʿAlam al-Din, 5 Alexandria, 20, 173–4, 190–2 Algeria, 147, 201 Allen, Roger, 82 Allende, Salvador, 205 America see USA American Indians, 167 American University in Cairo (AUC), 28 American University of Beirut (AUB), 146–7 ʿammiyya, 3, 185 Amrikanli, 4, 26, 27, 52, 141, 155–69, 172, 183, 199, 207, 214, 215 anachrony, 140, 145 analepsis, 46, 62, 63, 141, 162, 183 anti-hero, 59, 74, 107, 133, 152, 215

Aoun, Michel, General, 89 al-ʿAqqad, ʿAbbas Mahmud, 7 Arabian Gulf, 145, 148, 166 Arabian Peninsula, 136–7, 142 Arab League, 91, 105, 174 Arab Spring, 30 al-Ard, 9, 11–12 al-ʿArish, 191 al-Asad, Hafez, 149 Asfour, Gaber, 30 ʿAshur, Nuʿman, 10 ʿAshur, Radwa, 156 Aslan, Ibrahim, 11, 37 Aswan High Dam, 21, 35, 53–6 Aswan Low Dam, 53 ʿAtiyya, Shuhdi, 20, 23 al-ʿAttar, Hasan, 196 Les Aventures de Télémaque, 5 ʿAwdat al-Ruh, 1, 7 ʿAwdat al-Waʿy, 209–10 Awlad Haratina, 8 al-Ayyam, 6 baʿathat, 156 Baath Party, 20 al-Bab al-maftuh, 10 Badaʾiʿ al-Zuhur fi waqaʾiʿ al-duhur, 12 Badawi, M. M., 78, 82–3 Bakr, Salwa, 10 Baʿlabakki, Layla, 147 Bani Suwayf, 23 al-Bannaʾ, Hasan, 174–5 Banque Misr, 129 Barakat, Halim, 156 Bayrut, Bayrut, 25, 26, 52, 86–101, 104, 107–8, 128, 136, 140, 142, 151, 155, 215 Beauvoir, Simone de, 147 Begin, Menachem, 76, 90, 95

226 | sonallah i b r a h im Beirut, 88–9, 91, 93, 96–8, 140, 142, 148, 150 Benjamin, Walter, 22 Berbers, 201 Berlin, 25 Bouhired, Djamila, 147 Brecht, Berthold, 19, 22 Britain see Great Britain Brusians Esel, 27 Bulaqiyya printing press, 4 Bush, George junior, 158 Bush, George senior, 158 Cachia, Pierre, 74 Cairo, 17–18, 23, 24, 25, 140, 142, 145, 163, 166, 171–7, 180–1, 191–2, 196, 199, 205 Cairo Agreement (1994), 158 Cairo Fire (1952), 18 Cairo from Edge to Edge, 27 Cairo International Book Fair, 28 Cairo Opera House, 29, 168 Cairo University, 17, 18 Calderbank, Anthony, 113, 120 California, 163 Camp David, 71, 90, 105 Camus, Albert, 19, 22, 45 Carter, Jimmy (US President), 76, 79, 82, 94 Casablanca, 24 Castro (district of San Francisco), 162, 164 Castro, Fidel, 148 Chahine, Youssef 9 Chekhov, Anton, 19 China, 138–9 cholera epidemic (1947), 179, 201 Christianity, 209 Clinton, Bill (US President), 158, 162, 164 colloquial Arabic, see ʿammiyya Communist Party of Egypt, 19–21, 23, 35, 106, 174, 213 Copts, Coptic, 196 Le courier de l’Égypte, 3, 190 Creswell, Robyn, 22, 24, 30, 38–9, 101, 175, 177 Daily Californian, 162 Dar al-Adab, 205 Dar al-Hilal, 123–4 Dar al-Kalima, 69

