Ezzat al-Kamhawi’s House of the Wolf (trans. Nancy Roberts), winner of the 2012 Naguib Mahfouz Medal, is a multi-generational epic in the tradition of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. But unlike the trilogy, which centers on a Cairo patriarch, al-Kamhawi’s book begins and ends with a village outcast, a female orphan who’s married off as a second wife to a much older man:

Like the Trilogy, House of the Wolf is set in a patriarchal world, and it is the men who make life-changing decisions. Yet it is daily life — particularly the lives of women — that provides the book’s rich emotional tapestry. The frisson of the book comes not from the way things change over a hundred years and more. Instead, it’s provided by lost opportunities, often missed chances at love.

The book is set in the Egyptian village of al-Ish (the Nest), and follows the Al-Deeb (Wolf) family from Napoleon’s invasion to the present. Large historical events do appear (Napolean’s failed invasion, wars, the Free Officers Movement, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the US Occupation of Iraq), but they are not plot-drivers. Nor do they change anything essential about our central characters. Mubaraka does change, yet these changes aren’t pegged to new ideas, but instead to the ways she adapts to social and cultural constraints.

The novel begins with its central missed chance: Mubaraka and Muntasir, two young orphans, are in love and want to get married. They’re smart, attractive, and it seems their future should be easy enough to secure. But when Muntasir’s guardian asks for Mubaraka’s hand, Mubaraka’s father misunderstands — he thinks the old man wants Mubaraka for a second wife. Muntasir’s guardian, who now sees Mubaraka’s beauty, goes along with it. The two are married.

Muntasir thus becomes first to leave The Nest for a tumultous life of exile, both in Egypt and abroad. But the story doesn’t follow Muntasir, and we hear only snippets about his life. Instead the novel is interested in the more “ordinary” life of the who stays, Mubaraka. Back in al-Ish, her strong will earns her dominion over a much older husband, a man “whose cough at the end of the street had once been sufficient to send all the children scurrying for cover in some dark corner of the big farmhouse” but who “was now a mere puppet in the hands of this teenage girl.”

If Mubaraka’s older husband was once similar to the character at the center of Mahfouz’s Trilogy, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, he changed utterly when Mubaraka entered his life.

Al-Kamhawi’s book, published in 2010, shares ground with another book published that same year: Radwa Ashour’s multigenerational epic, The Woman from Tantoura, also published that same year. Like al-Kamhawi’s, Ashour’s book takes as its opening move a moment of teenage lust and a missed opportunity for love. Ashour’s book also centers on a woman who doesn’t love her husband and has a large family. But Ashour’s epic, like Mahfouz’s, is interested in the great events that change her characters’ lives. For The Woman from Tantoura, it is the 1948 Nakba, the Lebanese Civil War, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and the power shift toward the Emirates.

In al-Kamhawi’s book, meanwhile, fortunes rise and fall, but these changes are cyclical. Sure, the family’s fortunes decline somewhat after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s redistribution of farmland, but their fortunes rise (and fall) again. Muntasir’s grandson ends up in Iraq in 2003, and flees the war, but it might have been anywhere. We don’t see how the invasion changed him, but instead that he was driven back to Egypt, and to al-Ish.

Al-Kamhawi’s book is also different from Ashour’s in that, while Mubaraka is a strong-willed female character, she never defies the culture of male decision-making. The same can be said of all the female characters in The House of the Wolf. 

Thus, although women form the core of the work, they don’t take on positions of social influence, even in the later years. Young Zayna is on track to become a doctor, but elopes with a carpenter who imprisons her in two small rooms above the apartment he shares with his first wife. After she flees, Zayna goes back to study in the faculty of commerce. But the degree hardly matters in her quotidian life: “When she graduated, she hadn’t needed her university degree as anything but a souvenir. She made her way up the ranks in the private company and married an accountant who worked there.”

Yet even though women don’t make life’s big decisions, it’s the male characters who are secondary. This is, after all, a novel about daily life in “the Nest,” and daily life here is the domain of women. The novel begins and ends in the same place, and with the appearance of a grandson who looks eerily like Muntasir.

Not everyone in the novel celebrates the eternal return. Seven years after he leaves home, Muntasir “felt no regret over what Mugahid had done to him, since he would otherwise have lived and died in al-Ish without realizing how vast the world was, or that a person can move from place to place and create his destiny rather than surrender to a life of stagnation, bound by a strand from a spider’s web.”

But this is not Muntasir’s book, it is Mubaraka’s. The novel is crowded with characters — the family tree in the frontispiece confuses matters, if anything. But it is like an overcrowded village farmhouse, bursting with people from different generations, telling their individual stories about love, death, social expectations, and missed opportunities for happiness.

The pleasure in reading the book in English is not in its language. Nancy Roberts’ translation reads just fine, although it shares many similarities with her translation of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s multigenerational epic, The Time of White Horses. The pleasure is in rooting for people’s ability to find happiness despite social constraints and expectations.

Comics — and graphic novels — continue to blossom in Arabic-writing hotspots, including Algiers, Beirut, and Cairo:

Starting tomorrow, the first edition of Between Cadres (BECA) — Egypt Comix Week — will take place in Alexandria and Cairo. It is, according to Ahram Online, “the first large scale event in Egypt dedicated to comics.”

The week of exhibitions, workshops, discussion groups, and lectures has been organized by the Alliance Française, the Goethe Institute and Sefsafa publishers. Artists from Egypt, Germany, and France will participate. They include German comic artists Isabel Kreitz and Barbara Yelin, French artists Marc-Antoine Mathieu and Jean-Marc Troubet, and Egyptians Michel Maalouf and Fawaz.

Cartooning has a long and rich history across the region — hence the Sawwaf Arabic Comics Initiative at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Mu’taz Sawwaf, whose family is supporting the initiative, said in a prepared statement that comics and cartoons have always influenced society and public opinion and continue to inspire them in the 21st century.

“Yet no one has tried to understand and promote comics art from an educational, academic, and entertainment perspective, nor has anyone honored the Arab pillars of this very creative art form,” Sawwaf said.

Lina Ghaibeh, an associate professor of animation, motion, and graphics at the AUB, has been named the founding director of the initiative. In the release, she said that she hoped “we will be able to grow this initiative and develop it into a full-fledged Arabic Comics Center for the study of this Arabic cultural heritage.”

As Jonathan Guyer notes over at Oum Cartoon, Ghaibeh’s recent lecture on propaganda and Arab comics is worth watching.

But while short-form political cartoons, and longer ones for children, have a rich history in many Arab cities, the interest in longer works for adults is relatively new.  “Young people are looking for forms of expression that represent them,” cartoonist Haytham Ramadan told Ahram Online. They’re finding it in places like the popular comics-based magazine TokTok, he said.

The Ahram Online piece also sounds a note of warning on the future of Egyptian comics, slipping into first person:

It is still not clear if the margin of freedom in Egypt will curb the momentum that is still in its infancy, and what the future of comics in Egypt will be.

We still remember the destiny of the first Egyptian graphic novel by Magdi Al-Shafei, Metro, released in January 2008.

Metro is available in Cairo again, although in very limited distribution.

For the last two months — August and September — Egyptian authorities prevented the “Al-Fan Midan” (Art is a Public Square) festival from being staged. The festival started in 2011, after the uprising, and has been a place for vibrant art and debate. But organizers are intent to keep the fest going in Cairo and across Egypt:

Authorities have prevented the festival, Egypt’s signature post-2011 arts fest, from happening in Cairo the last two months. The first time, paperwork problems were cited, as organizers supposedly didn’t have the right permit.

However, Daily News Egypt reported that, “Al-Fan Midan’s organisers contend, however, that the presidency, which directly controls Abdeen Palace security forces, cancelled the event because one of the event speakers ‘insulted’ the military and the police forces in last month’s event.”

The next month, September, Al-Fan Midan’s permit was rejected for security reasons. Al-Fan Midan organizers held a press conference and said that they would continue to hold festivals. Minister of Culture Gaber Asfour also said he supported the event’s continuation.

Next week, organizers promise a media campaign in support of the festival.

The event has run into previous roadblocks. In April of this year, an Alexandria event was dispersed by police, with organizers and a sound technician arrested on charges of violating the anti-protest law. However, it’s set to return to the seaside city next month. The festival was also on hiatus for two months in 2013 after clashes between pro- and anti-Morsi protesters.

El-Fann Midan was launched in the spring of 2011, soon after the January and February revolt, and is volunteer-run with intermittent funding from the culture ministry. It has staged events in public squares throughout Egypt, including pieces by rising theatre star Laila Soliman, poetry by Zein El-Abdeen Fouad,  art by Mohamed Abla. Basma Abdel Aziz’s new book, Memory of Oppression, a Study of the Torture System, was set to be released at the fest this month. The book release had to be rescheduled.

“Had the committee for the Nobel Prize decided at an earlier date than 1988 that recognition should be given to the renaissance that was occurring in modern Arabic literature, the prize would surely have been awarded to Tawfiq al-Hakim.” – Denys Johnson Davies.

These are the words  translator and author Denys Johnson-Davies wrote in the introduction to The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim, published by AUC Press in 2008.

Johnson-Davies should know: As he wrote in his Memories in Translation, he was consulted when the Nobel committee came to Cairo to discuss their “Arab shortlist” for the 1988 prize. The list, according to Johnson-Davies, included the prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, the perennially mentioned poet Adonis, as well as two authors who are now deceased: Tayeb Salih and Yusuf Idris.

Al-Hakim, who was born in Alexandria on this year’s Nobel Day (October 9), 1898, died in the summer of 1987, just before the Nobel committee apparently turned its mind to Arabic literature. Althought best-known as a playwright, Al-Hakim was also a memoirist, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, journalist, and jack-of-many genres. A newly translated collection of his essays, The Revolt of the Young, trans. Mona Radwan, will be available this fall from Syracuse University Press.

Although lesser-known globally than Mahfouz, Al-Hakim continues to be widely read in Arabic.

And indeed, the older author’s Return of the Soul had a great effect on Mahfouz, who wrote in his Naguib Mahfouz at Sidi Gaber: Reflections of a Nobel Laureate:

I consider Hadith Isa ibn Hisham [A Period of Time, by Muhammad Muwaylihi] the first modern Egyptian novel. Although it has not received the attention it deserves from researchers, I believe it is a great work. It draws directly on the Arab heritage through its use of the maqama style. Its content of social criticism has shaped Egyptian novels until today. In fact, that novel affected our whole generation.

After Isa ibn Hisham, I read Muhammad Husayn Haykal, known as the father of the Egyptian novel, then Taha Husayn and al-Mazni. Then I reached Tawfiq al-Hakim, whose works were truly landmarks in the evolution of Arabic novel writing. In the truest sense, they represented and helped shape a new age.

Al-Hakim’s writing ushered in a modern phase in the art of narration. In all truth, after the early sources of inspiration that shaped my concept of narration, such as the Qur’an, the Thousand and One Nights, and the epic tales that so fascinated me as a child, my direct mentor was al-Hakim. The Return of the Soul I believe marked the true birth of the Arabic novel. It was written using what were then cutting-edge narrative devices. Its predecessors, on the other hand, had turned toward the Western novels of the nineteenth century for inspiration. The Return of the Soul, in that context, was a bombshell.

Al-Hakim pioneered a new kind of literary theatre in Arabic, as well as writing as a public intellectual, a novelist, and journalist. You can read his The Return of the Soul (translated by William Hutchins as Return of the Spirit) and a number of other works in English translation. For those unfamiliar with the great writer’s work, The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim, ed. Johnson-Davies, is an excellent place to start.

A back-and-forth with the author and translator of the witty, wild Women of Karantina (2013), released last month in excellent, gum-snapping English translation:

The must-read Women of Karantina, listed by several authors as one of their “favorites of 2013,” follows several generations of Egyptian crime-boss families in the northern port city of Alexandria as they attempt to take over the city and re-make it in their own images.

