A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (9 page)

The idea that political circumstances, because deeply undemocratic, have removed a sense of purpose from literature is repeated in
Adrift on the Nile
, this novel also suggesting that artists and writers can nevertheless now expect to be rewarded as they never have been before as the ornaments of the regime. A group of professionals – ‘the director of an accounts department, an art critic, an actor, an author, a lawyer, a civil servant’– meet regularly on a houseboat on the Nile. ‘For the first half of the day we earn our living, and then afterwards we all get into a little boat and float off into the blue’. The novel consists of fragments plucked from this drug-induced haze, these also being recycled as the subject matter for a literary work by one of the characters. Great play is made of the forms that creative work can now take, it having broken with traditional realism, among them the type of experiment associated with ‘the Absurd’. The problem is that
none of these new options seems to fill the void, either because, the real decisions being made elsewhere, a writer’s choices are trivial ones, or because no choice a writer makes will bring him an audience outside the circle of his peers. All of these are, like him, ‘adrift on the Nile’. As one of the characters puts it in the earlier novel
The Search
, from ‘anti-novel … to the Theatre of the Absurd … If you can’t attract the public’s attention by your profound thoughts, try running naked through [Cairo’s] Opera Square’.

Perhaps the best novel Mahfouz wrote during this stage of his career is
Miramar
.
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Set in a small guesthouse or pension (the ‘Miramar’) in Alexandria in the 1960s, the novel is divided into five parts, each of which relates the same material from a different character’s point of view. While the novel suggests considerable scepticism about the achievements of the 1952 Revolution and the role of the writer under the revolutionary regime, this scepticism is voiced by characters who are themselves in various ways compromised, the author himself disappearing into the background.

For Hosni Allam, a ‘gentleman of property’ ruined by the Revolution, things are quite clear-cut: ‘… you don’t believe any of this rubbish about socialism and equality. It’s simply power … Have you actually seen any of that gang walking around in poverty lately?’ But his views are contextualized both by those of Sarhan el-Beheiry, a member of the Socialist Union, the single party of the time, and by those of Amer Wagdi, a retired liberal journalist. El-Beheiry has done well out of the new order, and he asks his fellow guests to be reasonable: ‘look at it this way: what other system could we have in its place? If you think clearly, you’ll realize that it has to be either the Communists or the Muslim Brotherhood. Which of those would you prefer …?’ Wagdi, though nostalgic for the pre-revolutionary liberal order and ‘living proof that the past was no illusion’, reflects that whatever the excesses of the regime’s nationalism, one day the city ‘had to be
claimed by its people,’ as a once cosmopolitan Egypt has now been claimed by an aggressively nationalistic regime.