Dar al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabi, 86, 104, 137, 155, 171, 189 Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 23, 37, 55, 205 Dar Qurtuba, 37 Darraj, Faisal, 28 Dar Shuhdi, 37 Dayan, Moshe, 76, 95 De Bruyn, Günter, 27 Debt Commission, 173 Le décade égyptienne, 3, 190 Deir Yassin, 179 Denon, Vivant, 192 Description de l’Égypte, 3, 190, 192 Dhat, 26, 28, 52, 60, 79–80, 93, 94, 95, 101, 104–20, 123, 126–8, 131, 133, 143, 155, 161, 185, 214 Dhat al-Himma, 107–8 Dhofar, 27, 136–40, 146, 148 Dhofar Force, 137 Dhofar Liberation Front (DLF), 137, 138 Diwan Group, 7 Dokki, 18 Don Quixote, 116 Drought, James, 27 El-Enany, Rasheed, 65, 160, 201–2 Eliot, T. S., 22 ellipsis, 76, 115, 127 Empty Quarter, 137 The Enemy, 27 engagement, 9 Étoile d’août, 55 l’Étranger, 45 Europe, 156 Ezbekiyya Square, 196 Fadl, Fathi, 124 Farag, Alfred, 10 Farida, Queen, 180 Farouk, King, 174, 179–80 Fayyad, Sulayman, 11, 37 Fénelon, François, 4 Fi al-shiʿr al-jahili, 6 al-Fikr al-muʿasir, 69 Filipinos, 144 first-person narrator, 193, 206, 214 First World War, 87 Foda, Farag, 124, 158 The Fountainhead, 20 Fourès, Pauline, 193, 195, 199–200

i ndex   | 227 France, 1–3, 27, 87–9, 156, 171, 189–202, 215 National Assembly, 200 Free Officers’ Revolution (1952), 1, 3, 9, 18, 34–5, 70, 105, 135, 173, 175, 209–10 Freud, Sigmund, 45 Fuad, King, 179 fusha, 3, 185 Gallery 68, 2, 10–12, 52 al-Gamaʿa al-Islamiyya, 124–5 Gates, Bill, 165 Gaza–Jericho Agreement, 158 Gemayel, Amine, 89 Gemayel, Bachir, 89 Generation of the Sixties, 1, 6, 10–11, 45, 52, 202 Genette, Gérard, 42, 76, 126 George Antonius Lecture, 212 Ghalib Halasa Award, 27 Ghanim, Fathi, 10 al-Ghitani, Gamal, 6, 11, 12–13, 45, 123, 213, 214 Golan Heights, 206 Gorky, Maxim, 19 Graves, Robert, 20 Great Britain, 17, 53, 139, 145–6, 148, 152, 173–4, 178–80, 189–91, 196 Grimm Brothers, 27 Guardian Weekly, 162 Guevara, Che, 148 Gulf see Arabian Gulf Gulf States, 157 Gulf War (1991), 124, 157 Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham, 5 Haditu, 18, 19, 34 Hafez, Sabry, 28 Haight-Ashbury (district of San Francisco), 164 al-Hakim, Tawfiq, 1, 7, 9, 131, 209–10 al-Halabi, Sulayman, 193, 196 Halasa, Ghalib, 11, 37 Haqqi, Yahya, 34, 37, 39 harb al-istinzaf, 117 Hariri, Rafic, 89 al-Hasan, Taj al-Sirr, 18 Hawwa’ bila Adam, 7 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, 6 Heliopolis see Misr al-Jadida Hemingway, Ernest, 22, 37, 45, 46

