A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (15 page)

Zaat
has been widely commented upon, some considering that Ibrahim’s aim is to suggest that consumerism, like some other features of modern Arab society, ‘encourages passivity’, and seeing in the novel criticism of the sort contained in Ibrahim’s earlier short stories, such as ‘Across Three Beds in the Afternoon’.
⁹
In this piece, the protagonists spend most of their time sleeping, when they are not watching television. This story, like
Zaat
, suggests the ways in which a political situation that Ibrahim has characterized as a kind of mix of a lack of popular participation with comprador capitalism can be maintained. However that may be, at the very least
Zaat
contains some startling material relating to the scale of corruption in contemporary Egypt and beyond. While one might have doubts about how far this can be made sense of in translation, since the English version, like the Arabic original,
¹⁰
gives only minimal details of the clippings provided and does not go very far in identifying the persons concerned, Ibrahim’s ‘cut-and-paste’ technique is a remarkable innovation in the Arabic novel.

In other works not available in English, Ibrahim has continued the literary project announced in the 1960s. In
Beirut, Beirut
, for example, he turns his attention to the Arab publishing industry, the protagonist travelling to Beirut in order to publish a novel that in one way or another offends ‘almost all’ Arab regimes.
¹¹
This novel allows Ibrahim to comment on the situation of the writer in the Arab world, while also writing about the civil war in Lebanon. While
Beirut, Beirut
is perhaps a writer’s novel, or at least a novel about the travails of being a writer, later novels like
Sharaf
and
Amrikanli
return to more familiar territory.
¹²
In the former, a young man, idling about the streets gazing at consumer goods he cannot afford, is subjected to a sexual assault at the hands of a wealthy foreigner. Ibrahim may want to see in this an indication of the ways in which Arab populations are invited to prostitute themselves, potentially or actually, to foreign
capital, though for at least one critic the novel misfires.
¹³
The latter novel is the story of an Egyptian academic invited to lecture in the United States at the height of the Monica Lewinski crisis. Though the American university environment is uncongenial to him, the atmosphere at his home university in Cairo is little better, with academic careers being made or broken by how closely individuals are able to conform to dominant religious trends. A recent memoir, a kind of pre-history of
The Smell of It
, has also appeared in Cairo under the title ‘Voyeurism’.
¹⁴
Though Ibrahim’s novels have been getting longer and longer, losing some of the directness of
The Smell of It
, he remains an author to watch.

Gamal al-Ghitany is also a prominent member of the generation of the 1960s, but his writing is very different from Ibrahim’s. While the latter has adopted an explicitly political stance, al-Ghitany has made his reputation through research into pre-modern Arabic literary materials, and his politics, though deeply felt, are rather more concealed. Al-Ghitany is also a journalist and editor of the weekly
Akhbar al-Adab
, one of the few literary reviews for a general audience available in Arabic, which is published by the Cairo paper
al-Akhbar
. His best-known novel, one of only two titles translated into English from perhaps a dozen or so published works, is
Zayni Barakat
,
¹⁵
this text exemplifying its author’s wider literary procedures.

Al-Ghitany first came to prominence in the late 1960s, when, like many other writers of his generation, he published material in
Gallery 68
, the literary showcase of the time edited by an editorial committee including the novelist and critic Edwar al-Kharrat. (The latter’s work is discussed below.) A first collection of short stories appeared in 1969 entitled
Papers of a Young Man Who Lived One Thousand Years Ago
, among them a story purportedly referring to events in the al-Maqshara prison in Cairo during the medieval period and told in the language of the time.
¹⁶
This experiment al-Ghitany then reworked in
novel form to produce
Zayni Barakat
, published in Arabic in 1973 and subsequently translated into most European languages. The historical Zayni Barakat ibn Musa held the office of
muhtasib,
or markets inspector, during the final decades of the Mamluk state in Egypt, managing to retain the post after the Ottoman takeover in 1517 and surviving both the country’s last Mamluk sultan and its first Ottoman ruler.
¹⁷
In the novel, as its translator points out, he is portrayed as ‘the quintessential opportunist and sinister manipulator’, a kind of power behind the throne whose charismatic influence allows him to outmanoeuvre all rivals. The ‘most striking impression’ made by the novel’s source text, a history by Muhammad ibn Iyas (1448–c.1522), is that Zayni Barakat ‘is a survivor’.