Miramar
’s display of pluralism might be Mahfouz’s way of hedging his bets: a quintessentially liberal writer, his natural bent in this novel is to give a voice to every side without appearing to endorse any. Nevertheless, he tips the scales a little in his treatment of the servant girl, Zohra, a newcomer from the countryside. It was for her, or for people like her, that the Revolution at least in part was made, yet now she appears like ‘a faithful dog astray, looking for its master’. She is indifferent to politics, and she is rejected by el-Beheiry following his clumsy attempts to seduce her: what’s the good of marrying a girl like Zohra, el-Beheiry asks himself, ‘if it doesn’t give me a push up the social ladder?’ The only character who comes close to Zohra, this lost representative of ‘the people’, is Amer Wagdi, himself a survival from the pre-revolutionary regime, though Mahfouz does not suggest that nostalgia represents any kind of solution. There is no such easy exit from the Pension Miramar. This novel, hinting at the corruption and murky compromises that characterized life in Egypt in the 1960s, might be compared to
The Man Who Lost His Shadow
, written at the same time by the prolific Cairo journalist and writer Fathy Ghanem. In Desmond Stewart’s gripping translation, the latter novel conveys what success under the new regime could involve, and it is told in a similar experimental style.
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Among Mahfouz’s later novels,
Respected Sir
,
Karnak Café
and
Wedding Song
might be picked out.
¹⁰
Each continues the preoccupations of the 1960s, with
Karnak Café
being a
tour de force
of protest against the excesses of the Nasser regime.
Mirrors
is a rewarding work, both in formal terms (it is written in short, named sections, sometimes almost entirely in dialogue), and in terms of its content (a series of sketches of the unnamed narrator’s friends and acquaintances, building up into a kind of portrait gallery of the Egyptian middle class). It contains some of the most telling, though
typically veiled, indications of Mahfouz’s own political and social attitudes.
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However, in the 1970s Mahfouz’s writing also entered a new phase, as he began to experiment with new forms, bringing him close to the experiments carried out at the same date by the younger writers of the ‘generation of the 1960s’ in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. These are discussed in
Chapter 5
. While Mahfouz’s writings from this time onwards will not strike every reader as being among his best, their consistent search for new forms and subject matter bears witness to a continually exploratory mind. They include works such as
The Harafish
,
Arabian Nights and Days
and
The Journey of Ibn Fattouma
.
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The first of these, written in the shadow of the riots that broke out in Cairo in January 1977, is often considered Mahfouz’s last great work, the disturbances of the time causing him to revisit the theme of the formation of modern Egypt and the connections between the old, pre-modern system and the increasingly troubled modern state. With regard to what might be seen as consistently his best work, on the other hand, published between the 1940s and the 1960s, the foreign reader might well agree with the Iraqi critic who writes that Mahfouz was not only the writer who, more than any other, did the most to develop the Arabic novel, ‘rooting’ the form in Arab culture, but that he was also in his own way ‘the most critical, the most radical and the most subversive of all Arab writers’.
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Among Egyptian writers, Mahfouz’s greatest rival in the 1950s and 1960s was Yusuf Idris, a short-story writer, dramatist and journalist, whose work compares interestingly with his. Whereas Mahfouz always tended to disappear behind his books, fashioning a self-deprecating public personality, Idris had an arguably closer relationship with the regime and a rather different conception of literature.

Born in 1927 in the Egyptian Delta to a relatively prosperous family, and a medical student in Cairo during the last years of the prerevolutionary
regime, in his work Idris, like Mahfouz, attempted to forge a national literature, though for him this meant a greater focus on the lives of the poor and a more direct approach to the exposure of injustice and hypocrisy. Whereas Mahfouz cultivated an unruffled public image, Idris typically presented himself as a passionate, even angry, man.
¹⁴
From his student days onwards, when he was arrested for left-wing political activities, Idris was a more obviously ‘committed’ writer than Mahfouz, arguing that literature should assist in the process of social change and in the struggle to bring in a more just social order. Like many writers at the time, he welcomed the 1952 Revolution and the collapse of the hated monarchical regime, identifying the agent of social change in the Nasser regime that replaced it. Perhaps inevitably he was disappointed in that regime’s actual record, becoming more and more disillusioned in later life and less and less productive in literary terms.

Idris’s first collection of short stories,
The Cheapest Nights
, appeared in 1954, and, together with the volumes that swiftly followed it, contains some magnificent stories, some of the best written in Arabic, including ‘All on a Summer’s Night’, ‘The Dregs of the City’ and ‘The Shame’, filmed as
The Sin
in 1965 with Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in the lead role. Later pieces that have been widely noticed include the longer stories ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Black Policeman’.
¹⁵
The former story is a study of the psychology of killing, the latter of the effects of torture, not on the tortured but on those doing the torturing.