heterodiegetic narrator, 52 High Dam, see Aswan High Dam Hijazi, Ahmad ʿAbd al-Muʿti, 168 Hikmet, Nazim, 147 al-Hilal, 22 Hitchcock, Alfred, 147 Hitti, Philip, 156 homodiegetic narrator, 52, 79, 91, 92, 108, 126–8, 141, 152, 160, 176 Hussein, Saddam, 149, 158 Hussein, Taha, 6, 7, 20, 166 Ibn Iyas, 12 Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of thought, 28, 212 Ibrahim al-Katib, 7 Ibrahim Bey, 190 Ibrahim, Sonallah passim family background, 17 early life, 17–20, 171–86 imprisonment, 20–3 literary career, 24–31 I, Claudius, 20 Idris, Suhayl, 9, 147 Idris, Yusuf, 18, 19, 36, 37, 80, 156 iltizam, 9, 12 al-ʿImama wa-al-Qubbaʿa, 2, 26, 52, 189–203, 215 India, 190 infitah, 70–2, 79, 82, 105 Insan al-sadd al-ʿali, 24, 54, 65 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 158 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), 11 intertextuality, 26, 45–6, 54, 108, 162, 194, 198, 199, 203 Iran, 139 Iraq, 20, 145, 149, 157, 174, 209 Islam, 209 al-Islambuli, Khalid, 104 Islamisation, 166 Ismaʿil, Khedive of Egypt, 4, 173 Ismaʿiliyya, 90, 95 Israel, 28–9, 71, 88–91, 94, 96, 105, 109, 117, 133, 157–8, 166–7, 174, 206, 209 Ittihad al-Kuttab al-ʿArab, 55 al-Jabal, 10 al-Jabarti, ʿAbd al-Rahman, 192–4, 196, 197–8, 200, 202 Jacquemond, Richard, 113, 116, 176

228 | sonallah i b r a h im Jad, Ali, 51 al-Jalid, 25, 26, 52, 65, 141, 205–11 Japan, 167 Jebel Dhofar, 137, 138 Jerusalem, 94 Jews, 174, 178 Jibran, Jibran Khalil, 157 Jil al-sittinat, 1, 6, 10–11, 45, 52 al-Jindi, Muhammad Yusuf, 24 Johnson-Davies, Denys, 24, 38–9 Jones, Paula, 159 Jordanian Authors’ Union, 28 Joyce, James, 38 Kafka, Franz, 75, 83 Kassem-Draz, Céza, 54, 57, 64 al-Khal, Yusuf, 37 Khalil Bey, 21 Khan al-Khalili, 8 Kharga Prison, 37 al-Kharrat, Edwar, 10, 37, 52, 64, 177 Khartoum, 24 Khitat al-Ghitani, 13 Khrushchev, Nikita, 23, 53 al-Khuli, Lutfi , 10 Kissinger, Henry, 90, 94 Kitab al-gharib fi al-gharb, 156 Kitab al-Tughra, 113 Kléber, General, 191, 193, 196 Knesset, 90 Kuwait, 157–8 Labbad, Muhyi al-Din, 110 al-Lajna, 26, 52, 60, 69–83, 92, 101, 109–10, 128, 131, 133, 155, 185, 207, 213, 214 Lashin, Mahmud Taha, 7 League of Arab States see Arab League League of Nations, 87, 174 Lebanon, 26, 86–9, 91–9, 105, 146, 157, 174 Civil War, 26, 86–9, 91–8 Lefebvre, Henri, 19 Lewinsky, Monica, 158–9, 164 Lindsey, Ursula, 31 al-Liss wa-al-Kilab, 8 Lukács, Georg, 22 Luxor, 125 Madame Bovary, 116 al-Madrasa al-Haditha, 7 Madrid Peace Conference, 157–8

Mahfouz, Naguib, 6, 7–9, 64, 82, 97, 124, 158, 167, 207, 209 Maktabat Yuliyu, 36–7 Malas, Muhammad, 25 Malhamat al-Harafish, 82 Malraux, André 19 Malta, 190–1 Mamluks, 190–1, 196 Mandora, 191 Mann, Thomas, 19 al-Maraya, 8, 207 Marxism-Leninism, 138, 150, 152 Massad, Joseph, 126 Mat’, 19 Matbuʿat al-Qahira, 69 Maupassant, Guy de, 45 Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shimal, 74 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 80–1 Mazhar al-taqdis bi-zawal dawlat alFaransis, 192, 198 al-Mazini, Ibrahim, 7, 20 Mehrez, Samia, 28–9, 96–7, 108, 128, 160, 165, 167, 212 Menou, General, 191–2 Michelangelo, 54, 58, 63 Middle East News Agency (MENA), 24 Miramar, 8 Misr al-Jadida (Heliopolis), 25, 27, 37, 181, 205 Misr Prison, 20 Moreh, Shmuel, 192 Moscow, 25, 92, 205–7, 209 Mostafa, Dalia, 176 Mubarak, ʿAli, 5 Mubarak, Husni, 18, 30, 105, 118–20, 124–5, 205, 215 Muddat al-Faransis bi-Misr, 197 Muhammad ʿAli, 3–4, 173, 190 Murad Bey, 190–1 Musʿad, Raʾuf, 24, 37, 38, 54 Muscat, 139–42 Muslim Brotherhood, 20, 60, 106, 174–5, 180 al-Muwaylihi, Muhammad, 5 Nabil, Mustafa, 22 Naguib Mahfouz Award, 28 Naguib, Mohammed, President, 18, 19 nah∂a, 1–6, 157 Najmat Aghustus, 24, 25, 26, 52–65, 69, 73, 74, 91, 92, 98, 99, 100, 107–8, 127–8, 140, 142, 211, 214, 215