Its author is Nael Eltoukhy. Born in Kuwait in 1978, he moved to Egypt while still a toddler. He published his first collection of stories, Technical Changes, in 2003, which as followed by two novellas, the novel 2666, and Women of Karantina. He also translates from the Hebrew and was a once-upon-a-time blogger about Hebrew literature in Arabic.

ArabLit: First, a question to Robin. How and when did you come across this novel? Do you remember your first impressions?

Robin Moger: I’d read Nael’s novels — Leila Antoun (really a novella) and 2006—and had translated an excerpt of the former plus a short story of his and then I think I told him I was keen on translating 2006—which is also terrific by the way. So he said to me that I should wait and read his next novel that he was in the process of finishing, and I waited and I read it and I could tell about three pages in that he’d gone up a gear. He’d outdone himself. Though it was a sort of “voice” novel, all about tone and timing and great lines, it also had these stupidly compelling characters and plot. A properly fantastic comic novel, I thought.

AL: Nael, when did you first begin to write, or plan for, this novel? Was it a conscious response to anything you’d read before, such as Awlad 7aretna / Children of Gabalawi? Or any “true crime” stories you’d read in the papers? Do you remember where the germ of the idea came from?

Nael Eltoukhy: I do remember, yes. I had this dream that I was in a microbus with my girlfriend and the driver harassed her, so we both got out and killed him and then decided to go on the run and set up something new in a completely new place. When I woke up it struck me that this would make a great beginning for a novel and I started thinking about a family that made its living off crime. As for The Children of Our Alley, I don’t much like it. I wasn’t thinking of it at all while I was planning what to write. Actually, I was thinking more of a response to Naguib Mahfouz’s trilogy: the idea of the three generations. Later, though, while I was writing, it struck me that the plot really did resemble that of Children of Our Alley.

AL: Robin, once you’d read the novel, what aspects made you decide you wanted to be the one to translate it? Once you got in up to your elbows, did your impressions of the novel change at all? 

RM: Because I loved it as above and I just knew how I would go about it. I thought I could do a good job on it and it would make me incredibly happy. And it did. Definitely when I start the actual business of translating, no matter how closely you’ve read it, things change in my appreciation of the text. It’s more a case of hearing a tone and voice in my head then finding that you are pegged to a real, concrete text, not writing some literary response, and making it work.

AL: Nael, how do you see the role of the grittiness (bodily fluids, cussing, sewage, dirt) in the novel? Why were you drawn to the visceral? My mother would surely tell you that it would be such a lovely book if you never mentioned mucus, masturbation, or excrement. What would you tell her?

NE: To your mother I’d say, Ah well. Forgive me. And I’d smile. As a general rule I don’t have snappy comebacks for my elders, but you, Marcia… I’d tell you that this is a fundamental part of the spirit of the novel. The novel is built around dirt: around a dirty, realistic tragi-comic tone. Speaking for myself it’s impossible for me to conceive of the story without it.

AL: Robin, you could call the language colorful, you could call the language obscene. Surely many (proper, civil) English-language readers will find moments uncomfortable. Did you have to push yourself to follow Nael into some places? Did you ever think, “I’ll just tone down this one passage…”?

RM: I mean, there’s bad language for sure, but none of those beastly words that make me, personally, cry and I wasn’t ever shocked. It honestly didn’t occur to me that this might be a feature of the book until you asked. So I’d say that, no, I never felt I had to tone down a passage or that I was following Nael into a sewer or anything like that. Actually, you sort of are following Nael into a sewer, it’s just he makes it seem like a good idea. Or maybe Nael is pointing out that, bad luck, you already are in sewer, but it’s all right because he’s holding your hand.

AL: Nael, the events of 2010-2011, particularly what happened to Alexandria’s Khaled Said, play an wonderfully interesting role in the novel, tangled as they are in the neighborhood’s anger, the government’s corruption, and the average person’s (often manipulated) veneration of successive crime bosses. Did setting your book, for the most part, far into the future, give you a freedom that the past and present wouldn’t permit? 

Eltoukhy. From “Arab Artists in a Revolution”

NE: The political events were used to move the story on and that, basically, is because I was trying to create a narrator-cum-lecturer and the history of the neighbourhood had to be linked to the history of Alexandria in general and then, very generally indeed, to Egypt’s history. But I used a lot of incorrect information when it came to Egypt and mixed it with real details. For instance there’s stuff in the novel about the governor of Alexandria banning shisha from the cafes, and that’s true enough, but the residents’ response, all of that came from my imagination. Then there are those parts that take place in the future against the backdrop of a future political dispensation and that, of course, is completely made up.

As for the second part of your question, Yes, I chose to set it in the future because it was easier and left me freer and more comfortable.

AL: Robin, your sentences have great bounce and snap, and are a pleasure to read. Chapeau. Did you have any prose models in mind as you translated? Any books that helped you imagine how this would sound in English? How did you know what you were working toward?

RM: Not really as a prose model, but his characters reminded me a lot of Martin Amis’ deluded underclass/criminal anti-heroes. Though this sounds a bit like a line, I’d say it was the Arabic that gave the sense of how it should feel in English. I didn’t consciously start thinking about English-language prose stylists, though I suppose it is a very distinctive approach. I just started out trying to get the voice down and then refined it a bit. If refined is the word.

AL: Nael. you don’t seem to worry about introducing any new whiz-bangs or gadgets into the future. There are no flying cars, no chips embedded in the characters’ heads. There is the Shanghai Tunnel, true, but besides that everything seems to stay just as it is. (In 2064, we still celebrate Police Day.) You never felt obligated to toss in some google glass?  

NE: True, and there a number of reasons for that, first of all that I wanted to make the story feel believable. I mean, I wanted readers to feel they were hearing and seeing it all up close, with their own eyes and ears, and that would have been impossible to achieve if I’d introduced any science fiction gadgetry. Science fiction would have immediately taken the reader away from the world I was trying to create.

The second reason is that technology develops very quickly and no one can really predict what new inventions will be around sixty years from now, and the kind of books that offer predictions were never a model as far as I was concerned.

The third reason is that I’m basically hopeless at science and I’d never be comfortable writing about something I don’t understand.

Anyway, I didn’t completely ignore the question while I was planning the novel. I thought that if I wasn’t able to create a sense of the future by describing technological innovations then at least I could provide a feeling of strangeness, and this led me to come up with the idea of the tunnels as the place to which I could transport the conflict over Karantina.

By the way, as far as I’m concerned the whole Shanghai Tunnel thing isn’t science fiction. All the details are readily conceivable… like: if there was sufficient funding and enthusiasm for the project it would get made. It doesn’t really require any great scientific breakthrough—it’s not time travel for instance or memory chips implanted in human brains. That was its attraction for me: that it’s simple, that it “feels” futuristic, that it opens the way to talk about the Alexandrian metro.

Moger, from English PEN.

AL: Robin, I found this book by turns bitingly, darkly, and punch-drunk funny, and I know a lot of Egyptian writers who also greatly enjoyed it (Magdy al-Shafee, Muhammad Aladdin, Iman Mersal, Muhammad Abdelnaby). Did you worry at all that the non-Egyptian/Egyptophile reader misses out on the humor? Or is there just nothing much you can do about it? 

RM: In the case of this book I reckon you could go out on quivering limb and say its humour will succeed with a wider demographic than just Egyptians/Egyptophiles. Egyptophobes will love it, for instance. The context for the big joke is well established and a mainspring of the humour comes from posing the characters against the backdrop of a supposedly universal morality and ideological fervour. I would think those that don’t get it aren’t not getting the Egyptianness, just the type of humour on offer, whether they ascribe it to Egyptianness or not. The ongoing joke at the expense of Alexandria, for instance, is more readily absorbed if you are familiar with Egypt, but he sets it up clearly enough. 

AL: Nael, did you sketch out the timeline before you began, or did you just get in and start writing? How long did you work on the book? 

NE: No, it happened during the writing process. Once I was happy that the writing was moving forward I amused myself thinking about what was coming next. The character Hamada, for example, popped into my head while I was writing the first section. Yehyia Volcano came to me as I was finishing off the second part: I was walking in Alexandria when I saw a sign over a shop with the owner’s name on it. I read the name as “Burkan”—Volcano—then saw that I’d got it wrong and that wasn’t his name, but this came after I’d had the idea that Burkan might be the name of a main character. The idea of the tunnels came at about the same time while I was riding the metro in Cairo and examining the way the tunnel looked from inside.

Right from the outset I’d had this vague idea of a crime family in Alexandria and the rest of the main themes appeared while I was writing. This always happens with me. I’m useless at planning novels, except for the very broadest outlines.

AL: Robin, was your process here different at all from translating Crocodiles, Vertigo, Where Pigeons Don’t Fly?

RM: It’s a very different book to all of them, but my process is the same. From one to the other the amount of time I spend in communication with the author or researching stuff will vary, of course. Crocodiles and Karantina are both largely about the voice and the language—much more thought about the writing and sentence structure and punctuation; designing effective rhythms and timing and tone to recreate the novels’ effects. Though that’s part of all translation, something like Vertigo comes a little easier: plainer and less polished—it really comes down to what the author has put his effort into, and recognising that. Pigeons is very long and has a lot of detail you have to research, like Riyadh mall names, streets, Saudi history. The effort there was to try and keep a long heavily-plotted narrative buoyant; not let the prose get in the way, while keeping it alive. In Karantina and Crocodiles, by contrast, the prose is front and centre, though for different reasons.

AL: Nael, why so many powerful women? What do they allow the narrative to do that men couldn’t/wouldn’t? 

NE: Because I love strong women; the women who are capable of imposing their point of view, particularly those from the very poorest and deprived areas. That type is inspiring to me, and specifically its Egyptian manifestation: the hagga or miallima, the woman with a powerful personality who’s able to dominate men.

AL: Robin, has this book won any prizes and I missed them? Or is it too soon yet? (Although yes, I saw that Nael won/wins the Nobel.) 

RM: I don’t think it has. But as you can see from that link Nael’s evolution into a heavily-garlanded literary monster is already underway. Hear me, judging panels: ride on his coattails or be crushed under foot.

AL: Nael, I see that you’re still going out and discussing the book and doing signings. What do people ask about at the book signings? Or complain about? (In perusing the reviews on GoodReads, there are a number of people who warn this book is “not for the young.”) 

NE: There aren’t so many events, by the way, but there was one about ten days ago in Alexandria where people were more interested in debating the way their city was portrayed in the novel. Of course there are complaints about the book’s “obscenity” but these complaints are only on GoodReads and for the most part the readers are saying that they personally enjoyed it but place warnings for younger readers about the novel’s “obscenities” which, I believe, are not regular fare in Egyptian literature. But in general, people mostly ask about things like “the portrayal of Alexandria,” “the language used in the novel, both aamiya and fusha” or “the problematic relationship between official history and alternative history.”

AL: Robin, how are you getting this book out among the masses? Are there any English-translation book-launch events planned? If you had to explain to an Anglophone reader why they’d want to pick up this book, what would you say?

RM: Any events and launch things that the AUC might be doing I haven’t yet heard about. I’ll try to do a bit of promotion here in South Africa where I am (that would be very satisfying), I’ll hand my complimentary copies to influential-looking and attractive strangers and of course the devastatingly effective technique of links-on-social-media. If I can attend some AUC thing in Cairo I will, but not likely, life being as it is. To the Anglophone reader I would say: Good evening. Women of Karantina is a savage comic epic, relentlessly ironic, uncompromisingly rude, profoundly moral, totally true, good value for money, and available online. Ihab Abdel Hamid said of it: هتفشخ دماغ الخواجة

AL: And finally, Nael. You’re also a translator. Did this make you more or less anxious when turning over your book to Robin? Did you involve yourself in the process, or mostly leave it with him?