‘All on a Summer’s Night’ is set in the Egyptian countryside and is the story of a group of boys, farm labourers, who meet by the irrigation canals on summer nights to dream of a better life, or at least of a life not so dominated by toil and sexual and other forms of frustration. ‘A handful of boys … their muddy faces full of cracks, their clothes in rags, their faces an indefinite blur of tanned hide’, they dream of going to the nearby town of Mansoura. This dream,
however, is no sooner realized than it ends in an outbreak of violence and in the frustrated realization that ‘we were wretchedly poor, and that there was nothing in our homes but barking dogs and roaring fathers and screeching mothers and the suffocating smoke of the stove.’ ‘The Shame’ also ends in frustration and defeat. The story of Fatma, a young girl wrongly suspected of breaking the strict honour code that governs sexual behaviour in her village, it shows Fatma being eventually vindicated, though not before horrific violence is done to her.

9. Still from the film of
The Sin
by Yusif Idris, made in 1965 with Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in the lead role

Idris’s description of such modest lives is repeated in ‘The Dregs of the City’, in which a prim young judge, carried away by the obsequiousness he thinks of as his due, seduces a female servant from a poor area of the city. This he does mainly out of idleness, but also out of a desire to assert his power over her, the story pointing to connections between class difference and sexual exploitation. At
the end of the story, the judge seeks out his servant among the ‘dregs of the city’, suspecting her of having stolen his watch. For a moment he feels ashamed at the performance he is putting on before this miserable woman: standing in the squalor of her home, demanding the return of a cheap watch, he catches a glimpse of the ridiculous figure he cuts. He feels much better when driving back into the better parts of the city, once the ‘orderly streets come into view’, where the ‘people are clean-shaven and well dressed and their features are fine.’

Idris saw his writing as a mode of intervention in contemporary life, which is why, later in his career, he insisted that he could not engage in literary writing with the streets of Cairo flooded with sewage water, public services having broken down as a result of years of mismanagement, and with ‘economic anarchy … rampant’. Instead, he stepped up his activities as a journalist, contributing a regular column to the newspaper
al-Gumhuriyya
throughout the 1960s and to
al-Ahram
from the 1970s onwards. Moreover, Idris wanted to produce a ‘truly Egyptian’ national literature that should serve as a series of ‘revolutionary blasts’ against present conditions. He disliked both the ‘pale imitation of European literature fashionable in the late forties’, consisting of what he saw as the ‘aestheticism and the elitist conception of literature still fostered by “grand old men” like Taha Hussein’ and the result of the earlier generation’s desire to construct modern Arabic literature on the European model. He commented bitterly on what he saw as the ‘drudgery’ of Mahfouz’s
Cairo Trilogy
, for him a sort of vast pastiche of European realism.

However, Idris also disliked the experiments with the Arab ‘heritage’, in other words with pre-modern literary materials, that other writers were turning to in a desire to produce a literature less contaminated by foreign influences. ‘Our cultural heritage is crammed with nonsense,’ he wrote, ‘so much so that when contemplating those hundreds of thousands of books in the
National Library I curse the day we learnt to write Arabic.’ Perhaps Lytton Strachey felt something similar when contemplating what he felt were the cartloads of stuff produced by the British nineteenth-century writers he satirized in
Eminent Victorians
. Perhaps one can see in Idris a figure like Ismail in Hakki’s fable
The Lamp of Umm Hashim
, desiring to liberate himself from the past, even at the risk of smashing it entirely, yet at the same time seeing in that past reflections of the deepest parts of his personality.

Idris wrote of the ‘huge, strange gulf that separates our written language from the simple and fluent idiom in which we speak’, meaning that ‘literature’, elevated conceptions of which Idris disliked, almost inevitably sounded artificial for reasons explored earlier in this book. This gulf was social as much as intellectual, separating the educated classes from the masses, and Idris dramatizes such issues in his stories, not only in pieces like ‘The Dregs of the City’, where the realities of the class structure are exposed, but also in those stories where ‘preachers, authorities and reform-minded intellectuals … deliver
ex cathedra
speeches to admiring or stunned peasants … their grandiloquence [being] only partly understood, if at all.’ He had a ‘deep-seated dislike of the established literary and linguistic authorities’, notably the ‘bunch of eccentrics’ making up bodies like the Arabic Language Academy, who sometimes spoke in literature’s name.
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