i ndex   | 229 nakba, 1 naksa see Six-Day War Napoleon, 1, 2, 3, 172, 189, 191, 193–5, 199–202 Nasser see Abdel Nasser, Gamal National Company for Mining Industries, 24 National Democratic Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (NDFLOAG), 138 National Democratic Party, 71 National Union, 35 Nehru, 35 Nelson, Horatio, 191 New Testament, 20 New York, 163 Nobel Prize, 90 Non-Aligned Movement, 35 North Africa, 174, 198, 201 Nuʿayma, Mikhaʿil, 157 al-Nuqrashi, Mahmud, 174 Oases Prison, 18 , 20 October 1973 War, 70, 95, 150, 206 Old Testament, 20 Oman, 27, 136–40, 142–6, 148 omniscient narrator, 108, 126–7, 142 Opera House see Cairo Opera House Oslo Accords, 158 Ottoman Empire, Ottomans, 3, 87, 190–1, 196 Palestine, Palestinians, 28–9, 88–91, 149, 178, 191, 193, 196, 201 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), 158 Paraguay, 167 paralipsis, 115 Paris, 198 Peled, Mattityahu, 166 People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), 138–9 La Peste, 45 Phalangists, 88–9 Podgorny, Nikolai, 53 Poitiers, 198 Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman, 139, 143 Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), 138 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 38

Presley, Elvis, 147 Pyramids, Battle of, 190 Qaboos ibn Saʿid, 138, 139, 143–4, 150 Qaddafi, Muʿammar, 149 al-Qahira al-Jadida, 8 al-Qaʿid, Yusuf, 11, 13, 45, 120, 214 al-Qanatir al-Khayriyya, 20 al-Qanun al-Faransi, 2, 26, 27, 52, 141, 189–203, 207, 215 Qasim, ʿAbd al-Hakim, 11, 37, 38 al-Qilish, Kamal, 24, 37, 38, 54 Qur’an, 20, 110–11, 158 Rached, Tahani, 161 Rakha, Youssef, 29, 55, 113, 156, 160, 202 Ramses II, 56, 61, 63 Rand, Ayn, 20 Rasasa fi al-qalb, 131 Ribière, Jean-Pierre, 27 Rifʿat, Alifa, 10 al-Riwaya, 51–2, 56, 58, 74 Riwayat al-Hilal, 123 Riwayat al-jayb, 17 Rosetta Stone, 196 Rossetti, Chip, 101 Russia, 191; see also USSR Rustum, Mikhail Asad, 156 Ruz al-Yusuf, 19 Sabra and Shatila, 89 al-Saʿdawi, Nawal, 10 al-Sadat, Anwar, 18, 26, 53, 70–2, 82, 90–1, 104–5, 118–20, 167, 206, 209, 215 Said, Edward, 29 Saʿid bin Taimur, 137 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 131 Salalah, 137, 140–1 Saleh, Tayyeb, 29–30, 74 al-Sallal, Abdullah, 36 San Francisco, 162, 164, 166, 168 al-Saq ʿala al-Saq, 5 Sara, 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 19, 147 Saudi Arabia, 109, 137 Sawt al-thawra, 143 Second World War, 174, 178 Shakawa al-Misri al-fasih, 120 Sharaf, 26, 28, 52, 123–33, 152, 155, 161, 165, 171, 185, 214