Barakat is the leader of a drive to restore moral order reminiscent of Angelo’s campaign in Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
. Like the latter, ‘a man whose blood/Is snow broth [… and] who never feels/The wanton stings and motions of the sense,’ he is apparently incorruptible, and his success is advertised as due to ‘his virtue and integrity, his honesty and righteousness, his strength and firmness, [and] his revered respectability.’ Whereas Angelo is a revolting hypocrite, Barakat turns out to be a man for all seasons, and al-Ghitany’s narrative method, which mixes reports by a fictional Venetian traveller, Visconti Gianti, with letters, proclamations, and other documents written in the language of the time, adds up to a kind of polyphonic portrait of the man. We shall probably never know whether Shakespeare, writing under the censorship conditions of his time, intended to make some particular point in his portrait of Angelo. Al-Ghitany, however, almost certainly means his readers to be reminded of a particular individual through his portrait of Barakat, as was the case in many other literary subterfuges at the time.
¹⁸
This individual, like Barakat, was ‘a man of unknown origin, without roots, on whom fortune suddenly smiled and who claimed that he was going to establish justice on earth’, and Edward Said spells out the
‘correspondence’ in his foreword to the English translation: ‘al-Ghitani’s disenchanted reflections upon the past directly associate Zayni’s role with the murky atmosphere of intrigue, conspiracy and multiple schemes that characterized Abdel Nasser’s rule in the 1960s,’ which nevertheless survived defeat in 1967. Though the parallels are not exact, they are close enough, and Zayni’s charismatic control over the population, his populism and his temporary disappearance following news of the defeat of the Sultan’s armies by the Ottomans are enough to make the connection with Nasser.

These two paths, ‘exaggerated realism’ on the one hand, giving way to politically aware experiment and a critical re-functioning of techniques taken from the pre-modern Arab literary heritage on the other, have provided models for many other writers. However, the two trajectories do not exhaust the possibilities available, and other writers have opened up distinct paths for themselves. Edwar al-Kharrat, for example, has looked to Proust for inspiration in works such as
Rama and the Dragon, City of Saffron
and
Girls of Alexandria
, published comparatively late in life from the 1980s onwards.
¹⁹
He has also produced critical work that acts as a kind of commentary on the kinds of ‘new writing’ with which he is associated.

Al-Kharrat was born in 1926 in Alexandria, and during his student years he was involved in radical left-wing politics, leading to his imprisonment between 1948 and 1950. Following a career spent in the cultural bureaucracy, he published his first novel,
Rama and the Dragon
, in 1979, going on to publish over a dozen other works in the decades that followed. In his critical writings, al-Kharrat is ambivalent towards the ‘committed’ literature that became fashionable in the 1950s. In the wake of the work of al-Sharqawi and Idris, discussed in
Chapter 3
, which marked a new and ‘genuine concern for the vast poverty-stricken inarticulate mass of the people’ and went hand in hand with the development hopes of the day, there came a ‘growing
swell of pompous works of literature that dubbed themselves “socialist” and “realist”, he says, yet which in fact were crudely rhetorical,’ their characters merely stereotypes (‘effigies’) in the manner familiar from Soviet-style ‘socialist realism’. Such work, al-Kharrat thinks, was aesthetically or philosophically naïve, since it took for granted ‘that it was possible and even desirable to portray, or reflect, that is, to represent,
the
reality in literature’. As a result, reality and representation became linked together in a vicious circle, such that only what could be described in realist style was considered the legitimate content of literature, and literature, far from suggesting new ways of thinking, merely reflected and endorsed the official version of things.
²⁰