NE: Yes, I did. Robin sent me the draft translation when he’d finished with it. I didn’t read it all, just focussed on those parts where I anticipated there’d be some confusion in the translation, and we discussed a number of words and formulations together. Sometimes he convinced me and sometimes I convinced him. Naturally there were things I had to just accept would be lost in translation, things it would be completely impossible to translate without footnotes, and I don’t like footnotes and nor, I think, does Robin. So I gave up on my dream that 100 per cent of the content would reach the reader from other cultures. It’s something I first experienced with non-Egyptian Arab friends of mine. They read the novel and enjoyed it despite there being references they didn’t understand because they belonged to a highly localised Egyptian context. I realised there were specific references that would be impossible to understand for anyone but Egyptians: like a little bonus for Egyptian readers. Thats how I thought about them and I left it there. But at least the spirit of the text and the different tones and voices in it were conveyed brilliantly and that was the most important thing for me.

But hey: translation is betrayal. What can we do?

While you wait for your copy to arrive in the mail (or at your local bookshop), you can read an excerpt from Leila Anton and Eltoukhy’s short story “The Next President of Egypt” over at Robin Moger’s blog, QISASUKHRA.

Contributor Aisha K. Nasser explores the difference between Sonallah Ibrahim’s classic novel, Zaat, and the TV series it inspired, just as news comes that Ibrahim’s Sharaf (Honor) will also be coming to the screen:

By Aisha K. Nasser

Introduction

“Zaat” in Arabic is a pronoun that means “self” or “person who shows a particular quality.” In Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel of the same name, the protagonist’s father calls her Zaat al-Himma, or Zaat for short.

She is named Zaat al-Himma (one who shows/embodies resolution, ambition, or determination,) after the mother of Abou Zaid al-Hilali the legendary mythical character. Given that she has shown little resolution, ambition or determination in the novel, readers are left with the assumption that the name has been ironically intended. The scriptwriter for the television series based on Ibrahim’s novel, however, succeeded in turning this ironic name into a reality. Through subtle transformations in the life and character of Zaat throughout the series, she becomes worthy of her full name Zaat al-Himma.

Zaat is a novel published in 1992 (trans. Anthony Calderbank, 2004) by the renowned Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim. The plot follows the life of an insignificant Egyptian woman navigating the turbulent socio-economic changes of the seventies and the eighties. Ibrahim – a leftist – was immensely concerned with documenting these changes, after the dramatic shift in state policy from Nasser’s socialism to the liberal economic policies during Sadat’s and Mubarak’s times (the seventies and eighties respectively). In fact, Ibrahim alternates chapters in this novel: one is dedicated to the story line, while the next contextualizes the event through extensive quotes from newspapers.

His quotes are pointedly chosen to prove the infertility – even absurdity – of the political decisions and the widespread economic corruption. The breadth of his documentation is amazing, and these quotes are immensely important in documenting the socio-economic and political changes that Egypt witnessed during the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century; these were understandably difficult for the screenwriter to negotiate into the scenario, so she didn’t use them directly.

Mariam Naoum, the screenwriter, changed the novel and expanded its scope with the approval of Sonallah Ibrahim. The protagonist, Zaat, has acquired in the screenplay a depth of character that can be easily compared to the novel. Ibrahim’s Zaat is a symbol for many other insignificant people within a specific, turbulent socio-economic period; in the screenplay, she becomes a symbol for contemporary Egyptian women who persist in spite of socio-economic difficulties.

The novel

Zaat is a young woman of middle-class background who drops her college studies to get married. She marries Abdel-Maguid, who has not completed his college degree and is working in a bank. Abdel-Maguid, who induces Zaat to drop out of college, later encourages her to bring in a second income and finds her a trivial job. They live in an insignificant building with people of comparable socio-economic status.

The plot picks up as major changes hit the society: first, liberal economic policies that flood the market with imported commodities, which projects the neighbors into consumerism. Second, political corruption, which results in economic corruption involving some of the state bureaucrats, becomes a quasi-state policy. Third, opportunities are rendered possible, by the rise of oil prices in the Arabian Gulf States, for Egyptian laborers and professionals. Finally, a larger segment of the society is inclined towards religious conservatism, partly as response to the widening economic gap between classes, and partly as an attempt to assimilate within the conservative Gulf States where they are working.

Combined, these phenomena affect Zaat, as she, like her neighbors, friends, and family, are inclined towards consumerist behavior; but only the lucky ones can actually afford it through a “work contract” in the Gulf. Neighbors who remodel their apartments every year besiege Zaat; co-workers, who find her too insignificant to be included in their inner circle alienate her. Helpless, Zaat resorts to tears whenever she is overwhelmed, which is often the case.

The screenplay

The TV drama series was aired during Ramadan 2013 (July/August) under the title: A Girl Called Zaat. Misr International Films, TNTV and BBC Media Action produced it, and Kamala Abou Zikri and Khairy Bishara directed it. The screenplay diverges from the storyline on the span covered. In the serialized version, Zaat is born on July 23, 1952, the day of the revolution, and it ends with Zaat participating in the revolution on Jan. 25, 2011. With such a wide time span, the screenwriter was able to cover significant cultural and political incidents, documenting wars and political changes. The series also documented various cultural events, memorable songs, films, and funerals of legendary singers (Umm Kalthoum and Abdel Halim Hafez). The socio-economic changes that the novel intensely documents are interwoven in the screenplay.

Zaat is not only involved in consuming goods made available by open-door policies of Sadat’s era, but she is also a producer of goods. In the novel, she is only involved in failing enterprises initiated by a couple who live next door. In the series, however, she is actively producing (sewing clothes, head scarfs, nighties, dresses, and later costumes) and selling mainly to her co-workers and neighbors. Through her enterprise, she manages to remodel her bathroom and kitchen against the will of her husband.

The political and economic decadence of the state senior officials (best documented in the novel) coincided with the interests of corrupt businessmen who sought the help of state bureaucrats. The latter usually opened their drawers, as the euphemism for bribes went, in exchange for their much-needed endorsement on official papers.  “Opening one’s mind” is another euphemism for such corrupt acts, one that Abdel-Maguid has not been capable of, despite his employment in the promising banking sector. The screenplay thus has him gone to the Gulf for few years.

During the four years while Abdel-Maguid was away, Zaat thrived. Not only could she temporarily cease her own time- and effort-consuming enterprise and enjoy the fruits of his labor — relaxing, enjoying her time with her friends, and taking care of herself — but she could also be free of his rule. That is, if it had not been for her mother, of course. The depiction of the relationship between mother and daughter within an Egyptian context is realistic, humorous, and witty. In such a relationship, the mother insists on interfering in her daughter’s life, controlling every minute detail, belittling her every act and deed, and refusing to withdraw her guidance of her now mature daughter.

Religiosity was also skillfully handled by the screenwriter and accurately applied by the directors. The costume designer, who conveyed fashions ranging from the 1950s to 2010s, brought about authentic colors and cuts. The viewer thus saw Zaat wearing mini-skirts that grew longer as time went by. Her head covers (and their names) also changed slowly as she progressed, with the whole society, into deeper religious phases. Equally successful was the depiction of the changing inter-faith relations in Egypt: first with Jewish neighbors, then with Christian co-workers, showing how tension in inter-faith relations coincided with growing Islamism.

Zaat, however, remained faithful to her early upbringing, allowing her domestic worker to play church music in her house, and defending it as “God’s Words” against her mother’s objections. Zaat has succeeded in maintaining a balanced religious existence within her family framework throughout her life. Religiosity has come though closer to Zaat’s life, when her son-in-law turned fanatic, refusing to allow Zaat’s family members close involvement in his daughter’s upbringing, and doubting the authenticity of their faith.

Changing gender relations

The changing gender relations within the context of the Egyptian family and the various ways in which females negotiate and renegotiate these relations have gone unnoticed in many cultural representations of modern Egyptian family life. In this section, attention will be focused on the overall depiction of the changing gender relationships. I will discuss the perspectives of both the older and younger generations, in addition to the perspective of someone from the borders (someone of an outsider/insider status). I will then pinpoint moments in the screenplay where these changes have been brought to the forefront.

Zaat’s mother, who early on voiced her disdain at Zaat’s involvement in the paid labor market, never ceased to compare the older and the younger generations. Her stand was clear from the beginning, favoring the male breadwinner and wife homemaker model. After all, this was the model that she was raised with, and it was the model into which she trained her girl.

A girl’s education from her perspective was a waste of time, and she attempted to steer Zaat into studying home economics. Throughout the series, she also trained her granddaughters, after she was done with her daughter, to be excellent housewives modeled after herself. The training, however, doesn’t include any discussion of sexuality that may prepare young girls for their future roles. “The prospective wife and mother is kept in complete ignorance of her only asset in the competitive field–sex,” Emma Goldman observed over a century ago. This was partly responsible for the fractured sexual relations between the married couple as touched upon in the series and elaborated upon in the novel.

The mother also initiated, planned, and executed her daughter’s circumcision (FGC) and attempted the same on her granddaughters, but was faced with her daughter’s firm opposition. Zaat was about to yield to her mother’s pressure, but decided that this had ruined her sexual pleasure and opted out. It is curious – and telling ­ –that decision-making on such a crucial matter is the role of females in the family.

Zaat’s mother decries the friction in relations between males and females of Zaat’s generation. She wonders at the lack of trust that is endemic to the new generation. On the other end of the spectrum, Zaat’s nephew, who has newly returned from the States, has a more radical view. He maintains that Egyptian men choose well-educated and beautiful young ladies to show them off for a while, then keep them locked up for life. Zaat herself considers her husband an additional child that she has to take care of. Her view neatly sums up the ambivalent gender relations in modern-day Egypt.

The screenplay offers a subtle feminist perspective on changing gender relations in contemporary Egypt. Most striking are the huge changes in Zaat’s character. The protagonist, who was depicted as an insignificant young woman in the novel, reduced to tears by various systems of oppression in her life, is transformed in the screenplay to a slowly maturing woman with plenty of agency.

As a young woman, Zaat juggles her responsibilities as a working mother. She starts her days early to dress and feed her daughter(s) and commute to drop her at her mother’s, goes to work, picks up her child, buys dinner supplies, and rushes home for her second shift, without much help from her husband. Such a routine is typical of many working mothers in Egypt since women have joined the working force and men have maintained their traditional roles as “breadwinners.” Her income, not particularly her salary, represents the major share in the family’s income except for the brief years when Abdel-Maguid travels to work in the Gulf.

Zaat, who hastened into marriage to comply with her pre-determined fate and compete with her peers, also dropped out of college for the same reasons. In the ensuing years, Zaat took matters within her marriage into her own hands, making decisions and following them through. Her resolution to compete with her neighbors in renovating her kitchen and bathroom took her five years to fulfill. During these years she worked on her sewing enterprise and saved every penny to manifest a dream to which her husband wouldn’t yield. Upon his objection, she confronted him, saying, “I come home and spend hours every day cooking and washing in these ruins. I had to renovate them.” She was voicing her objections about inhumane conditions for her second shift in the house, ones to which her husband was oblivious.

When Abdel-Maguid spent a few years in Kuwait, he had pre-determined the financial arrangements. He was to send most of his salary to Zaat, who was to deposit most of it with an Islamic financial establishment and only keep what was necessary for the family expenses. Zaat, however, took full advantage of the opportunity, refurbishing the whole apartment and enrolling the girls in a private school. Yet the bulk of the money went to the Islamic Financial establishment as Abdel-Maguid had arranged.