230 | sonallah i b r a h im al-Sharqawi, ʿAbd al-Rahman, 9, 11–12 al-Sharuni, Yusuf, 11 Shia, 89 al-Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris, 5 Shiʿr, 37 Shubrakhit, 190 Sijn al-Wahat see Oases Prison Sinai Peninsula, 90, 206 el-Sisi, ʿAbd al-Fattah, 31, 215 Six-Day War (naksa), 1, 36, 70, 88, 90, 116, 138, 214 ‘Snobbism’, 80 Socialist Union, 209 South Arabia, 140 South Lebanese Army, 89 Soviet Union see USSR Speroni, Charles, 54 Stagh, Marina, 36–40 State Novel Prize, 167, 212, 214 Stehli-Werbeck, Ulrike, 42 Steinbeck, John, 19 Stone, Irving, 54 stream of consciousness, 57, 64 Sudan, 17 Suez Canal, 70–1, 90, 91, 117, 133, 173–4 Supreme Council for Culture, 28 Supreme Council of the Armed forces (SCAF), 205 Swift, Jonathan, 83 Syria, 20, 87, 88, 145, 157, 174, 191, 193, 196, 206, 209

31, 34–47, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61–2, 65, 69, 74–5, 80, 87, 93, 97, 100, 101, 123, 128, 129–30, 142, 162, 175, 178, 185, 195, 199, 207, 213, 214 Tito, Josip Broz, 21, 35 Tom Jones, 116 Tripartite Aggression, 145 Transjordan, 174 Tristam Shandy, 116 Truffaut, François, 147 Tunis, 91, 105 Tvardovsky, Aleksandr, 37

Tahir, Bahaʾ, 11, 18, 37 Tahrir Square, 30, 205 Tahta al-Mizalla, 209 al-Tahtawi, Rifaʿa Rafiʿ, 4 al-Tajriba al-unthawiyya, 27 Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Bariz, 4 Talaʿat Harb, 129 al-Talassus, 21, 26, 47, 171–8, 195, 215 tanwiʿ, 78 Tarikh muddat al-Faransis bi-Misr, 192 Tawfiq (Khedive of Egypt), 173 Taymur, Mahmud, 156 Tel el-Kebir, 173 Tel el-Zaatar, 88 Tenderloin (district of San Francisco), 164 Terre des Hommes, 131 al-Thaqafa al-Jadida, 19 al-Thulathiyya, 8 Tilka al-Ra’iha, 2, 8, 11, 13, 23, 25–6,

Wafd Party, 174 Wahat al-Ghurub, 11 Wahba, Saʿd al-Din, 10 al-Waqaʾiʿ al-Misriyya, 4 Waqaʾiʿ Harat al-Zaʿfarani, 12 Warda, 26, 52, 136–52, 155, 163, 199, 213, 214, 215 War Ministry, 17 War of Independence, 175 Weizmann, Chaim, 76 World Bank, 53, 90 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 20

Ulysses, 38 United Arab Republic, 20, 145 United Nations, 174 UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), 88 University of California, 156, 159, 161 Upper Egypt, 24, 191–2 ʿUrabi, Ahmad, 173 USA, 28, 53, 71, 75, 88–90, 109, 124, 131–3, 139, 149, 155–60, 163–6, 205, 215 USSR, 21, 22, 23, 25, 53, 81, 138–9, 157, 206, 209, 215 Van Gogh, Vincent, 45 Vietnam War, 149, 205 Voyage dans la basse et haute Égypte, 192 Vozninsky, 37

al-Yawm al-sabiʿ, 31 Yawmiyyat al-Wahat, 18, 21, 23, 39, 40, 127, 129, 212, 213 Yawm qutil al-zaʿim, 82 Yemen, 35–6, 40, 42–3, 60, 136–8, 148, 149

i ndex   | 231 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 37 Yom Kippur War see October 1973 War Young Egypt (Misr al-Fatah), 174 Zaghlul, Saʿd, 133, 174 Zaydan, Jurji, 5, 97

Zaynab, 6 al-Zayni Barakat, 12–13, 45 al-Zayyat, Latifa, 9–10 al-Zinzana, 124 Zionism, Zionists, 166 Zola, Émile, 22