For al-Kharrat literature should aim at ‘widening the scope of “reality”’, rather than simply representing how it appears, and it should be engaged in a work of ‘constant questioning’. While this may or may not also be an important consideration, the ‘new writing’ for which he has argued has had an authenticity component in that, he says, ‘the Arab literary mind was nurtured on the epic [and] the frankly phantasmagorical,’ and the new writing can be understood as drawing on this ‘rich heritage … while reaping the benefits of the modernist achievements of the West.’ Debates of this sort about the merits of realism and other forms of writing are familiar to students of earlier modernist experiments in Europe, al-Kharrat’s strictures on realism, for example, recapitulating attacks made by modernist intellectuals on the kind of writing favoured by Marxist critics with a penchant for realism, such as Lukács.
²¹
What is of interest here, however, is not so much the provenance of al-Kharrat’s ideas, their ‘reaping the benefits of the modernist achievements of the West’, as the ways in which such thinking has found its way into the aesthetics of the Arabic novel and his own novels in particular.

He has drawn up a typology of the kinds of ‘new writing’ he favours, going from a writing that, like some modernist experiments, seeks to
convey the ‘entire inner life’ in the form of a subjectivism similar to ‘stream-of-consciousness’ writing styles, to a writing that, rather in the manner of the objectivism favoured by Ibrahim, magnifies the ‘alienation, or the estrangement of man’ from the events around him. There is also what al-Kharrat calls a ‘contemporary mythical current’ that draws instead on legends or re-functioned historical and pre-modern materials in the different manners of al-Ghitany in
Zayni Barakat
or Salih in
Bandarshah
. Perhaps al-Kharrat’s own novels are best understood in terms of the first of these alternatives, since they are typically concerned to convey the ‘entire inner life’, including the life of memory.
City of Saffron
, for example, a collection of ‘Alexandrian texts’, is set in the 1930s in Alexandria, and it consists of the boyhood memories of the first-person narrator, Mikha’il, who grew up in the city. Each of the nine ‘texts’ making up the novel is built around an image – ‘Billowing White Clouds’ is the picture with which the book begins – and each of these images connects, rather in the manner of the ‘involuntary memory’ described by Proust, with a whole tissue of past experience. Moreover, Mikha’il’s remembered experience might be taken to be linked with that of al-Kharrat: both the narrator of
City of Saffron
and its author went to school and university in Alexandria; both were raised in difficult circumstances following the deaths of their fathers; both were obliged to work to support their studies, Mikha’il in the novel describing work in the British naval depot at Alexandria during the Second World War, when the German army led by Rommel was almost at the city’s gates.

Mikha’il sees his past in indulgent terms, and he reflects on ‘this obsession of yours – tinged as it is with irony – with that which has perished, which has been effaced’. Perhaps al-Kharrat’s aim in the novel is to reconstruct that ‘perished’ city, the Alexandria of his childhood, in linguistic form, a sort of ‘virtual’ city of saffron to make up for the real one that time has swept away. If so, then this is a project he continues in another novel,
Girls of Alexandria
, which
reproduces the memories of a slightly older Mikha’il, again in nine named sections. According to the English translator of the two books,
City of Saffron
and
Girls of Alexandria
are ‘two excursions into a discourse which continues unbroken … [The text] illustrates the tension between transient surface experience and the unending dream of life which underpins it.’ As in the earlier novel, Mikha’il takes an ironic view of his younger self, of the young man who would order ‘Marxist and Trotskyite books and periodicals … direct from the publishers’ in Europe and America, having them delivered to a post office address in Manshiya, a district of Alexandria. ‘My belief in life then,’ he explains, ‘was that Revolution could not dispense with aesthetics …’

As far as ‘transient surface experience’ is concerned, the later novel records some of the ‘most important event[s] in our recent history’, but only as these are witnessed by Mikha’il out of the corner of his eye. Once, changing buses in front of the Cecil Hotel, for example, ‘I saw the tanks, armoured cars and troop carriers clattering along the Corniche’ to Ras al-Tin Palace to arrest the king (in the 1952 Revolution); earlier there had been the ‘long black Packard’ car ‘belonging to the young Prince Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’, later Shah of Iran, on his way to marry Princess Fawzia (in 1939); and later there is ‘the deep magical voice which had for so long intoxicated millions and filled their breasts with elation … “lift up your head, brother, for the age of colonialism has passed”’ (the voice is that of Nasser bidding farewell to British colonialism).