Upon Abdel-Maguid’s return, it was revealed that the Islamic financial enterprise was a scam that embezzled their life-savings, along with that of thousands of other people. Abdel-Maguid, who worked for a bank and had made the arrangements, had himself to blame for the loss, but instead blamed his wife for her expenditures. Her reply was simple and swift, “had I not done all these things, the money would have been lost along with the rest.” Women are often accused of frivolous spending, but in this case Zaat’s frivolous spending was a successful affair.

Saddam’s venture into Kuwait in 1991 had detrimental effects on the Egyptian economy. Many Egyptians returned home, most penniless, and competition for jobs grew higher. In this dire economic situation, it was hard for Abdel-Maguid to find a job, so he was a stay-at-home dad when the long-awaited male heir arrived. It was Zaat who bore the brunt of providing for the family, although her second-shift was now reduced by all the support she received from her mother, her teen-aged girls, and her husband. She could then dedicate more time for her original enterprise, sewing, in which she had moved a step further: sewing costumes for special events.

Amgad, Zaat’s youngest, posed a big challenge for the family. The boy, who as a small child had been unable to speak, suddenly started speaking in English. He was thus unfit for admission in public schools, which have, anyway, deteriorated beyond acceptable standards. Zaat was thus determined to place him in a private school, and her mother volunteered, selling her own apartment and moving in with Zaat to help pay for the school. Zaat was not satisfied with the arrangement, and arranged to meet the school’s owner, who happened to be an old acquaintance. Through the meeting, she landed Abdel-Maguid a job that guaranteed Amgad a substantial discount in school fees, and the family a stable income.

In this, as in other episodes, it was Zaat who made the decision and took practical steps towards executing it. The screenplay has thus portrayed the changing gender relations within the conservative family structure in Egypt. Zaat here is an example of the female at the center of the family with enough agency to sustain the family and better the social standing of its members. The males, however, still hold the formal position as head of the family whose decisions are seldom revoked. It is thus in everyone’s interest to reduce the number of decisions males make. Here, women learn to bypass their husbands in a variety of ways and maintain the equilibrium between formal and actual leadership in the family.

Identity and crossing boundaries

Crossing national boundaries has been an integral part of lives of the Egyptians throughout the last few decades. Millions of Egyptians crossed borders seeking better working and living conditions, either temporarily as in the Arab Gulf States, or permanently as in the US and Europe. Egyptian cinema has touched on the topic of diaspora, identity, crossing borders and re-crossing borders (the returning, especially, of second generation immigrants). Most notable among these are Asal Iswad “Black Honey” (2010), a comedy that tells a story of a second-generation immigrant coming ‘back home,’ where he is faced with disparities between his treatment as an Egyptian citizen vs. as an American citizen. Yet he remains enchanted, loving his original country, and thus the title black honey, denoting the mixed bittersweet feelings he harbors towards it.

Mariam Naoum, who was born in the US, is more concerned with the concept of identity. In a graceful treatment of the issue, she tells the story of two brothers, Zaat’s two nephews, who were born and brought up in the States, and who take up the issue of identity very differently. One refuses his Egyptian origin, insists on being American, volunteers in the army, and is later deployed to Iraq. The other is more in tune with his origins, comes back home, and gets involved in political activism prior to the 2011 revolution.

Conclusion

Zaat, an “ordinary” woman in the novel by Sonallah Ibrahim, has been transformed into a character of strength in the screenplay. Mariam Naoum depicts the changing gender relationships within the setting of traditional family structures in Egypt during the second half of the twentieth century. The screenplay presents how women have been negotiating and re-negotiating relations within the traditional settings that have not been altered in their outward format. Against the backdrop of socio-economic turbulence that marked the seventies and eighties (onwards) in Egypt, Zaat has emerged in the screenplay as an evolving and maturing character who takes matters into her own hands and is thus worthy of her intended name: Zaat al-Himma, the one who shows/embodies ambition, resolution, and determination.

Aisha Khalil Nasser holds a PhD in Middle East Studies from Exeter University, and has recently completed an MA in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Oregon State University. Her research interest is in Cultural Studies and International Women, especially women in the Middle East.

Also, watch the mosalsal:

Since their launch and expansion, the two big big book fairs in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah have attracted the most attention from non-Arab publishers. But Cairo is now attempting to throw its hat into the ring with the city’s first-ever professional program:

From Publishing Perspectives:

In early 2015, the Cairo International Book Fair will launch its first-ever professional program. The program’s set to be held from January 29 through 31, on the eve of the city’s 47th fair.

The Cairo book fair, which boasts two million annual visitors and more than 700 publishers, has seen hard times in the last several years. The fair was cancelled in 2011, and the fairs that followed have each had their organizational challenges.

But Egyptian politics isn’t the only hurdle facing a professional program in Cairo. A number of international publishers are already attending Arabic-focused book fairs in Sharjah or Abu Dhabi.

But Sherif Bakr, a member of the Egyptian Publishers’ Association (EPA), says the Cairo program can work. Bakr is part of an EPA subgroup that has been pushing the new professional program.

In launching a professional program, Bakr says, Cairo is not aiming to compete with the well-funded fairs in Sharjah or Abu Dhabi. Instead, “we actually hope to cooperate.” The Cairo fair, which is traditionally held at the end of January and beginning of February, is nestled between the Sharjah (November) and Abu Dhabi (April/May) fairs. In this way, Bakr suggested, “It would be another chance for foreign publishers to discover the area with a different taste.”

It’s also true that, while the saying is “Egypt writes, Beirut publishes…,” it is Cairo that has the largest number of publishers in the region. And the Cairo fair, Bakr said, “has a better variety” of publishers, “especially with independent publishers and newcomers who are really changing the publishing scene in Egypt and the Arab world.”

Keep reading on Publishing Perspectives.

With the pre-publication launch of an excerpt of Mohamad Rabie’s third novel, Otared — both in the original Arabic and in English translation by Robin Moger — the Egyptian journal Mada Masr is establishing itself as a place for fresh new creative work:

Mada hosts these fraternal-twin excerpts of Otared before the book is published, in the coming weeks, by Dar Al Tanweer.

The novel is Rabie’s third, and he has won acclaim for the first two: Amber Planet (2010) and The Year of the Dragon (2012).  Rabie was also selected to be part of the 2012 International Prize for Arabic Fiction nadwa.

But in this novel, writes translator Robin Moger, Rabie hits his fearless stride.

The novel is named for its protagonist, Captain Ahmed Otared, but it’s also is the planet Mercury. It’s a “future history,” like Nael Eltoukhy’s celebrated Women of Karantina, that follows the fortunes of a Cairo police officer. Or at least he begins as a Cairo police officer when we meet him at the scene of a horrific crime: a father killing and eating wife and children and feeding their flesh to the chidlren’s grandfather.

Moger calls it a “quite extraordinary, weird, epic book. Deeply upsetting (and I mean emotionally affecting, not shocking) in parts (I found some of it hard to read) shocking in parts, but always haunted and terrifying.”

It opens at a horrible crime scene. From the English translation:

​A beginning

This line of blood puts me in mind of many things.

It’s traced on the wall, not quite vertically but leaning at a slight angle and at its apex bending sharply back to the ground. Small droplets hang down, running from the edge of the bend. It reminds me of an ostrich’s tail feather, a column of water rising from a fountain, the glowing tracks of fireworks launched across the sky.

The butcher was a true professional. With his massive cleaver he struck the calf’s forelegs a single blow to bring the animal down then passed the same blade over its neck, opening the rosy throat and an artery to send the blood jetting out in a clean line just like the line of water from a fountain — pulled down by gravity, held horizontal by the heart’s pump — only to meet the wall a few centimeters away and describe itself: the classic profile of airborne liquid, a profile on the verge of being lost forever and then preserved, a stroke upon the wall. Keep reading at Mada Masr.

It’s great to see Mada throwing its hat into the creative-writing ring, and it will be great to see this book getting out to readers in Arabic and in English translation.

Today,  Ittihadiya detainees including rights activists Yara Sallam and Sanaa Abdel-Fattah, will receive a verdict. Abdel-Fattah, like a number of other arrested activists, has been on a hunger strike for the last 60 days. Stories like hers were dramatized last week in a production titled “Cannula: Stories of Empty Stomachs”:

The production, staged by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), tells the stories of detainees “who have decided to stage a hunger strike in protest against their trials, which failed to meet international standards of due process, and their inhumane treatment in prison.”

It focused on the stories of 14 people who have been detained in different prisons, in connection with various cases, over the past year and a half. Among these are field medics, journalists, students, and peaceful demonstrators, and bystanders.

That’s just a fraction of the more than one hundred detainees on hunger strike, along with 1,081 solidarity strikers.

According to a CIHRS release:

In their preparations for the production, members of CIHRS’s Alumni Club collected testimonies of hunger strikers, obtained through prison letters written to families, letters some detainees have managed to publish online, as well as videotaped statements. The alumni club members also contacted detainees’ families and friends who have visited them in prison to gain an accurate understanding of their conditions, the hardships they face, and their motives for going on hunger strike. The play also explores the hunger strikes’ impact on the families and friends of the detainees, and those standing in solidarity with them outside prison. It also tells the story of some of the detainees’ children through letters they have written to their loved ones behind bars.

The play was staged last Sunday at the AUC Greek Campus Theatre and reviewed on Daily News Egypt.

A CIHRS organizer told Daily News Egypt that the performance reflects a human element that’s absent in most discussions about hunger strikers.

Other recent intersections of politics and theatre in Cairo:

Mada Masr: Laila Suleiman’s Whims of Freedom

News on Ettehadiya protesters:

Mada Masr: Lawyers denounce charges against Ettehadiya protesters, verdict expected Oct 26

Daily News Egypt: Amnesty calls for release of activists on trial under Protest Law

Ahram Online: Trial for Egyptian activists Sanaa, Yara adjourned for final verdict

The Egyptian Board on Books for Young People (EBBY) has recently re-launched its website and is re-launching itself in a meeting at Balsam Bookstore next month. Why is it time for the twenty-seven-year-old organization to re-envision itself? And should you help?

The EBBY, initially founded in 1987, is an Egyptian branch of the International Board on Books for Young People, an organization active worldwide in promoting book culture for young readers. Regionally, there is an active UAEBBY in the Emirates, an LBBY in Lebanon, and a PBBY in Palestine, .

According to Egyptian children’s literature scholar and translator Dr. Yasmine Motawy, the EBBY ceased to exist shortly after January 2011, after its patron the Integrated Care Society withdrew from many of its former projects, including EBBY.

For about a year, Motawy wrote in an email, “the fate of [the Egyptian branch of] IBBY was uncertain, until Dr Nadia El Kholy adopted it, found a patron in the Shoura Foundation for Development, and pulled together a team of fabulous people to start EBBY up again.”

It was Kholy’s tenacity, Motawy said, that helped the EBBY “rise from the ashes.” Right now, the group is looking for new people who would like to be involved with the new website, as well as “social media presence and activities” and Motawy hopes “it can be a home for their energies and imaginations.”

The group’s goals are big: Motawy hopes they will establish a home for “publishers, writers, NGOs, scholars, librarians and others who are interested in children’s books” where they can “come together to promote reading, reading activities, writing/illustrating/translating workshops, creating bibliographies and recommendations to promote a reading culture (and hopefully more writing) for children, setting up competitions and working with the government, private institutions and other organisations on whatever activities they imagine can promote a culture of reading and writing for children in Egypt.”

But that’s not all: “We also want to be able to put Egyptian books on the IBBY honor list and eventually make sure an Egyptian writer gets the Andersen award. We also want to work with other IBBY chapters in the CANA region to promote the reading, writing and translation of Arabic children’s books in general.”

They also aim to help parents and children select better books, by creating a “gold EBBY endorsement sticker for books we select”….

In the short term, the new EBBY hopes to reach out to publishers, writers, and others in the field and estabish itself as a “neutral hub” for shared projects. They also aim to help parents and children select better books, by creating a “gold EBBY endorsement sticker for books we select,” and the group is planning to raise funds so that Egyptian authors are represented at children’s book events worldwide.

The November 15 event is an “open conversation,” Motawy said, between herself, editor of Samir magazine Dr. Shahira Khalil, award-winning author-illustrator Rania Hussein Amin, and audience members. She hopes that all who come will “imagine the possibilities of the Egyptian IBBY together. I hope all those interested can make it, the enthusiasm of our small team is infectious!”

If you want to attend:

“EBBY a Home for Everyone Working on Children’s Culture in Egypt” will be held on Saturday, Nov. 15 at 6 p.m. Balsam Bookstore (parking lot available, take a right before the bookstore), 128 Nile St. Dokki 12311, Giza, Egypt.

The new EBBY website:

http://www.ebby-egypt.com

Twitter presence:

@IBBY_EGYPT

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/ebbyegypt

Egyptian writer Hadil Ghoneim’s A Year in Qena was one of five books on a shortlist for this year’s Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature, in the Young Adult category, the winner of which will be announced this morning. The EBBY’s Yasmine Motawy reviews Ghoneim’s novel, and ArabLit talks with Ghoneim about her book, the writing process, and the future of Arabic MG and YA:

By Yasmine Motawy 

One Year in Qena is an intelligent, humorous, and delightful journal whose chapters are paced according to the Coptic calendar used to calculate agricultural seasons in Egypt. For a year, the reader is thrown together with the 13 year old urban writer into a world ruled by the seasons and the mindset of an agricultural society.

Our protagonist joins his family for a year in Qena to care for his ageing grandmother, fully equipped with his anti-boredom kit that he relies on to avoid engaging with his surroundings. He first collides with them by trying to cleverly find solutions to the people’s problems, but is quickly humbled by the understanding that they have dealt with every contingency before and that the modern solutions they have sometimes shunned do not come from stubborn ignorance but from a deeper understanding of the nature of their problems. From awkward collision to happy collusion, the boy learns to find ways to engage with the agricultural, social, culinary and cultural life of this Upper Egyptian village as he tries to make friends, prove his worth to his family, stay connected with Cairo and ultimately grow up.

Yasser Gueissa’s  sleek line drawings discreetly illustrate concepts urban children may not be familiar such as the adobe cemeteries of Upper Egypt, the hibiscus flower, and irrigation equipment. The illustrations culminate into the spectacular ‘Mulid’ festivity scenes towards the end of the book.

This charming story is a crossover book to be experienced in all sorts of combinations; read with small children, read by young readers, or even adults nostalgic for an Upper Egypt they wish they knew better.

ArabLit: Why a boy narrator?

Hadil Ghoneim: I didn’t think too much before making that choice, but as I started writing with his voice that first page, I got into it (or him) and it was working for me. In retrospect I might say it was a practical choice because if the narrator were a girl, the challenge of being an urban modern girl transplanted to a rural Upper Egyptian society would have overshadowed all the other challenges in this experience and it would have been the main struggle in the book. In fact, having a boy as the central narrator allowed me to display several types of female influence surrounding him (mother, grandmother, uncle’s wife, sister and his love interest) without being trapped indoors with them all the time.

I also enjoyed the freedom of building a male character that I like and that both males and females would relate to. I don’t think that being sensitive, tender or bookish are feminine characteristics, and he is like that (besides enjoying soccer and video games). The different cultural perception of masculinity in Qena causes him anxiety and he admits his fears in the privacy of his diary, and perhaps that is why he develops sympathy towards his younger sister when he notices how much less freedom she enjoys outdoors compared to him and compared to her activities in Cairo.

AL: Why Qena? How did the idea come about?

HG: Because it almost rhymes with “sana”?! No, I chose Qena because I have a close friend and relative from there who is also in the agricultural business. I spoke to him a few times during the research period and even midway through the story to make sure things remained believable and realistic.

But the idea of a book came up from a conversation I was having with my friend Ehaab Abdou about the Coptic calendar and the folk proverbs connected to it. Ehaab is very keen on promoting and recognizing the diversity in Egypt’s cultural heritage and he set up a foundation to do just that (Ana Masry). He asked me to join in creating a series of books for children and we agreed I would write the first title and then we invite other writers to contribute more.

At first I thought I would put together a small non fiction book for six year olds about the ancient Egyptian calendar months and that would be it. But then when I saw how it was (and partially still is) connected with agricultural practices it clicked with another passion that I was just beginning to discover at the time, and that is gardening and growing food. And just like this boy, I’ve always lived in Cairo and have no experience of farm life in rural Egypt. “Sana fi Qena” is a journey that I wish had happened to me.

AL: I don’t think I’d call this “young adult” literature, but “middle grade,” (for 8- to 12-year-olds), I guess because the prejudice in US markets is that “kids won’t read about kids younger than them.” How do you see it? Who were you imagining as you wrote?

HG: The only thing I was imagining was the 13 year old boy writing it. I bound myself only by the condition that what he observes or cares about and the language he is using remains as true as possible to his age. Whether younger or older kids would read it, is really up to what they would find interesting.

AL: Do you know how the book will be distributed? Will you do any school visits to talk about it? Readings? How does it get from Balsam’s shop into children’s hands?

HG: Balsam is the publisher of the book and is selling it not only through the Balsam bookstore but through other booksellers as well. Ana Masry foundation bought a thousand copies and plan to distribute those copies through networks of charity organizations that work in poor or faraway places around the country.

I haven’t been to Egypt since the book came out last January, but I hope to meet readers and plan visits next summer.

AL: It seems more gentle (less snarky, less mean, fewer catastrophes) than English-language “journal” books that come to mind for the same age group, like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which was popular both in the US and in Egypt. Do you think Arabic books for young people live in a gentler space? Why?

HG: This particular boy was gentle and sensitive, and I think he had to be like that in order to be able to notice nature and the changes in the weather and the seasons. It affected his mood and his journal entries. But I think his friend Mina would have been the snarky type. As for catastrophes, he had plenty happening to him and his family throughout the year.

I cannot generalize about Arabic books for young people, since we don’t have that many and I haven’t been following the new releases as closely as I used to. But I think Rania Amin’s “Farhana” and Walid Taher’s“Fizo” are snarky and funny. And perhaps the use of Standard Modern Arabic language as opposed to the spoken dialects has a limiting effect in that respect too.

AL: An outsider comes to Qena (and at moments he seems like a US AID representative). The “fish out of water” narrator helps the outsider-reader get inside Qena. But how does the book read to a child from Qena? Do you know?

HG: It’s funny that you say that.  The boy is certainly an outsider coming from the middle classes of the capital city of Egypt and he does carry some of the stereotypes and prejudices that Western outsiders ( e.g. US AID representatives) might have towards rural Upper Egyptians such as backwardness and rigidity. In addition to a little conceit in assuming that he knows of better solutions to their problems than they do. I am hoping that reading about the errors he made (e.g. about the the tractor vs. the cow plough), would make readers both inside and outside Upper Egypt rethink their assumptions about development and modernization.

I sent out a draft of the book to several friends who are from Qena and Upper Egypt, and they recieved it very well and I addressed all their comments. However, they were all grown ups. I haven’t had feedback from a young reader from Qena, but I’m looking forward to that.

AL: This reminded me in some ways of Afaf Tobbala’s al-Bayt w al-Nakhla. What books for young people do you enjoy? Which (in any language) might you consider a model?

HG: Unfortunately, I haven’t read that one. Growing up I used to enjoy the Moghamereen ElKhamsa adventures by Mahmoud Salem (he made them travel all over), and the Shayateen 13 series by him too. In English, I liked Beverly Cleary’s Ramona and Pippi Longstocking. I read all the Little House books by Laura Ingalls with great passion, and at one point as a kid I declared The Secret Garden to be my favorite book. But it’s A A Milne who I still enjoy reading now as a grown up. (I have to re-read The Boxcar Children because that was a one-time favorite too).

AL: How do you balance the “educational” with the “literary” aspects of the book? Did you see it as primarily an educational or an entertainment project?

HG: I think that any good literary work is, in a way, both educating and entertaining. And in general if you want kids to learn anything it better be entertaining.  The other two books I wrote for this age group were non-fiction biographies, and they were heavy on the research and the informational aspect. That is why I enjoyed writing Sana fi Qena so much, planning  only the base of a story and then letting it flow was an exciting experience. Even though I purposely made it convey certain points or information along the way. But I cannot judge for myself whether it comes across to readers as more educational or more literary.

AL: There has been a new surge in Arabic books for young people, just in the last few years. Do you see a future where they become a popular genre, and there are bestsellers among Arabic MG and YA novels? What will it take to make that happen?  

HG: The “alghaz” genre or the paperback mysteries and science fiction series were always bestselling among older children and young adult readers. In fact, given the demographics of the Arabic speaking countries, young adult readers probably comprise the majority of readers even for adult fiction. Especially now that there is a more younger generation of novelists being published.

For a specialized market to emerge for MG novels the way it is in the US for example, I think schools have to be more involved in the process of extra curricular reading. Adapting some of these children’s novels and characters into television shows and movies would also popularize the genre and bring more attention to books.

AL: I would say there is more “politics” (like for instance at the end) than I remember finding in English-language books for the same age. There also are in for instance Faten or Sit al-Koll. Do you think Arab children have more of an interest in politics than American/UK kids?

HG: Arab children are seeing more political conflict interrupting their daily lives, and maybe that makes them more interested in politics, or more averse and fed up with politics. I don’t know. But what is interesting in this comparison, is that American/UK kids get more practical understanding of politics as citizenship than Arab kids. They are introduced early on to politics as a process that runs their schools and activities and makes things happen, and they are allowed involvement in this process.

This is what was happening at the end of the book, when Mina was telling our narrator that in order to build their dream town in Qena, they have to understand “politics.” As for political tension, there was a little of that too when he was forbidden by his family to go to the Coptic moulid in Assyut.

I think discussing or just acknowledging political tensions in children’s books depends on the level of comfort that grown ups in each society feel in talking about politics, religion, and sex with their kids. US racial issues come to mind, would American kids be interested in books that touch upon these issues? Would writers or  parents be comfortable discussing them? I think it’s essential to discuss difficult subjects, but also essential to be very careful and tactful when doing so.

AL: What did you learn in writing this that you might apply to your next book? What have you learned from the reactions of readers? Are you writing a next book?

HG: I’m still learning! I wish there were Arabic magazines that reviewed children’s books. Or even a place where you can read reviews and feedback from  teachers, librarians and parents. Until this happens, I will keep keep looking out for feedback.

I am writing. But it hasn’t taken shape yet. It might not be for children at all.

AL: How will you know if this book has been a “success,” whatever that means to you?

HG: I guess it’s a combination of positive reviews and sales. It didn’t hurt at all to be shortlisted for the Etisalat Award. In fact, we were all thrilled and I’m grateful because it’s given me motivation to continue with writing. Recently, a mom told me that her kids loved the book and now “can’t wait to spend a year in the countryside”. That felt like success to me.

Today marks the launch of Sherif Adel’s “Foot 3aleyna Bokra” (“Pass By Tomorrow”), an all-new satirical SF comic that will be published on the first Wednesday of the month:

The fun, campy “Pass By Tomorrow” — set in the year 3104, and featuring the not-altogether-heroic Fahmi — will see its kickoff tonight at Townhouse Rawabet, next to downtown Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery, at 7 p.m. Musical guests Hany Must and Friends will also be there.

This is author-illustrator Sherif Adel’s (@barbatoze) first serialized comic story, and he’s opened up with a bang. The first issue is fun, cleanly and brightly drawn, with fumbling, larger-than-life characters and a fast-moving story, good for ages 11-111. This work could easily draw in new adult readers, as well as older children, with its engaging humor and expressive drawing work.

The plan, Adel says, is to have out each new issue on the first Wednesday of the month and a launch event on that Friday. If you want to get one of the first 2,000 copies, you’ll have to get to Townhouse Rawabet tonight at 7. If you’re still not sure if you want to brave traffic tonight (and yes, there’s still bad traffic in 3104), we’ve got a brief interview with Adel about what he’s got in store.

ArabLit: So was Pass By Tomorrow written in the far future and transported back to you to transcribe for us? 

Sherif Adel: I’m afraid that’s classified information, let’s just say it involves a time machine, a fake moustache, and a falafel sandwich.

AL: Why the history of the future? For camp/humor value? Just because it’s more fun? Because you’re freer to comment on anything you like: past, present, future?

SA: “Where is Egypt heading to?” is a question that we have been asking ourselves over and over during the past few years and -in my experience at least- we’ve been slowly realising that nothing major is actually changing. Corruption, misbehaviour, harassment, bad traffic, political indifference, and pretty much everything is settling back into place. So Pass By Tomorrow is my answer to an extension of that question, “How will Egypt be like in 1000 years?” In my opinion, it will also be about the same. Our chaotic foolish half-assed way of dealing with our problems and the world, will prevail. On the bright side, we get a lot of surreal comedy on a day to day basis; so there’s always that.

AL: What are the “red lines” of the future?

SA: No red lines per se, except for my personal red lines of not including obscenities and sexual content in my work.

AL: What are your inspirations? 

SA: Inspirations.. I consider myself an avid consumer of fiction in many of it’s forms; I’m specifically enthusiastic about comics, video-games and cartoons. For Pass By Tomorrow, I would say my biggest inspiration is “ملف المستقبل – The Future File” by Dr. Nabil Farouk. They are science fiction novellas that were insanely popular in the Nineties, and I’d go as far to say they introduced a whole generation (myself included) to science fiction and to the hobby of reading itself.

Pass By Tomorrow started out in my mind as a strict parody to ملف المستقبل, the latter was a optimistic imagination of the future where Egypt is a world leading country built on science and ethics with an intelligence team that saved the planet more times than you can count on one hand; while the former is a realistic (and thus satirical) imagination of the future where things are.. as I said pretty much the same as they are now. As I went along with writing the script of Pass By Tomorrow it departed from being a parody towards being it’s own thing; there are still nods here and there to ملف المستقبل, but yeah I wouldn’t consider it just a parody anymore.

AL: Do you have the whole story mapped out? Or rather, has it all been transported from the future to our time? Or is it coming in pieces?

SA: I have the story mapped out, but I’m re-adjusting and tweaking the plot as I go along. I’m planning on using the monthly issue format to be able to get a feel for what people are expecting, enjoying or disliking with the feedback that I get.

AL: I’m not sure of my confidence in the Egyptian intelligence services of the year 3014. 

SA: Me neither.

AL: No girls in the story yet! Well, except our very helpful office admin and the holo-radio lady. Are there women in the future? Does Fahmi have a lady-friend?

SA: Yes, Sahar -سحر- one of the 4 major characters is a lady. The first issue was building up the setting and introducing the reader to the world through the protagonist. The rest of the team are introduced with the 2nd issue.

AL: Are tales of 3014 for readers of all ages? Thus far, I’d say they’re for anyone 11-111.

SA: My intention, as is with the rest of my work, is that anyone of any age can grab a copy and enjoy it. That being said, I would assume that people who spent their childhood in the Nineties will get most of the references and jokes. An interest in SciFi and pop culture would help as well.

More about tonight’s event: on Facebook.

Egyptian novelist Youssef Ziedan made a widely shared statement on Facebook yesterday: He will suspend “any cultural action or interaction in Egypt and the Arab world.”

This announcement came on the heels of a different announcement: Embattled Biblioteca Alexandrina director Ismail Serageldin was appointed as a special consultant to Egypt’s culture ministry.

As the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)-winning novelist wrote in his statement, it is well-known that he and Serageldin have disagreed over the path of the Biblioteca, and that, as a result, Ziedan resigned from his position as director of the Manuscript Center and Museum two years before.

Ziedan further referred to the legal case pending against Serageldin, who has been on trial for three years on charges of squandering public monies. Despite these charges, Serageldin has continued to serve as the library’s director, a position he’s held since its opening in 2002.

Serageldin’s treatment stands in stark contrast to that of one of his former employees, the poet Omar Hazek. As the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information commented last month:

What seriously raises doubts about if the Egyptian government has a political will for the rule of law and fighting corruption, is that Omar Hazeq is still languishing in the Egyptian jails to serve two years besides a fine of EGP 50000 against the backdrop of expressing his opinion peacefully in a protest during the trial of Khaled Saeed’s killers. Meanwhile, Ismail Serag Al-Din, who is accused of financial and administrative irregularities, is still the head of Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Novelist Youssef Ziedan announced yesterday that he was taking a sort of action — removing himself from the Egyptian cultural sphere entirely.

“As of tonight,” Ziedan posted, “I will suspend any cultural action or interaction in Egypt and the Arab world, and I will stop writing my weekly column in Al-Ahram and Al-Watan (and any other newspaper). I will also retreat from any educational efforts, cultural salons, and seminars that take place in Cairo or Alexandria or other Egyptian cities.”

Ziedan further wrote: “I will not retract my decision as long as Ismail Serageldin remains in his position as director of the Biblioteca Alexandrina or he is acquitted by a court, and as long as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is in turn president of the Biblioteca, doesn’t interfere in this matter, which I see as evidence that any cultural effort in this country is futile.”

The post on Facebook had more than 900 shares and 800 comments, many of which urged Ziedan to reconsider his decision.

Ziedan most recently appeared at the Sharjah International Book Fair, where he spoke about the topic of culture and”globalization” alongside Justin Marozzi and Dr. Riyad N’asan Agha. Ziedan is the author of many academic works and four novels. His IPAF-winning Azazeel has been translated into English by Jonathan Wright.

Novelist Muhammad Aladdin’s Column Suspended

Meanwhile, Egyptian novelist Muhammad Aladdin announced on Facebook that he had been asked to “temporarily” stop writing his column for the private Al Shorouk newspaper after his editor was removed from his position.

Aladdin, who has been openly critical of Pres. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, only began writing the column this September.

The author did not think the suspension was related to his latest column, “Sword of Islam Abu Lahab,” which was to have aired yesterday.

Egyptian novelist and poet Mohamed Nagui died in Paris after undergoing liver surgery. He was 68:

Nagui, who won the Nile Award (formerly State Excellence Award) in 2013, had been ill for several years.

He was born in Gharbiya governorate in 1946 and wrote poetry before turning to novels in the 1990s. His first novel, The Moon’s Secret, published in 1994, is considered by some his best work. He published six more well-received novels between 1994 and 2010, including Morning Song, Travel Night, and Al-Ayaqa, Daughter of Al-Zein.

Although Nagui’s work was poetic, it also took a pointed look at Egyptian society, for instance in his 2008 novel The Effendi, “a criticism of the middle class obsessed with chasing monetary and personal gain even at the expense of the nation and the society.”

In a review of The Effendi, published by Dar al-Hilal, novelist and blogger Ahmed Khalifa writes that:

On the surface, Mohamed Nagui’s The Effendi looks like another one of those anger-laden books about the corruption eating contemporary Egypt from the inside out. But delve deeper into this wonderfully realized piece of literature, and you discover that this novel offers much more than that. Nagui uses the by now cliched template of the Egyptian young man who snakes his way up using unethical short-cuts and sleight-of-hand, and turns it over its head by writing something closer to a modern fairytale.

After his seven novels, Nagui returned to his first genre, with a long poem titled Prayers of Oblivion, which came out from Dar al-Ain in 2011. The work explores Nagi’s difficult journey with cancer.

Nagui received a number of tributes on Facebook, including from novelists Muhammad Aladdin and Ibrahim Abdelmeguid. Ahram Online points out that Nagui’s close friend Mostafa Noureddin wrote on his Facebook page: “Great novelist Mohammed Nagui has died. I was with him from when he had his first surgery in November 2011 until his last moments in 2014. To whom shall I give my condolences? To his family, to his friends, to Egypt? We have lost a noble writer, but for me it is another story.” (Translation by Ahram Online.)

It doesn’t seem that any of Nagui’s work has been translated into English.

We have become so accustomed to thinking of religion as a place of singularity in human identity that Diary of a Jewish Musilm gives all the shock in translation that author Kamal Ruhayyim surely intended in the original:

It was — as I have written earlier – beginning about a decade ago that films and novels that foregrounded ordinary Arab Jews began to appear, set in Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria. Among these were Syrian novelist Ibrahim al-Jubain’s Diary of a Damascus Jew (2007), Iraqi novelist Ali Bader’s The Tobacco Keeper (2008), and Ali al-Muqri’s The Handsome Jew (2009). The latter two were widely discussed and also longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

Kamal Ruhayyim’s Exhausted Hearts: The Muslim Jew (2004) was among the first of these new novels. Exhausted Hearts, translated by Sarah Enany and published in English as Diary of a Muslim Jew (2014) was the opening novel in a trilogy. The second, published in 2008, was translated as Days of the Diaspora (2012). The third, Days of Return, was published in Arabic in 2012 and hasn’t yet been translated.

So why did Ruhayyim, who has worked as a policeman in Cairo and Paris, decide to bring Arab Jews back into Arabic narrative arts? Like other authors who have recently written novels featuring Arab Jews, Ruhayyim is not descended from Jewish parents or grandparents. But Ruhayyim’s son Ahmed said that his father has long believed that Jewish Egyptians formed an important part of the Egyptian community, and “he wanted to write a book so the Egyptians remember them and keep their memory immortal.”

The first novel in Ruhayyim’s trilogy, Diary of a Muslim Jew, met with both acclaim and readerly interest. It won a State Encouragement Prize in 2005 and was republished in 2009 after the second novel in the trilogy was released.
The books follow the life of Galal, the “Muslim Jew”, so-called because of his dual religious life. His father’s family is Muslim, while his mother’s is Jewish. Charmingly, the first book opens from the point of view of infant Galal, who is given a six-month-old’s body and an adult’s narrative voice.

Galal is born in the middle of the twentieth century, when the situation for Egyptian Jews is becoming less and less tenable, a moment also sketched out in Waguih Ghali’s seminal 1964 novel, Beer in the Snooker Club. Galal’s Muslim father dies in the Suez War of 1956 without ever meeting his son. At this point, the two halves of Galal’s family don’t yet know each other, and it is a month before Galal’s mother hears that her beloved husband is dead.
Although the opening is pegged to a historical moment, the story barely engages with official history. Instead, it focuses on the characters’ interior lives, most particularly the conflicts that arise between Galal and his mother.

>>Keep reading the review at Qantara.

Scholar and theatre artist Nesreen Hussein is raising funds for an unusual performance: One that turns an academic and personal essay into a multilayered, ongoing theatre event:

The first performance of “My City, My Revolution” is set to open at Rich Mix in London on Jan. 23, 2015. It promises to synthesize physical performance, visuals, text and video, weaving “autobiographical and historical narratives that stem from the experience of an Egyptian woman living a revolution that redefines her relationship to two cities: London and Cairo.”

The performance is based on Hussein’s “Cairo: My City, My Revolution,” published in Performance and the Global City (2013), a collection edited by Kim Solga and D.J. Hopkins.

Hussein answered a few questions about the project over email.

ArabLit: How does an academic essay — embedded in memoir  — become a performance text?

Nesreen Hussein: This is one of the challenges I’m dealing with in this performance, which is how to creatively negotiate a text that is originally intended for an academic context. However, as you suggest in your question, the essay uses an autobiographical narrative — my experience of living the beginnings of the Egyptian revolution between London and Cairo — as its point of departure, which is what I’m investing in and pushing further, using this narrative as a vehicle to put forward broader ideas and to engage other narratives and stories. Narrating the personal experience in the essay uses a language that has a visual emphasis, which contributed to my interest in recreating that text visually. The essay lends itself easily to visual interpretation, and it will be adapted to be more suitable for a theatrical frame — it won’t be used directly as it is.

AL: When did you decide you wanted to make it into a performance piece? At what stage in its creation or reception?

NH: Writing that essay was a long process that went through different stages. It started in 2012 with an attempt to write a scholarly article for an edited book about the relationship between performance and modes of protest and resistance that took place in Tahrir Square at the early stages of the 2011 revolution. But I found it difficult to achieve a level of distance necessary to maintain a fully objective scholarly stance at the time. Tahrir, and all that it stood for, was so close to me personally and emotionally, and acknowledging that closeness was my only way to access the process of writing about this topic. That’s how my experience about the revolution and about Tahrir became central to the essay.

Articulating that experience then led to wider historical narratives about the history of activism in Egypt and the genealogy of urban transformation in Downtown Cairo, before and during the 2011 revolution. So it became a dialogue between the personal, the political and the historical. When I finally finished writing the essay, I became interested in the form that emerged from that process, which was not entirely planned when I started writing; it gradually grew through the writing process. And after hearing the responses of friends and colleagues who read the essay, I’ve realized how visually evocative it is, and also how it engaged different readers and triggered their own contemplation about their relationships to their cities, to their ideas about “home,” displacement and belonging. So I’ve decided to push that potential further in a performance piece.

AL: Why a combination of forms — video, text, visuals, physical performance? Have you written a script that holds it all together, or is that in progress?

NH: Such a script is in progress at the moment, but the decision to use a combination of forms is also driven by what the essay evokes for me. This is how I imagine it in my mind’s eye: as a multilayered text that manifests itself visually and spatially through video, physical performance and verbal text. Some images and moments there might be best interpreted in one medium or the other. On an artistic level, I’m interested in experimenting with different ways of telling a story visually, without relying entirely on verbal text.

AL: There are two others on your creative team: Mahmoud Hamdy and Vanio Papadelli, the first in Egypt and the second in the UK and Greece. How are you working together with them?

NH: We are working collaboratively. Mahmoud is a talented Egyptian visual artist and graphic designer with a unique visual style and an interest in experimentation with image, sound, and typography. He also has a strong position towards the 2011 Egyptian revolution, having been actively engaged in the momentous event since its very beginning, from the frontlines at some points. Mahmoud’s experience of living in Cairo is also interestingly positioned alongside my experience of living between London and Cairo, which is something we are exploring in the creative process.

Vanio is a gifted established performer from Greece with whom I’ve worked in the past. She has a strong artistic identity as a practitioner, and she’s created autobiographical performances using physical theatre sensitively as a mode of storytelling. She also experiments with mediums such as video and site-specific performance. Vanio and I share similar attitudes towards some of the broad issues raised in the piece, such as how we relate to our cities and to our homes.

Vanio and Mahmoud will contribute to the storytelling, employing their skills and mediums of expression. Their contribution will also open up the narrative and respond to its complexity. This is the first collaboration between the three of us, which is something we are excited about. Mahmoud is based in Cairo, while Vanio and I are in London, which adds an enriching, but also challenging dimension to our collaboration, and it’s partly why we’ve launched the crowdfunding campaign, to try to bridge the geographical gap on some level.

AL: How do you navigate what is “Ahdaf’s” and what is “yours”? I assume she’s aware of your project?

NH: Yes, Ahdaf Soueif is aware of the project (and I’m grateful for her generous contribution to our crowdfunding campaign). The essay is not directly anchored in a reading of her memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, but engages with it as a reference point. In some aspects, both the essay and the performance are partly inspired by Soueif’s negotiation of the personal and the historical/political in that memoir as well as in some of her other works of literature, such as In the Eye of the Sun. Especially the latter novel, which is anchored in autobiography, had a large impact on me when I first read it a few years ago. It spoke aptly to my experience as a young Egyptian woman shaping and negotiating her identity while living between two socio-political, cultural, and geographical landscapes, which happen to be Egypt and England in both Souief’s case and mine. The impact of that novel stayed with me since then, and is slowly (and perhaps subconsciously) becoming more and more manifest in my work.

I guess on one level reading that novel made me more aware of the constant tension embedded in my life experience, and that is articulated in my essay and the performance. So while Soueif’s work is one of the threads interwoven in the fabrics of my work, both are not the same, and the distinctions are clear.

AL: Why now? Are people telling you, “The time for revolution has passed…”?

NH: People are saying that, anyway! Which is a view that I do not share. But it’s not why I’m doing this now. I think that now felt like the right moment for me for reasons related to the journey of my creative practice. Also, the essay and how it engages with something I care deeply about triggered that decision, and representing such an essay theatrically posed a challenge that I wished to take. It’s also important to say that the piece is not only about the revolution, nor is it only about my experience. The revolution is always there, it’s present and continuous, it’s a provocation that opens up a series of questions about our ‘selves’ which we are trying to confront in this personal, but also open piece.

AL: What comes next, after the Rich Mix performance? How do you establish a network of participants, and what will they do to carry it forward?

NH: The Rich Mix performance is a work-in-progress that will be developed further, with the aid of larger funding, which we hope to secure after this first showing. We are then aiming to share it in Cairo. I’m also hoping to use this performance in the future as a starting point that builds around it a series of wider modes of engagement to look at the key issues of displacement, belonging, and our urban experiences in an age defined by mobility. It’s still early to decide the specific forms of those modes or what the participants will do, but I think it’s important to push the project beyond the particularities of the performance and see it as an open forum that engages other voices and experiences. And I believe that the subject matter demands and allows for this kind of open inclusive engagement.

You can read more about the “My City…My Revolution…” flexible funding campaign, and also make a donation, on IndieGoGo, or follow news about the performance on Facebook. Hussein can also be found at nesreennhussein.wordpress.com.

Beloved, acclaimed Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour has died, leaving behind a great hole:

Ashour has struggled with cancer for several years, a struggle that has been beautifully chronicled in her writing, particularly her recent Heavier than Radwa. Three days ago, novelist Ahdaf Souief tweeted: “Radwa Ashour: Get well quick. We need you.”

As news of Ashour’s passing spread, many expressed gratitude and loss on social media. Novelist Miral al-Tahawy wrote: “Radwa Ashour…you taught us to love writing…. Good-bye!”

Journalist Amira Howeidy wrote that: “Novelist, literature professor, intellectual, critic and most beautiful, gentle soul Radwa Ashour has died.”

Souief wrote: “Peace my beloved friend. Radwa Ashour. Silence now.”

Ashour left behind her husband, the great Palestinian poet and memoirist Mourid Barghouti, and her son, the poet and political scientist Tamim Barghouti.

A tweet from July 2012.

It was only a few months ago — March of this year — that Ashour was celebrated with a two-day conference on her work by Ain Shams University, titled “Radwa Ashour: Writer and Critic.” Guests and scholars came from around Egypt and beyond to discuss Ashour’s writing.

But the celebrated author — whose Granada trilogy was voted one of the top 100 literary works of the 20th century by the Arab Writers Union, and who has confidently and authoritatively taught hundreds of students to love literature — has not always had an easy relationship with writing.

In 1969, at the age of 23, Ashour traveled to a young writers’ conference in Zagazig, and was overwhelmed by the talents of the other writers. She soon abandoned the idea of writing. In her essay, “My Experience With Writing,” Ashour says that the question of whether or not she’s a truly talented writer plagued her. In the 1970s, “I renounced writing. I said that I was no good, and my resolution hit home as sharply and decisively as a guillotine.”

Ashour and Barghouti, via Mansoura Ezz Eldin

Between the ages of 23 and 34, Ashour focused on being a teacher, a mother, and an activist. Her son Tamim was born in 1977, the same year her husband — Mourid Barghouti — was deported from Cairo. For a time, Ashour’s husband lived in Hungary, and she and Tamim visited as frequently as they could.

But the 1970s passed and, she wrote, “all of a sudden, I found that writing reappeared with an insistent, importuning presence.”

It was 1980 when Ashour got back to writing. The impetus, she says, was the health problems that have continued to dog her throughout her life. Ashour’s first book, The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Student in America, was written after she nearly died. The book, published when she was 37, seems to have let writing’s “insistent, importuning presence” back into her life for good. Her first novel, Warm Stone, was published two years later.

Illnesses confined Ashour to bed many more times. But perhaps — as well as limiting her activities and causing her great pain — they also elevated and honed her writing. In her keynote address at the March conference celebrating Ashour, Professor Ferial Ghazoul discussed her long relationship with the multiple and singular Radwa. She described how Ashour’s passion for writing emerges from a fear of a lurking death, in a metaphoric sense, a fear of “life burial and assassination of potential.”

Ashour’s Warm Stone was followed by several other novels, including Siraj in 1992, the celebrated Granada trilogy in 1994 and 1995, and the quasi-memoir Specters in 1998.

Ashour wrote her half-autobiography at nearly the same time her husband Mourid Barghouti wrote his. But Specters doesn’t paint a picture of Ashour’s life in the same way I Saw Ramallah sketches Barghouti’s. Instead, she both conceals and reveals by moving between the “real” stories of her own life and the fictional ones of a character named Shagar.

The novelist Rehab Bassem, a former student of Ashour’s, said in an interview three years ago, “She was nearly the only professor who talked to us ‘normally’…she didn’t patronize us, she didn’t think us stupid. She was teaching us, listening to us, and she made me fall in love with every single [author] she mentioned. … She made me feel that the things she was teaching us were reachable, tangible, could be grasped and understood and discussed.”

As she taught, Ashour also continued to write: A Part of Europe, published in 2003, and her beloved 2010 multigenerational epic, Tantoureya. She was honored with a number of literary prizes, including the 2007 Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature and the 2011 Owais Prize.

Ashour’s health problems also sidelined her from direct political activism during much of the last few years. But her presence — through her writing — was always felt.

The influence of Ashour’s work on successive generations of Egyptian writers is yet to be reckoned. Acclaimed nineties-generation author Mansoura Ezz Eldin said in an interview several years ago that she hasn’t drawn directly from Ashour’s work. But, Ezz Eldin said, “I really admire her personality. She is like a candle that inspires others, as a human being and as a professor.”

A funeral will be held on Monday afternoon at the Salah al-Deen Mosque in Manial, Cairo.

A partial bibliography of Ashour’s work in English:

Siraaj, trans. Barbara Romaine (2007)

Midnight and Other Poems, by Mourid Barghouti, trans. Ashour (2008)

Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, ed. Ashour and Ferial Ghazoul (2008)

Granada, trans. William Granara (2008)

Spectres, trans. Barbara Romaine (2010)

The Woman from Tantoura, trans. Kay Heikkinen (2014)

Blue Lorries, trans. Barbara Romaine (2014)

More about Ashour:

Barbara Romaine: ‘I Would Like To Be Radwa Ashour’

Barbara Romaine on Translating Radwa Ashour

Amira Abd El-Khalek: ‘Whenever I Think of Writing…I Remember Radwa Ashour’

Youssef Rakha: As one long prepared

Mona Elnamoury: Radwa Ashour’s ‘Siraaj’: A Trip into the Past that Ends in the Present

Mona Elnamoury: Radwa Ashour on the Train of Images in the Egyptian Revolution

By Ashour

“A Clean Kill,” trans. Gretchen Head

An excerpt from Siraaj, trans. Barbara Romaine

An excerpt from Granada, trans. William Granara

Also, a documentary about Ashour that came out of this March’s conference:

Photos and quotes from Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (1946-2014):

Ashour and her husband Mourid Barghouti, posted to Facebook by Barghouti.

On her husband, Palestinian poet and memoirist Mourid Barghouti, from Spectres, trans. Barbara Romaine: “Seven years after his deportation, Mourid would be able to return to our house in Cairo, not to live with us, but for short visits, determined each by a prior permit granted by the authorities in charge of security. Upon his arrival at Cairo Airport, an airport official would stamp his passport and make a note upon it saying, ‘One week, non-renewable,’ or, ‘Two weeks only.’ We would meet him at the airport. See him off at the airport. Wait until we could go to him during our summer holiday, or petition once again in the hope that he might be permitted to visit us again. This situation lasted another ten years.”

Via Lobna Ismail

Via Lobna Ismail.

At center. In Budapest in 1980, from Mohamed Medhat Mostafa.

A 1993 photo in Ashour’s office at the Department of English at Ain Shams University. Via Lobna Ismail.

On teaching: “I joined the Ain Shams University faculty soon after I graduated in October 1967, and have never stopped teaching since, except for the nine months after I got married [1970], when I had to join my husband in Kuwait, but even then I worked as a school teacher. I like teaching, it’s the job I really enjoy, even though currently it puts pressure on me because I need the time for writing, but that’s the only kind of pressure it’s ever put on me. The only other job I might have enjoyed would’ve been a job that involves writing, like journalism, but I can’t imagine myself otherwise. I see myself in the eyes of the students. I feel their eyes are a mirror that comforts and reassures me. I feel there is a value there, the value of that contact, a contact with a life in process. It is actually a very complex experience, which I live moment by moment; no two lectures are alike.”

With her husband Mourid Barghouti and Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi.

On writing and other writers: “Then I went to a young writers’ conference in Zaqaziq in 1969. Looking around me, I saw Bahaa Taher, Yehia El-Taher Abdallah, Ibrahim Aslan, Abdel-Hakim Qasim, Amal Dunqul and others. Admittedly, they were all about a decade older, but each had something to show for himself, some form of evidence that he was really talented. And what had I written, apart from one short story that proved nothing? This scared me even more and I stopped writing. It wasn’t until 1980 that I finally made another attempt. I had health problems and underwent a serious operation, and I felt I might be dying, and suddenly I had this sensation of abrupt awakening: I’m dying to write, and perhaps I will die before I do, so let me write something, say a word or two in time, and it doesn’t matter whether or not I’ll manage to write what nobody else has written. So, based on my relatively recent experience in America I wrote The Journey, and as I did so, for the first time I was learning; nothing teaches you to write better than writing.”

With her son, the poet and political scientist Tamim Barghouti and husband Mourid. Posted to Facebook by Mourid Barghouti.

Again, with Tamim and Mourid.

On her son, Tamim Barghouti, from Spectres: “I would call Tamim for lunch or dinner, or Mourid would call him: sometimes ‘Tamim!’ but at others ‘Tamtam’ or ‘Tamatim’ (‘tomato’), which later evolved into ‘Tamatish,’ and subsequently ‘Mukarrar,’ or ‘Ma’quoud,’ after a visit to Algeria during which Mourid discovered that tomato sauce is known in Algerian dialect as ‘mukarrar ma’qoud al-tamatish.’ In this way the three words were used interchangeably as new names for Tamim. Mourid would shout at the top of his lungs, ‘Ma’qoud! Mukarrar!’ and Tamim’s voice would be heard beneath the window, ‘Yes, Papa!’ In a moment of anger or frustration, I might exclaim, ‘Ya zift!’ Tamim would answer, ‘Yes, Mama,’ and dash up the stairs, fearful all the way of some rebuke. He would ring the bell, and when I opened the door he would find us laughing. Suddenly grasping the absurdity of responding as he had to ‘You rubbish!’ as if it were yet another of his new names, he would join in the laughter.”

With novelist Ahdaf Soueif.

At the launch of The Woman of Tantoura, 2010.

From The Woman from Tantoura, trans. Kay Heikkinen: “I was with the boys on the train and yet I wasn’t, because ever since that day when they loaded us into the truck and I saw my father and brothers on the pile, I have remained there, unmoving, even if it didn’t seem like it.”

Receiving the Owais Prize, 2011.

Campaigning for the release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah.

On protest, from Heavier than Radwa, excerpt trans. Barbara Romaine: “No sooner had the wall been built than kids came with their buckets of paint and paintbrushes, and covered it with colorful artwork, along with whatever graffiti they cared to put there, sayings and slogans. Thus the wall was transformed by the gloriously colored images superimposed upon it, and by arresting murals such as might have pleased David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, the great Mexican artists who painted murals and brought attention to the value of such expression, during the revolutionary period in their own country.

“The fact is that the kids made the best of a bad job when they took a wall–bleak, sand-colored, depressing, painful to contemplate–and turned it into an artistic monument, in brilliant colors that brought relief to the soul. This is not just because they proved that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction–meaning they could be reassured that the laws of nature continue unchanged, subject to the forces of no government, no Israel–but rather that, in offering artistic beauty that also served a purpose, they carried on in the spirit of those who had gone before them. Moreover, they balanced the timelessness of art with the paradoxical notion of timely advantage, and the possibility that the two may be interchangeable, according to circumstance and necessity.”

Signing “Heavier than Radwa,” 2013.

At the conference celebrating her work, March 2014. Photo credit: Amira Abd El-Khalek.

On good-byes, from Spectres: “Her husband stands on one side of the divider, she stands with her son on the other. They call the passengers for boarding. Her husband holds out his hand to say goodbye, she clutches at his hand, beginning to weep. Weeping breaks into sobbing. Her husband entreats her to cancel her trip and go back home with him. ‘We can postpone the journey,’ he says. She shakes her head, dries her tears, and proceeds with her son onto the plane.”

The relationship between Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti and Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour — as traced through their literary works — is one of the twentieth century’s great love stories:

Barghouti and Ashour met as students at Cairo University in the 1960s, and he writes about the beginnings of their relationship in his second memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, trans. Humphrey Davies:

“I read my first poems to her on the steps of the Cairo University library when we were not yet twenty. We took part together in literary gatherings at the Faculty without it occurring to us that a personal interest had developed, or was developing, between us. We were students and limited our conversation to ‘professional’ matters such as our studies and never went beyond these into any intimate topic. She would tell me, ‘You will become a poet,’ and I would reply, ‘And what if I fail at that?’ I’d tell her, ‘You will become a great novelist’ and she’d give the same answer and we’d laugh. This ‘fraternal’ language and collegial spirit continued between us until the four years of study were over and I went to work in Kuwait. I used to write regular letters about my new life in Kuwait to her and to Amina Sabri and Amira Fahmi, our best friends throughout our studies, with whom we’d made something like a small family. I realized, however, that my letters to Radwa contained nothing of my news or the events of my life and concerned themselves only with my unspoken feelings about that life.

“When I saw her on my first visit to Cairo during the summer holidays, we found ourselves talking like a mother and a father, and sometimes like a grandmother and a grandfather. We talked like a family of two that had been together for ages.

“It was out of the question to talk about ‘steps’ we ought to be taking.”

They married in 1970, and Radwa went to the U.S. for a time to study toward her PhD. Their only son, Tamim, was born in 1977. Barghouti writes about it in I Saw Ramallah, trans. Ahdaf Soueif:

“I do not know how men have stolen the right to name children after themselves. That feeling was not simply a temporary reaction to seeing a mother suffer during delivery. I still believe that every child is the son of his mother. That is justice. I said to Radwa as we took our first steps out of the door of the hospital, she carrying the two-day-old Tamim on her arm, ‘Tamim is all yours. I am ashamed that he will carry my name and not yours on his birth certificate.'”

That same year, 1977, Barghouti and many other Palestinians were deported from Egypt on the eve of Anwar Sadat’s controversial visit to Israel. Barghouti was prevented from living in Egypt for the next seventeen years. Also from I Saw Ramallah:

“And then the Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, had a decisive role in defining our size as a family. His decision to deport me resulted in my remaining the father of an only child, Radwa and I not having a daughter, for example, to add to Tamim, or ten sons and daughters. I lived on one continent and Radwa on another: on her own she could not care for more than one child.”

On their continued years of off-on separation, from I Was Born There, I Was Born Here:

“Radwa would pay for the policies of Sadat and his successor Mubarak in the coin of her own private life. She would experience the expulsion of her husband and dedicate her time to caring for her son without the presence of his father for seventeen years, except for short and intermittent periods. When she was obliged to undergo a life-threatening operation, she would be alone with Tamim, who was not yet three years old, while I was in Budapest and forbidden to put my mind at rest about her and be by her side. My mother flew to Cairo the moment she heard of the disease and that lightened the burden for me a little. Once more I had failed to be where I ought to be.”

Barghouti was later able to return to Egypt and later even to Palestine, a journey documented in his I Saw Ramallah. Later yet, he is able to bring their son Tamim. On a poetry reading in the square of Deir Ghassanah, in Palestine, from I Was Born There, I Was Born Here:

“I wanted to speak of Radwa in the square of Deir Ghassanah and to the people of Deir Ghassanah because it wouldn’t be natural if Radwa’s almost total knowledge of everything about the village and its people — their names and life stories, the funny things they’re known for and their sorrows — were to remain one-sided. I wanted them to know her too.”

The two of them were married for forty-four years:

Also from I Was Born There, I Was Born Here:

“Alone, between sky and earth, I think of Radwa.”

Egyptian playwright Laila Soliman, one of the great emerging Arab theatre artists, is giving a talk today in Cairo on “Bilingualism on Stage: The Case of ‘Hawa l-Huriya'”:

Soliman’s acclaimed “Whims of Freedom,” which will was most recently in Germany and will play next month in Brussels, is a collaborative effort between Soliman, a cultural historian, a musician, a political prisoner and an actress. Its use of multiple streams of information and collage style — somewhat reminiscent of a Sonallah Ibrahim novel — is part of Soliman’s signature style. The same collage-style can be found in her wonderful “Egyptian Products” as well as her controversial “No Time for Art” and “Lessons in Revolting.”

Soliman’s work also centers on how history is written. “Whims of Freedom” challenges conventional narratives of the 1919 Egyptian revolution. In a 2011 interview with Qantara, Soliman said, “One of the aims of my work is to create an alternative version of history with the means of theatre. Especially now, where one can already see how the official history is being written.”

On one of her blogs, in 2013, Soliman wrote that “this relationship between reflection and time was one of the key issues I am currently dealing with.”

Part of the tension of Soliman’s current play, “Whims of Freedom,” is between the state archives centering on 1919 and art and folk songs of the time. The show premiered in Cairo and then moved directly to London. After that, it went back to Cairo in October and on to Berlin and Freiburg in November.

Ruud Gielens, the show’s producer and creative advisor said, in an interview with Egyptian Streets, that he was worried about how people would receive this very Egyptian narrative, but, “Because it was so specific, it became universal again. The play is a history lesson in a way. It’s about a history that is completely unknown to the West.”

Gielens also said in the fall 2014 interview that they currently weren’t worried about Egyptian censors, but “It wouldn’t be a good idea to stage her [Soliman’s] former plays again now. We’re not necessarily worried [about censorship], but it definitely is something we talk about. We’re aware of the fact that what we are saying could be interpreted as non-patriotic. But anyhow they’re not focused on theatre.”

Soliman is not the only Egyptian to draw attention to 1919 — Ahmed Mourad’s latest novel, 1919, draws the same parallels. But Soliman’s style is wonderfully, intelligently frenetic, and her talk at AUC this evening will surely be worth attending.

Snapshots of Soliman:

Rolling Bulb: No Time for Art, by Doa Aly

Truth is Concrete: Q&A with Laila Soliman

Qantara: Vomit – Until the Revolution Comes

PEN America: Revolutionary Plays Since 2000: The Future of Political Theater

Mada Masr: Laila Suleiman’s Whims of Freedom

Egyptian Streets: Drawing Parallels Between Two Egyptian Revolutions By One Theatre Play